October 29, 2025

I am writing this on Oct. 6, 2025, just a day shy of Oct. 7 — a date that carries tremendous emotional weight for me, as I’m sure it does for many. I place it among the two most devastating moments in my life: the untimely death of my father at 54, one day after I turned 24, and the shocking and unexpected death of my younger sister, Susie, on a Wisconsin road. In each case, the world fell away beneath my feet. I was transported to a new reality, one that required a slow and painful adjustment to whatever it held in store. So it was with Oct. 7.

My wife and I had been staying in Brooklyn at the time, celebrating the birth and bris of our newest grandson, born to my son Isaac and his wife. It was a time of unbounded joy — its own kind of new reality, one that expanded my sense of the world and of myself. The closest thing I can compare it to was pulling back the lens of a camera to reveal not a new scene, but the same one—suddenly, and unimaginably, more vast. It contained more possibilities, more understanding, a clearer sense of priorities, and mostly, I think, a deeper gratitude for all I had been blessed with.

Such was my mood that Saturday morning, a Shabbat that fell on Simchat Torah — the most joyous of all the Jewish holidays. I slept in and woke with that same sense of gratitude. As I walked down the stairs, I saw my wife. For those who have been married a long time, knowing the mood of one’s spouse becomes an instantaneous, visceral knowledge. There was no guesswork, only the certainty that something terrible had occurred. Not an inconvenience, not a broken pipe or a bill that needed to be paid — this was far beyond that.

“Something happened in Israel,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what, but there’s been a terrorist attack. A lot of people have been killed, and many have been kidnapped and taken into Gaza. That’s all I know right now.”

So, why, you might ask, would this news—and the staggering details that came afterward—be on par with the deaths of my father and sister? I’ve thought a great deal about that over these two years since Hamas’ pogrom. The question becomes more refined: what place does Israel hold for me, a Minnesotan-born Jew? What is it that is so compelling about this tiny strip of land?

Oftentimes it’s something as simple as a scent that brings me back to an answer. Some say that our sense of smell — perhaps because it warns of danger or decay — roots itself more deeply in memory than any other sense. I know that’s true. There are moments when I’ll catch something familiar — a whiff of blue spruce or night-blooming jasmine. I’ll stop what I’m doing and be carried back to Israel, to the sense-memories of my childhood: the first time I traveled there with my parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I was eight years old then. It was June of 1968, exactly one year after the Six-Day War. I didn’t understand the import of that brief, epoch-changing war, but I did intuit something about peoplehood, about family, about tribe — about belonging.

It was there that our family, who had gone West before the Shoah, met another branch who had survived and gone East, to Israel — to the only place on earth that would accept them. To the only place on earth that would embrace them. And so, I, too, was embraced — showered with love from people I had never met. This feeling — not the holy places, not the sea, not the roar of jets with blue Magen David stars on their wings — spoke of acceptance and protection. It was people. It was love. It was the sensation, exquisite and heretofore uncommon, of being part of something beautifully mine. There was one more aspect, one I could not fathom, only feel, which is the centrality of the land of Israel; something universal, something cosmic.

Think for a moment about history, ancient and recent, and about the present. Think about the role this seemingly insignificant piece of real estate has had in world consciousness. Consider how for millennia, countless wars have been fought over it; consider how often it has played on the news, in poetry, and in song. One answer to these questions, which has intrigued me for decades, is this: in Solomon’s temple, the Beit HaMikdash, which stood some 3,000 years ago in the place where the Al Aqsa mosque stands now, there was a space called the Holy of Holies. It was there that the High Priest of the Jewish people would enter once a year on Yom Kippur, to relate directly to God. It was said to be the “interface” between the temporal world and the spiritual. It’s doubtful any rational person would take this seriously. But then again, no rational person can fully explain the magnetic pull the land of Israel has in the human imagination.

When I think about Israel today, and in the days since Oct. 7, I am not thinking about the government, politics, or infrastructure. I am thinking about brothers and sisters. But how is it possible to mourn, to fear for, to love and support people you’ve never met? This is not a psychological question, but a spiritual one.

In my view, every person is a Tzelem Elokim — created in the image of God. Each is sacred. None are to be reviled based on color or creed. To do so is to commit a kind of moral insanity. Each person, whether they know it or not, belongs to a past, a peoplehood—even if that past or peoplehood has been lost. I know, beyond a doubt, that I am part of Am Yisrael, the family of Israel. Oct. 7 saw Hamas acting out its own distorted sense of peoplehood. It led them to commit the greatest acts of evil. For many, the word “evil” feels anachronistic, something from a distant or irrelevant history. To the contrary, evil always lives among us.

I recall a psychologist friend of mine, an older man who has since died, who wouldn’t use the word even for those who committed the worst crimes. “Bad brains,” he would say — at least until I pressed him. He was a man steeped in the latest scientific theories. One day, as he told me about his early years as a therapist, he mentioned that while earning his degree, he’d gotten into conflict with a professor over his unwillingness to work with certain people. My friend refused to treat sex offenders, particularly those who had harmed young children. “I just couldn’t do it, nor can I now,” he said. I pushed back. “What if they simply needed your help?” He paused. “Even so, I find them evil and disgusting.”

This is to say that no matter how we’ve been educated or acculturated, we all know that evil exists—and that it must be confronted. Oct. 7 was our horrific reminder.

Allow me to jump to the present. Many of the world’s leaders are widely reviled. Some of my readers have written to me saying that certain political figures are themselves evil, that they should be destroyed or erased. Indeed, people have strong emotions.

There’s an old moral hypothetical you may have heard: knowing what you now know, would you have killed Hitler while he was still a baby? The tension is obvious — you would commit the murder of a child to prevent the murder of millions.

But let me invert the question: if all the hostages were released, and peace — not merely a ceasefire, but real peace — were to break out across the Middle East, would we still despise the figures who helped bring it about, even if we once found them unbearable?

And what if the peace we long for had to come through brutal and tragic means? Could we — at least, those of us who have not been directly traumatized by serious injury or by the loss of loved ones — accept that some things must pass through darkness before arriving at light? Would we be willing to see that, at times, the instruments of redemption may not resemble the ones we would have chosen?

Now, after many years, I’ve come to see that my father’s death led to circumstances I could never have imagined — to experiences so beautiful they once lay beyond my comprehension. To be fair, I haven’t been able to do that with my sister’s passing. And yet with enough time, I know it’s possible. Would I have preferred that my father not die? Of course. And for my sister as well.

But here we are — with scars that will never heal, but might, with time, soften. With the scents of pine and jasmine. With a sky above us that has remained, and will forever remain, untouched by war. With oceans and rivers unconcerned with the machinations of humankind. With love, now freer to express itself. With things of importance taking precedence over things of lesser consequence. And with a faith that, though battered and bruised, still carries each of us forward.

May we seek peace. May we find it, even through the fog of our well-founded doubts. These are days of revelations and wonders. Just as we do, they too, long to be noticed and embraced.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author. 

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught, “Judaism does not mean living in the past. It means living with the past, but with eyes firmly turned toward the future.” While the concern for the rabbinic pipeline and the need for more quality rabbis has already been sounded, we need to simultaneously be engaging in the parallel conversation around rabbinic training. Emerging from the 18th/19th century Haskalah movement, the early Rabbinic Seminary sought to blend traditional Torah learning with secular studies and modern academic methods to best prepare its graduates for holy rabbinic work. Now in the 21st century our rabbinic seminaries still strive towards these same purposes – to prepare graduates for holy rabbinic work. Yet, as the role of rabbi has shifted, our training modes have not kept pace. 

Jewish communal survival is directly tied to our ability to innovate – using the present as the foundation upon which to build a better future. The establishment of the modern state of Israel is an example of such an innovation. In 1902, Theodor Herzl published his utopian novel “Altneuland” (“The Old New Land”). In this work Herzl imagines a future in which the old land is not forsaken but rather is transformed into a modern, thriving, advanced society. A student of his reality, Herzl understood that for the growth and sustenance of Judaism and the Jewish people, Jews need a nation of refuge and national pride. Now, roughly 125 years later, Herzl’s vision is widely celebrated as a core element of the Jewish present and not just a dream of the Jewish future. It is now our generation’s turn to pick up this mantel of vision and begin to imagine how we might critically engage our present as a directive towards building our future.

Let’s not pretend that training rabbis is an easy task. Professionally, rabbis take on a variety of roles including (but not limited to) spiritual guide, educator, pastoral care giver, Jewish legal adjudicator, public speaker, supervisor and fundraiser. A rabbi should be fluent in modern politics and ancient biblical and rabbinic texts, capable of inspiring youth many years their junior while also engaging with those many years their senior. As the classic joke suggests, a rabbi should emerge from school being both young and with 20-plus years of experience. Our seminaries have attempted to navigate the need for these diverse skills with semi-regular curricular shifts around their edges, aimed to better prepare their graduates for the professional work of rabbis. And it’s not enough. Small curricular shifts can’t equip rabbis with the requisite skills need to serve the variegated needs of the Jewish people in modernity.

Rather than patterning themselves on secular academies of higher learning, rabbinic seminaries should seek a new paradigm – the vocational school. Vocational schools provide their learners with hands-on, job-specific training, allowing them to enter the workforce already imbued with the practical skills to make an impact. By maintaining a model of the secular academy, each rabbinic training program tackles the impossible problem of attempting to adequately train rabbis by imparting 4,000 years of wisdom in three to five years of training through extensive coursework in subjects like Jewish History, Tanakh, Talmud, Midrash, Hebrew, Jewish Thought and Philosophy, etc. To add to the complexity, as schools have identified the increased need for skill-based learning, i.e. pastoral care, this discipline too has been shoehorned into the larger academic endeavor. As a result, rabbis are ordained with a significant amount of content knowledge and (at best) an ability and desire to continue to learn outside of the classroom. They learn very little of the valuable skill sets used for the majority of rabbinic work.

If one were to graph the tasks and roles rabbis most frequently navigate professionally, would that graph correlate with the similar chart of time allocation and focus during rabbinic training? At Mem Global, as we’ve invested in our work around building the rabbinic pipeline and developed our own rabbi-centered programs like Base and Embark, we’ve become increasingly aware of the dissonance between skill sets rabbis are trained for as students and the skill sets they need to be successful in their rabbinic work. We believe that rabbis are vital for the Jewish future. And we believe that the significant gaps in rabbinic education don’t adequately prepare emerging rabbis for rabbinic work.

Three examples:

• Relationship building is core to the rabbinic profession and yet, for most students, proportionally very little time is invested in building and refining this skill set.  How might relationship building be a core objective in rabbinic education rather than an ancillary part of a student’s learning?

• Public speaking is a common element within many rabbinic roles. What would it look like if students were equipped, not just with periodic moments of public speaking training, but rather if public speaking was a significant and repeated element of learning aimed to enhance a rabbi’s ability to articulate and communicate both inwardly and outwardly and through a variety of media?

• Rabbis serve as leaders. How might, over multiple years, rabbinical students dive deeply into leadership development, better understanding their own unique talents and leadership style? As a core element of training, how might it look for a student to learn about staff supervision, strategic visioning and change management, to deeply immerse in preparing for a career as a leader?

Admittedly, the shift I’m calling for isn’t simple and, as a zero-sum time game, an emphasis in one area of learning inherently requires a de-emphasis in another.  And yet, this is the hard calculus we are now called to do.  In an age of Sefaria and AI – access to Jewish knowledge is no longer the core element of a rabbi’s role.  Knowledge is now accessible wherever there is an internet connection. Rabbis are no longer the primary or sole access point to Jewish wisdom. Rabbis are now called on for different types of communal roles. Roles that can’t be outsourced.  Roles of relationship building, communication, teaching and leadership. The classic rabbinic training model, despite its fringe efforts to adapt, cannot meet this shift. Rather, a new model is needed. We need rabbinic training programs to serve as vocational schools – best equipping their students with the tool sets of classic Jewish learning and, equally critically, the toolsets of modern leadership to be best prepared to serve the Jewish people.

In the early 19th century Herzl had the courage to assess his reality and dream of an Altneuland – a better future built on the foundations of the present.  It is time for us to begin to dream of an AltneuRabbi, built on the commitment of service to the Jewish people that has compelled rabbis for ages, but enriched through a change of the training model to better meet the needs of the modern rabbinate.  Im tirtzu ain zo agadah – If you will it, it is no dream. 

Rabbi Ari Perten is the VP of Jewish Learning at Mem Global (formerly Moishe House).

When surveyed, voters across the West, from the US and the UK to France and Germany, report wanting their tax dollars going toward social services at home while being less enthusiastic about various causes abroad. Governments have also realized that some recipients of their foreign aid have diverged sharply from their own objectives and values, and turned into proxies of anti-American, anti-Western influence campaigns. And so, after years of leaving foreign spending on autopilot, countries have begun to reign in overseas development to reflect the priorities of their electorates.

The danger of modern foreign aid mechanisms thus goes beyond frivolity of spending, and extends – thanks to a lack of oversight and an overreliance on middlemen with varying agendas – into countries’ funding of causes that threaten their own security and flirt with terror glorification and support.

Examples, unfortunately, abound. In December 2020, the US Senate’s Oversight and Investigations Unit made public its findings that major humanitarian NGO World Vision had knowingly channeled funds received from the US government’s development agency USAID to ISRA, an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Sudan. World Vision made these transfers nearly a decade after ISRA was designated as a terror entity by the US Treasury for ties to terrorists “including Osama Bin Laden.” For World Vision, this wasn’t an isolated incident either – in 2016, the organization’s Gaza manager was arrested for and later convicted of embezzling aid money to US-designated terror group Hamas, and “tak[ing] an active and significant part” in its activities.

The USAID black hole took other forms, too. An investigation by NGO Monitor, the independent research institute where I work, has uncovered highly problematic grants channelled through the Tides Network, an opaque “fiscal sponsor” entrusted by an array of federal sources to spend government money.

USAID, the Departments of State, Labor, Agriculture, and even NASA have sent Tides over $55 million since 2008, mainly allotted for civil society initiatives as part of a “Foreign Assistance Program” meant to “advance US foreign policy objectives.” Tides distributed the money to various bodies, theoretically aligned with American policy aims.

However, listed after the innocuous-enough “Fiji Council of Social Services” on the US government’s Tides outlays list is 7amleh, an anti-Israel activist organization claiming to fight “censorship,” by which it means social media companies’ guidelines against hate speech, terror glorification and incitement to violence. Especially since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, 7amleh has primarily lobbied Meta to reframe pro-terror agitprop as neutral content. For example, it advocated on behalf of a news account described as “Hamas-affiliated” by the State Department, and pushed back on restrictions against the “Al-Aqsa Flood” keyword, Hamas’s name for the massacre.

Cases extend far beyond the US. Since October 7th, NGO Monitor has revealed UK government funding in the Palestinian territories to NGO partners with links to terror groups, to the tune of £100 million and counting. One project details a cash assistance program coordinated via UNICEF with MoSD, a Gaza ministry “affiliated with the de facto authorities” in the enclave. “Thus,” in the government’s own words, “UK Aid can be linked directly or indirectly with supporting the de factor [sic] authority in Gaza which is part of a proscribed group.” The UK has also been a primary backer of Norwegian Refugee Council operations in the territories, despite the NGO’s “strong partnerships with national and local authorities, particularly with the MoSD in Gaza and the West Bank” – again, Hamas.

Thankfully, NGO Monitor’s revelations come at a time of international introspection that presents an opportunity for change. In February, France launched a commission to review its development aid, following public outcry at “billions squandered on aid to foreign countries.” The US has also wound down USAID, its primary foreign aid vehicle, pending significant reform – realizing it had morphed into a black box which had drifted away from serving American interests.

The problem, said congressman and international development expert Michael Baumgartner, is that foreign aid bodies like USAID have “become trapped in what has been called the ‘iron triangle’ of government programs,” where “bureaucrats, private contractors, and lobbyists work together to block efforts of the executive to control or even understand the agency.” Essentially, development becomes so opaque that legislators and the electorates who elevate them to office lose track and control of their funds’ destinations.

Western governments have come to the conclusion that, while there is value to foreign development, significantly more accountability is needed to bring it in line with voter priorities and make sure it doesn’t fund explicitly hostile causes.

Eliminating the use of groups like Tides and World Vision as passthroughs and “fiscal sponsors” – often coming in with their own ideological agendas – would go a long way. More broadly, foreign development is indeed a valuable component of the West’s soft power toolbox. It is worth revitalizing, but only in a reformed capacity where sufficient oversight, transparency and accountability ensure projects legitimately advance worthwhile foreign policy goals.

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Olga Deutsch is Vice President at NGO Monitor