On Belonging, Grief, and the Limits of Moral Certainty in Jewish Community Life

There is an old Jewish joke: A Jewish man is stranded alone on a desert island for fifteen years. One day, a ship appears on the horizon. Rescue at last. Before leaving, he asks the captain to take one final walk with him. As they stroll, he points proudly.

“This is where I slept.”

“This is where I stored my food.”

“And this,” he says, gesturing to a hut, “is the shul I go to.”

They walk a little farther and pass another building.

The captain asks, “And what’s that one?”

The man replies, “Oh, that’s the shul I would never step foot in.”

Even alone on a desert island, we built two synagogues.

We laugh because it is absurd. We laugh because it is familiar. But in an era of rising antisemitism and deep internal polarization, the joke feels more like a cautionary tale. After all, we are no longer alone on an island. We are under pressure from outside. And yet we continue to divide ourselves inside.

Jews disagree. We always have. The question now is not how to avoid division, but how to remain one people inside it.

The External Reality We Cannot Ignore

The Anti-Defamation League recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2023, the highest annual total since tracking began in 1979, with a dramatic spike following October 7. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Jews continue to be the most targeted religious group in reported hate crimes.

These numbers shape real decisions: security budgets, insurance costs, whether Jewish students wear visible symbols, how institutions plan public events. But security infrastructure, however necessary, cannot answer the deeper question antisemitism forces upon us. It does not distinguish between denominational labels, political affiliations, or cultural identities. It collapses us into peoplehood. But, we are willing to live into that peoplehood ourselves?

The Internal Fractures

Our internal fractures are very real.

The Pew Research Center found in its 2020 study that 27 percent of Jewish adults identify as having no religion while still identifying as Jewish culturally or ethnically. Among younger Jews, that number is higher. Others remain deeply rooted in denominational synagogue life. Our community is not shrinking into sameness. It is diversifying.

Since October 7, I have watched something shift. Jews who once stood at the edges of organized Jewish life have stepped inward. Israeli Americans who saw synagogue as peripheral are searching for belonging. Secular Jews are seeking ritual. Synagogue regulars are seeking solidarity. But as people move closer, disagreements intensify. And when leadership is not equipped to hold that complexity, the results can be devastating.

I witnessed this in my own community. During Yom Kippur services, a rabbinic sermon indicated it would be a sin not to acknowledge the suffering of Gazans while we grieve our own fallen. For some congregants, the inclusion reflected Jewish moral integrity. For others, still raw from October 7 and the ongoing war, it felt wounding. For some, it did not land as an expansion of moral concern, but as an erasure of the distinction between victim and perpetrator. Not as compassion, but as a displacement of their own still-raw grief.

What followed was not a conversation. It was a confrontation. And what made it a confrontation was not the disagreement itself, which was inevitable, but the way leadership responded to it. Rather than creating space for the pain in the room, leadership clung to the higher moral ground. Those who were grieving were made to feel, implicitly but unmistakably, that their grief was the problem. That their need for solidarity was somehow a failure of ethical imagination.

It was a failure to acknowledge pain.

In moments of rupture, leadership must choose covenant before correction. Not certainty, but presence. The question that needed answering was not “who is right?” but “who is hurting, and how do we hold them?” By the time leadership got there, it was almost too late to restore trust.

This is what I mean when I say that structure and humility in leadership are not optional. Without them, a single sentence in a sermon becomes a fault line. And a fault line, left unaddressed, becomes a fracture.

This is not an isolated story. It is our broader communal condition nowadays. Trauma compresses our capacity for nuance. Words that might land gently in ordinary times can feel like betrayal in extraordinary ones. Leaders carry disproportionate weight in their language. And when they mistake moral certainty for moral leadership, congregants carry the cost.

Curiosity Over Assumptions

What the Yom Kippur moment needed, and what our communities need now, is not agreement, but a willingness to understand before we judge. To choose curiosity over assumptions. To listen in order to understand, not to convince.

Many American Jews experience Jewish identity through synagogue life and religious practice. Many others experience Judaism first as culture, language, and national story. Neither is more authentic. But when institutions assume a shared starting point that members do not share, misunderstanding grows. Too often we expect ideological alignment before relational commitment. We seek comfort before covenant.

Durable communities are not built on comfort. They are built on commitment.

The Negotiation of Belonging

The Yom Kippur exchange revealed something deeper than disagreement over content. It revealed a negotiation of belonging. Does my grief have primacy here? Is my moral framework legitimate here? Is there room for my way of being Jewish?

These are not abstract debates. They are questions about whether we still belong when we hurt the way we hurt. Whether we can still feel safe amongst our own people.

Belonging is the real measure of safety. It is also the real measure of resilience. A community whose members feel genuinely held, even in disagreement, even in grief, is one that can withstand pressure from outside because it has learned to withstand pressure from within.

A community protected by guards but fractured within is not yet a community. It is an address.

From Conversation to Structure

Good intentions are insufficient. If we want meaningful cohesion in an age of polarization, we need structure. Not as a bureaucratic imposition but as the architecture that allows disagreement to be held without becoming rupture.

That means facilitated roundtable dialogues and dedicated listening spaces where diverse voices can surface without the pressure of immediate resolution. It means joint working groups that reflect the genuine diversity of contemporary Jewish identity, with shared governance built in from the start rather than added as an afterthought. It means clear communal agreements about the terms of discourse, and leaders willing to uphold those agreements when conversations grow uncomfortable rather than shutting them down.

It also means investing in a different kind of leadership development: one that trains leaders not only in rhetoric and vision, but in the pastoral capacity to sit with pain they did not cause and may not share. The ability to say “I see your grief” before saying anything else is not a soft skill. In a fractured community, it is the most important one.

These are infrastructure for belonging.

The communities that will hold together under pressure are not necessarily the ones with the strongest ideological consensus. They are the ones that have done the slower, less visible work of building relationships strong enough to survive disagreement.

Covenant Over Convenience

The desert island joke reminds us of something uncomfortable. Even alone, we divided ourselves. But we are not alone now. We are visible. We are vulnerable. We are watched. Antisemitism links us by fate. The question is whether we will link ourselves by choice. That choice requires humility. It requires leaders who understand that holding complexity is the deepest expression of conviction. It requires congregants willing to assume good intent even when they feel hurt. It requires all of us to resist the pull toward separate ecosystems, ideological, cultural, political, where we are never challenged and never have to negotiate our belonging with someone who grieves differently than we do.

We cannot build durable communities on ideological agreement alone. We never have. Jewish continuity has always depended on covenant, a shared commitment to one another that survives disagreement.

October 7 was a rupture. It exposed vulnerability. It also awakened belonging. Jews who once stood at the edges stepped inward. The question before us now is what we will build with that movement. If we retreat into ideological silos, we will exhaust ourselves policing differences while the world grows more hostile. If instead we invest in communal elasticity, building structures that allow disagreement without exile, we may emerge stronger.

In an age of polarization and rising antisemitism, the most important investment we can make may not only be in security infrastructure, but in the relational architecture that allows us to remain one people, even when we do not pray, vote, or grieve in the same way.

Because if we cannot learn to sit in one room together under pressure, we may not recognize one another when the pressure eases.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)