For Jews, it's time to celebrate — and then strategize.

The illusions are gone. We are living in a time that demands intellectual fortitude, moral clarity, political intelligence, creative genius, and spiritual stamina.

Released hostage Avinatan Or (left) with an IDF officer after he was handed over after over two years of captivity in the Gaza Strip (photo: Israel Defense Forces)

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The news that Israeli hostages returned home breathing, alive, and reunited with their families is a moment of overwhelming joy.

For two years, we’ve lived in suspended animation, hearts clenched, waiting for names, photos, signs of life. Every return is not just a personal salvation, but a collective resurrection. These Israelis represent the heartbeat of the Jewish People: each one a fragment of our soul that has been wandering through darkness. Their return, like light breaking through a tunnel, deserves unrestrained celebration.

And it is fitting that this moment coincides with the Jewish holiday Simchat Torah, the festival of joy, renewal, and unbroken continuity — the day we dance with the Torah, embrace it, kiss it, hold it high. The timing feels divine, as though the universe itself is telling us: After all the grief, after all the funerals and anguish, now — dance.

Not because the pain is gone, but because joy itself is our rebellion. To celebrate now is not naïve; it is profoundly Jewish. It is saying: We are still here. We will not let despair write our story. Our faith in life, Am Yisrael Chai, remains unbroken.

We have been here before, countless times. After every exile, every pogrom, every massacre, every war, Jews have rebuilt not in spite of tragedy but from within it. From the ashes of the Temple came the Talmud. From the ruins of Europe rose the State of Israel. From the silence of the camps came new songs, new families, new hope. This moment — this fragile, holy mix of joy and exhaustion — is part of that same eternal rhythm of destruction and renewal. The Jewish story has never been linear; it is a spiral that keeps returning to the same truth: We fall, we rise, we remember, we rebuild.

But once the dancing stops, we must do what Jews have always done after survival: We must strategize. Because joy alone will not secure our future. Neither will wishful thinking, crossing fingers, or divine prayer. The world that allowed October 7th to happen — and the world that excused, justified, or even celebrated it — is not the same one we lived in before. The illusions are gone. We are living in a time that demands intellectual fortitude, moral clarity, political intelligence, creative genius, and spiritual stamina.

Politically, we must face a difficult truth: Jewish safety has become conditional. Our security, once thought to be protected by alliances and goodwill, is now subject to political convenience. One election cycle of sympathy can become the next cycle of betrayal. Those who championed tolerance now tolerate antisemitism in their ranks. Those who once claimed to stand with Israel hedge their support with “context” and “nuance.”

The lesson is clear: Jewish survival cannot be outsourced to the political class. No government, no party, and no ally will guarantee our security unconditionally. Not the Democrats or the Republicans, not Labour or the Tories, not the European Union or any NGO.

And too much Jewish loyalty to political parties has become a liability, an emotional dependency masquerading as strategy. Jews must learn to hold power accountable without worshiping it, to build partnerships without surrendering independence. Our advocacy must evolve from reaction to design, from crisis management to long-term vision. We must be in the rooms where narratives are written, policies are shaped, and culture is produced. Influence without purpose is vanity; influence with vision is survival.

The moral asymmetry of our age is staggering. The world weeps for terrorists’ children and yawns for Jewish ones. Universities, once devoted to truth, now reward the lie that genocide is resistance. The media calls it “complexity,” as if mass murder needs footnotes. It is not enough to expose the hypocrisy; we must build moral clarity into culture itself — through art, film, journalism, education. We must create a generation of Jewish voices who speak not from fear, but from conviction.

We must also reclaim the power of storytelling. For too long, Jewish institutions have played defense in the cultural war for truth. We react to lies instead of creating beauty. We respond to hate instead of shaping imagination. Every film, song, podcast, and classroom is a battlefield of ideas, and we have ceded too many. If the lie spreads faster than the truth, it’s because we stopped telling our story with conviction. It’s time for a Jewish renaissance, one that produces not just arguments, but art. Not just explanations, but inspiration.

And we must learn to play offense in the moral arena, not defense. For decades, Jews have tried to reason with those who despise us, as if antisemitism were a misunderstanding rather than a pathology.

That era must end.

Antisemitism and “anti-Zionism” must no longer be debated or explained; it must be stigmatized. We must ostracize antisemites as the moral lepers they are, not invite them to panels or quote them in op-eds, but expose them for what they truly are: the ideological heirs of the Nazis. When someone calls for Israel’s destruction, when they celebrate Jewish death or justify Jewish fear, they are not “critics,” “activists,” or “students.” They are Nazis in modern language, hiding behind the costumes of keffiyehs.

The time for polite disagreement is over. The Jewish People must reclaim the moral high ground — unapologetically, fiercely, and without fear of offending those who already hate us.

Socially, we must repair the fractures that divide us. The chasms between religious and secular, Israeli and Diaspora, liberal and conservative. These divisions are luxuries we can no longer afford. The enemy does not distinguish between denominations or political views; neither should our solidarity. Unity does not mean uniformity. It means remembering that what binds us — our shared history, our shared destiny — is stronger than what separates us.

Zionistically, we must reaffirm that Israel is not a project or a policy; it is the heart of Jewish life. It is the anchor of our identity, the guarantor of our continuity. For too long, Diaspora Jews have outsourced their Jewish identity to Israel, and Israelis have outsourced their global voice to the Diaspora.

That era is over.

We need a new covenant, one built on mutual responsibility, respect, and shared strength. The Diaspora must not just defend Israel; it must deepen its own Jewish literacy. And Israel must not just seek solidarity; it must earn it through leadership, innovation, and creativity.

And we must look in new places for Jewish creativity, far beyond the same old institutions that have perfected the art of fundraising but forgotten the art of transformation. The Jewish establishment, for all its resources, has grown comfortable managing continuity instead of inspiring it. But continuity is not enough.

We need disruption — a new ecosystem of Jewish innovation that embraces risk, experimentation, and relevance. Real change will not come from another gala, conference, or campaign. It will come from bold thinkers, young creators, and unapologetically Jewish builders who are ready to reimagine what Jewish life, education, art, and identity can look like in this century.

Spiritually, we must find a way to connect the modern Jewish experience with ancient Jewish meaning. Fear cannot be the glue that holds us together forever. We need love — love of Torah, of peoplehood, of purpose. Judaism is not just what we fight for, but what we live for. It is the imagination that gave the world conscience, the discipline that gave it justice, and the hope that keeps it from despair.

And we must demand it from within our own. It’s time for our spiritual leaders to lead, not equivocate. The Jewish People do not need rabbis, educators, and executives who speak out of both sides of their mouths to stay politically correct. We need voices that speak with faith, fire, and moral backbone. Silence disguised as balance is cowardice. Platitudes about peace mean nothing when Jews are being hunted in their streets and vilified on their campuses.

Leadership is not about saying what is safe; it is about saying what is right. Our rabbis and community heads must remember that their first duty is not to donors or public opinion, but to truth — to the Jewish soul, to the moral clarity of Torah, to the defense of our people.

The same demand must extend to every Jew who has stayed quiet out of fear. History is watching who stood tall when it mattered. Silence today is not neutrality; it is surrender. The next generation will not forgive us for hiding our identity to keep our jobs or our social standing. Courage does not mean shouting; it means standing upright. Every Jew who wears a Star of David, who speaks truth without apology, who refuses to bow to the mob, is a soldier in this moral war.

Strategizing means more than words; it means infrastructure. It means investing in Jewish education, think tanks, leadership programs, and security systems. It means supporting Jewish journalists, creators, and innovators who can carry our message into the mainstream. Every Jewish community should think like a startup for survival — agile, strategic, united by mission, and unwilling to outsource its future. We must rebuild a Jewish ecosystem that is proactive, not reactive; visionary, not defensive.

And sociologically, we must see ourselves as one people — a global civilization, not a scattered collection of tribes. We are a family of 17 million, scattered across continents but bound by one destiny. The Jewish story has always been a relay race across generations. The baton is in our hands now, and history is watching how we run.

The Jewish story has never been about comfort; it has been about calling. We are the people who wrestle — with God, with history, with ourselves — and in that struggle, we become light. This is not the end of our suffering, but it can be the beginning of our renewal. We have survived Pharaoh, Rome, Crusades, Inquisition, Auschwitz, and the Arabs. We have outlasted every empire that tried to bury us. What will define us now is not endurance, but vision.

So yes, let us dance. Let us sing, rejoice, and hold our children close as the hostages come home. Let us taste the sweetness of life that our enemies tried to extinguish.

But when Simchat Torah ends and the scrolls are rolled up again, let us turn our joy into discipline, our pain into purpose, and our unity into a plan.

For the Jewish People, celebration and strategy have always gone hand in hand. We celebrate because we survived — and we strategize so that survival will never again be our only measure of victory.

The time has come for a new generation of Jewish builders — thinkers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators — to link arms and create a movement of spiritual and cultural renewal. One that fuses ancient wisdom with modern creativity, faith with technology, pride with purpose.

If the world insists on defining us by our suffering, let us redefine ourselves by our strength. We have been the conscience of history. Now we must become its architects.

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