The answer to antisemitism is more Judaism.

To every Jewish parent: Now is not the time to shrink.

photo: Anton Mislawsky/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Rabbi Steven Abraham, the rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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When I learned what happened at Temple Israel in Michigan last Thursday — a man driving a truck loaded with explosives through the front doors of a synagogue, armed with rifles, heading down the hallway toward classrooms where a hundred and forty children were learning — the first thing I felt was fear. That is natural. That is human.

But the fear that has stayed with me, the one I cannot shake, is not about my own safety; it is about my children.

What worries me most is not that I may turn inward. I know how to fight that impulse. I have Torah for that. What worries me is that my kids are growing up in a world where it is easier to hide their Judaism than to be proud of it. That the ambient lesson of their generation is: Keep your head down. Don’t wear the Star of David to school. Don’t mention Israel. Don’t draw attention. Be Jewish at home, quietly, behind locked doors — but out in the world, be something safer. Be something less.

That fear (not the fear of violence, but the fear that our children will learn to shrink) is what I want to confront this morning. Because fear is not the answer. It has never been the answer. And fear cannot be the inheritance we leave our children. Our children’s inheritance should be the beauty of a religion that has survived the fall of every empire that ever tried to destroy it, that has buried every language in which its death sentence was written, and that still — still — finds a way to thrive.

That is what belongs to them.

Not the truck. Not the smoke. Not the fear. The beauty. If this generation of Jewish parents allows this moment to teach our kids to hide, then the people who drove that truck will have won something far more devastating than any bomb could achieve.

We read the Torah portion Vayakhel-Pekudei last week, the final chapters of Exodus. Moses gathers the people and asks them to build the Mishkan — the portable sanctuary, the dwelling place of God’s presence in the wilderness. But the Torah uses a remarkable phrase to describe who should participate: kol n’div libo — everyone whose heart moves them. Everyone whose heart is willing.

Not commanded. Not conscripted. Willing.

The Sfat Emet, the Gerer Rebbe, taught that the willingness itself was the offering. Before a single beam was cut, before a thread was dyed, the people’s readiness to bring their gifts forward made the Mishkan real.

And the Midrash Tanchuma¹ adds something I find devastating in light of this week: The Israelites built the Mishkan in the wilderness, surrounded by enemies, with no permanent walls, no army, no guarantee of safety. They built a house for God’s presence in the most dangerous place on earth. And they did it not because the danger had passed, but because the holiness could not wait.

They did not wait for safety; they built anyway. They brought their gold and their silver and their skill and their willing hearts into a hostile wilderness, and they made something sacred. That is the theological claim of this Torah portion: that holiness is not a reward for security. It is an act of defiance against its absence.

And here is what I want my children to understand: Jewish identity is not a vulnerability to be managed. It is a Mishkan to be built. Not in spite of the wilderness. In the middle of it.

There is a passage in the Jerusalem Talmud where Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai says: Halachah b’yaduah she’Esav soneh l’Yaakov — it is a known principle that Esau hates Jacob. This teaching has haunted Jewish consciousness for two millennia. And for much of our history, it was treated as a fixed law of nature — something to be endured, managed, survived.

But Rav Kook² rejected that posture entirely. He taught that the Jewish response to hatred is not retreat but intensification; not less Judaism but more. The purely righteous, he wrote, do not complain about darkness. They increase the light. They do not lament heresy. They deepen faith. Kook understood that the soul of a people is not preserved by hiding but by radiating. The answer to a world that hates your light is not to dim it; it is to burn brighter.

I need my children to hear that. I need your children to hear that. Because the cultural message they are absorbing right now — from social media, from campus discourse, from the sheer weight of a world that has made Jew-hatred respectable again — is the opposite of Rav Kook’s teaching. The message is: Be less, assimilate, blend in. The less Jewish you appear, the safer you will be.

And that message is a lie. Not because visibility is safe — I will not stand here and pretend it is. It is not. We spend three-quarters of a billion dollars a year securing Jewish institutions in North America because it is not safe. But the lie is the premise beneath the message: that safety is the highest value, that survival means shrinking, that the goal of Jewish life is to not be noticed.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel³, marching in Selma, Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement, with his legs and praying with his feet, did not hide. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, sending emissaries to light menorahs in public squares on every continent, did not hide. Our tradition has never — not once in 4,000 years — taught us that the answer to danger is to become invisible. It has taught us the opposite: The Mishkan is built in the wilderness. You bring your gifts forward precisely when the world tells you to put them away.

So what does this look like in practice? What does it mean to raise Jewish children with more pride and not less in a moment like this?

It means we do not let last Thursday’s attack or the recent resurgence in antisemitism become the defining story of their Judaism. The defining story is not the truck. The defining story is what happened the next evening: The congregation of Temple Israel, locked out of their own building because it was a crime scene full of smoke, gathered across the street at a country club and welcomed Shabbat. They lit candles. They sang. Their rabbi said: We are going to be processing this for weeks to come. And a community leader said: No matter how hard they try, they will not stop us.

That is the story I want my children to know. Not the attack. The gathering after.

It means we give them more Torah, not less. More Shabbat dinners with the candles burning where the neighbors can see. More Hebrew, more Jewish camp, more Israel, more of the particular, unapologetic richness of Jewish life that makes our tradition worth inheriting. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks⁴ wrote that the greatest gift a parent can give a child is a strong identity — because identity is the foundation of resilience. A child who knows who they are cannot be shaken by a world that does not want them. A child raised with pride does not flinch.

And it means we let them see us — their parents, their rabbis, their community — choosing pride over fear in real time. Not performed courage. Not false bravado. The honest, trembling, stubborn insistence on showing up. On going to synagogue. On putting the mezuzah on the door. On saying to our children, by our presence alone: This is who we are, and we are not ashamed.

The Talmud teaches that in Nisan, the first month on Jewish calendar, our ancestors were redeemed from Egypt, and in Nisan we will be redeemed again. But I want to remind us of something about that first redemption: It did not begin with the splitting of the sea. It began with parents. It began with Amram and Yocheved, who — in the darkest chapter of Israelite history, when Pharaoh was drowning their sons — chose to have another child. Moses exists because two parents looked at a world of unspeakable cruelty and decided that the answer was not to stop bringing Jewish children into it, but to raise them with enough strength and faith and identity that they could change it.

That is the choice before us. Not whether to be afraid — we are afraid, and there is no dishonor in that. The choice is what we do with the fear. Whether we pass it to our children as a reason to retreat, or whether we transform it, as Amram and Yocheved did, into fuel for the most radical act available to a Jewish parent: raising a child who is proud.

I stood in my children’s doorway last Thursday night and watched them sleep. And I made a promise — not to God, not to the Jewish People, but to them. I will not teach them to hide. I will teach them to build. Their inheritance will not be my fear. Their inheritance will be the full, luminous weight of a tradition that has outlasted Pharaoh and Babylon and Rome and the Inquisition and the Third Reich, that has been burned and scattered and buried alive and has risen, every single time, to light candles on Friday night. I will give them a Judaism so radiant, so rich, so deeply theirs, that no one — no attacker, no algorithm, no cultural tide — can make them ashamed of it.

I want to add a word — not about theology this time, but about money. About where we put our dollars, and what that says about what we actually value.

The American Jewish community spends over $765 million a year on physical security. A typical Jewish organization now devotes 14 percent of its annual budget just to keeping its people safe — guards, cameras, bollards, hardened doors, intelligence-sharing, active-shooter training.

One Jewish leader recently called it what it is: a Jewish tax. A tax we pay for the privilege of showing up to pray, of sending our children to school, of gathering to celebrate a bar mitzvah or welcome Shabbat. The FBI investigated over 2,300 hate crimes against the Jewish community last year, 10 times more than against the next largest religious or ethnic group. We are two percent of the population bearing a wildly disproportionate share of the hatred.

That number ($765 million, paid out of our own pockets, every year) should be the starting point of every conversation about Jewish communal priorities. And it should force us to examine, gently but honestly, another set of expenditures we have rarely been willing to question.

For nearly half a century, the default American Jewish response to antisemitism has been Holocaust education. When hate crimes spike, we fund museum exhibits. When a public figure says something vile about Jews, we invite them to tour Auschwitz. When a state legislator asks what can be done, we lobby for a Holocaust-education mandate. Since 2016, 18 additional states have passed such mandates. The assumption is so deeply embedded it has become almost liturgical: If people understand what happened to us, they will stop hating us.

And we have put extraordinary resources behind that assumption. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum alone received $72 million in federal funding last year, with total revenues regularly exceeding $100 million annually and total assets valued at over $700 million. Its anniversary fundraising campaign raised over $715 million from private donors. Congress has directed more than half a billion dollars to this single institution in the last decade.

And Washington is only the beginning. There are at least 16 major Holocaust museums across the country (in Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Dallas, and beyond), plus nearly three hundred affiliated organizations worldwide. The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum opened a $78-million facility. The Illinois Holocaust Museum built a $55-million center. A conservative estimate of cumulative spending (federal and private) on Holocaust memorialization and education in this country since 1980 runs well north of $3 billion.

I want to say clearly: I am not ungrateful for any of it. I am not calling for the erasure of memory. We are a people who still mourn the fall of the Temple in 586 BCE. We will never stop saying their names. The historical record must be preserved. Holocaust denial must be fought. These are sacred obligations and they remain so.

But I am asking us to look honestly at what all of that investment has accomplished — and what it has not. Ruth Wisse, a former Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University, observed that antisemitism in the United States has grown in tandem with increased Holocaust education, not in opposition to it.⁵ She argued that the entire framework is misconceived — that it universalizes a specifically anti-Jewish political phenomenon into an abstraction about “hate,” strips the Holocaust of its political and historical context, and introduces Jews to the world exclusively as victims.

The result, Wisse contended, is an education that conceals the nature of anti-Jewish aggression rather than confronting it, and that teaches identification with the helpless rather than with those who fight to protect them.

Author Dara Horn, writing in The Atlantic, arrived at a similar conclusion from a different angle. After visiting Holocaust museums and speaking with educators across the country, Horn found that Holocaust education as currently practiced is incapable of addressing contemporary antisemitism — and in the total absence of any education about living Jews, may actually be making it worse.

When the Holocaust is reduced to a morality play, she argued, anything short of the murder of six million seems minor by comparison. The curriculum teaches empathy for dead Jews while requiring no engagement whatsoever with Jewish text, Jewish values, or Jewish people who are alive. Horn asked the question that should haunt every Jewish philanthropist and communal leader in this country: Why do we care so much about how Jews died if we show so little interest in how they live?

I do not raise this to condemn anyone’s generosity. The people who built these museums — many of them survivors, many of them driven by sacred obligation — acted from the deepest place of conscience. But we are permitted to ask whether a strategy born in one era still serves us in another. We are permitted to notice that the world our children actually inhabit looks nothing like the one those institutions were built to address.

Here is what that world looks like: Last week, a man drove a truck loaded with explosives into a synagogue in Michigan, heading toward classrooms where a 140 children were learning. Armed security guards, trained by the FBI just weeks earlier, shot and killed him before he reached them. The bollards did not stop him. The guards did. Those guards exist because a community chose to invest in protecting the living.

And yet consider what this reveals about our country’s actual priorities. The federal government spends more each year on a single museum in Washington, D.C. dedicated to dead Jews than on the entire security grant program that protects living Jews in every synagogue, day school, and Jewish Community Centers in America. The Nonprofit Security Grant Program is funded at roughly $300 million. The Holocaust Museum receives $72 million in federal appropriations alone — and that is one institution, in one city, about one chapter of our history.

The math is not complicated. The message it sends, even if no one intends it, is the one Dara Horn identified with devastating clarity: The world is far more comfortable caring about dead Jews than protecting living ones. Dead Jews are safe. Dead Jews do not make demands. They do not insist on sovereignty, or wear kippot in public, or send their children to schools that need armed guards at the door. Dead Jews can be pitied, memorialized, universalized into a lesson about the human condition — and then set aside.

Living Jews are inconvenient. Living Jews need things. Living Jews need protection. And the disparity in how we fund the memory of the murdered versus the safety of the breathing tells us everything about which Jews this country — and, if we are honest, which Jews our own communal institutions — have been most willing to invest in.

So here is what I am asking — not as a provocation, but as a moral claim rooted in the oldest Jewish principle I know: Pikuach nefesh (the saving of life) overrides nearly every other commandment. It overrides Shabbat. It overrides Yom Kippur. It overrides the fast. If it can override the holiest day of the year, it can certainly ask us to reexamine a line item in a budget.

If we have limited dollars, limited political capital, and limited communal attention — and we do — then the next marginal dollar should go to a security guard at a day school before it goes to a new wing of a museum. It should go to a reinforced door at a synagogue before it goes to another curriculum about the dead. It should go to a threat-assessment team at a Jewish Community Center, to armed and trained protection at every Jewish gathering place in this country, before it goes to one more exhibit that teaches the world to pity us.

And beyond security, it should go to the thing many Jews have neglected most of all: teaching our own children to be proud.

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1. A significant 5th–9th century CE collection of homiletic Midrash on the entire Torah

2. Orthodox rabbi, and the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine

3. Polish-American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century

4. En English Orthodox rabbi, philosopher, theologian, and author who served as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013

5. “The Dark Side of Holocaust Education.” National Affairs.