Back to School, Back to Jewish Wisdom
It’s the start of the school year. My daughter is heading back to class, and I’ll be teaching seventh and eighth graders in religious school. My theme is simple: Jewish wisdom will make you a good human and keep you out of jail. I truly believe that if we follow the wisdom of our ancestors, we become better people.
I’m starting with the idea of teshuva—acknowledging our mistakes, apologizing, and trying to do better. Because the truth is, whatever wrong you’ve done only gets worse when you try to cover it up or lie.
Old Friends, New Distance
Following that wisdom, I recently chose to visit someone I hadn’t seen in years because she was ill. Visit the sick. That’s a core value. This person had been part of a writing group I was in for many years. But after October 7, they never reached out. They didn’t check in on me, my family, or my emotional state—even though they knew I was Jewish, had family in Israel, and a child about to go off to college. After nearly ten years of friendship where we had been each other’s sounding boards and shared political causes and views, their silence had been especially painful. But I chose to not reach out to them as much as they had not contacted me.
Fast forward to recently: I learned that one of the members had been in and out of the hospital and had specifically asked to see me. So we agreed to meet. I decided ahead of time not to bring up the silence after October 7. It didn’t feel productive, and I’ve been thriving without them. I had taken the advice of peers and friends—even social media: when people don’t have your back, maybe they’re not really your friends. But I had been asked to show up, so I did.
The Propaganda Question
The visit itself was fine. Four of us sat for two hours talking. We caught up on our lives, and I shared about my daughter heading to college, and about the discomfort and fear many of us in the community are feeling. Then two people in the group asked me if what’s happening on college campuses is real, implying that either my community was overreacting or we were using the events for propaganda.
That gave me pause. My instinct was to yell: You think this is fake? Why would you think we’d lie about threats to our own children? Why would you imagine it’s okay to vandalize libraries, fraternities, synagogues—or to shoot innocent people? But instead, I looked them in the eye and simply said: It’s real. It’s happening. And it’s bad. I did not bring out the shocking statistics about the rise in hate crimes in the US or the world. Had they not been reading the newspapers?
I left feeling once again alone among my friends on the left. These were people I had been politically active with, people I had trusted as allies. Now I wonder why they would believe that I or my community would lie or cry wolf about antisemitism. I wondered how they could easily dismiss my concerns about my family’s safety.
Moving Forward
I don’t know how to respond to them. I had hoped that friendships that withered after October 7 might grow strong again, but that seems unlikely. What feels more important now is to keep strengthening my own community—and to keep teaching my family as well as my seventh and eighth graders that Jewish wisdom will help them be good human beings, help them to thrive, and maybe even keep them out of prison.
My friend, Melissa Hunter, and I are cohosts of The Kibbitz podcast, where we talk about motherhood, friendship, Jewish values, and other issues on Jewish women’s minds. Join us in the conversation. You can listen by clicking right here.
