I know that I have been feeling that way. And I am confident that there are many others in the congregation who have been feeling that way too. For me, there have been many times over the past handful of years in which I could not bear to look at the news, for fear that what I would read there would feel overwhelming.
Consider this dizzying – and yet, only partial – list of events, all of which have happened just in the past eight years. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in which protestors marched through the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us.” The shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The election in Israel of the most religious and most rightwing government in the country’s history. The proposed Israeli judicial overhaul, and the popular protests against it. The massacre and hostage-taking of October 7. The murder of hostages like Hersh Goldberg, or Shiri Bibas and her children. The utter destruction of Gaza – with 70% of all buildings destroyed, and more than 60,000 people killed. A 30% increase in extremist Jewish violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. The removal by the Trump administration of billions of dollars in federal funding for universities, ostensibly withheld under the guise of fighting antisemitism. The arson at the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers; the fatal flamethrower attack at a rally for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado. Mass starvation in Gaza. A war between Israel and Iran, in which the United States also got involved. And many, many other such troubling headlines.
This torrent of unsettling events has left me with a pit in my stomach: a sinking feeling that the relatively comfortable Jewish world in which most of us grew up is gone – and that we now have entered a strange new era of Jewish history.
I know that I am not alone in this feeling. Over the past few years, many of the most prominent Jewish social commentators have been writing about the end of an era in Jewish history. For example: perhaps you saw one of the most widely shared magazine articles of 2024 – a piece in The Atlantic entitled “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” Or: perhaps you listened to an episode of The Ezra Klein Show this summer that began with the line: “The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down.”
For me, among all the public intellectuals who have been writing about the end of an era in Jewish history, one of the thinkers that I have found most helpful is Yossi Klein Halevi. He argues that this past era can be characterized as a time in which, on the whole, the Jewish people felt an increasing sense of optimism. In the United States, American Jews were able to climb the economic ladder, and grew to feel more accepted here as a welcome minority group. In Israel, a sovereign Jewish state guaranteed not only physical safety and political self-determination, but also, Jewish cultural flourishing. It was an era, in Halevi’s formulation, in which the Jewish people moved from formerly having no home, to suddenly having two homes.
However, over the past decade, that era of increasing optimism has gradually come to an end. In the United States, in the time since the Charlottesville rally, antisemitism has only become more wide-spread, more high-profile, and more deadly. In Israel, October 7 tore a deep wound in the Jewish psyche – undermining not only the feeling of security, but perhaps even moreso, undermining the feeling of hope. Halevi argues: if the previous era represented the move from no home to two homes, then our strange new era represents the move from stability to precariousness.
When the Jewish people find ourselves in precarious times, one of the primary ways in which we make sense of our situation is by looking to the past for guidance. Ours is a tradition that venerates precedent – that believes deeply in the wisdom of our ancestors.
The novelist Dara Horn describes it well. She points out that in many great stories, there is often the literary motif of the portal – a magical door through which a character passes that whisks them away to a foreign land. In Alice in Wonderland, a young girl falls through a rabbit hole and into a fantastical world. In The Wizard of Oz, a tornado carries Dorothy away to Munchkinland.
For the Jewish people, our magic portal, Dara Horn notes, is our literature. And the foreign land to which it carries us away is the eras of our Jewish past. When we pull a volume off the Jewish bookshelf, we are transported back in time to the period of the Babylonian Exile, or to the destruction of the Second Temple, or to the Golden Age of Jewish Spain. And there in the Jewish past, we rummage around for historical experiences that might help us make sense of our own day.
Given this, we might wonder: now that we have entered this strange new era of Jewish history, where – or, rather, when – in our people’s past might we look to help us make sense of our day? In this unsettling time to be Jewish, we might ask: what would our ancestors tell us to do?
I spent much of the summer puzzling over exactly this question. I pulled off the shelf many of my favorite books on Jewish history – in hopes that a magic portal to our past might open, and provide us with some wisdom. I read about the Babylonian Exile, and the destruction of the Second Temple, and the Spanish Golden Age. I took pages and pages of notes.
But after two months of searching, I came up dry. Nothing from those historical eras quite matched the circumstances in which we now find ourselves.
And then at last, in late August, I came across an article by the historian Yehuda Kurtzer that finally helped – although I should add: it helped, but not in the way I had expected. In his article, Kurtzer writes: “One of the reasons our particular moment in Jewish history feels so hard – especially for those of us who think about our place in Jewish history a lot – is that our moment in Jewish history is entirely unprecedented.”
Perhaps this helps to explain why it feels like such an unsettling time to be Jewish. Perhaps this helps to explain the sinking feeling in my stomach. It is not only because we are living through a time of great upheaval. Rather, it is also because we are a people who looks to the past to help us make sense of the present – and our present is completely unprecedented.
I can think of at least three key ways in which this is true.
First: there have indeed been previous eras of Jewish history in which a diaspora community, like ours, has witnessed the slow and steady erosion of their host society’s commitment to civil liberties. And yet, never before in Jewish history has that erosion taken place, at least in part, under the guise of fighting antisemitism. A legitimate concern for the Jewish people – the rise in antisemitism – has been hijacked and turned into a political battering ram, used in service of a broader political agenda aimed against elite institutions like universities and other voices that this administration opposes. This development puts the Jewish people in an uncomfortable position: concerned, on the one hand, about threats to our safety – while also concerned, on the other hand, about some of the ways in which those threats have been responded to.
Second: there have indeed been many previous eras of Jewish history in which a diaspora community has experienced a rise in antisemitic violence. And yet, never before in Jewish history has that rise in antisemitism taken place, in part, as a repudiation of a Jewish state in which we do not live. I know many proud Jews, including myself, who sometimes choose (with great pain, I might add) to hide their Jewishness in public – for fear that the sight of a Star of David necklace might provoke uninvited questions or even criticism.
Third: there have indeed been previous eras of Jewish history in which our people endured the kind of hideous violence that Israelis experienced on October 7. And yet, never before in Jewish history has that kind of violence been committed against a sovereign Jewish state – such that our reaction was not only to gather together and collectively grieve, but rather, also to muster our significant military capacity and respond with force. Over the past almost-two-years, Israel’s just cause for war against Hamas has slowly deteriorated into a military and humanitarian catastrophe. As many Israeli citizens and even the IDF chief of staff have been saying: we have long since passed the point where further military action could make any meaningful progress towards the original strategic goals of dismantling Hamas and bringing home the hostages. And meanwhile, the continued war effort has led to the utter devastation of the Gaza Strip and its civilian population.
In all of Jewish history, these three developments are entirely unprecedented. (Again, they are: first, the erosion of civil liberties under the guise of fighting antisemitism; second, violence against Jews in reaction to a state in which they do not live; and third, Israel’s ability to respond to horrific terror with significant force.)
Considering all of this, it is no wonder that these feel like unsettling times, or that we sometimes cannot bear to look at the news. We face a set of circumstances that no generation of Jews before us has ever faced. And the feeling, at least for me, is overwhelming.
It is entirely understandable to sometimes feel overwhelmed. But even in our unsettling times, there is, in fact, a sliver of Jewish wisdom that might help us to keep our heads above water.
It may be true that our circumstances are entirely unprecedented. But it is also true that the Jewish people has faced unprecedented circumstances before. If we look through the portal, we will see that while the particulars may be different, the experience of living in a strange new era is something we have been through in the past.
When the leaders of the Jewish people were exiled to far-away Babylon in 586 BCE, leaving behind the only homeland they had ever known, their world must have felt new and strange. And yet, they did not give up hope. Rather, they discovered that God does not live in just one place: that God is everpresent, accessible not only in Jerusalem, but also, in far-away Babylon – with us not only in our triumphs, but also, in our tragedies.
When the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, making it impossible for our ancestors to practice the religion of priestly ritual and animal sacrifice that they had known for a thousand years, their world must have felt new and strange. And yet, like their ancestors before them, they did not give up hope. Rather, they discovered that religion can be practiced not only through sacrifices, but also, through study and prayer – that religious leadership can be conferred not only by virtue of being born into the priestly class, but also, by virtue of piety and learning.
When our ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492, and scattered to every corner of the Mediterranean, their world must have felt new and strange. And yet, they too did not give up hope. Rather, they evolved the Jewish mystical tradition – founded upon the belief that, just as their Golden Age in Spain had been shattered, so too, they imagined, was God shattered: that every part of the universe was a broken-off piece of the Divine, and that the Jewish people’s task was the recognize the holiness of every single piece, and work to reconnect the broken parts.
In each of these historical eras, our people faced unprecedented circumstances. And while never before had they been through anything like it – although there was no previous chapter in Jewish history to which they could turn – there was, and still is, one enduring principle of Jewish history to which they could hold fast. Which is: history might not always tell us how to navigate our strange new world; rather, it reassures us that we can.
It may be true that an era of Jewish history – the era of increasing Jewish optimism – has come to an end. But the end of an era does not mean the end of our people. And the loss of optimism does not have to mean the loss of all hope. Rather, we must now strive to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors: not to avoid the news, not to let ourselves feel overwhelmed by the unprecedented circumstances of our strange new world – but instead, to approach these challenges head-on, with clarity of vision, and with resolve that we can face them.
This, after all, is exactly the message of Rosh Hashanah: the year ahead may seem new and strange, but we also have power to shape it.
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