Recently, I asked other instructors if they felt the same way I did: lectures delivered before October 7th were very different from those delivered after that date.
Today’s lecture is new. We are all at a much higher level. We have all had a full academic year of classes since Simchat Torah. We are meeting in a deeper way, and that meeting is an encounter between souls who want to learn and be strengthened together, especially with our young audience, with new Jewish leaders.
Many lecturers agreed with me.
Below are some examples from the field at conferences I host both nationally and around the world.
• For my youth lectures, I prepared a presentation of “Victory Photos,” a collection of small moments of light, justice and power.
A moment of pride for Israel and the Jewish people. I told the audience that to envision the ultimate victory, we must pay attention to the small accomplishments along the way.
The goal is not to just look at such pictures together, but to get into this mindset: Let’s look for those little moments in our lives and start reflecting on them.
The next day I received a message from a soldier named Yishai Tageman. He sent me a photo of his soldiers putting on tefillin together and a description that moved me deeply: “This is a photo of our victory! Our commander, Noam Ramati, was in the battle with us. He had not been able to put on tefillin all day, and the sun had already set.
The soldiers all felt his grief: this was the first time since his bar mitzvah that he had not been able to put on tefillin.
The tefillin were a few meters away, but we were forbidden to even move there, let alone begin to put them on.
What happened the next day? The next day, all the soldiers, one by one, even those who hadn’t put on tefillin since their bar mitzvah, asked to put on tefillin with him.”
Spiritual moments throughout the year
• On the eve of Passover this year, I met with a group of students who regularly study Judaism in Jerusalem.
Although I came to teach, I learned so much from them. They told me that they enrolled in the program earlier this year for the scholarships and the Shabbat meals and trips, but now feel that Judaism is the subject that means the most to them.
One of them held up a Bible and said, “How will I get through this season unless I study this week’s Torah portion and realize I am part of a great story. This is the best commentary, better than any news release.”
• We need not only to learn, but to act. At our Passover Eve meeting we spoke about freedom.
In a series of lessons leading up to the holidays, they learned, for the first time in their lives, that freedom is not just the freedom to make choices.
True freedom in Judaism is about becoming the highest and truest version of yourself.
A slave is always worried about his own needs, but that is not freedom. That is being enslaved to his ego. Being free means paying attention to the needs of others, caring about others, not being self-centered, and understanding that you are connected to other Jews, especially if there are Jews in need of help.
One of the students, amazed by this new concept of freedom that he had first heard about when he was 26 years old, proposed the idea of cleaning the homes of the elderly, the poor and families whose fathers had been drafted into the military reserves.
After all, there are certainly families out there who need that kind of help before the holidays, and true freedom comes from helping them, from within ourselves.
This fascinating initiative was implemented in a short time: students who did not clean for Passover last year went out this time to clean the homes of strangers, because they realized that they were not strangers, but brothers.
I had the honor of spending a recent Shabbat at Ir Hava Hadim, the Israel Defense Forces’ main training base near Jeroham.
I have met over 1,000 future commanders who see themselves as the “corrective generation,” the generation that will repair what has gone so badly wrong and broken in Simha Torah.
One of them told me, “It’s a mistake to talk about 7/10 as if everything started and ended on 7/10. I realized that our story is much broader, with thousands of years in the past and an eternity into the future.”
These stories are not the main news headlines.
But this is a quiet revolution currently taking place throughout the Jewish world, in which INEXTG occupies an important and central place in its work with young people.
It is an honor to be part of that revolution and to witness these hidden historical processes up close.
The author is a media personality and lecturer for INEXTG (Israel’s Next Generation) students and soldiers.
