Rethinking Outreach Post-October 7: Speaking with Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz
Israeli armor going into battle at Rafa during the Six-Day War. Photo: Han Micha/Israel Government Press Office // Jews in America are increasingly interested in engaging in Judaism, as seen in Manhattan’s new Altneu Synagogue. Courtesy of the Altneu Synagogue
Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin, Jewish Action Editorial Committee member and host of the 18Forty Podcast, recently sat down with Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz to discuss the American Jewish response to October 7 and how it compares to the religious awakening after the Six-Day War.
Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz is a senior lecturer at Yeshivas Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem and serves as Jewish Action’s rabbinic advisor. Prior to making aliyah in 2010, he was the rabbi of the Woodside Synagogue Ahavas Torah in Silver Spring, Maryland, and professor of law at the University of Maryland Law School. He received semichah from Ner Israel Rabbinical College, a BA from Johns Hopkins University, and a JD from Harvard Law School. He has written and lectured extensively both in the United States and Israel.
Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin:
I want to discuss the awakening that has taken place surrounding Jewish identity post-October 7. Following the Six-Day War, talmidei chachamim like Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe began trying to reach out beyond the boundaries of the religious community to Jews who were experiencing their Jewish identity in new ways for the first time. Do you feel this moment is similar, and if so, are there any significant differences?
Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz:
The short answer is that there are similarities, but there are also significant differences. One significant and obvious difference is that the Six-Day War concluded with a miraculous victory for Israel. Even people who were not religious saw the hand of G-d. The genesis of the entire teshuvah movement in Eretz Yisrael, from the founding of Ohr Somayach and Aish HaTorah to the hundreds of ba’alei teshuvah coming to the Wall, was a consequence of the gilui, the clear revelation, of Hakadosh Baruch Hu experienced in the Six-Day War.
Now, by contrast, we are unfortunately in the opposite situation: We suffered a devastating massacre on October 7, and the hostages [as of this interview in the fall of 2024] are still in captivity. Just recently, six people on the verge of being rescued were brutally murdered in cold blood. In the current situation, we don’t have that open yad Hashem.
Back in April and again in October, when Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel, there were blatant miracles. But the euphoria simply wasn’t present. We are at war, and there is no clear endpoint. We hope there will be a yeshuah. But the post-1967 euphoria resulting from the recapturing of the Kotel and the Old City is simply lacking.
However, there is a common denominator. Many people don’t remember what life in Israel was like before October 7. There was talk of the country falling apart as a result of judicial reform and various other issues. The polarization in Israeli society was so extreme that some people threatened to pull out their financial investments and soldiers talked about not reporting for duty.
Baruch Hashem, all soldiers did report for duty following October 7. But who knows if it wasn’t those threats that emboldened Hamas? Society was on the verge of falling apart. At a Yom Kippur minyan in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv, people began tearing down the mechitzah. But the fault lay on both sides; the disunity stemmed from both the religious and nonreligious.
The tragedy of October 7 brought with it a miraculous transformation in Israeli society. If there was any silver lining in the dark cloud, it was a sense of achdus, a feeling that we’re all in this together, we’re all on the same page. The divisions between religious and secular were collapsing. Chareidim were delivering tzitzis, tefillin and medicine to chayalim. People were working together. Sapir Cohen, one of the hostages who was released relatively early, related that one of her captors was watching footage of some of the unity rallies and the terrorist remarked that when Jews are together, they are very strong. Even a terrorist recognized this phenomenon!
In many ways, the achdus, the unity, the sense of purpose, the ahavas Yisrael, the “Kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh” could’ve been our yeshuah. The turn toward Hashem might not have been the same as in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, but it wasn’t insignificant.
In the words of Dickens, “it was the worst of times,” but in some limited ways, “it was the best of times.” It’s very unfortunate that we are often at our best in times of adversity, but unfortunately that’s often the nature of life, the nature of human beings and the nature of Jews in particular.
What I’m very concerned about, though, is that as the war continues, and as the tragedies continue to pile on vis-à-vis the hostages, we will become like an elastic band. Let go of it and we go back to our old ways. Some of the genuine achdus that was developing in Klal Yisrael is still there. But on many levels, it’s petering out and we’re finding a resurgence of the old divisions along with the emergence of new divisions.
This is a tragedy compounding a tragedy. The war and the hostages and the suffering are tragedies, but if we go through a tragedy and we don’t learn from it, grow from it and become better from it, then that’s truly a wasted opportunity, a tragedy without any redeeming feature.
Chief Chaplain Rabbi Shlomo Goren carries a sefer Torah surrounded by IDF soldiers at the Western Wall after the Six-Day War. Photo: Eli Landau/Israel Government Press Office
RDB: Your response focuses heavily on the Jewish people in Israel. But in North America, with the second-to-largest Jewish population in the world, Jewish identity has also been very much in the headlines. Many Jews in America are experiencing their Jewish identity for the first time. Yet I have not seen sufficient effort from within the educated Orthodox community to reach out to those Jews.
Is it possible that Orthodoxy, particularly in America, has become a victim of its own success? We don’t really have a template, because on American shores the Orthodox community was always the underdog. But now, over the last seventy-five years, we’ve built incredible, vibrant communities with solid religious infrastructure, including shuls, yeshivos, day schools and communal institutions. Are we doing what we should be doing when it comes to reaching out to our brothers and sisters who are outside of the Orthodox community?
RYB: You raise some interesting points. I grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, which had a small Orthodox community. I went to a local Orthodox day school, but 75 percent of my classmates were from non–shomer Shabbos homes. We grew up, we integrated and we kind of got along. Even though people today might look at that type of integrated school with disdain, there were a lot of positives in that type of modality. There was a sense of common faith and common commitment, a feeling that we’re all part of Am Yisrael.
Now, baruch Hashem, the religious world has developed. It has grown much bigger, stronger, more organized and more self-sufficient. At the same time, this tends to create a certain insularity. We want to shield our children not only from nonreligious Jews but even from religious Jews of a different ilk. While that’s a sign of strength, it also means that our children are simply not being exposed to different types of Jews. And when they become adults, they continue that type of insularity. On the flip side as well, kids from different backgrounds and levels of observance aren’t getting to mingle with frum kids. So there’s this great divide.
You lose some things while gaining others. As you mentioned, being a victim of our success is a real problem, both in chutz la’Aretz and in Eretz Yisrael. At the same time, I don’t want to paint as bleak a picture as you’re painting. There is a significant amount of Jewish outreach taking place in the United States. Although the anti-Israel sentiment on campus is enormously powerful and many Jews are swept up in the anti-Zionism rhetoric, it has also been a flashpoint for bringing people to Judaism.
If we want to attract Jews to Torah, we ourselves have to work on creating communities in which people are connected to the Ribbono Shel Olam with genuine deveikus.
A friend of mine who works in college kiruv hosts a Friday night meal for students, and he noted to me that one Friday night shortly after October 7, a Jewish kid whom he had never seen before walked in. The young man was not connected to Hillel or to any Jewish group on campus. He said, “I realize now that you are my friends and you are my family, and I want to be connected to you.” It wasn’t a religious awakening. It wasn’t a spiritual epiphany, but it was a sense of shared fate: You are my people, and I want to be connected to you.
I believe this bears repeating: while I don’t think it’s as grim as you describe, there is certainly accuracy in some aspects of your description. We’ve been too insular and too preoccupied with our own survival. Which is understandable. But once we become successful and our own survival is well established, we need to look outward. We can’t be focusing on ourselves all the time, even though that may have been necessary at an earlier stage in American Orthodox history.
RDB: The kiruv movement has a very specific lens through which it approaches non-Orthodox Jews, and that tends to be: “We are Orthodox, we have the truth, and we would like to share that truth with you in order to make you Orthodox.” Much of the kiruv world is very outcome driven. The thinking is: We’re not here to just give people a pat on the back and remind them of their Jewish identity. We’re here to make people shomer Torah u’mitzvos.
But not everybody, given their starting point, can end up leading a fully Orthodox life, at least not in the way we think of it in 2024. Do we need to reevaluate what the outcome should be in our interactions with non-Orthodox Jews? Is there another path we should be imagining that is perhaps more realistic or more accessible for a wider swath of Jews? What’s the change that might be necessary for the kiruv movement to really meet the magnitude of this moment?
RYB: I agree that we may have to redefine what we mean by kiruv. There are many different components here.
The paradigm of the kiruv movement is to get an individual into a yeshivah such as Ohr Somayach or Aish HaTorah, or a women’s seminary such as Neve Yerushalayim, for six months or a year, or longer. That tends to be the measure of success. And indeed, that is an extremely important goal.
At the same time, there should be other types of goals within the kiruv world besides helping someone become a full-fledged Orthodox Jew. There is the kiruv of Jewish identification, there is the kiruv of a person learning to care about the Jewish people, there is the kiruv of just being connected to the history of our people and to G-d’s providence in Jewish history.
Here in Israel, there is what I call “Tel Aviv kiruv.” For many years there was no real Jewish outreach in Tel Aviv, but in recent years there’s been a small revolution in Tel Aviv and it hasn’t necessarily been based on observance or Torah learning, but rather on social identification. It’s had the salutary effect of bringing people to observe Shabbos on some level and to keep some Jewish traditions. It’s more of a family-based kiruv rather than a student-based kiruv; often, when people have children, they’re more interested in exploring their traditions. While some would refer to this critically as “superficial, gastronomic Judaism,” within its own parameters I see some significant success there. I would classify such kiruv as a legitimate form of outreach.
You’re making the argument that we need to create more of those options. Perhaps this type of kiruv would then feed into a more intense Jewish level of observance, but even if not, it would serve an intrinsic end in and of itself. We have to redefine success. You know the old saying, “Half a loaf is better than none.” If we get somebody to identify with Klal Yisrael, that’s a certain measure of hatzlachah. We can’t define success so narrowly that tremendous percentages of Jews are simply excluded from the definition of success.
The challenge is not to dilute the core commitments to Torah and mitzvos, but to create alternative pathways that can help nonreligious Jews and give them a more spiritual grounding and more of a connection to Hashem. Chabad might be a bit of a role model in this regard—the nonjudgmental, accepting and fully welcoming approach.
Jews are experiencing their Jewish identity in new ways for the first time, as seen at the Kesher Yehudi Simchat Torah event for Nova survivors and hostage families. Courtesy of Kesher Yehudi
RDB: Surely some of the responsibility for the assimilation of the broader Jewish community falls on Orthodox shoulders. What do you think our responsibility is? What could we have done differently, and what should we begin doing differently?
RYB: I do not want to cast aspersions on the tremendous, devoted work that has been done over decades in trying to build a vibrant Orthodoxy. The truth of the matter is that it was a miracle. If you go back to the 1940s or earlier, it was a given that there was no future for Orthodoxy. The assumption was that Orthodoxy would die out and we would be left with a few religious European immigrants. That’s why so many Orthodox rabbis became Conservative and Reform. The resurgence of Orthodoxy is a gift from Hashem that was dependent on the mesirus nefesh of the post-war generation.
The point you raise—that the Orthodox community may have a certain responsibility for the assimilation of the non-Orthodox community—was made by Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook in the early twentieth century.
He said that there are Jews who are rebelling against the superficiality and externalities of formalized religion, and even though they may be going in the wrong direction, it’s a wake-up call for religious Jews to understand that religion and spirituality are not the same thing. A person might keep all the halachos in a very conspicuous way, but without a sense of Hashem, without a sense of love, without a sense of reverence. When Judaism becomes a series of dos and don’ts and is not accompanied by inner spiritual content, there will be many sensitive people who will turn against it in search of some other meaning in life. They will often try to look for it in false places, but Rabbi Kook saw this as a holy impulse coming from a good place.
So while I don’t want to blame anybody for anything, if we portray being an Orthodox Jew as “you can’t do this and you can’t do that,” and we are not connected in a spiritual way to a relationship with G-d, then we are going to be viewed as archaic and superficial. If we want to attract Jews to Torah, we ourselves have to work on creating communities in which people are connected to the Ribbono Shel Olam with genuine deveikus. In fact, the fairly recent phenomenon of neo-Chassidism is an attempt to try and infuse within our communities a sense of authentic spirituality that has unfortunately often been a casualty of modernity. In some ways, we’ve been so focused on buildings and infrastructure that we’ve neglected Hashem in the whole equation.
That’s the first answer to your question about Orthodox responsibility for non-Orthodox assimilation.
Secondly, there is the element of ahavas Yisrael. If we communicate the message that you’re not welcome, you’re not legitimate, you’re not a real Jew, then they’re going to respond in kind. If I’m not Jewish enough for you, why should I join you?
A pasuk that I often quote is the maxim pronounced by Shlomo Hamelech in Mishlei, “Kamayim hapanim lapanim kein lev ha’adam la’adam—As water reflects a face back to a face, so one’s heart is reflected back to him by another.” If I show a person respect, regard and legitimation, he’s going to be open to what it is that I represent. If I show a person disparagement, a sense that he’s not good enough and he doesn’t count, he’s going to feel that way about me.
So while I don’t want to phrase it in terms of blame, if we’re too busy delegitimizing people and not respecting their integrity as human beings and as spiritual seekers, then they’re not going to see value in what we’re doing either. Even if from our perspective they’re on the wrong path, we need to recognize the good in people. That is fundamental.
Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin, a member of the Jewish Action Editorial Committee, is the founder of 18Forty, a popular media site discussing big Jewish ideas. He is also director of education for NCSY and clinical assistant professor of Jewish values at the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University.