Foreword The Secret of Our Staying Power

Bari Weiss¹. She was previously senior editor at Tablet magazine and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Weiss’s first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award.

footnotes: ¹ Bari Weiss is an op-ed editor and writer at the New York Times

I sit here typing these words down the street from a school for young Israelites in Pittsburgh. Or, as we now call them, Jews.

There are no schools for Amalekites or Moabites on planet Earth. The Roman Empire that destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem is long gone. And yet here, speaking in the language of King David, there are Jews.

“Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though the Hittites had a great flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people? When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable,” noted the late Southern American Catholic writer Walker Percy. “What are they doing here?”

By every rule of history we should have disappeared long ago, a civilization only capable of being recalled, like those others, on Wikipedia. But we are here, in all those places Percy named and more. It seems to me that our very existence is an earthly miracle more astonishing than the parting of the Red Sea.

What are we doing here? Not just here, against all odds, but here still asking the eternal questions that gave us the name Yisrael in the first place?

I don’t know the answer. I am no scholar, unlike the brilliant author of this volume. I am just a simple Jew.

But it doesn’t take a genius to see that the secret is not our superhuman physical strength. Nor is it our ability to organize, or to wield political power. No, I believe the secret of our staying power is the subject of this volume: our ideas.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks shows in these soul-nourishing essays, those ideas – one God, freedom, Shabbat, the dignity of difference, the preciousness of human life – have not just sustained our desert-born tribe. They have also transformed the world.

These days, there is understandable cynicism about that very notion. But if I didn’t believe that ideas have the power to change the world I would be in the wrong business, as a writer and editor of opinion columns. Indeed, one of the ideas that changed the way I live my own life was uttered by Rabbi Sacks, and its insight hit me right in the heart of a newsroom.

That idea? Non-Jews respect Jews who respect Judaism.

I bore witness to the wisdom of that lesson when I was a young editor at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. It was a heady place to work and I was eager to fit in.

So when the good people from Chabad showed up bearing sufganiyot at Hanukkah time, I was less than thrilled.

Why did my fellow Jews need to show up in their beards and black hats with boxes of high-caloric food with weird names in front of all of my staid, salad-eating colleagues? Chabad does amazing work. But did they really have to do it here, at my fancy newspaper job?

The shame hit me when I saw the reaction of my non-Jewish colleagues. Everyone loved them. The treats, sure, but more so the warmth and curiosity of the Chabadniks who would become my friends.

It’s not just that non-Jews respect Jews who respect Judaism. That experience, and countless others that followed, taught me the unspoken part of Rabbi Sacks’s teaching: Jews who respect Judaism respect themselves.

It was a reminder to me at the precise moment I needed it that my Jewishness is never, ever an obstacle to connection to people who are different from me. Just the opposite. The truth of that is perhaps the most powerful demonstration of the greatest of all Jewish ideas: That everyone is created in the image of God.

Since that day, I have made it a point in my own life to try to live by their example – and the example set by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who knows that ideas are not ancient ruins or mere ornaments, but lamps that light the way. And that it is the people who live by them that give them their glow.