A few days after Oct. 7, a fiercely secular Israeli called me, angry at God.
He wanted to know how I could continue saying certain words in our prayers. How could we speak about God’s mercy and kindness after what we had just witnessed?
I’m a Chabad rabbi, and much of my work is with young Jewish professionals and teaching Torah. Give me a theological question and my instinct is to open a book. That day, we got coffee instead.
We talked, cried, laughed and eventually embraced. Neither of us walked away convinced by the other. He is still secular. I am still a Chabad rabbi. We disagree about plenty. Yet something at that table ran deeper than our disagreement. We were two Jews trying to make sense of what had happened to our people.
I’ve watched versions of that encounter repeatedly among the young Jews I work with. I’ve seen politics contribute to fractures within a family and later watched those relationships begin to heal while the political disagreements remained. I’ve watched people with serious objections to Orthodox Judaism become regulars in our community. Their questions and objections didn’t suddenly disappear. They simply stopped requiring distance.
Among the young professionals I spend my days with, I see how carefully we define ourselves. Careers, politics, values, communities and causes increasingly help answer the question: Who am I?
Jews are hardly immune.
Secular Jew. Orthodox Jew. Progressive Jew. Conservative Jew. Israeli Jew. American Jew. Somewhere along the way, many of us began treating the adjective as more important than the word “Jew.” Our divisions tell us where we belong and, conveniently, who doesn’t belong with us.
Every Jewish camp seems to have its explanation for which other Jews are endangering the Jewish future: the religious or secular, the left or right, the assimilationists or extremists. It is remarkable how often our analysis of the Jewish people’s biggest problem ends with the conclusion that the problem is other Jews.
Unity exists beneath our differences. Our task is to uncover it.
Sometimes, we seem to need the other Jew to be the problem. When part of my identity is built in opposition to him, letting go of the fight can begin to feel like losing part of myself.
Oct. 7 disrupted that, at least for a while.
I watched young Jews who had struggled to articulate what being Jewish meant to them suddenly know, viscerally, that what happened to Jews they had never met had happened to their people.
Then, gradually, our old categories and divisions returned.
Three years later, I wonder whether Oct. 7 exposed something that had been there all along. Catastrophe brought a deeper connection to the surface. Must it take that to remind us that we are one?
That question brings me back to Simchat Torah.
No medical-school graduate celebrates by hugging a closed anatomy textbook and dancing with it. Books are meant to be opened, studied, questioned and argued over. Jews have certainly made an art of that.
Yet after an entire year of reading the Torah, when we reach its end, we close it and dance. And what a dance it is.
We sing until we’re hoarse. We clutch the Torah to our chests. There is a fire and abandon to Simchat Torah that seems to transcend whatever happened during the year that came before it.
Jews have carried this Torah through fire and water, exile and persecution, through periods that should have broken us. We have carried it through freedom, prosperity and good times as well.
Our enemies have sometimes reminded us that we are Jews. They don’t get to define why we are Jews.
Our dancing is far more than a celebration of survival. Being Jewish itself is worth celebrating, in difficult times and in good ones. The bond between a Jew, God and Torah has outlived every attempt to sever it.
And for those hours, the scholar and beginner hold the same Torah. The secular Israeli and Chabad rabbi can dance in the same circle. Their differences remain, yet something deeper holds them together.
That is how I understand Jewish unity. It already exists beneath our differences. Our task is to uncover it.
Then, after all that dancing, we open the Torah again—immediately.
Bereishit bara Elokim. We start again.
I’ve had to ask myself in difficult conversations: Am I trying to be right, or are we trying to get it right?
Closing the Torah puts our arguments in their proper place. For a few hours, we remember the relationship that precedes them. Then we return to studying, questioning, examining and searching for truth.
Disagreement belongs in that search. It challenges assumptions and exposes blind spots. Judaism has never been afraid of it. Trouble begins when disagreement turns the person across from me into the problem.
I’ve had to ask myself in difficult conversations: Am I trying to be right, or are we trying to get it right?
The second question demands humility. I can argue passionately and remain convinced of my position while taking you seriously enough to consider that you may see something I don’t.
My secular Israeli friend probably understands our conversation over coffee very differently than I do. I see in it the essential bond between a Jew, Torah and God. We never settled that question. We didn’t need to before sitting at the same table.
We often speak about Jewish unity in terms of “building bridges” and “finding common ground.” I wonder whether that language starts too late. It assumes two people standing apart who now need to construct something between them.
Simchat Torah begins earlier. The connection was already there.
The Torah remains at the center of the dance. Truth still matters. Our convictions still matter. Remembering that we belong to one another allows us to pursue those convictions without turning the person searching beside us into an enemy.
Simchat Torah gets the order right.
We dance first, with all the passion and joy we can muster, remembering who we are and what has held us together through fire, water and far happier times.
Then we open the Torah again.
We question, examine, disagree and keep searching for truth. And when we reach the end, we begin again.
