This week, a friend I have known for more than 20 years sent me a text message. I had shown him a new billboard campaign sponsored by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which recently launched, across New York City and his reaction startled me.
“I don’t like it,” he wrote. “You don’t see any other religion trying to promote themselves on billboards anywhere in the USA. Enough already with trying to ‘educate’ everyone on antisemitism. How’s that been working out for the last 30 years?”
A few minutes later, he added: “Louder Jews the world does not need. Prouder, yes.”
Although he was trying to argue against it, my friend was actually making the best case for the campaign.
The billboards contain beautiful photos depicting Jewish life. One shows a bride and groom beneath a chuppah, breaking a glass. The other shows two boys in kippahs and tzitzit, laughing and playing. They both say the words “Born to Be a Yid.”
My friend assumed that it was yet another billboard decrying antisemitism because that’s what Jewish billboards, Super Bowl ads and influencer campaigns have been doing for years.
However, this is totally different. The billboards contain no statistics about hate crimes or pleas for tolerance. Rabbi Motti Seligson, the Chabad spokesman who directed it, put it simply: “No one needs another billboard telling them how scared they should be.”
This is not to say that antisemitism or Jew-hatred aren’t real problems. They are real issues that must be addressed.
Years before the rest of the nation caught on, Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine wrote to Ohio’s college president about protecting Jewish students. In 2022, he ordered Ohio’s public universities to adopt the Internatioinal Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. In 2024, when neo-Nazis marched in Columbus, he condemned them unequivocally within hours. I am grateful to live in a state with leaders who recognize the importance of confronting antisemitism head on.
But the question remains: How to rebuild our shattered sense of confidence and security despite the hate. Campaigns targeting antisemitism, while important, can unintentionally fuel the cycle of fear. When my 12-year old Hebrew-school student confided in me that she’s afraid to tell her best friend that she is Jewish, it was clear that we need an approach to instill within her pride and confidence in who she is, rather than just condemning the problem.
This was the lifelong position of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He had significant personal experience with antisemitism; he hid from pogroms as a child in Ukraine, watched the Nazis rise while studying in Berlin and lost his own brother in the Holocaust.
In 1964, the novelist Harvey Swados asked him whether the Holocaust could happen again, and his response was: “tomorrow morning.” Yet the Rebbe refused to let antisemitism occupy the center of Jewish life. Following the World War II and the Holocaust, he transformed global Jewry with a simple premise: Fill Jews with light, and the darkness loses its claim on them.
This is an approach with ancient roots, the beginnings of which can be found in Devarim, this week’s Torah portion. Moses is weeks from death, and as the text opens, he delivers his farewell address. Rashi, the 11th-century biblical commentator, tells us that during Moses’s lifetime, he endured much gossip from the Israelites: If he left his tent early, they would invent one rumor about him, and if he left late, they would invent another.
So how does the greatest prophet who ever lived, despite leading a nation that complained, rebelled and broke his heart for 40 years, open his farewell address?
Rashi teaches that in the very first verse, Moses hid any rebukes he had inside a list of place names as veiled allusions to any past wrongs. Moses understood that as he was about to turn over leadership, the Israelites needed to be uplifted and fired up, rather than beaten down.
So when Moses expressed any criticism, he did so in a coded language, and then followed it up immediately with a blessing: “The Lord, your God, has multiplied you, and behold, you are as numerous as the stars of heaven.”
When Moses mentions the hostile nations waiting across the Jordan, he says: “Do not dread them and do not fear them. The Lord your God goes before you … and carries you as a man carries his son” (Deuteronomy 1:29-31). Moses recognizes that a people about to confront their enemies needed as much encouragement as possible. Rather than reminding them of their fear or anxiety, he focused on building up their confidence.
Next week is Tisha B’Av, the day Jews mourn the destruction of its ancient Holy Temples in Jerusalem, which our sages taught were destroyed because sinat chinam, or “baseless hatred,” was rampant among Jews. The future Temple, they teach, will be built when ahavat chinam, or “unconditional love,” will abound.
That’s what the billboard campaign is all about. When Jews have pride and confidence in themselves, and realize that have so much to be grateful for just because they are Jews, then it will be much easier to follow in the footsteps of Moses, who blessed his fellow Jews even when they were less than perfect.
Madison Avenue will say that in order to sell something, you need to play on people’s fears. Moses’s eternal truth is that as Jews, we have nothing to fear; we just have to be proud of who we’ve always been.
A billboard encouraging us to be proud of who we are might just be the medicine that helps that 12-year-old Hebrew school girl feel more confident or the secular Jew stuck in traffic on the FDR Drive breathe a sigh of relief.
