I want to tell you about a room I was in on June 3rd.

Isreal’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon had just come off one of the ugliest weeks Israel has faced at the United Nations in recent memory. Israel had been placed on a sexual violence blacklist alongside Hamas and ISIS, organizations that raped women, murdered families, and kidnapped children. Think about that for a moment. The same institutions that exist to uphold human dignity had just told the world that Israel belongs on a list with monsters.

And then Danny walked into that room.

He looked out at the crowd and said something I have not stopped thinking about since. He said: usually, I am the only ambassador speaking on behalf of Israel. Tonight, this whole room is full of ambassadors. That is what Jewish community looks like when it is working. Not reaction. Not grief. Not defense. A room full of people who have decided, in the face of everything, to show up.

We were there to honor Mike Leven. And as I sat in that room, I found myself thinking about what the word ‘honor’ really means when it is applied to a man like him.

It is not about a career, though his career has been extraordinary, decades at the highest levels of American business, from the Georgia Aquarium to Las Vegas Sands to the Asian American Owners Association. Danny Danon named those things and then set them aside. He said: the reason we honor Mike tonight is not because of what he built in business. It is because of what he chose to build for the Jewish people.

That distinction is everything. Because most people, when they reach a certain age and a certain level of success, stop building. They give. They endow. They write checks. All of that matters. But Mike Leven did something different. He built an idea into an institution. He took a conviction, that the Jewish future does not guarantee itself, that someone must deliberately, generously, and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)