What Jews Do Best

Even when everything breaks, the Jewish People build again. That is the lesson of October 7th, just like it is throughout the Jews' extensive history.

The Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem (photo: Sander Crombach/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a lawyer in Toronto.

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

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When Ephraim Hertzano arrived in the Land of Israel after the Second World War, he didn’t have much.

A Romanian Jew who had survived a Europe that tried to erase him, he came to a country barely breathing: newly independent, materially barren, but rich in hope.

In those early years, Israel was a place of shortages: Food, housing, jobs, everything was scarce. Thankfully, Hertzano was used to this. He came from Romania where he was born in 1912, and while there, he came up with the idea for a game that could be played when card-playing was outlawed — yes, outlawed — under the Communist regime.

Hertzano envisioned playing a game that would use small tiles instead of cards to play, a game that could be played by young and old alike, and that had no ties to any language or religion. He wanted to create a game that would bring people together and one day change the world’s leisure time.

After arriving in Israel, idea in mind, Hertzano did what Jews have always done when the world gave them little: He began to build.

From scraps of wood, he fashioned the first Rummikub tiles in his Bat Yam backyard. His family hand-painted the numbers. They went door to door selling the sets. It was humble, but it was also a declaration: Even in scarcity, there is creativity. Even, maybe especially, in displacement, there is invention.

Rummikub became Israel’s best-selling export game. In the 1970s, it was brought to the United States, and after the rules were translated from Hebrew to English in 1977, it became a bestseller in the U.S. too. In 1978, three different versions were released: America, Sabra, and International.

So, the next time you walk through an anti-Israel encampment and see people playing Rummikub, make sure you remind them of its Zionist roots.

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Rummikub isn’t just a game; it’s a metaphor. You start with a jumble of numbers and colours that make no sense. Chaos. Slowly, you build. You find runs, make sets, connect stray pieces. Sometimes you must dismantle what you’ve built to make something new. Sometimes everything collapses and you start again.

It’s patient, deliberate work. And I ask you: Isn’t that exactly the Jewish story?

That was Israel in its first years, and it remains Israel and the Jewish world now — especially as we now mark two years since October 7, 2023.

The horror of that day still echoes: families destroyed, hostages taken, lives ripped apart, the world’s sympathy evaporating basically overnight. Once again, the Jewish People found themselves staring at a pile of scattered pieces, asking how to move forward.

Rummikub might not answer that question, but it offers a quiet philosophy: Start where you are, use what you have, build what you can.

Hertzano didn’t have a factory. He didn’t have investors, or suppliers, or certainty. What he had was will, his family, and a table in his yard. That same impulse has carried Jewish life through centuries of exile, pogroms, and loss. We don’t wait for the perfect conditions to act. We can’t. We build from fragments. We make beauty from scarcity.

It’s the same instinct that, in early Zionist history, turned desert into farmland, tents into cities, refugees into citizens. The same one that built schools, hospitals, banks, theatres, and families after the Holocaust. The same one that drives volunteers in Sderot, trauma counsellors in Ofakim, and the hostages’ families still holding vigils every single day until their loved ones are returned home.

We build because it’s what we do.

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Rummikub only works when you interact. You can’t just play your own tiles; you have to engage with what’s already on the table. You rearrange, connect, and build upon others’ moves. Sometimes you even have to break apart your own successful run to make the board work for everyone else.

It’s a profoundly communal game and, in that sense, deeply Israeli and remarkably Jewish. The point isn’t perfection; it’s participation. It’s the understanding that no single person can make sense of the chaos alone.

That is what we’ve always done: Build community from confusion, unity from fragmentation, hope from horror.

Two years after the October 7th massacres and kidnappings, the Jewish world remains suspended between grief and determination. We are tired, and the world feels indifferent. But we can’t wait for conditions to be perfect before we move forward.

We are still here. We remain. Still building, still teaching, still creating. Still finding patterns in the mess. Again, it is what we’ve always done.

The first Rummikub tiles were imperfect: hand-cut wood, uneven, painted by a family who couldn’t possibly imagine that their game would one day sit in living rooms across the world. Those imperfections were part of its beauty. Each tile carried a fingerprint, a unique brushstroke, a reminder that even handmade things can endure. There’s something profoundly Jewish about that: We make do, and we make meaning, in our own unique way.

If this October 7th anniversary teaches us anything, it’s that we don’t always get to choose the tiles we’re dealt. We don’t need an anniversary to remind us of that as Jews, but it always helps to be reminded.

We can’t undo the horrors of October 7th. We can’t bring back what and who was lost. But we can decide how to play our hand: Will we retreat into despair, or build something enduring from the fragments?

We’ve done it before. We’ll do it again.

To me, that’s the truest Jewish act of all: not just stoic endurance, but creative persistence. Refusing to fold. Pushing back hard and living a life of revolution. Believing that, even in a world of chaos, we can still find runs of order and glimpses of grace.

Because that’s the game we’ve been playing all along.

Even when the tiles are scattered, even when the numbers don’t add up, we sit down, take a breath, and begin to rebuild. We turn to our children, sitting on our laps, ask them if they have any ideas, and give them a turn too.

We may never get all the pieces we want. But, somehow, through faith, community, and sheer stubbornness, we will make the game beautiful again.

And, importantly, we will find a way to win.

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