In a few days, Jews around the world will sit at their seder tables and sing a song that is over a thousand years old. Dayenu. Each verse names a gift, and each verse ends with Dayenu. It would have been enough for us (some say “It would have sufficed,” but “It would have been enough for us” was the variation my 1983 Hebrew School Haggadah chose).

If Hashem had brought us out of Egypt but not split the sea? Dayenu. If He had split the sea but not led us through on dry land (a.k.a. “dryshod”)? Dayenu. Fifteen verses, fifteen gifts. Each sufficient on its own. But the accumulation is the point: gratitude, built brick by brick, the sheer weight of it almost overwhelming until we realize that we are not carrying it — we’re standing atop it, ready to add more bricks, more mortar, more chapters, more songs.

Now I want to tell a different story. Not of gifts from above, but of gifts from each other. A litany not of what Hashem did for us, but of what we’ve done for one another over the past three thousand years. Because there’s another pattern that runs through Jewish history, one just as old as the song, just as relentless, and just as true:

Every time they came for us, we came together for each other.

And every time, every single time, it was ultimately enough. We prevailed. Yes, we’ve paid heavy prices. Yes, we will continue to do so. But we WILL prevail.

We were slaves in Egypt. We had been slaves for four hundred years, long enough that slavery had become the only life we knew. And so, we fled. And דווקא not all of us, because when has that ever happened? But our People fled. Not as individuals, not as scattered refugees, but as a People, together, through the desert, toward a land that had been promised to us. We did not know precisely what awaited us there… we went anyway.

Do you see it? Together, we set our sights on a better world. Together.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

They desecrated the Temple. Antiochus erected idols in the קודש הקודשים, the Holy of Holies, and forbade the practice of Judaism on pain of death. And so, a family of kohanim (not soldiers, not warriors, a family of priests who had never held a weapon before that day) picked up swords they barely knew how to swing… and they took the Temple back. They were outnumbered. They were outmatched. They won. And the oil lasted just as the Jewish People have lasted.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

They gave us a choice. Conversion or exile. And in 1492, the Jews of Spain (some of my ancestors among them), who had built lives and communities and libraries and traditions over centuries, were told: become something you are not, or leave everything behind. And so, we carried Torah scrolls on our backs across borders and rebuilt in every land that would have us (and some that wouldn’t). The Sephardic diaspora scattered across North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, the Americas. We lost Spain, or more accurately, Spain lost us. Yet we retained ourselves.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

They burned our villages. In Kishinev and across the Pale, they came with axes and torches and the permission of governments that were indifferent at best, more often malevolent. Bialik walked through the aftermath and told us what he saw: “The sons of the Maccabees… concealed and cowering… they died like dogs, and they were dead.” His fury was not only at the murderers. It was at us: at the hiding, the cowering, the silence. And so, we listened. We organized self-defense. We stopped waiting for permission to survive. We emigrated, we built entire new worlds, and we refused — refused — to disappear.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

They industrialized our murder. Their great, smoking machine of death ground over us in the millions. The number was so large that it became almost abstract, which is precisely what they would have wanted. But it was not abstract. It was one person, then another person, then another person, six million times. And so, many of those who survived… the ones who walked out of the camps with numbers on their arms and no homes to return to, the ones who languished yet again in DP camps for years… did something that should have been impossible: they came to Palestine and helped build and defend their own homeland, a homeland that hadn’t yet been reclaimed, their Eretz Yisrael.

Not just a theory. Not just a dream. A country, with borders and a flag and a Declaration of Independence that Ben Gurion read aloud on Friday, May 14, 1948 while five armies were already massing to destroy us, while Herzl’s portrait gazed down at something that was no longer a dream.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

For two thousand years our People had lived as guests in other people’s countries; sometimes tolerated, infrequently celebrated, always ultimately vulnerable. In the Middle East and North Africa, we lived as dhimmis, with the specter of harm and exile hanging over us like a cloud. And so, we reclaimed our indigenous homeland, the State of Israel. And then we defended it. War after war — 1948, 1967, 1973. They attacked on our holiest day and we still prevailed. Our victories were hard-won. They cost the Jewish People sons and daughters, fathers and mothers. Innumerable futures lost to Jew hatred. But we prevailed. Every time, we prevailed.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

On October 7th, 2023, they massacred our families. At music festivals. In their homes. In their beds. In their safe rooms. They took hostages — our mothers, our fathers, our children — and dragged them into tunnels, tunnels reserved for terrorists and their victims alone, never as a sanctuary for Gazan citizens. They starved and abused us there. And so, we fought and prayed and cried out in anguish and anger, and we brought our hostages home. Not all of them — and the grief over those we could not bring home will never leave us. But we fought, and we defeated Hamas militarily, turned them into a shell of what they had been, and we again proved that the Jewish people do not abandon their own.

And when the media said we were alone in the world… well, they were partly right. The governments equivocated. The institutions failed us. The UN, with its decades of systemic antizionism, was truly useless. Old allies discovered new silences. They called out our isolation on magazine covers in bold type, as if “aloneness” were our destiny rather than their projection. And in the eyes of the world, we often were alone.

But the world’s eyes have never been the ones that mattered. Because 290,000 Jews came to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to show our solidarity and connection with Israel. Because Diaspora communities mobilized overnight, online and in real life. Because synagogues that had been half-empty filled up again. Because we turned toward each other in an embrace that we had not felt for many, many years.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

*  *  * And here we are.

Antisemitism and antizionism are surging again — in the streets, on campuses, in legislatures, in the casual chatter of people who should know better but, shamefully, simply don’t know what they don’t know. Another great, smoking machine of exclusion and vitriol and harm, the antizionist libel machine, grinds over us anew. And the operators of that machine cavalierly toss lethal libels into everyday language like grenades. They cry genocide over coffee. They cosplay as terrorists and congratulate themselves for their courage. They’ve made Jew hatred a lifestyle, an identity… a “vibe.”

And so, we fight them. With education. With truth. With the deliberate, defiant reclamation of Jewish pride and power.

In the Diaspora, we’re slapping stickers on lampposts and street signs and buying ad space and finally getting our message out into the world in a meaningful way. We’re wearing our Magen Davids outside our shirts, not tucked beneath them. We’re filing Title VI complaints and suing universities and holding institutions legally accountable, because the law is a weapon too, and boy, do we know how to use it.

We’re doubling down on Shabbat — lighting candles in windows that face the street. We’re wearing our kippot on the way home from shul because whatever city we’re in, this is OUR city. We are making ourselves impossible to ignore. Defiant. “Kumen vet nokh undzer oysgebenkte sho…”

And in Israel, our homeland and our home, we are fighting a war against an enemy backed by the largest state sponsor of terror on earth. A war that will, kenahora, break the IRGC’s stranglehold on the region and reshape the landscape of war and peace, suffering and freedom, for decades to come.

Diaspora and Israel. Arm in arm. Defiant. We are changing the world for the better. Together. Tikkun olam, indeed.

We know this invites a greater threat. We know that visibility is not safety. We know that every Star of David worn in public in the Diaspora is a choice (as crazy as that may sound to you, it’s more accurate every day), and that our choices carry weight. But we’re doing it anyway. Affirmatively. Visibly Jewish. Because the alternative — the hiding, the cowering, the tucking-away of who we are — is not survival. It is Kishinev. It is erasure by consent.

NO. No, we do NOT consent. We will not be erased. WE.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

There will be challenges ahead. There always are. That is the one constant of Jewish history, the one pattern that has never broken. And so, we will unite, as we always have, to overcome them. “S’vet di morgnzun bagildn undz dem haynt / Un der nekhtn vet farshvindn mitn faynd.”

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

The pattern holds. It has held for three thousand years. Every generation, the same test. Every generation, the same answer.

But this is what I want you to carry with you this Pesach, when all around the world, like a musical round, we sing Dayenu and remember Hashem’s gifts: the answer has never come from one place alone. It has come from Jerusalem and from Brooklyn. From Tel Aviv and from Buenos Aires. From Haifa and from Melbourne and from Paris and from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The diaspora and Israel are not two separate stories running in parallel. They are one story, told in two voices, and neither voice is complete without the other. A dialogue. A harmony.

Unity does not require uniformity. We argue about politics and theology and how to raise our children and what it means to be a good Jew. We always have. But when they come for us, we come together for each other. The arm that reaches across the ocean does not ask whether you are Orthodox or secular, Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Mizrahi… it does not ask. It just reaches, outstretched, its hand waiting for yours.

And it reaches across time, too. Every night when I close my eyes, I know that I am connected by a single silver thread to every Jew who ever lived, to every Jew who now lives, and to every Jew who will ever live. That thread runs through Sinai and through Spain, through the camps and through the kibbutzim, through the lampposts where the stickers peel and fade in the sunlight and through the windows where the candles burn. I am suspended in that knowledge, and it protects me.

And that is the gift. That is the evidence. That is the litany I’m asking you to carry in your heart, not as a prayer but as a fact: in every generation, we have shown up for each other. It would have been enough for us if it happened once. But it did not happen once. It happened — it happens — every single time.

So when you sing Dayenu, sing it with the knowledge that you are part of something that has never failed to answer the call and never will. Not in the past three millennia, and not in the next three.

And to every Jew reading this who is even a little bit frightened, who feels even a tiny bit alone — I’m not asking you, I’m TELLING you:

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד.

Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

(Dedicated to my family, my stickerim community, and the clergy and congregation of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue.)

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)