I was once in Miami for a lecture, and when the program concluded, I hurried outside. I knew I was already very late for my flight, which wasn’t great news, on top of which it was right before Yom Kippur and I needed to get home. But, for some reason, my taxi never arrived. I ordered another, but that one also failed to show. A few more attempts produced the same result, and with each passing minute, the situation became more stressful.
And then I noticed something. Senator Joseph Lieberman a”h, who served for many years as the Senator from Connecticut, was stepping into a limousine. Under normal circumstances, it would have felt inappropriate to approach him, but desperation has a way of reshaping etiquette.
I walked over and said, “Senator, forgive me... are you on your way to the airport?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“I know this may be inappropriate,” I said, “but would it be possible for me to sit in the front seat and catch a ride? None of my taxis are coming. I promise to be completely quiet.” He smiled warmly. “Of course. Come in.”
So there I was, finding myself sitting in the front seat, determined to keep my word. But sitting silently next to a United States Senator is not exactly a Jewish instinct. Someone once asked Elie Wiesel whether there is a tradition of silence in Judaism, because everywhere he traveled, Jews carried on endless conversations. Wiesel replied, “Yes, but we don’t talk about it.” So what was I supposed to do, sit there and reflect on my silence?
Eventually I turned around, apologized again, and said, “Senator, once I’m already here, I have to ask you something. There’s a story I’ve been telling about you for years, and I want to know if it’s true.”
I shared the story.
During the presidential campaign when he was running for Vice President on the Gore–Lieberman ticket, Jews everywhere were thrilled. A Shomer Torah u’Mitzvos Jew possibly becoming Vice President of the United States. But when the election ended and the results were finalized, Gore lost, Lieberman lost, and he returned home that night feeling deeply dejected. His wife greeted him, saw the sadness on his face, and said, “Joe, you don’t have to be depressed. In this house, you will always be Vice President.”
He chuckled softly. “It’s a good story,” he said.
I’ll leave it to you to interpret what he meant.
I have returned to that moment many times over the past year, especially as I’ve reflected on the condition of the Jewish people today, not only in Israel, but across the world. What we have witnessed since October 7 is, on the one hand, deeply disturbing, baffling, and beyond comprehension. And yet, in a strange and moving way, it has also revealed something profoundly spiritual and unmistakably true.
I told my students recently that, tragically, what unfolded after October 7 may be one of the most compelling demonstrations of the authenticity of the Torah and the unique nature of the Jewish people.
Because the global reaction simply defies rational explanation.
A tiny country of 6.6 million Jews is surrounded by fifty-seven Muslim nations. Israel is barely the size of the Dallas airport, or as New Yorkers like to say, roughly the size of New Jersey. A tiny dot in a vast region.
And on Simchas Torah morning, at 6:30 a.m., terrorists invaded with unimaginable brutality—burning, torturing, beheading. I will not revisit the horrors; everyone knows exactly what happened. These were acts of sadism reminiscent of the darkest chapters of Jewish history—Chmielnicki, medieval pogroms—except this time, proudly filmed and broadcast to the world. The Nazis tried to hide their atrocities. Hamas uploaded theirs.
And then came a moment almost too surreal to believe: an international film festival in Toronto refused to screen a documentary about October 7 because, they said, the producers, “Did not have permission from Hamas to use their footage.” Imagine rejecting Holocaust photographs because Hitler hadn’t signed a release form.
This is Toronto—2025.
Israel was attacked. Twelve hundred murdered. Hundreds kidnapped. Hamas publicly vowed to repeat it over and over until, G-d forbid, every Jew was dead. Israel entered Gaza to dismantle a genocidal organization, an act any sane civilization would consider morally mandatory. You would think the world would show empathy.
Instead, within days, protests erupted around the globe, and not against the terrorists, but against Israel. And not only in the Middle East, where one might expect it, but on elite university campuses: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Oxford. Campuses filled with Jewish students whose parents paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education that somehow left their children unable to distinguish between Hitler and Churchill.
A rabbi from Duke told me that on October 12, 2023, the University of North Carolina held a massive pro-Hamas demonstration. A secular Jewish professor saw it from his office window, stormed outside, and shouted, “You’re Nazis! You support genocide!” The police escorted him away “for his own safety.” When he returned to class, shaken, a student approached him with a rose. “A rose?” he asked. The student said, “I saw how you stood up for truth. I wanted to show my support.” “You must be Jewish,” the professor said. “I’m not,” the student replied. “I’m a Christian.”
“So why do you care?” The student looked at him gently and said, “Because you’re the Chosen People.” The professor, an avowed atheist, laughed. “You know I don’t believe that. I don’t even believe in G-d.” The student responded, “Professor, you may not believe it, but the rest of us know it.”
Moments like that do not happen in normal history.
Think about this: In the Congo, five million people were killed in two years. In Darfur, four million. In Chechnya, 200,000. In Syria, 600,000, many of them children, gassed by their own government. No worldwide protests. No campus revolutions. Most people don’t even know these numbers.
But Israel, defending its citizens from an enemy openly committed to genocide, is condemned by journalists, academics, politicians, and heartbreakingly, even by some Jews. How can this be explained?
There is only one framework that makes sense: the one the Torah has articulated for thousands of years. The Jew is not merely a member of another nation. The Jewish people represent something metaphysical, something transcendent, something that touches the deepest and most unsettled layers of the human spirit.
G-d told Avraham, “Through you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Bereishis 12:3). We declare three times a day, “L’taken olam b’malchus Shakkai.” Our mission is to heal the world through G-d’s sovereignty. The Jewish people are meant to bring moral clarity, spiritual truth, and ethical responsibility to humanity. We are tasked with proclaiming that good and evil are real, that truth is real, that G-d is One.
This tiny, improbable nation carries that burden. And four thousand years later, we still provoke irrational hatred on one side and inexplicable admiration on the other. The reactions are wildly disproportionate because the Jewish story itself is disproportionate. It is beyond history, beyond logic and beyond any natural scale.
The hatred is mysterious and the survival is miraculous. But both point, with painful clarity, to the same conclusion: the story of the Jewish people is not merely historical.
It is destiny.
