What I want my children to know about being Jewish in 2025 cannot be inscribed on a donor wall. It will not be found in the minutes of a board meeting or captured in a gala tribute video. It cannot be named after you. It is something quieter, deeper, and more enduring. It is the knowledge that Judaism is not a legacy to be managed but a covenant to be lived. And that the great project of Jewish continuity will not be secured by capital campaigns or commemorative plaques. It will be secured by people—ordinary people—who choose, stubbornly and lovingly, to live as Jews when it would be easier not to.
You are not the beginning of this story, and you are not the end. You are a link in a chain so old it has forgotten the names of some of its links, but not their weight. You were born into a people that has carried memory across millennia not through stone, but through song; not through prestige, but through practice. Our ancestors did not have endowments. They had intention. They did not secure continuity by funding buildings. They did it by blessing wine on Friday nights, by studying ancient texts under candlelight, by refusing to forget who they were in times and places that demanded their erasure. Continuity is not built. It is inherited—and then, critically, it is chosen.
It is tempting, I know, to equate permanence with presence. To believe that a name etched into limestone is more enduring than a child whispering the Shema before sleep. But I want you to know this: the Judaism that survives is not the Judaism that is commemorated. It is the Judaism that is practiced. You can fund it, yes—but if you do not live it, you have built a museum, not a future. If your Judaism consists of attending fundraisers but not funerals, of advocating for Jewish survival but not studying Jewish text, of wearing your Jewish identity like a designer label while remaining unacquainted with its content—then what you are preserving is not Judaism, but a simulacrum.
Judaism is not a survival strategy. It is a spiritual revolt against meaninglessness. We did not endure Pharaoh and pogroms and Auschwitz and October 7 in order to emerge as donors without devotion. We survived because Judaism gave us something to live for and something worth dying for. It gave us ritual when the world descended into chaos. It gave us law when kings ruled without it. It gave us Shabbat when labor became endless. It gave us a language for grief and for God, even when God was hidden. Judaism is not a relic. It is a resistance. It is the refusal to be flattened by history, to be dissolved by empire, to be forgotten by time.
And yet, I want you to know the beauty, too. Not just the burden. I want you to feel what it means to stand at the edge of Yom Kippur, hungry and broken and held. I want you to hear the ache of Kol Nidrei echoing in your bones. I want you to know the joy of a wedding beneath a chuppah, the strange sweetness of a glass broken in the moment of triumph, the quiet sanctity of wrapping yourself in tallit. These are not symbols. They are encounters. We meet the divine not in grand declarations but in the rhythms of Jewish life—lighting candles, reciting blessings, observing days that pull us out of time and back into ourselves.
Being Jewish is not always easy. It is not supposed to be. It demands fidelity in a world that rewards flexibility. It asks you to place your life in service of something larger, older, and less immediately gratifying than the self. It insists that your calendar and your conscience be shaped by a people’s collective memory and not by the market. But that is precisely what makes it sacred. In a society where meaning is increasingly privatized and commodified, Judaism dares to suggest that holiness is found in obligation, and that freedom without form is not liberation but loneliness.
I want you to love Israel. Not for its perfection, but for its imperfection. I want you to understand that Israel is not the moral equivalent of every other country. It is not merely a state; it is a stake in the Jewish future. It is the only place on earth where Jewish time and space align. Where the language of Torah is spoken in the streets, and where Jewish holidays are national holidays not because someone lobbied for inclusion, but because they are indigenous to the soil. Yes, it is flawed. Yes, it struggles. But it is ours. And love does not mean silence or complicity. It means presence. It means showing up. And it means refusing to cede our story to those who hate us with fluency and fire.
There are those who believe that our survival as a people depends on how much we give. I disagree. I believe it depends on how much we give of ourselves. You will not transmit Judaism to your children because your name is on a building. You will transmit it because they saw you live it—imperfectly, maybe, but authentically. Because they heard you pray, and saw you weep, and watched you wrestle with God and history and peoplehood. Because they saw you choose this covenant when no one made you. That is the only legacy that lasts. The rest is scaffolding.
I do not want you to be Jewish out of guilt or fear or nostalgia. I want you to be Jewish because it is beautiful. Because it is hard. Because it is holy. Because it is yours. You may wander. You may doubt. But this tradition is capacious enough to hold both faith and fury. We are a people descended from Jacob, after all—the one who limped after wrestling the divine. We do not expect you to walk upright every step of the way. But we do ask you to keep walking.
One day, someone may ask you what your family did to preserve the Jewish people in the 21st century. You can tell them that you gave. But I hope, more than anything, that you will be able to say: we lived it. We kept Shabbat. We sent our kids to camp. We taught them Torah. We stood with Israel. We buried our dead and welcomed converts and studied texts that made us uncomfortable. We gave tzedakah because it was commanded, not because it was named. We were not spectators to Jewish life. We were participants in it.
The future of Judaism will not be decided by the number of buildings we erect. It will be decided by the number of people willing to live as Jews without needing their name inscribed in stone. Continuity is not found in architecture. It is found in the soft-spoken, sacred audacity of those who choose to remain.
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