Bret Stephens’ recent State of World Jewry address generated a great deal of discussion.

His core provocation: the fight against antisemitism, however well-meaning, is largely a wasted effort — antisemitism is a neurosis, not an information deficit, and you can’t educate people out of a psychological reflex.

So instead of pouring our energy into persuading the haters, Stephens urges us to invest in the vitality of Jewish life itself.

He reaches for a metaphor from Philip Glass: “If there’s no room at the table, build your own table.”

In his telling, that table evokes both the industries and institutions Jews historically built when excluded from others and the urgent call to now strengthen Jewish education, culture, and communal infrastructure.

I’m not here to dispute that claim. There is real wisdom in it. But as the debate unfolded over how best to respond to antisemitism, I found myself returning to a different question: not whether to build the table of Jewish life, but how we build it. Because how we build it determines whether anyone stays.

I say this as someone trying to build such a table. The hard part isn’t deciding to build Jewish life. The hard part is resisting the pressure to build it the wrong way.

For a long time, we American Jews didn’t just underinvest in Jewish life — we structured it in ways that made it shallow. We trained Jews to experience Judaism as optional and low-stakes.

We should not have been surprised that something structured as optional became, for too many, easy to walk away from.

This was a philosophical mistake. We absorbed the logic of the market and applied it to our covenant. Markets reward preference. Covenant demands responsibility.

If we are serious about Jewish renewal — not new branding, but generational renewal — then we must be serious about structure.

This week’s Torah portion, Terumah, offers a radically different blueprint for building Jewish life.

God tells Moses to issue an open call for the Jewish people to offer voluntary donations.

And then God promises something magnificent: “Build for Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in them” (Exodus 25:8). The commentators note the grammar — not “in it,” but “in them.” The sanctuary is a conduit for divine presence in the people.

But why build it this way? God is omnipotent. The sanctuary could have descended complete, or its materials requested from elites.

Instead, God binds divine dwelling to the voluntary offerings of anyone whose heart moves them to give. God designs a process in which each giver feels the project cannot happen without them.

This was not an accident. It was by design.

Here is why: the most powerful force for belonging in this world is the feeling of being needed.

Not welcomed. Not included. Needed.

Anyone who has ever been genuinely needed knows: it is exhausting, and it is also one of the most potent elixirs of purpose we ever experience. When you know that the greater good is counting on you, something shifts. You stretch. You invest.

In his ethnographic study of Orthodox Jews in Los Angeles, the sociologist Iddo Tavory, who generously served on my doctoral committee, calls this the experience of being summoned: needed for a minyan, needed for institutions, needed for Shabbat meals. Constantly called into being as a Jew among Jews (See Summoned: Identification and religious life in a Jewish neighborhood. University of Chicago Press, 2019).

For Tavory, that sense of being summoned is what gives that community its cohesion and its pull.

Without unpacking his full theory, I want to borrow Tavory’s core insight: you want a Jew to care? Make them feel summoned. Make them feel that if they don’t show up, something sacred does not happen. There is nothing as psychologically powerful.

This was the genius of the Mishkan. God gifted the people the experience of being needed for something transcendent. That experience — not the building itself — is what allowed God to dwell in them.

Imagine walking through the wilderness, seeing the Mishkan gleam in the sun, and knowing: my silver is in there. My labor is in there. It stands because I showed up.

Once you have felt that, you cannot casually walk away.

But when the logic behind Birthright — no cost, low expectation, designed above all to entice —becomes the logic of Jewish life more broadly, we teach that Judaism competes for attention, that participation is a favor, that nothing serious will be demanded.

Consumer logic produces consumers.

This isn’t something I’m judging from afar. I feel this tension every week. At our shul, we debate questions that sound mundane but are actually formative: how much to charge for a Friday night dinner? Whether to invest heavily in a great kiddush? How to approach Purim in a Young Professional Jewish marketplace where the best-attended Purim events are the best parties in town?

Some of my best moments as a teacher have happened at that kiddush table or in those celebratory spaces — real friendships, real conversations, real Jewish life. The people who come are not the problem.

The question is about us, the builders. When my first instinct is to make it free, make it exciting, make it easy, am I building something that lasts or something that entertains? Am I teaching the Jews who come that they are needed, or that they are customers?

If we never ask anything of people, we are teaching them that their contribution doesn’t matter. And if their contribution doesn’t matter, why would they stay? Why would they invest?

Frictionless Judaism runs the risk of producing Jews who attend but don’t belong, who consume but don’t contribute — and who disappear when something shinier appears.

You cannot summon someone to entertainment. You can only summon them to something that needs them.

The Mishkan model is high-friction by design. It says: we need your gold, your silver, your acacia wood, your fine leather skins — your unique contribution.

Because being needed transforms you from a spectator into a stakeholder. That is how God ends up dwelling not in the building, but in the people.

Stephens says build the table — yes! But build a table that costs something. A table people are summoned to, where their absence is felt.

That is how we nourish covenant. That is how we build commitment. That is how God comes to dwell in us.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)