When I leave my office at a Jewish nonprofit at night, there is sometimes a moment when I pause before opening the door.

Outside, the parking lot is quiet. The building behind me is full of Jewish life—children who played and sang throughout the day, families who came for programs, colleagues still finishing their work.

And for a brief second, before taking a breath and stepping outside, a thought passes through my mind:

Please don’t let this be the moment.

In the past year, I have been asked a very specific question in many different ways. Sometimes it is spoken directly. Sometimes it arrives quietly in a text message late at night from a donor or community member. Sometimes it is the look in someone’s eyes when they walk into our Jewish building and notice the security guard.

The question is always the same:

Recently, there was yet another attack on a synagogue, this time in West Bloomfield, Michigan. In the same news cycle: a shooting at a college campus, violence against Jewish institutions in Toronto, attacks in Europe, rockets fired toward Israel.

For Jews today, the news often arrives in a steady rhythm of alerts and headlines. But the question many of us are asking is not really about the headlines. It is how to live as Jews when the world feels increasingly hostile to Jewish life.

I think about this often.

I think about it when community members call asking what our organization is doing to keep them safe—not because they distrust us, but because fear has a way of making people reach for reassurance.

I think about it when I watch children playing on the playground outside my office window.

And I think about it when my phone buzzes at three in the morning with a missile alert from Israel, knowing someone I love is running to a safe room.

Moments like these make an ancient Jewish teaching feel especially real.

The Talmud teaches that kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh—all Jews are responsible for one another.

It is a beautiful teaching. It is also a heavy one.

Because responsibility means that when rockets fall in Israel, Jews in Maine feel it in their bones. When a synagogue is attacked in Michigan, Jews in Toronto feel it. When antisemitism rises anywhere, Jews everywhere instinctively look over their shoulder.

This is what it means to belong to a people.

And belonging in this way carries its own tension.

There are moments lately when many of us feel pulled in two directions at once.

One part of us wants to double down on Jewish life—to speak louder, to show up more visibly, to gather our communities together and remind each other that Jewish life has endured far worse than this.

Another part of us wonders quietly what would happen if we stepped back.

If we identified ourselves a little less openly.

Would life be easier?

These are not questions I expected to ask. But I know I am not alone in asking them.

Perhaps that is why this moment feels so connected to the story we will soon retell at our Passover tables.

Pesach begins with the story of Mitzrayim—Egypt. But the Hebrew word Mitzrayim also means narrowness. A place where the walls close in. A place where breathing feels harder. A place where fear begins to dictate what is possible.

The story of the Exodus is not only about leaving a physical place. It is about leaving that narrowness behind.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote that the Jews are the people who refuse to accept the world as it is. We remember slavery because we believe in freedom. We remember darkness because we believe in light.

And we continue telling our story because we believe tomorrow can still be different from today.

This year, as Passover approaches, I find myself thinking about a different kind of narrow place—the narrow space between fear and courage, between wanting to hide and choosing to show up anyway.

I have felt that tension personally as well, including when I wrote an essay recently about being a Jew by choice. When it was published, I expected that perhaps a few people might read it.

Instead, something unexpected happened.

Strangers began telling me that the piece had comforted them. That it had put words to feelings they had struggled to articulate. That it reminded them why Jewish identity still matters.

Jewish tradition has always understood something powerful about words—and about the responsibility that comes with speaking them aloud. Our tradition teaches that the world itself was created through speech. Words shape reality. They remind us who we are. And sometimes they give courage to someone we will never meet.

Dara Horn once wrote that people often claim to love dead Jews while struggling to understand living ones. But living Jews are not relics of history. We are not symbols in someone else’s narrative. We are a people still building families, communities, and traditions in real time.

That work is not theoretical.

It looks like parents sending their children to Jewish preschool even when there are security guards at the door. It looks like teenagers choosing to wear a Star of David necklace even when classmates question them about it. It looks like communities gathering for Shabbat even when the outside world feels uncertain.

There are real risks in speaking publicly about Israel and Jewish identity today. But Judaism reminds us again and again that every person has a role to play in repairing the world.

Pirkei Avot teaches: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

We do not choose the moment in which we live. But we do choose how we respond to it.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who spoke with extraordinary courage after the murder of her son Hersh in Hamas captivity, said something that has stayed with many of us.

Hope, she said, is not a feeling.

Hope is a discipline.

Perhaps that is what this moment requires.

Just the quiet discipline of continuing to live Jewish lives.

Continuing to gather.

Continuing to tell our story.

The Jewish people have never waited for the world to become comfortable before choosing to exist.

We build communities.

As Passover approaches, I find myself thinking again about that word—Mitzrayim.

The Exodus story reminds us that the narrow places of history do not last forever. The Jewish story has always been about moving toward something larger—toward breath, toward possibility, toward freedom.

And so, even now—between fear and faith—I know which direction I am choosing.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)