In the two years since October 7th, something has been happening quietly and steadily, and everywhere I go I hear versions of the same story.

I hear it from secular Jews who never once lit Shabbat candles. From parents who never imagined raising their children with Jewish ritual. From people who spent their adult lives carefully distancing themselves from anything that looked like organized Jewish life. And yet, after October 8th, they came home. Not always to synagogues, not necessarily to prayer, but to their people.

Across the Jewish world, Jews who had been completely unaffiliated suddenly felt a pull they could no longer ignore. Some describe it as instinct. Others as ancestral memory. Many simply say they woke up to a world that had removed its mask. Whatever language they use, the phenomenon is unmistakable: Jews are closing ranks, reconnecting with one another, and shedding an exile mindset that assumed someone else would always step in when things became dangerous.

Exile is not only a place Jews live. It is a way Jews learn to think. It teaches that safety comes from fitting in, that moral alignment guarantees protection, that if Jews contribute enough, assimilate enough, and advocate loudly enough for others, they will be spared when history turns.

October 7th shattered that illusion. October 8th clarified it. What followed was not a wave of sudden religiosity, but something older and more basic: responsibility. Jews began asking different questions, not “How do we explain ourselves?” but “How do we take care of each other?”

One of the clearest expressions of this shift can be seen in the formation of the Shomrim Marksmanship Association in Michigan. SMA did not emerge from an existing institution or political movement. It formed organically, out of conversations between Jews who found themselves newly aware of their vulnerability and unwilling to outsource their safety any longer. Its founders, Taryn Gal and Scott Silverman, describe themselves as “two October 8th Jews,” pushed together by fear, by the apathy of others, and by the realization that “Never Again” is not a slogan but an obligation.

That’s when the cognitive dissonance became impossible to ignore. Taryn Gal, Co-Founder of Shomrim........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)