The spiritual awakening taking Israel by storm
By: Paula Levin
“Jews are choosing Judaism for the very first time in their lives!”
Something deeply mysterious is going on in the Jewish world. On every continent, Jews are reaffirming their commitment to G-d, to the Jewish People, and to the ancient, eternal covenant forged at Sinai. It’s not actually a new phenomenon. In fact, we’ve seen it in every age, when Jews across the Persian empire stood firm when assimilation could have guaranteed their safety from Haman’s genocidal decree, when they chose the fires of the Inquisition rather than convert, and literally countless more individual and national examples, great and small, for over 2 000 years. But what’s fascinating about the phenomenon is that it’s not religious Jews demonstrating their commitment to Judaism under the most adverse circumstances. That would be admirable, but not surprising. After all, it makes sense that one would be prepared to sacrifice everything for one’s most deeply held beliefs. And it happens across the board of every religion, where religious people give up their lives rather than violate their deepest truths. What’s really mysterious is that since October 7th, it’s Jews who – at best – were unaware of their rich heritage, or – at worst – harboured deep hostility to the religious world and to Judaism itself, that are rising to the call of the hour. Faced with unimaginable suffering, in the dungeons of Gaza, having lost loved ones on October 7th and the ensuing war, or threatened with violence or social ostracism across the globe – these Jews are choosing Judaism for the very first time in their lives!
It’s a phenomenon already described 200 years ago by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi in his work the Tanya. He explains that deep within the soul of every Jew burns a fiery love for G-d and His commandments. So deep, in fact, that most of us are unaware of it. Chassidic teachings compare this love to a coal left over from a roaring fire that appears to have lost its glow and warmth but suddenly springs to life with surprising heat. This love was imprinted into the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a result of their actions and sacrifices, coming to the surface when put to the ultimate test. It is because of this “ahava musteret” (hidden love) that a Jew ‘has no choice’ but to cling to G-d, when the more logical options might be to abandon Him in favour of safety, comfort – or life itself. And yet, when it really counts, the Jew finds himself unable to do the smallest act that would separate him from G-d, even if it would save his life.[1]
Journalist and broadcaster Sivan Rahav-Meir has a name for Jews who were awakened and transformed by the cataclysmic events of October 7. On a recent trip to Toronto, Canada, she documented the following. “Since the attack on October 7, we’ve been reciting the Kiddush blessings every Shabbat.” “After October 7, I started learning Hebrew online, and also coming every week to a Torah class at the synagogue.” “For the first time on campus, I’m wearing a Star of David necklace, despite hostile reactions. I’ve never been so moved by something.” “On the surface, what does the first part of each sentence have to do with the second? If Hamas slaughtered, burned, and kidnapped Israelis in the Gaza periphery, does someone in Toronto start learning Hebrew and making Kiddush? The answer is yes. This global phenomenon is called ‘October 8 Jews’, the Jews who woke up the day after. Their hearts were opened and they suddenly understood that they are part of a bigger story – a battle over consciousness and faith, over identity.”
Keith Siegel (64) was held hostage by Hamas for 484 days and according to his daughter Shir[2], his search for his Jewish identity began while in captivity. “He found it in small prayers. He started saying blessings over food which he had never said before, and the ‘Shema’ prayer which he had never recited in his life. He said that amidst all that hell, he wanted to remember that he was Jewish, that there was meaning to his people and to the place from which he came… After he returned, I asked him what he wanted us to do for our first Shabbat meal together. I imagined he’d want some dish he loves or a good challah. He replied, ‘You know what I want most of all? A kippah and a Kiddush cup.’” Shelley Shem-Tov described how she and her husband had learned from freed hostages who were held in captivity with their son Omer that he had spontaneously begun making Kiddush and keeping Shabbos – not even using the flashlight issued to him in the dark underground caves in which he was held.
“I chose a path of faith and I returned through a path of faith.”
Agam Berger spent 481 days in captivity, after being taken from her bed by terrorists on October 7th. She was just 18 years old. In Gaza, she decided to keep Shabbat. She refused to cook for the terrorists on Shabbat, she refused to eat meat, though she subsisted on starvation rations, and she encouraged her fellow captives not to eat bread over Pesach. She fasted on Yom Kippur, Taanit Esther, and Tisha B’Av. She prayed every single day – using a siddur her captors found and gave her! In her absence, Agam’s mother Meirav also chose faith. When she heard that Agam was finally being released, she made a bold request: Do not violate Shabbat for me. Ultimately, instead of being released on Shabbat, Agam was freed on Thursday – without any violation of the very mitzvah she had risked so much to keep. Millions of people watched as she sat in the helicopter, finally free. On the white board given to freed hostages she wrote: “I chose a path of faith and I returned through a path of faith… Thank you to all the people of Israel and its heroic IDF soldiers! There is no one like you in the world.” Her mother Meirav is reported to have said, “Now, I know what Hashem wanted of me. To convey the message that Shabbat and the Jewish People are inseparable.” On that note, now in its 11th year, the International Shabbos Project has seen an unprecedented uptake in Israel in the last two years since October 7th. Last year, 10 000 building captains volunteered to introduce Shabbos to their neighbours, and the Department of Education allocated 2-3 million shekels towards events, as part of its emphasis on Jewish identity.
Rabbi Shlomo Raanan runs a non-profit organisation in Israel called Ayelet Hashachar. For 30 years he has been building bridges between the Chareidi world and Jews living in completely secular communities. “They are people who, for three generations, have never fasted on Yom Kippur, never had a bar mitzvah, never kept Shabbat, never walked into a beit knesset (shul), never put up a mezuza. They never even had a brit milah because of their woke ideology,” he explains. “I am the son of Holocaust survivors. Growing up, the talk in our house was always about the future and the destiny of the Jewish People. I think that is why I chose to establish Ayelet Hashachar.” Rabbi Raanan started his work by paying for a minyan of yeshiva students to travel to secular communities for a Shabbat, soon it became 20 minyanim every Shabbat. He paid for the students’ food, travel, and accommodation, and in return asked that, summer or winter, they keep the windows open while they sang lecha dodi.
A chance meeting in the Ramada hotel in 2000 saw his organisation begin a new direction. “I was sitting in the lobby, waiting for the chance to meet with some American donors chatting to a man named Rabbi Shlomo Kassin, who ran Beit Midrash Sefardi in Jerusalem. He told me I was crazy to pay so much money for these Shabbatonim and that I should rather send a religious person to establish a community. I asked him how I could find someone willing to go live somewhere so hostile, without a beit knesset, kashrut, or a school for their children? “Yeled,” he said, “I sent a student to Argentina whose wife had to fly 880 miles to the nearest mikva!” I asked if he had anyone for my project and he did. Now we have 80 shuls, we are working with 200 communities, and we have over 10 000 people learning in chavrusa,” Rabbi Raanan explains.
“They thought that the Jew unencumbered by religion, with a country of their own, would be accepted into the family of nations.”
Since October 7, invited by the residents, Ayelet Hashachar has built 7 new shuls on kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope. These are the first and only shuls ever built there, in communities that have always vociferously objected to having a shul, or any religious ‘coercion’ or influence! Established by secular Zionists, these kibbutzim were determined to create a “new Jew”, one unburdened by ‘backward’ rituals that they believed had made them an object of hatred and derision to the nations. They thought that the Jew unencumbered by religion, with a country of their own, would be accepted into the family of nations. Many of the members defined themselves as Israeli rather than Jewish and spent their lives building bridges with the Palestinians across the border. These were the Jews butchered in their homes, driven across the border in their own cars, dragged into captivity on pickup trucks and motorbikes. One of the hostages, murdered in captivity, his body paraded and bartered for hundreds of convicted prisoners, was 88-year-old Oded Lifshitz, a man who had spent decades driving sick Gazan children for treatment in Israeli hospitals.
“For the first time in my life I saw my soul; I saw that I am a Jew.”
Before October 7, Rabbi Raanan had suggested a basketball game between some yeshiva students and members of kibbutz Re’em. The game was scheduled for October 2, Chol Hamo’ed Sukkot. Dafna[3], the kibbutz’s cultural director (and one of the Nova festivals organisers), led the charge to cancel the game, seeing the match as a way for religious influence to creep into the kibbutz. She warned Rabbi Raanan not to bring his religious mission to her doorstep. “Cancel this game immediately,” she wrote to him. “If you don’t, we’ll all block the entrance with our bodies.” In the interests of peace, Rabbi Raanan called the game off. Five days later the kibbutz was decimated. Dafna’s mother and her two children were murdered, and she was held hostage until her release in November 2023. Ami magazine reporter Danny Wise interviewed Dafna about her ordeal. “I said to an older guard in Arabic, why do you torture me? For 20 years, I’ve made programmes for Arab and Jewish. The Jews are your cousins.” As she pleaded in the darkness for some recognition of their shared humanity, she was met not with empathy but with a cold dismissal. “You are not a descendent of Ibrahim! You are not a Jew!” he spat. “You are a European colonialist who stole our land!” The accusation hit hard. Religion had always been secondary to her identity. But now, in the depths of that tunnel, being denied her Jewishness by a Hamas fighter, she experienced a crisis of self. “I started screaming, Ana Yahudiun, Ana Yahudiun, I am a Jew, I am a Jew!” The guards restrained her, taping her mouth. “For the first time in my life I saw my soul; I saw that I am a Jew.”
“All my life,” Dafna reflected, “I’ve been part of this community. We didn’t see ourselves as Jews, in the traditional sense. When I travelled overseas and someone asked if I was Jewish, I’d correct them. “No, I’m Israeli,” I’d say. But when he called me a colonialist, it hit me. He didn’t see me as a Jew because I didn’t see myself as a Jew. “Every Arab village has a mosque. Christian settlements build churches. And here, we have nothing. Nothing to say that we are Jews. And in that moment, I realised that if we were going to rebuild, we needed to reclaim our identity.” Dafna pointed out that no shuls were destroyed on October 7th, not because of some miracle, but because no shuls existed. Now, under her leadership, and in partnership with Rabbi Raanan, Kibbutz Re’em is building its first beit knesset.
Rabbi Raanan is very connected to the Trupanov family who were attacked on October 7 in Nir Oz. Trying to defend his family, Vitaly was shot. He died in his wife Yelena’s arms, before she and her 73-year-old mother Irina Tati were taken captive along with their son Sasha and his girlfriend, Sapir Cohen. “Yelena is a Russian Jew who moved to Israel 25 years ago,” explains Rabbi Raanan (who has become close to many hostage families in this time, running a Beit Midrash on Hostage Square all this time). “Stalin eradicated Judaism, and the Trupanovs had very little knowledge or connection to it.” After her daughter and family left Russia, Irina became involved in Chabad of Rostov, reclaiming her own Jewish identity and beginning Jewish practices, only moving to Israel to be closer to her family a year before October 7. Together in Gaza, Yelena and Sapir resolved to start keeping Shabbat! I asked Rabbi Raanan how Yelena could still believe in G-d, in Judaism, in the Jewish People after seeing her husband and kibbutz members murdered before her eyes? “Yelena told me that on that day, she saw the Hand of
G-d,” says Rabbi Raanan. “She saw miracles with her own eyes, even in that great darkness.”
Since being released on 29 November (as a ‘gesture’ to Russian President Vladimir Putin), Yelena has been a public advocate for Shabbat. Overnight, she took on Jewish observance, deciding in Gaza that what G-d wanted of her was to live as a Jewish woman. The day before her son’s release, she told Rabbi Raanan, “I ask the people of Israel to please light Shabbat candles in joy and ask that all the hostages be released soon.” What was the first thing her son Sasha asked for on Sunday morning, the day after his release? To put on tefillin for the very first time in his life!
In addition to building shuls, Rabbi Raanan has found architects to redesign the homes of the people living on the border with Gaza, for free, and is in talks with suppliers for discounts on building materials. “Our approach is 3% talking and 97% listening. Our job is to care and to understand the issues these people have with religion. The work needs unlimited patience and most of the time you never see any results. Unless you are wearing the right glasses. I measure results in terms of relationships being created and so I am seeing success.”
Naama Kadosh is an Israeli television journalist who recently visited South Africa as a volunteer for an organisation called Generations, hoping to tell Israel’s story to the local press, explaining the justice of its war against Hamas. Covering the atrocities of October 7 and her deep engagement with the hostage family forum, Naama was traumatised. “I saw so much evil, and for the first time, I was afraid for my life,” she says. “At the centre of all that evil, amid the pain and ruin, I saw good and hope. But it took a price from me, I felt the need for ‘shmira’ – protection. I asked a rabbi and was advised to start saying the Tehillim corresponding to my age. I started to say the morning brachot and I started to keep Shabbat,” she explains. “In Israel, many people don’t feel the need to work on their Jewish identity. It’s something we take for granted. But the war changed us. People who were ‘left’ turned to the ‘right’. They saw that all they had done for the Palestinians never helped to bring peace. And the divisions before October 7 gave Hamas the push they needed to attack. Since then we have woken up to the fact that there is more that unites us than that which separates us. Judaism belongs to all of us. G-d is close to all of us. Many secular people saw October 7 as a sign to be more united and to recognise our Jewish identity. We’ve seen the hate and anti-Semitism. We’ve seen that no one cares whether we live or die. No one else is going to defend us. We have to stand up for what it means to be a Jew, to unite, be proud, and love each other,” she says.
In exploring how so many Jews have turned to G-d in their darkest hour, in the most remarkable ways, we must point out that with or without these public displays of their Jewish identity, the real transformation is always internal and intensely private. So, while we draw strength and inspiration from their outward commitment to the Jewish People’s collective purpose, equally, we must be careful not to judge anyone’s value or significance by any external barometer or lack thereof. Every Jew has a piece of G-d above within, whether we see it or not, and fulfils a unique purpose that only he or she can. As for us, our work is to find a way to access[4] our own hidden love for G-d, His Torah and commandments – without needing to be tested in such extreme ways. To live a life aligned with our deepest values, not only being willing to die for them.
