Who are the Jews? This is the sort of question that has generated countless answers. There is the historical approach, which will track our origins at least to an ancient Egyptian stele, or stone column, with an inscription that mentions how they “laid waste” to the Kingdom of Israel, thousands of years ago. There is a biological answer as there are definite genetic markers that the priestly class of kohenim carry. There of course is a religious answer, in which the Jews offer to the world the purest, earliest form of monotheism.

An Israeli election in which a far-right demagogue gains power. Upcoming American and local elections which will redraw assumptions. Fear of crime and homelessness. Skyrocketing gas and food prices. A regional war in Ukraine that is spreading its impact to all corners of the globe. Kyrie Irving, Kanye West, and the rising tide of antisemitism.

Ye, the rap musician formerly known as Kanye West, has been in the news recently after a long and continuous slew of antisemitic diatribes. His vitriolic hatred encouraged others, as shown by a banner that hung over a Los Angeles freeway that stated, “Kanye West is right about the Jews.” The banner hangers accompanied their action with a Nazi salute.

Judaism usefully distinguishes between the values of tzedakah and gemilut chasidim. Tzedakah refers to our requirement to provide materially for others; many Jews are familiar with Maimonides’ famous ladder of tzedakah. In Rambam’s golden ladder, the lowest rung occurs when we give unwillingly, while the seventh and highest level consists of an anonymous donor and recipient.

“What is dance? In a dance, the people who dance join together, and no one is left [alone]….The dancers kick the earth so as to ascend heavenward. Again and again, the dancer strikes at the lowest part of the world, because [the dancer] does not want to be there [but] longs to elevate…above the surface of the ground….The desire for ascent, for transcendence, makes revelation possible.” -Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"For many people…the question about where you are from begins with how people define home. One definition of home is, it’s a place you think you can always go back to because it’s as much a pushpin location on a map as it is embedded in your consciousness. The decision to leave home…perhaps indicates a breach between self and other, a fissure, a crevice. Where we are from is an opening inside us. The objects inside a house, moveable as they are, are the telling expressions of what we think of as home, more than perhaps the structure of the houses themselves." -David Biespiel

“Is it possible to grasp how to die? Yes, on the condition of not refusing fear, of being ready, like Moses, to turn around to see the future. The future is not in front of us, but behind, in the traces of our steps on the ground of a mountain that we have just climbed, traces in which those who follow us and survive us will read what we are not yet given to see there.”