Tribe: A Return to Global Family

In the year 2000 I took my social-justice Judaism on a trip to the Palestinian Territories. I planned to teach (and love) Palestinian children in the West Bank. Naive and idealistic, I was an un-Zionist Jew, by which I mean that I had no Zionist education.

I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport, stepped onto the land of Israel, and burst into tears. Inexplicably, I was home. I didn’t yet understand the connection between diaspora Jews and Israel. I hadn’t yet studied the archaeological evidence, visited the ancestral caves or stuffed a prayer into a crack in the Western Wall. I had never peered inside a Jewish prayer book and knew nothing of the Torah; the hundreds of references to Israel in Jewish lore and liturgy weren’t tucked away in my subconscious mind. I didn’t know that Jews were indigenous to the land of Israel. I just felt it.

Still stalwart in my resolution to carry out the original, peace-building plan, I took a Palestinian sherut van across the green line to the U.S.-funded, pro-Palestinian NGO where I would volunteer. Now a lone Jew at a café table in Bethlehem, the leadership warned me: If I were abducted I would become political bartering fodder. They would not help, rescue, advocate, or rally for my release. Bewildered and scared, I resigned.

Later that week I enrolled in an orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem and had a revelatory insight: I wasn’t just Jewish, I was part of an am. A people. A transnational, multiracial, book-loving, Nobel-prize winning, category-breaking, genocide-defying people. An ancient people.

On Tisha B’Av night I decided to commemorate the destruction of the first and second Jewish temples by sleeping out at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. Wearing only a long summery skirt and thin long-sleeved shirt, the drafty, desert night was punishing and I hadn’t thought to bring a coat. I laid down on the Kotel’s limestone ground, wrapped my arms around my knees and somehow slept. At dawn, I woke up stiff, warm, and under several thick wool blankets. I was surrounded by the sound of Jewish women muttering prayers. Which of those women had covered me? There was no one to thank.

In the years following – as a young, single woman in Israel, the U.S. and South America – new Jewish acquaintances invited me to coffees and classes, study sessions, excursions and workshops. Jewish strangers taught me Hebrew songs and prayers, they helped me muscle through Rashi script and Talmudic texts. They overlooked my ignorance and faux pas, answered my questions, and brought me from Jewish family to Jewish family, treating me like Jewish family. 

I spent Shabbat nights in these families’ guest rooms; I was welcomed, educated and fed, then invited back and fed again. How had I not known that I belonged to this large global family? How had I spent two full decades of life with a tenuous connection to this vibrant, brilliant tribe?

Years later, weeks after October 7th, 2023, a Jewish stranger named Paul Allen reached out to me on LinkedIn. He asked me to help him reinvigorate a network of Jewish and allied professionals he had founded 25 years prior. We had never met; only one of his tens of thousands of LinkedIn connections was an acquaintance. His invitation would be a time-intensive volunteer gig, but with global antisemitism reaching a fever pitch, our hostages held without global outcry, and my husband’s family regularly in and out of Israeli bomb shelters, I agreed to help. Was I making a naive decision to build the project of a Jewish stranger? Absolutely.  And it was also time for me to return many Jewish favors. 

Today Tribe – our global network of Jews and allies in business – has a large volunteer leadership team. Our founders community helps startups in Israel and the Jewish diaspora go farther, faster, and our large international jobs community grows daily. Thousands of people are active; every morning I wake up to messages from Tribe members around the world engaged in effective, transnational collaboration. The Tribe network has amassed a reach of more than 38,000 and, to date, we have not collected a penny. We are building Tribe to build each other. And we are just getting started.