This past week, I stood in the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia for the first public celebration of Jewish Heritage Month ever held in our provincial capital.

That sentence matters because the key word is celebration.

For years, Jewish communal engagement with government has necessarily focused on antisemitism, Holocaust remembrance, security, and, since October 7, the fear and vulnerability Jews feel in Canada and around the world. Those conversations matter. The security guards outside our synagogues and schools are not decoration. The anxiety parents feel when their children go to campus or walk down the street wearing a Magen David is not paranoia. Jewish fear is real. Jewish vulnerability is real. Our indignation is righteous.

But fear cannot be the whole story of Jewish life.

Fear can protect a community, but it cannot nourish a soul. Security can guard a building, but it cannot make that building holy. Indignation can wake us up, but it cannot be the only thing that gets us to our feet.

That is why Jewish Heritage Month matters.

In 2018, the Parliament of Canada unanimously passed the Canadian Jewish Heritage Month Act, recognizing the contributions Jewish Canadians have made to this country’s social, economic, political, and cultural life. Yet until now, British Columbia had never formally celebrated it in the provincial capital.

We have gathered there many times in grief. For Yom HaShoah. For International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Since October 7, public officials have stood with us to mourn, condemn, and remember. All of that is necessary.

But it does not define us.

The historian and author Dara Horn insightfully titled her award winning book People Love Dead Jews. The title lands with a painful force because the world often seems more comfortable mourning Jewish deaths than celebrating Jewish life. Jews are invited to be symbols of tragedy more readily than partners in joy, culture, creativity, faith, and moral imagination.

So this past week, the Jews of British Columbia Canada insisted on celebration.

To our august provincial capital we brought Jewish music, Jewish food, Jewish leaders, Jewish pride, and Jewish joy into the heart of Canadian civic life. We gathered not only to say that Jews must be protected, but that Jews must be seen. Not only as a vulnerable minority, but as a living, breathing, contributing, creating, blessing people.

That........

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