What Jews Really Want - Jewish Action

A while back, I was talking to my dear friend and teacher Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik about how we should engage the throngs of Jews who are flocking to the faith in the aftermath of October 7. “Simple,” Rabbi Soloveichik quipped. “We should begin by realizing that we got it all wrong when we named our college student outreach group after Hillel. What we ought to do now,” he continued, “is to form a new organization called Shammai: instead of joyful Shabbat dinners, entertaining movie screenings and lively talks, we should offer anyone curious about Judaism seven hours of intense Torah study followed by another three of Aramaic for beginners. And there ought to be a sign above the door that reads, ‘Abandon any hope of having fun, ye who enter.’”

Like all great jokes, this one, too, contains more than a grain of painful truth. Attend any conversation about education, outreach or any of the other subtle arts of bringing people closer to the faith, and sooner or later you hear someone say something empathic about meeting people where they are.

But what if the opposite is true? What if those perplexed Jews whose desire for Yiddishkeit was rekindled in the aftermath of tragedy are looking not for convenience but for a real life-changing challenge?

To those who want to grow and change and flourish, let’s offer everything we can. To those in the market for yet another facile lifestyle affectation, let’s show them the door.

And changing lives is what this moment is all about. To the extent that we frail mortals can begin to comprehend Hashem’s plan for us, we must believe that those moments that strike us as intolerably painful are here not as punishments but as an opportunity an all-loving G-d is giving us to rethink what matters and repair what needs correction. Would we dare ask our fellow Jews to stand up and really, truly change their lives?

The question is a touchy one. Having spent much time this past year talking to friends on their journey to faith, I’ve become accustomed to a string of predictable questions: How can you sit apart from your wife and daughter at shul? How can you thank Hashem every morning for not making you a woman or a gentile? Isn’t it all just too misogynistic, racist, patriarchal and entirely out of whack with what a good, kind, modern person ought to believe? And for that matter, why let halachah dictate how you live rather than make up your own mind about what to wear, what to eat and whom to marry?

There are many good intellectual answers to these questions and others like them. But what my friends were looking for, I realized, weren’t intellectual answers at all. Instead, they were hoping to catch a glimpse of that rare and true and profoundly unmodern spectacle, a person standing firm in faith and offering a clear and compelling case for choosing right over wrong. They were looking not just for someone to offer them, say, a lively little vort on the parashah, but also for someone to tell them that swiping right on a screen to summon a casual intimate encounter is corrosive to body and spirit alike. Or that there were precisely two genders, and that both were different and immutable, and that pretending otherwise is an affront to all that is holy and good. Or that a life spent gratifying our basest appetites is the saddest way to squander Hashem’s precious gift of being. Put bluntly, they were looking for the one thing that all humans, but particularly those reeling from trauma, desire: a real, serious, meaningful, character-building challenge.

We know, then, exactly what we have to do. Let’s not spend another minute humoring those who, by definition, seek us out for instruction, not indulgence. Let’s offer a serious, demanding, uphill path into the faith, one that is as eminently forgiving of failure as it is uncompromising about effort. To those who want to grow and change and flourish, let’s offer everything we can. To those in the market for yet another facile lifestyle affectation, let’s show them the door.

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine, and the host of Rootless, its weekly flagship podcast, and Take One, its daily Daf Yomi podcast. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. A recovering academic, he serves as a senior research fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, How the Talmud Can Change Your Life: Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book, and is currently working on a biography of his great-great grandfather, Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, zt”l.