Megaprojects for a post-traumatic Golden Age

The wound of October 7 is still open, but we can already see that it will leave a ragged scar not just on Israeli, but Jewish, history. The catastrophe and its still rippling impacts have revealed the illusion of a bright line between Jews who live in Israel and those who don’t. A common enemy does us the favor of dwarfing our distinctions and reminding us what we have in common.

We face the common challenge of building our resilience as a people. But the prescriptions differ because we have different starting points. Israelis start with a high level of resilience. Bitterly divided just a day before, Israelis ran as one to the front and self-organized to take the place of their paralyzed government and support the soldiers, the families of the hostages, the bereaved, and the displaced.

Not since the Yom Kippur War, exactly half a century before, had Israelis so viscerally felt impelled to fight in what was clearly an existential war. But as the war progressed, this broad consensus started to fray. In recent weeks, Israel has turned the military tide dramatically, leaving Iran’s “axis of resistance” in shambles. But the divisions within Israeli society seem to be inversely linked to progress on the battlefield. This is dangerous. The existential threat has shifted from external to internal.

Israel runs on hope. Wars have never caused Israelis to despair, but division does. This is because Israelis know that their strength is based on their unity. As singer and actor Idan Amedi said after being severely wounded in Gaza, “the Israeli people are the strongest in the world. When we are united we are invincible.”

Diaspora Jewry is another story. On one hand, Diaspora Jews were not massacred and did not have to fight for their homeland. On the other, they faced a tsunami of antisemitism, including violence, seemingly from out of nowhere. Worse, because all they had known was a “golden age” of acceptance and integration, there was little built-up resilience to fall back on.

When the war began, the Jewish world did spring into action, with a billion dollars raised in record time for Israel’s emergency needs. And since then the first post-October 7 Jewish megaproject, a Day After Fund to help rebuild Israel’s south and north, has been gathering steam.

The financial resources that the Jewish world could bring to bear are staggering. Just the 25 wealthiest Jews, including a significant number of Israelis, are collectively worth over $1.5 trillion (a sum that is increasing by about $200 billion annually). One percent of this is $15 billion. Imagine if this small amount were mobilized to bolster the resilience of the Jewish people.

The question is, where would a billion dollars be best deployed? Birthright Israel, the largest single Jewish megaproject in recent decades, absorbed around a billion dollars over 25 years. The impact of just ten days in Israel on many disconnected young Jews has been measurable. Studies show that about one-quarter of participants marry another birthright participant and the desire of participants to marry someone Jewish rises by 160 percent. More than four out of five participants show a marked increase in their Jewish identity.

In 2007, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson stepped up with $25 million to cover Birthright’s entire waiting list and went on to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars, leading to a peak of 48,000 participants in 2018. Even before the war hit, however, participation had dropped by half due to lack of funds.

But even a fully funded Birthright and a substantial Day After Fund are a partial answer given the tectonic shifts that we suddenly face: an explosion in global antisemitism, the demonization of Israel, and the compounding strains on Israel’s economy and society.

Fortunately, another megaproject has just been launched. A private American-Israeli consortium has founded Nevo Labs, a for-profit venture to build Israel’s first national lab. Modeled on the legendary Bell Labs in the United States, which produced Nobel-prize-winning breakthroughs such as the first transistor, Nevo Labs aims to solve Israel’s chronic “brain drain” of talented scientists.

Israel’s scientific output is extraordinary. Six Nobel prize winners, thousands of high-tech startups, and hundreds of multinational R&D centers have rested in part on Israel’s strength in scientific R&D. This output is even more impressive given the paltry resources that went into it. The scientific R&D budgets of all of Israel’s academic institutions — including the Technion, Weizmann Institute, Tel Aviv and Hebrew Universities — is $1.7 billion combined. This is half of the budget of Johns Hopkins, a single American university.

It is no wonder that much of Israel’s top scientific talent ends up leaving when there are simply not enough spots for them in Israel, and American universities are offering prestigious positions and double the salary.

Nevo Labs aims to raise $3.6 billion and hire one thousand scientists over ten years. These scientists will engage in applied research in critical areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology. Israeli scientists excel at turning their research into patentable innovations and startup companies, which will create returns for the investors. Some of the returns will be contributed to the Nevo Science Foundation, a non-profit organization that will fund basic research inside Israeli universities.

A project of this magnitude could flip this crisis into an opportunity to boost Israel’s entire scientific R&D ecosystem and innovation sector, with rippling effects through the economy and society.

The building blocks of Jewish resilience

Another crisis that can be transformed into an opportunity is the global wave of antisemitism. The answer to antisemitism is Jewish resilience, and the building blocks of resilience are the same in the Diaspora as in Israel: identity, community, and purpose. But the Jews are, as Abraham Joshua Heschel called them, “A messenger who forgot his message.”

Ironically, our enemies may understand our message better than we do. Genocidal antisemites aim to decimate Jews for a reason: to destroy the moral mission that Jews have always represented. Survival is not enough to “deny Hitler a posthumous victory,” as Emil Fackenheim put it. If our enemies make us forget our mission by throwing us back into the swamp of survival, they have succeeded. If all we do is survive, we have failed, they have won.

What is our mission? This should be the central question of the Jewish conversation. At a minimum, it is to fight for, as Israel is doing now, a world that celebrates life, freedom, and morality and abhors death, oppression, and barbarism. Regardless of the answer, the first order of business must be to build Jewish identity, without which we have no “troops” to accomplish our mission. And an essential means to building identity on a societal scale is education.

The most obvious missing megaproject is to reimagine Jewish education. Jewish schools should be second to none, widely available, and easily affordable — a “birthright.” The Diaspora could also import the best of Israel’s social “technology,” such as youth movements, gap year programs, and service frameworks. Israel’s resilience is built on a culture that tells Israelis from a young age, It’s not all about you. You are part of something larger than yourself. Society measures you in the coin of service, not just material success. Israel’s informal educational frameworks have arguably been an even more potent tool for building identity and solidarity than the formal education system.

While the price tag of a birthright for Jewish education may seem astronomical, it would be modest in proportion to the resources of the community. To recall, the collective resources of the 25 wealthiest Jews alone amount to about three times the size of Israel’s GDP.

The phenomenon of PTSD has a lesser-known sibling: Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG). If resilience is bouncing back to a pre-trauma state, PTG is actually becoming stronger from trauma. Signs of PTG include better relationships, greater appreciation of life, and a renewed sense of meaning. Societies can also experience something akin to PTG.

For decades, we did not need to exercise our dormant strengths. Now we do. We can set our sights beyond resilience. Growing from catastrophe is not only possible, it’s what we have done time and time again in Jewish history. The Jewish answer to October 7 should not only be a safe and flourishing Israel, but a new golden age of Diaspora Jewish identity. The two are intimately linked.

PTSD or PTG, it’s our choice.