Our Eternal Love
Mike Leven knows the answer. He published it in eJewish Philanthropy on June 3rd, calm and confident and almost entirely without alarm. Tamim Academy schools work. The data is unambiguous. The economics are scalable. Eighty schools for fifty million dollars. All we need is alignment and the will to act.
He is right. Every word of it. So why is it so hard to raise the money?
Because too many of us still consider funding options, without realising that the options themselves helped bring this crisis into being.
In the past two years, every Jewish leader worth his title has spent hours in a situation room, debating the same urgent questions: the surge in antisemitism, the collapse in support for Israel among the young, the visible vulnerability of Jewish communities across the Western world.
The debate is serious. The will to do good is real. And the money is about to go to the wrong places.
The responses to the surge in antisemitism are divided. Some are doubling down, fighting with even more desperation. New organisations have arrived with real passion and new faces, but the playbook is the same: more funding, louder voices, bigger campaigns, familiar tools, simply wielded with greater force.
Others, having spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars watching the tide rise anyway, are beginning to sound like men who have lost faith in the fight. Ronald Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress, said recently that the Jewish community had spent six hundred million dollars fighting antisemitism since October 7 and asked the room: has any of it helped? His answer was no.
I have written about another path for that fight, one that involves spending much less money fighting antisemites and that has proven far more effective, but that is not what this piece is about.
This piece is about the more urgent crisis: the dwindling support for Israel, the disconnection, the collapse of Jewish identity among the young, the Jews walking away. That crisis is being discussed extensively, seriously, and with real money behind the conversation. And yet every answer on the table is wrong.
Leven puts it plainly: “Too many young Jews are stepping onto college campuses unprepared, not just to defend Israel or Jewish identity, but to even understand them in any real, lasting way.”
It is a diagnosis of symptoms. And in eighty years of organised Jewish life, we have never once paused to treat the cause.
The cause is not antisemitism. The cause is the Jew we produced.
Since the Holocaust, our representative organisations reduced the Jewish project to two main pillars: Never Again and Zionism. Anyone who subscribed to a loose civic Jewishness deserved to be supported, including those who de facto taught that identity could be preserved without its roots. That God was optional. That Torah was interesting folklore. That Israel was only created in 1948.
When everything is optional, eventually people opt out.
The temples, the Sunday schools, the camps, the ones that did make it into the 21st century are not doing well.
The remnants of those movements are now in those emergency rooms, presenting themselves as the solution.
They have studied the institutions that actually work. They envied the Sephardi ability to maintain warmth without rigidity. They watched Chabad breathe life back into what they had emptied. They took notes. They learned the vocabulary, outreach, immersive education, relevance. And the answer they arrived at is better bottled oxygen. More sophisticated, more efficiently delivered, more beautifully packaged bottled oxygen.
They never asked why those Jews they studied can breathe on their own.
Because asking that question honestly leads somewhere they cannot go. It leads to the recognition that they severed their movement from the source of life, from the living God, from the eternal Torah, from a covenant that is not a metaphor, and that no amount of institutional redesign can repair that severance.
So instead of reconnecting, they are designing better delivery systems. And philanthropists who cannot tell the difference are about to fund them.
If you are not convinced by my urgency, allow the numbers to speak. Ninety-one per cent of observant Jews feel emotionally attached to Israel. Among young non-Orthodox Jews, four in ten say that attachment has been weakening. The pattern holds without exception across every diaspora community.
Show me the Judaism a Jew was raised in, and I will show you where he stands when it costs something.
Some, unfortunately, do not fade away silently. The Jews dismantling Israel’s legitimacy, lobbying against us in the media, in politics, on campuses, did not emerge from nowhere. We know where they came from. They are the product of the very spectrum of institutions we once convinced ourselves were worth supporting.
We do not need the same observance, but we need the same God.
A Jew who knows in his bones that the covenant is real, that this people and this land are bound by something that preceded history and will outlast it, that Jew is too connected to his people to become an instrument against them.
He will never walk away when the going gets tough. He does not need to constantly feel that he is getting something out of the relationship.
There is a Chassidic teaching, captured in a beloved spiritual song: “If people could feel the sweetness of Torah, they would burn with passion for it, and the whole world’s silver and gold would seem like nothing in their eyes, for the Torah contains all the goodness in the world.”
And then there are those who are only culturally Jewish. Comedian Gianmarco Soresi puts it sharply: it means you have “all the gastrointestinal problems and stress and anxiety of regular Judaism, without the sweet comfort of God.”
Can we agree that passionately Jewish has more of a future than culturally Jewish?
If so, then we must prioritise institutions like Tamim Academy. We need to cultivate this passion from a young age, not negotiate it into existence with teenagers who have already been told that Judaism is complicated. Trying to persuade young adults that Judaism can perhaps be part of their lives, with disclaimers, careful footnotes, or explanations that Zionism is not an anathema if used correctly, is far harder and far less effective.
We want to teach young children that Judaism is part of them. That Israel is their heritage. Too few of us were blessed to grow up immersed in passionate Judaism. And if the world considers the denial of education a violation of human rights, then surely we can recognise that Jewish education is among the essential needs of a Jew.
So the question we must ask when we are presented with charity opportunities is this: are we funding the formation of passionate Jews who want their grandchildren to be as committed as their ancestors were, or are we merely buying a bit of time?
I want to tell you about my friend Dennis, of blessed memory. I met him at the Chabad of Bel‑Air. One day he told me that when he first came from South Africa, he searched for a community for his young family. He found one that seemed aligned with his level of observance, part of the very movements we had long decided were worth supporting. He looked at me with sorrow in his eyes and said that if he had gone to Chabad instead, he didn’t know whether he himself would have become more observant, but he was certain of one thing: his children would have married Jewish.
I will never forget the pain in his eyes.
Too many Jews have passed with that same pain in their hearts. They were the last living link in a chain. The next link had drifted too far to be soldered back into place. They were the final living connection to our divine faith, to a people that survived three thousand years of exile. Not because they stopped caring. But because they had been connected to something that was not the eternal passion of our forefathers.
Let us do everything so that no more chains are broken
I am imploring you: let us focus our resources on strengthening and building institutions that harbour this passion for our faith and our people.
As our sages teach in Ethics of Our Fathers: a love dependent on benefit withers the moment its benefit is gone. We cannot shield our children from the price that comes with being Jewish, but we can teach them from a young age to love their heritage, to feel its joy, to cherish its meaning, and to want to be part of our tremendous legacy forever.
Our eternal love. Our Father in heaven will help us.
