Testimonials, and photo and video footage on social media, showing men donning tefillin and women wearing Stars of David or lighting Shabbat candles have emerged amid a Jewish great awakening after the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Add Shai Davidai, the Columbia Business School professor who has been one of the most prominent defenders of Israel on campuses and beyond, to that trend.

Davidai, 41, who is Israeli-American and a self-described atheist, told JNS that he has largely stopped using his phone on Shabbat since the Oct. 7 attacks, and in recent years he has said Kiddush with his family on Friday night.

“Post-Oct. 7, a lot of people are looking for ways to connect with their Judaism. I have been especially intentional about it, because I want to find a way to connect my Jewish identity and values with my atheist identity and values, without feeling that I am compromising any aspect of who I am,” Davidai told JNS.

“It’s definitely complicated and something that requires a lot of thought and some flexibility, but it’s something that our people have been doing for generations,” the assistant management professor added. “Above all, Judaism is about peoplehood, and people are just looking for ways to connect with the larger notion of us as a tribe.”

Davidai told JNS that he has been reading about religious thought and practice, “just from a place of, if I’m going to strongly try to unite our community, I need to understand all aspects of our community.”

He just finished reading a biography of the 12th-century Spanish rabbi, philosopher and physician Moses Maimonides, whose writings are among the most influential in Jewish history.

“I realized, if as a kid I read his biography, rather than was told what he said, I would have been more connected right to the story and the history,” he said.

“It’s very hard for non-Jews to understand that what Jews have is this extra layer in the middle of community, where we don’t just act to further our self-interests. We have a responsibility to other Jews,” he added. “When non-Jews ask how we can care about a Jew we’ve never met in our life, someone who lives halfway around the world, it’s because we’re of the same tribe.”

Jews have the same songs, book and land. “This is our history—the same history with the same rituals,” he said.

‘Extremely relaxing’

When Davidai first moved stateside for graduate school in 2010, he worked “around the clock, seven days a week,” he told JNS.

He decided he needed to take a day off from work. “Although most of my friends didn’t work on Sunday, it felt more natural for me to not work on Saturday,” he said.

In the last year, he began to feel that using his phone was like “work.”

“I decided to cut off my phone entirely, other than using it for its original purpose, connecting with friends and family,” he told JNS. “I still use the phone on Shabbat to call my parents and close friends, but I don’t text or use social media.”

Davidai has also stopped using any screen from Friday night until Saturday night, instead spending time with family and friends, or reading.

“I find it extremely relaxing, and I still get updates about ‘big’ events from people, who are exposed to the news that day,” he said “Even if I didn’t, I think the world could deal with me not being immediately up to date about everything for one day a week.”

“None of us is irreplaceable,” he said.

‘More invested’

Davidai and his family only say the Kiddush prayer—a blessing over wine recited on Sabbath and holidays—before Friday-night dinner. For a few years, they have been lighting candles, he said, and “in lieu of prayers, we all sing a secular Hebrew song, Hayom yom shishi, ‘Today is Friday.’”

“When we started doing Kiddush, I told my wife that I felt an urge to do so, and she was perfectly fine with that,” he told JNS. “Since then, it’s just become another part of our life, denoting the moment that the week officially ends and Shabbat starts.”

Davidai remembers when he was growing up that his grandfather would recite Kiddush, which connects the ritual, for him, to his grandfather.

“It kind of ties me to him and it also ties me to all Jews around the world, who are doing Kiddush at around the exact same time,” he told JNS.

Last month, he and his family attended a communal challah bake for the first time.

“We’re making food. We’re nurturing each other, but we’re really connecting as a community,” he said. “That’s something that we have kept for thousands of years. How cool is that?”

Shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, he began to sport a Star of David necklace across his neck.

He told JNS that the Jewish people under threat have inspired him to “become more invested in the religious rituals.” He understands these rituals as part of his “role in serving the community, and continuity, our connection to the past, but also what we bring forward to the future.”