Jewish life in America today unfolds behind thick, bulletproof glass.

The doors of synagogues and day schools are reinforced. Cameras rest above the entrances. Armed security guards stand in front of metal detectors offering smiles before pressing buzzers that release the secure locks on thick, reinforced double doors. The process so synchronous, one might forget they were entering a fortress.

Inside, Jewish life continues in its own magical rhythm as it has carried on for centuries. A bar mitzvah student stands at the lectern. Down the hall, younger children practice for a first siddur ceremony. In a classroom nearby, older students argue over the weekly Torah portion. Elsewhere in the same building, a newborn is welcomed into the covenant of a bris. Or perhaps mourners sit together during shiva. A civilization thousands of years old continues even if the glass separating it from the outside world has been forced to be built stronger.

Last Thursday in West Bloomfield, Michigan, that fortress was tested. A man drove a truck filled with explosives and ammunition into Temple Israel with the intent to murder Jews. No children or school staff were physically harmed because the synagogue’s trained security confronted the attacker and stopped what could have become a massacre.

And maybe that is the most devastating part of all: that the danger is real and so Jewish life in America must adapt. Build infrastructure. Invest in massive security budgets. Conduct trainings. Rehearse active shooter drills. It is the very real price Jews pay to do the most basic Jewish things.

Jews remain grotesquely overrepresented in the hate-crime data. According to most recent FBI statistics, nearly 70% of all religion-based hate-crime incidents were anti-Jewish despite Jews making up less than 3% of the American population. This is the backdrop against which every shattered synagogue window, every bomb threat, every swastika, every assault, every rammed gate must be understood.

That violence does not emerge from nowhere. It is shared on social media. It is normalized in podcasts. It is cultivated in a culture and politics that increasingly treats Jews as others, scapegoats, genociders, and power vampires. There are even public figures who perform outrage when Jews are attacked even as they spend the rest of the year laundering the rhetoric that makes such attacks more imaginable.

So what, then, are Jews supposed to do with that reality? Build higher walls? Hire more guards? Drill every child? Hide the Jewish star beneath the sweater? Tell our sons to wear baseball caps over kippot? Give up on this city, or that city, or the country altogether? Live forever half-packed, as if running away is always the next step?

That cannot be the answer.

Security is necessary, a nonnegotiable. Jews would be fools to outsource their safety to sentiment. But if our response to antisemitism always begins and ends with just defense, then hatred has already succeeded in shrinking Jewish life. If all we know how to do is brace, then the people who hate us have already dictated the terms of our existence.

The answer is not that Jews must become consumed by those who despise us. The answer is not that we spend our lives spiritually organized around our enemies. The answer is not that we let the antisemite set the agenda and then call that strength.

The answer is that we become even bigger, brighter, more alive.

We raise children who know our songs, our texts, our humor, our arguments, our stubbornness, our beauty. We fund synagogues and schools with learning, music, scholarship, youth programs, camps, books, celebrations, and spaces full of unmistakably Jewish joy. Joy is resistance. Joy is proof of confidence. Joy is what hatred cannot manufacture and cannot ultimately understand. A Jewish child should inherit our fullness.

To be Jewish is to belong to one of the world’s oldest, fiercest, funniest, most argumentative, most morally demanding civilizations. Jewish life is not just trauma of those who tried to kill us. It is also music, text, family, intellect, ritual, laughter, defiance, and transcendence. It is not merely the story of what was done to us. It is the story of what we kept creating anyway.

Will we allow fear to become the organizing principle of Jewish life? We should not.

We should protect our communities ferociously. We should secure our schools. We should guard our synagogues. We should take every threat seriously. And then, having done all of that, we should do something even more radical. We should live. We should live so deeply and so recognizably as Jews that no act of hatred gets the final word. We should build communities so thick with meaning that our children know exactly what they are part of.

Don’t just keep Jews alive. Give Jews a proud life worth living. Because being Jewish is not something to just defend. It is a beautiful thing to live.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)