On a recent flight to the United States, I struck up a conversation with the Israeli woman sitting to my left. After discovering that I was a settler from Efrat, she made her political views clear by saying: “Haaretz is a right-wing newspaper for me!” She told me that her husband was a professor of history in Miami, and how pleased she was that they no longer live in a fanatically religious country that is perpetrating genocide… (Later on, she revealed that she had taken a tranquiliser to cope with the flight, which explains why we spoke for over an hour. My conversations with leftists usually end abruptly when they discover that I live in the “Occupied West Bank”!)
Later in the flight, another passenger walked past and recognized me as someone who had lost his wife and daughters in a terror attack. She told me that her brother was killed in action on October 7th, and we consoled each other for a while. After that conversation, the woman to my left asked me who I was? When I told her my story, she burst into tears. Her whole countenance changed and the barriers between us fell down. She told me that her eight-year-old son is showing an interest in Judaism, and she would not be surprised if he became religious (“I just pray he’ll eat in my home!”). She confided that she would really like to return home to live in Tel Aviv, but her husband is against the idea.
This whole episode reminded me that inside each of us is a “Pintele Yid”, the essential spark of Hashem that is hidden within every Jew. Some people conceal it better than others, but it is always there.
This brought me back to the 5th October, 2023, when I organized an intentionally provocative Sukkot service in Dizengoff Square, erecting a mechitza barrier to protest the Mayor of Tel Aviv and the Supreme Court, who had ruled that it was illegal to hold gender-separate religious Jewish services in public spaces in that city. I believed strongly, together with most other praying Jews, that this ban was an infringement of our human rights.
The Sukkot service was beautiful, and many local people turned up to support us. Some attendees told me that it was the first time they had held a Lulav, and that they were keen to show their opposition to the horrific scenes on Yom Kippur, when a public tefillah service in Dizengoff Square had been disrupted. During the service, a handful of professional disruptors turned up, but we were able to complete our tefillot, to the satisfaction of the fifty participants. After the final Kaddish, two men turned up with megaphones, screaming obscenities and hustling people out of their way. One of them was wrapped in a “Gay Pride” flag, but their intervention was overlooked by the city police, who had torn down our mechitza during the service.
Two days later, thousands of Hamas terrorists stormed our borders on Simchat Torah and massacred 1,300 Jews in cold blood. A week after that I was walking toward the newly named “Hostage Square” in Tel Aviv, when a man recognized me and told me the following story. “Rabbi, I attended your prayer service last week and was pushed aside aggressively by the man wrapped in the flag. I want to tell you what happened three days later when I was sitting and packing boxes for soldiers in Dizengoff Square with hundreds of other people. At one point, I turned to the man next to me to ask him to pass me the tape, and I immediately recognized him as the man with the flag. He recognized me too. We smiled at each other. He passed me the tape. We continued to work in harmony side by side.”
In his new book about Jewish Unity, Dr. René Hanania Levy quotes the explanation of the “Pele Yoetz,” Rav Eliezer Papo’s book of Musar literature, on the verse “Do not hate your brother in your heart” (Vayikra 19:17). He asks why it is forbidden to secretly hate another Jew in your heart”, but not publicly. He explains that if you hate him publicly, he can respond and so you can make peace! Today it is well-known that married couples seeking therapy still have hope for reconciliation for as long as they are continuing to fight with one another. When their hatred becomes internalized and silent, that usually signals the end of their relationship, but as long as they are able to express their anger, they show that their conflict can still be resolved.
Shavuot commemorates the day when we all gathered at Har Sinai to receive the Torah, “as one person with one heart”, meaning that we stood together in perfect unity. How tragic it is that it takes an attack from our enemies to make us feel unified. I hope and pray that this Shavuot should be the day that we look with love at all our brothers and sisters, and appreciate that we’re all in this together. Jews in Israel and Jews in the Diaspora; those on the “Left” and those on the “Right”. May we all see through the conflicts raging between us and recognise that this is just Jews crying out for mutual understanding. May we find room in our hearts for love and acceptance, and may we be worthy to receive the Torah once again, as one person with one heart.
Rabbi Leo Dee is an educator living in Efrat. His book “Transforming the World: The Jewish Impact on Modernity” was republished in English and Hebrew in memory of his wife Lucy and daughters Maia and Rina, who were murdered by terrorists in April 2023.
