What It Means to Be a Good Jew
We are not required to preserve every custom exactly as it was practiced before us — but we are required to receive and transmit this inheritance.
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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Many Jews are asking themselves this question in our post–October 7th world: What does it mean to be a good Jew now?
Does it mean keeping Shabbat? Defending Israel? Attending synagogue? Giving charity? Raising Jewish children? Fighting antisemitism? Studying Torah? Supporting Jewish institutions? Speaking Hebrew? Caring about Jews you have never met?
There are endless possible answers, and Jews have never been particularly good at agreeing on only one, but beneath nearly all of them is something more fundamental: Jewish literacy.
A good Jew is a Jew who is increasingly learning the Jewish story.
Not because knowledge alone makes a person virtuous. A Jew can know every date, text, holiday, and historical argument and still behave terribly. Ignorance does not automatically make someone bad, either. Many Jews were raised with almost no meaningful Jewish education and cannot be blamed for what no one bothered to teach them.
But it is difficult to take responsibility for a people whose story you do not know.
It is difficult to understand Jewish traditions when you do not know what they were designed to preserve. It is difficult to understand Israel when you do not know what exile meant. It is difficult to recognize antisemitism when you do not know the forms it has taken before. It is difficult to understand Jewish peoplehood when Judaism has been presented to you only as a set of private religious beliefs.
Jewish literacy does not answer every question automatically, but it gives us the language, context, and memory required to ask better ones.
We were given fragments.
Most Jews today were not raised with a coherent Jewish story. We were given fragments.
We learned that Hanukkah involved candles, Purim involved costumes, Passover involved matzah, and Yom Kippur involved not eating. We may have been told that the Holocaust was terrible, Israel was complicated, and Judaism valued education and charity. But these facts often floated separately from one another. We were rarely shown how they fit together.
Why did Jews continue observing Passover after being expelled from their land? Why did Jerusalem remain central to Jewish prayer for two thousand years? Why did Jewish communities emerge in Iraq, Poland, Morocco, Yemen, Ethiopia, and Spain? Why were Jews repeatedly treated as foreigners even in countries where they had lived for centuries? Why did Zionism emerge? Why did the creation of Israel feel not merely political, but civilizational?
Without Jewish history, Judaism can look like a collection of peculiar habits. With Jewish history, those habits become evidence of an extraordinary act of survival.
The holidays are not random cultural celebrations. They are a people’s memory system. The prayers are not only expressions of faith. They are records of longing, loss, gratitude, and return. Hebrew is not merely a religious language. It is one of the great connective tissues of Jewish civilization. Israel is not simply a country that appeared in 1948. It is the modern political expression of an ancient people’s refusal to disappear.
Jewish literacy connects the fragments.
October 7th exposed the cost of not knowing.
October 7th did not only expose Israel’s physical vulnerabilities. It exposed the intellectual vulnerability of the Jewish world.
Many Jews suddenly found themselves confronted with arguments they were unprepared to answer. They heard that Jews were foreign colonizers in the land where Jewish civilization began. They heard that Zionism was merely a European project. They heard that Jewish national identity was invented, that Jewish ties to Israel were religious mythology, and that the conflict began in 1948 — or perhaps in 1967.
Some Jews knew these claims were wrong but did not know why. Others absorbed them because the people making them sounded confident, academic, and morally certain. This was not merely a public-relations failure. It was an educational failure.
Too many Jews had been taught how to feel about Israel without being taught enough about Israel. They had been encouraged to support it, criticize it, visit it, donate to it, or distance themselves from it, but not necessarily to understand the historical conditions that made Jewish sovereignty necessary. Then, when the moral and political pressure intensified, feelings proved fragile.
A Jewish identity built primarily on sentiment can collapse when sentiment becomes uncomfortable. A Jewish identity built on knowledge has deeper roots.
Jewish literacy allows a person to understand that Zionism was not born because Jews wanted to imitate European imperial powers. It was born because Jews had spent centuries learning that tolerated minorities could become persecuted minorities with terrifying speed.
It allows a person to understand that Jewish sovereignty is not a guarantee against danger, but a transfer of responsibility. Jews are no longer entirely dependent on kings, governments, neighbors, or temporary political fashions for their survival.
It also allows us to discuss Israel honestly. Jewish literacy should not produce blind loyalty or simplistic slogans. It should produce mature commitment: the ability to criticize particular policies without treating Jewish statehood itself as a moral error.
Knowledge gives us the ability to distinguish between criticism and delegitimization, between policy debates and historical erasure, between concern for Palestinians and indifference to Jewish survival.
Without knowledge, all of these things blur together.
Judaism is not only a religion.
One reason Jewish literacy matters so much is that Jews are regularly misunderstood — even by ourselves.
Modern Western society likes clear categories. A religion is a system of belief. A nationality is a citizenship. An ethnicity is an ancestry. A culture is a set of customs. Judaism refuses to fit neatly into any one of them.
Jews are a people with a religion, a history, a legal tradition, languages, collective memories, a homeland, and a shared fate. A Jew may be deeply religious or entirely secular and still feel bound to the Jewish people. A Jew may never enter a synagogue but feel shattered when Jews are attacked somewhere else in the world. A Jew may disagree with Israeli leaders yet understand that Israel’s survival matters personally.
This is Jewish peoplehood. It is one of the most important ideas that many Jews were never properly taught.
If Judaism is understood only as a religion, then Jewish solidarity can seem tribal or irrational. Why should a secular Jew in Los Angeles care what happens to a Jew in Paris, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, or Kyiv?
But if Jews are a people, the answer becomes clearer.
We care for the same reason members of any extended family care, even when they disagree, live differently, or have never met. We are connected not because we are identical, but because we belong to a shared historical community.
Jewish literacy teaches us that peoplehood is not an abstraction. It is what allowed scattered Jewish communities to raise money for one another, rescue one another, correspond across continents, preserve common texts, and maintain a sense of collective responsibility through centuries of exile.
“Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh” (all Jews are responsible for one another) is not merely a pleasant slogan. It is a survival ethic.
Literacy changes tradition from burden to inheritance.
Many Jews experience Jewish tradition primarily as obligation.
Do this. Do not do that. Eat this. Avoid that. Show up. Fast. Pray. Light candles. Marry Jewish. Raise Jewish children.
Presented without context, tradition can feel like a list of demands issued by dead people. Jewish literacy changes the experience. It helps us understand that traditions endured because they carried memory, identity, discipline, and belonging across time.
Shabbat was not simply a restriction on work. It was a declaration that human beings were more than labor, and that Jewish time would not be controlled entirely by the surrounding society. Passover was not simply a dinner. It was a yearly insistence that freedom must be remembered, narrated, and transmitted. The fasts were not exercises in misery. They were ways of refusing to let national catastrophe disappear from collective memory.
The Jewish calendar turned history into habit.
This does not mean every Jew will become observant in the same way. Jewish literacy does not eliminate disagreement. It makes disagreement more serious. There is a difference between rejecting a tradition after understanding it and abandoning it because no one explained or learned it well.
A literate Jew can ask: What human need did this practice address? What historical memory does it preserve? What kind of person or community was it designed to create? How might I carry its purpose into my own life?
The question stops being merely, “Do I have to do this?” It becomes, “What will be lost if no one does?”
A good Jew is not a perfect Jew.
The phrase “good Jew” can become dangerous when it is used as a weapon.
Throughout history, Jews have accused one another of not being Jewish enough, religious enough, loyal enough, universal enough, Zionist enough, or critical enough. That is not the purpose of the question. There is no single personality type, political ideology, denomination, or level of observance that defines Jewish goodness.
The standard cannot be perfection. Perfection produces either arrogance or despair.
The better standard is responsibility. Are we taking responsibility for learning what came before us? Are we taking responsibility for what we will transmit? Are we trying to understand Jewish disagreements before repeating the loudest argument we encountered online? Are we connected to actual Jewish people and communities, or only to Jewish opinions?
And are we building something that will remain after us?
A good Jew understands that they inherited something. Not merely trauma. Not merely persecution. Not merely an obligation to fight antisemites. We inherited a civilization. We inherited arguments about justice, holiness, responsibility, power, family, memory, law, exile, return, and God. We inherited the words of prophets and poets, rabbis and rebels, mystics and skeptics. We inherited a people that outlived empires that once appeared indestructible. We inherited Jerusalem — not always as a physical home, but always as a direction.
And inheritance creates responsibility.
We are not required to preserve every custom exactly as it was practiced before us. We are required to understand that when a generation fails to receive and transmit its inheritance, something irreplaceable can vanish.
October 7th reminded Jews that history was not finished with us, but our response cannot be only defensive. We cannot build Jewish identity entirely around those who hate us. Antisemitism may explain why Jewish strength is necessary, but it cannot explain why Jewish life is valuable.
For that, we must know more. We must know what Jews created, not only what Jews survived. We must understand the traditions, dreams, tensions, texts, institutions, memories, and moral responsibilities that made Jewish survival meaningful in the first place.
I'd like to suggest one not on your list. I think it would probably be good not to be denying Israeli war crimes due to any dubious nationalist commitments. Another really good one would be speaking up against the current Israeli regime in charge of the military perpetrating them. But one at a time I understand. Baby steps.
My being Jewish has never been ONLY since Oct 7th.
I was born a Jew, both Parents Family's migrated here to leave persecution in Russia, Austria and Morocco
I was always taught the Fundsmental importance of Istarl to us, as a People, since without, we are NOTHING.....
The Stories were still Fresh from my Parents.
My mother's family was Orthodox in Williamsburg my Father a Reformed College boy from Seagate.
Oct 7th tore a piece of my heart, my soul.
I was always taught we, Jews are 1, a People bound through Blood.
If they hit a Jew, we taught as a Team, never to worry, I was there.
If they killed a Jew, you killed 20 of them.
Im still absorbing what is happening here in America.
My decisions aren't yet finalized.