The Jewish world is on fire. The bloodbath orchestrated by Hamas and Iran on Saturday, October 7, 2023, in Southern Israel has woken up a part in Jews that laid dormant. Touched to the core, Jews are more aware of their own Jewishness than they have been in a very long time.
The glee of the enemy in slaughtering Jewish babies reminded us that this has nothing to do with occupation, colonisation, apartheid, or any other myth. This was a manifestation of visceral evil which craves to destroy every single Jew. Had Hamas had its way, it would joyfully perform this mini-Holocaust daily, until all 6.6 million Jews in Israel lay lifeless.
Jews feel the need to respond. Of course, we must defend ourselves in every possible way; we must support Israel and our soldiers with every fibre of our being—encouraging them to fulfil their moral duty of eliminating every vestige of bloodthirsty evil. We must lift the morale of our brothers and sisters in Israel and the world over through an unprecedented outpouring of support, love and oneness, like never before.
But there is one more critical weapon that Jews today, all 16 million of us, can embrace—and it will change everything.
Death for the Jews has been plotted by tyrants of every age. The greatest empires of the ancient world—Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome, all the way down to Stalin and Hitler—attempted to annihilate us; yet they have all vanished, and we survived. Jews have been expelled from nearly every country in which they resided, yet we are here to tell the tale.
How did a hunted-down nation constituting less than one-quarter of one percent of humanity survive and thrive?
All these nations and tyrants had large territories of land, mighty military prowess, culture, language, and affluence, yet they are gone. What is the secret of our immortality?
There is only one rational way to answer this—to search for the one unique and exclusive weapon that the Jewish people possessed from the day they became a people and accompanied them through all their history. Can we identify such a weapon?
In science, we search for the permanent trait in an organism to explain its longevity in difficult circumstances. With the Jewish people, the search is not difficult. There is only one weapon that has been with us forever, in every milieu, in every location, under all circumstances: The Torah that our people studies and the commandments that Jews have observed and celebrated with unwavering commitment on a daily basis, and bequeathed to their children and grandchildren.
Judaism is the only “weapon” that the Jewish people had from the day they became a people till this very day, which no other army or empire possessed. It is our mightiest weapon and it has outlived our enemies for over four millennia. Hamas and its supporters didn’t target just a piece of land, but an entire people. We are being confronted once again by a force of evil and diabolical hatred that craves to destroy G-d’s eternal people. At such a time, our response must be: Let’s be Jewish like never before in history, and let's be united like never before!
Let us become the greatest Jews ever, by studying what it means to be a Jew and living it. Whether it’s putting a mezuzah on your door, wrapping tefillin each morning, studying Torah on a daily or weekly basis or engaging in prayer and spiritual meditation... Whether it’s making your home kosher, lighting Shabbos candles and celebrating the holy Sabbath, giving charity every day, or giving your children an education filled with Jewish love and wisdom, becoming a passionate ambassador of love and unity among our people, imbuing your marriage with purity, love, and holiness, or going to synagogue and getting involved with a community – choose a mitzvah!
Judaism is about cultivating an ongoing relationship with your deepest soul-essence, filling your heart with the love and peace beating in your soul, and aligning yourself with the universal Divine consciousness of Oneness. Every mitzvah, every prayer, and all of Torah, is about becoming channels for the source of all love, peace, light, and truth—and drawing it down into our world. These are the spiritual weapons of victory and eternity.
We do not have time to live in fear and paralysis; we have a mission: to draw down infinite love into our hearts, our homes, our communities, our people, our homeland, and the entire world. We need G-d, the Creator and source of all love and peace, in our lives. That’s how we can grant the most profound power and courage to our people, our homeland, and all good people in the world. The support for Hamas in institutions of higher education, and the silence of people so many of us respected, has sickened us. This is the time for courage, resolve, and fortitude. Let’s not shrink nor shirk our calling.
Some of our brethren were drafted into the front lines of battle with Hamas; the rest of us can’t afford to remain spectators. We were all drafted into battle, on a physical or spiritual level. Four thousand years later, the Jewish People are still here, thanks to Judaism’s immortal weapon.
