We Never Called

We Never Called

For almost three years American rabbis have come to comfort us. It never occurred to me to call them.

The week before last I co-led a rabbinic mission to Israel on behalf of the organization I lead, Barkai, in partnership with the RCA, on whose executive committee I serve, and Mizrachi. It is the ninth mission sponsored by the RCA that I have been on since October 7th, 2023. The first one actually came in October 2023, among the first missions that arrived. Orthodox rabbis from North America have been among the most supportive friends Israel has had since October 7th, coming in droves, bringing their congregants and giving financially to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Much of the almost six million shekel that Barkai was able to distribute to soldiers and others in need was donated by these rabbis.

This time I noticed something different. In the past the rabbis were one hundred percent focused on Israel and how they could help. This time much of the conversation on the bus was about the antisemitism which has been rearing its head in America and across the world. There was real fear about physical danger as rabbis compared security procedures in their shuls. I have family in America and I have traveled quite extensively since the beginning of the war, so I have certainly been witness to what has been transpiring, but this is the first time that I witnessed palpable fear.

Fast forward a week or so and we watch the mayor of the most important city in the United States spewing antisemitism in an attempt to have Prime Minister Netanyahu arrested when he came to New York. Zohran Mamdani knows perfectly well that a mayor can’t arrest a visiting head of government, which is exactly why he said it. It was never a legal position, it was a message, and I think every Jew in New York understood well enough who the message was meant for.

Fast forward a few more days to Tisha B’Av. I am sitting in my dining room a few hours after completing my fast and I see the headlines that a man shouting allahu akhbar stabbed two men on 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, right where my brother and sister in law and their family live. Now the palpable fear is my own. I called them right away to make sure that they were okay.

There have been many podcasts and articles over the last two years or so which have explored the relationship between the American Jewish community and the Israeli community. Many Israelis, and many Americans as well, have wondered whether the American Jewish community has been there for the Israeli community the way it was at the beginning of the war. Writing in March 2026, during the Lion’s Roar operation against Iran, the New York based scholar Mijal Bitton asked: “have we developed a certain quiet acceptance that missiles are falling on our friends and family who are huddled in shelters that protect them, that the emergency six thousand miles away has become the weather?”

As a fundraiser I knew exactly what eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross meant when he wrote on March 12 about how “funders and nonprofit leaders in Israel are describing a marked drop in engagement from their Diaspora counterparts during this round of fighting against Iran and its proxies, compared to similar conflicts over the past two-plus years.” This has been a topic of discussion since the beginning of the war.

Rarely, however, has the discussion gone in the other direction. In November 2024, Dr. Erica Brown, Vice Provost for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University and the founding director of its Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks-Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership, said this on the Orthodox Conundrum podcast:

“It’s interesting, as many times as I reach out to friends in Israel and relatives in Israel, there’s raging anti-Semitism here. I can’t say that anyone has reached out to me from there, which I find very interesting.

Again, is it because we’re in the suffering Olympics? Because I don’t want to play that game. It’s the anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the only kosher restaurant in DC just had its windows smashed.

Is that the same thing as dying in Gaza? It’s not the same thing. Does it mean that you start internalizing the hate that other people are expressing towards you, and you feel a state of non-belonging, no matter how meaningful or how much impact you’re having here?”

Before I tell you what I thought at the time it is worth asking why not one Israeli picked up the phone, and I can only really answer for myself here, though I don’t think I was unusual. We were sure that we were suffering more. Nobody ever sat down and made that argument. It was just obvious to us and I don’t remember it ever being discussed. Sons in Gaza, funerals almost every week, hostages still underground, and next to that a smashed window in Washington didn’t feel like it belonged in the same conversation, so when someone suggested that American Jews might be carrying something we should be asking about, the suggestion sounded absurd to me. I don’t think anyone actively decided not to call. It just never came up.

To be perfectly honest, at the time, upon hearing this, I thought she was crazy. At the time I had three sons who were all combat soldiers, two in reserves and one in his regular service, coming in and out of Gaza. Each time I said goodbye to one of them I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that maybe this would be the last time I would ever see him. Twelve hundred people killed in one day. Many more killed since then. Hostages still not home. Thousands wounded and more than that uprooted from their homes in both Israel’s north and south, and I needed to worry about what seemed then to be some amorphous antisemitism!? Sure, I recognized it and felt bad, but it wasn’t anything I needed to check in with my friends or family about. Hell yes, I wanted to play the suffering olympics, because I was sure that we in Israel were winning by a long shot.

Now nearly two years later, when things have calmed down just a very little bit in Israel, things seem to be heating up in America. With a little bit more perspective I think that Erica is correct. We can each have our own challenges, and just because we are caught up in our own doesn’t mean that we can’t keep the other in our minds and show them that we care. It also means that we don’t need to be competing at all.

I have been asking myself lately why it took me so long to see this, and most of it, honestly, was just the moment. When you are in the middle of all that you don’t have any spare capacity, and I’m not going to apologize for that. But I have had time since then to think about it, and looking back I have to admit that the war doesn’t explain all of it. It explains why I didn’t call. What it doesn’t explain, and this is the part that has been bothering me, is why I had nowhere to put what she was saying in the first place.

I can’t blame my upbringing either, since I grew up in America and didn’t come here until I was in my forties, and I love the country I came from and still think that a great deal of good comes out of it and out of its Jewish community. But something happens to us after we arrive, and it doesn’t happen right away, it takes years, where you stop being a person who chose Israel and start being a person who is simply here, and somewhere in that transition the choice sometimes hardens, in some of us, into a verdict on everyone who chooses otherwise. Nobody announces this and most of us refuse to admit it, but you hear it in how we talk about the communities we left and in what we assume about the seriousness of a Jewish life lived over there, and you hear it in the little edge in the voice when a cousin’s plans come up. Nobody ever teaches this and I don’t think it counts as an ideology, but it makes it much harder to imagine that the people we left behind might be going through something of their own.

There is a line in what Erica said that I skipped over the first time, where she talks about a state of non-belonging. That isn’t the same as being afraid of getting stabbed. Many Israelis hear the word antisemitism and picture a knife, because that is the only category they have for it, but what she is describing is something else. It’s the slow discovery that the welcome had conditions that nobody ever mentioned, and that the country in which you built a life and raised your children may not actually be yours.

There is certainly no shortage of people telling Jews that we don’t belong in this land either. There is an entire region built on the claim and it isn’t theoretical, and Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the rest of our enemies say it openly and act on it.

But they are enemies, and I have an army and a state that answer them. What Erica is describing is coming from people who are not enemies at all. It’s your neighbors and the institutions that you helped build, letting you know by degrees that your place among them was always provisional, and no army can help with that. Our grandparents knew this feeling exactly, and even if we have never felt it ourselves I think we should be able to recognize it in our brothers.

I don’t say any of this to compare, and I’m not going to pretend that we are safe here, because we aren’t. Missiles from Iran, terror on the roads, a war that still hasn’t really ended after all this time. Physical safety is a live problem here and it isn’t going away. But there is one thing that I don’t have to think about, which is that I can walk down the street in a kippa without calculating anything, and on Friday night I sit in my shul and see boys who came home from the army for Shabbat with their rifles slung over their shoulders and I swell up with pride. Our American brothers shouldn’t have to think about whether to wear a kippa on the train or whether to tuck in a Magen David, and they shouldn’t have to choose between the two things either.

At this point I don’t want to play the game of who has it worse. I want to be aware that our brothers and sisters need us right now because they are afraid. We need to be there for them, because כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה. The assistance that we give is different from the assistance they give us. They may not need duffel bags of helmets and military vests. What they may need is our love and support, which in many ways is much easier and cheaper to provide. Jews may be having different experiences on either side of the ocean, or on whatever continent they find themselves, but there is one Jewish experience that has been with us since our founding and will be with us eternally, caring, love and being one family. On that we can all agree.

There is one more piece of this that must be stated. Just a very small amount of love and care can go a long way. When I speak about the war I often tell about an American rabbinic colleague who, since Friday, October 13, the first Friday of the war, has sent me a Shabbat Shalom emoji right before the onset of Shabbat in Israel every single Friday and holiday eve since, without missing even once. You may say that this is not the biggest deal. I will say that it is. Every Friday, when this rabbi is busy getting ready for Shabbat, he takes out a few seconds to tell me that he is thinking about me. This has given me a great feeling of support, and sometimes that is all that is needed.

There is also something that we shouldn’t be saying. I think that all things being equal a Jew should live in Israel. I moved my family here and built my life around that belief, and I stand behind it. But when an American Jew tells us that he is frightened, or that he doesn’t feel like he belongs there anymore, we answer that we are waiting for him here at home. We say it warmly and we mean every word. I have said it myself.

But consider what he is actually hearing. He told us that he is suffering, and the first thing that we did was remind him that he chose to live where he lives. We took his fear and used it to make our own case. Even if I am right about all of this, somebody who has just told me that he is afraid does not need me to prove it to him at that moment. He made his decision a long time ago for his own reasons, and most of the time we don’t even know what those reasons were. I want to see more American Jews come here as much as anybody does, but nobody has ever been inspired to make aliyah in the middle of being told that he chose wrong. So when we answer him that way we are not comforting him. We are telling him once again that he got it wrong. Caring means staying away from the question of where somebody has chosen to live, and not only when he is frightened.

And when Israelis are told that American Jews need our support the first instinct is to ask what the program is, which organization is behind it and where the budget is coming from. There isn’t one and there doesn’t need to be one, and since what is being asked for is so small there really isn’t any excuse. A message before Shabbat. A phone call the day after something happens in their city and not a week later. Asking a cousin in New Jersey how his kids are doing at school now, and then actually listening to the answer. Mentioning them from the pulpit so that a whole kehilla knows to think about them. None of this requires anyone to raise money or fill out a form. It just requires us to remember that they are there.

This article began with a rabbinic mission that came from America to support us, and I want to end it with the opposite. I am now organizing a mission of Israeli rabbis to the United States before the chagim, not to raise money and not to give a report from the front. For too long the arrangement has been fixed in one direction, they give and we take, and I think both sides have gotten comfortable with it, so it’s time to reverse it or at the very least to even it out a little. These rabbis are going to sit in their shuls and hear what the last almost three years have looked like from their side of the ocean, and say out loud, in front of their congregations, that we know what they are carrying and that we are thinking about them. Nine times they came to us over these almost three years, and it’s about time that we went to them.

I don’t want to compete in the suffering olympics, to use Erica’s term. But I would like to play in the caring olympics. That is a much better use of our time.