Jun 29, 2026
Defiant Dignity (Pinchas)
Defiant Dignity (Pinchas)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
I dedicate this learning to my brother-in-law, Arsen Ostrovsky.
A few months ago, thanks to the generosity of beloved friends, I was able to travel recently to Sydney, Australia, in the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack at Bondi Beach last December. My brother-in-law was shot in that attack. Thank God, he has physically recovered. My sister and nieces, who were also there, were not physically harmed, though they endured something no family should ever have to endure. Many people lost their lives.
Being in Sydney was both a blessing and an education. It revealed, painfully, the growing acceptability of antisemitism in too many places. And I want to be careful here. There is a difference between hateful rhetoric and violence. But they are connected. They exist on a continuum. The danger of violent rhetoric is that it does not stay limited to words.
Just yesterday, Arsen testified before Australia’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into antisemitism. He recounted not only the attack itself, but the thousands of threats and messages that followed, people turning his suffering into a conspiracy theory, claiming it was staged, that the blood on his face was makeup, that AI had somehow manufactured the evidence. All of it was a rejection of the right of a Jew to live in dignity.
He stood with eloquence and bravery. His voice quivered only when he spoke about our family, his children, his wife, my sister. It was a model of Jewish courage, Jewish pride, and moral steadiness. To stand in the face of antisemitism and call it out publicly, with dignity and clarity, is one of the responsibilities of this moment. He did so in a way that nobly modeled the mandate.
That brings us to Parashat Pinchas, one of the most difficult portions in the Torah.
The story begins at the end of last week’s portion. Israel is under assault, spiritually and communally. A plague breaks out. Pinchas, the son of Elazar, the son of Aaron the priest, sees a public desecration at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. He takes a spear and kills two people, and the plague stops.
This week’s portion opens with what sounds like divine praise. God says that Pinchas turned back divine wrath by displaying his passion, his “kina,” a word that means zeal, jealousy, fervor. And then God says, “Therefore, I grant him My covenant of shalom, My covenant of peace.”
That should trouble us. It must trouble us.
Yes, Pinchas acts in response to a threat against the community. Yes, Jewish leaders today must stand up against threats to Jewish dignity, including Antisemitism - and the Antizionism that so often serves as its fig leaf. We must speak, organize, testify, confront, and refuse to shrink.
But we must not do what Pinchas did. His act was violent. It was a spear thrust into human bodies. And even if the Torah presents the biblical context as a moment of existential threat, our ethical instinct must resist any easy sanctification of violence. We fight for Jewish safety, but we fight like mentches. We fight within the norms of a just society. We fight with strength, with strategy, with clarity, and with dignity.
And perhaps the Torah knows this too.
The word shalom in this verse is written in the Torah scroll with a broken vav. The letter itself is fractured. Anywhere else, a broken letter would make the scroll invalid. Here, the brokenness is required. The Torah is kosher only if this shalom is visibly wounded.
What kind of peace follows violence? A broken peace. A peace that may stop a plague, but cannot be whole. A peace that may interrupt destruction, but cannot be the fullness our people deserves.
Watching Arsen testify, and then watching him speak afterward with defiant dignity, I saw a different model. Fierce, but not cruel. Strong, but not violent. Unyielding, but deeply human. He channeled the best lesson we might draw from Pinchas without importing the worst of Pinchas.
That is our calling now.
We bless each other to be strong and fierce in defense of Jewish dignity, just as we are strong and fierce in defense of human dignity. We dare not shrink. Our children are watching. And if we want them to inherit a whole peace, not a broken one, we must teach them how to fight like mentches by modeling that commitment ourselves, fiercely and mindfully.
Jun 26, 2026
American Torah at 250: Call for Contributions!
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American Torah at 250
Goals
1. Mark America’s 250th anniversary through a Jewish lens.
The volume should explore how Jewish texts, history, and values can illuminate “the American experiment” and how America has impacted Judaism and the Jewish community.
2. Provide usable sermons for the Jewish year 5787.
Contributions should connect and explore democratic themes to particular Torah portions and perhaps holidays.
3. Strengthen democratic culture without promoting partisanship.
The collection can address difficult public questions while remaining nonpartisan. Its focus should be democratic principles, civic responsibilities, moral formation, the importance of virtue, and the health of the republic.
4. Encourage both gratitude and moral accountability.
The book should make room for appreciation of American freedom and Jewish flourishing, while also confronting the gaps between America’s founding ideals and its historical and present realities.
Call for Contributions
In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, Rabbi Charlie Savenor and Rabbi Menachem Creditor will be publishing a collection of original sermons for the weekly Torah portions of the Jewish year 5787. At this historic moment, we invite rabbis, cantors, scholars, educators, and Jewish communal leaders to help communities encounter the American story through Torah, and Torah through the responsibilities of American citizenship. Together, these sermons will offer a year of Jewish learning and civic reflection for America at 250.
The Torah-reading cycle gives Jewish communities a shared language through which to confront enduring questions of freedom, , justice, leadership, power, responsibility, disagreement, memory, and belonging. During America’s 250th anniversary year, these weekly readings offer a unique opportunity to consider the achievements, tensions, and unfinished work of American democracy.
For over two and a half centuries, life in America has created extraordinary opportunities for Jewish freedom, religious expression, civic participation, and communal flourishing. At the same time, the nation has repeatedly struggled to live up to its own aspirations ideals expressed in its founding documents. This anniversary invites both gratitude and honest reflection, celebration and renewed commitment.
We are seeking sermons that connect a specific weekly Torah portion with themes related to American democracy and civic life. Contributions might explore subjects including liberty and responsibility, covenant and Constitution, equality and human dignity, citizenship, immigration, religious freedom, political leadership, character, protest, pluralism, civil disagreement, minority rights, public trust, truth, national memory, civic friendship, or the pursuit of a more perfect union.
Authors might consider questions such as:
· What does this Torah portion teach about the responsibilities of citizenship and leadership?
· How can Jewish tradition illuminate the promises and contradictions of "the American experiment" in self-government?
· What obligations accompany freedom?
· How should communities respond to injustice, exclusion, polarization, or the abuse of power?
· What can the Jewish traditions of covenant, argument, memory, repentance, and communal responsibility contribute to democratic life?
How should we approach a hyphenated American Jewish identity today?
· How does this weekly Torah reading help us imagine America's next chapters?
Submissions should be written as sermons intended for delivery to a congregation and should be rooted substantively in the assigned Torah portion. They may express gratitude, critique, concern, aspiration, or hope, but they should promote civic reflection rather than partisan advocacy.
The collection will include one or two sermons for each weekly Torah portion, contributors are encouraged to select up to two parshiot they would be willing to address. The sign up for parshiot are available is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zfpwnl89MUEPqPb83ByWGDHU5PW3u1vhgM0wqUZIBLY/edit?usp=sharing.
Submissions should be sent to torahwithin@gmail.com by September 1. Sermons should not exceed 1,200 words and must be submitted in Word format. Please include the author’s name, title, institutional affiliation, short biography, and the Torah portion for which the sermon is submitted.
NOTE: The editors may not be able to include every contribution and that accepted pieces may be edited for length, clarity, style, and consistency. Final assignments may be coordinated by the editors to ensure broad coverage of the Torah-reading cycle and a diverse range of civic themes.
#AmericanTorahAt250 #America250 #Torah #JewishLearning #JewishCommunity #Democracy #CivicLife #FaithAndDemocracy #AmericanJewish #MorePerfectUnion
Jun 25, 2026
Jun 23, 2026
Blessings Not to be Missed (Chukat-Balak)
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Rabbi Menachem Creditor
If we read the five books of Torah as one great arc, Genesis is the family story. Exodus begins the national story, and from there through Deuteronomy, Moses stands at the center: prophet, teacher, intercessor, and, alongside God, the central figure of Israel’s journey. By the time we reach this week’s portions, that journey is changing. The wilderness generation is giving way. The old leadership begins to disappear.
The Torah tells us, almost starkly, “The Israelites arrived in a body at the wilderness of Zin on the first new moon, and the people stayed at Kadesh. Miriam died and was buried there. (Num. 20:1)” Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, prophet, singer, guardian of the infant Moses, leader of Israelite women, dies. And then, immediately, the next verse says, “The community was without water, and they joined against Moses and Aaron.”
There is no pause. No eulogy. No recorded mourning. No glimpse into Moses’s heart or Aaron’s grief. The people are thirsty, and they gather against their leaders. The Hebrew verb suggests that the community almost becomes an action. They gathered against Moses and Aaron. Their fear takes the shape of collective pressure.
The rabbis noticed the abruptness. They imagined that, as long as Miriam lived, a miraculous well followed the people through the wilderness. With Miriam gone, the well disappeared. This midrash may not be explicit in the biblical text, but it reveals a deep, psychological truth: Miriam provided a sustaining presence whose power was only fully recognized once she was gone.
That is often how love works. Someone steadies us, nourishes us, makes life possible in ways we barely name. Their presence becomes so constant that we do not notice how much we depend on it. Then, in their absence, the water is gone. Only then do we understand what they carried for us.
Moses, too, may be living that truth. Soon after the death of Miriam, God tells him to take the staff and speak to the rock, but Moses strikes it instead. It is worth considering whether this was not simply disobedience, but grief. Moses has just lost his sister. The people are panicking. Their protest linguistically echoes earlier rebellions, including Korach’s challenge just one Parasha before. Perhaps this time, Moses, overwhelmed and bereaved, simply cannot respond with calm.
Transitions are not only historical. They are personal. A generation changes when beloved people leave us. Leadership changes. Families change. The world changes. Even the familiar path through wilderness suddenly feels different beneath our feet.
And so tradition offers us a blessing hidden inside this textual exploration of grief: Do not wait. Do not wait until absence teaches you the value of presence. Tell your loved ones now what they mean. Name “the water” they bring. Give thanks while they can hear it.
May we be blessed to recognize the sustaining wells in our lives, and to cherish the beloveds whose presence keeps us alive.
Jun 22, 2026
Jun 18, 2026
Jun 16, 2026
The Knicks and the Holiness of Teamwork (Korach)
The Knicks and the Holiness of Teamwork (Korach)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
That is a model we need. Even in competitive systems, there can be humility. There can be generosity. There can be shared purpose.
Which brings us to Parashat Korach.
Korach is the Torah’s story of what happens when people are not team players. Moses, Aaron, and Miriam each have a sacred role. The tribe of Levi has a sacred role. The community depends on people serving something larger than themselves.
Then Korach, Moses’, Aaron’s, and Miriam’s cousin steps forward with a slogan: “Is not the entire community holy?”
It sounds beautiful. It even sounds like Torah. Of course the people are holy. Of course every person matters. In fact this is the very language from Leviticus: “You shall be holy.” But Korach uses this familiar sacred language for self-serving purposes. Beneath his claim is not humility, not service, not shared responsibility. Beneath it is the demand: Look at me.
Korach gathers others who know how to get attention, including Datan and Aviram, figures later tradition sees as constant sources of conflict. They are the people who inflame, provoke, and destabilize. They know how to make noise. They know how to pull focus. They know how to turn a community away from its center.
And so the question of Parashat Korach is still our question: What do we do with voices that are loud, talented, and destructive? What do we do with people who are clearly in it for themselves, but who know how to command attention?
There is a midrashic teaching that Moses treated Datan and Aviram honorably, bringing them to the communal table over the years, in order to restrain their worst tendencies. That can be wise. We should not rush to turn opponents into enemies. Inclusion can sometimes soften conflict. Honor can sometimes prevent greater harm.
But Korach also teaches that inclusion without boundaries can become dangerous. Sometimes giving destructive voices a central platform does not moderate them. Sometimes this weakens the community’s core commitments. This proves true when Datan and Aviram leverage their communal position to support Korach’s demagoguery.
This is a pressing question for today’s Jewish community, for America, for Israel, and for our world of social media algorithms that reward outrage and make fringe voices sound central. How do we stay open without losing ourselves? How do we honor people without amplifying harm? How do we hold a wide tent without surrendering the values that make the tent worth holding?
There are no easy answers to this challenge. But we do know this: humility matters. Service matters. Shared purpose matters.
Which brings us back to the Knicks.
The Knicks feel like more than a sports story this week. Yes, there are stars. Yes, there were heroic moments. But what moved us was the team. The trust. The discipline. The lack of selfish drama. The tears. The sweet vulnerability. The love. The proof that every contribution mattered.
Moses, too, is remembered as the humblest of all. When Korach meets him with bombast, Moses falls on his face. He does not make leadership about himself.
That is the contrast.
Korach, Datan, and Aviram were in it for themselves. Moshe Rabbeinu was not.
So let us ask which voices we amplify. Let us ask what kind of leadership we reward. Let us build communities around humility, service, boundaries, and shared purpose. Let us remember that holiness is not a slogan. Holiness is how we show up for one another.
And today, with a full New Yorker’s heart: Go Knicks!
Jun 12, 2026
Jun 11, 2026
Jun 3, 2026
God
God
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
There exists an invisible string, a sacred current, air moving through and between us.
We are connected by God’s spirit, through memory, through responsibility, through love, through the burdens we share, and through the blessings we make possible for each other. Perhaps that is one way to understand God.
Whatever else we might believe about God, God can mean this: there is more to this world than me.
God may be a Being, a Presence, the One to whom we pray, the transcendent power that holds us when we cannot hold ourselves, the sacred connection that pulses beneath everything. But the humility of faith begins here: I am part of something larger than myself. I am connected to you, you are connected to me, and we are connected to each other through something deeper than we can always name.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
There exists an invisible string, a sacred current, air moving through and between us.
We are connected by God’s spirit, through memory, through responsibility, through love, through the burdens we share, and through the blessings we make possible for each other. Perhaps that is one way to understand God.
Whatever else we might believe about God, God can mean this: there is more to this world than me.
God may be a Being, a Presence, the One to whom we pray, the transcendent power that holds us when we cannot hold ourselves, the sacred connection that pulses beneath everything. But the humility of faith begins here: I am part of something larger than myself. I am connected to you, you are connected to me, and we are connected to each other through something deeper than we can always name.
Jun 1, 2026
May 31, 2026
Today, 60,000 Voices for Zionism Marched Up Fifth Avenue
Today, 60,000 Voices for Zionism Marched Up Fifth Avenue
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Some have suggested that the Israel Day Parade should be transformed into a broader celebration of Jewish diversity, one in which Israel is merely one thread among many. That sounds generous. It sounds inclusive. It is also a profound misreading of what happened today on Fifth Avenue.
More than 60,000 Jews and allies marched. Not despite the current moment, but because of it. We marched as American Jews. We marched as religious Jews and secular Jews. We marched as liberals and conservatives, immigrants and native-born New Yorkers, day school students and public-school students, synagogue members and cultural Jews. We marched carrying Israeli flags not because Israel exhausts Jewish identity, but because Israel remains one of its central expressions.
The attempt to separate Judaism from Zionism is not new. We have seen versions of it before. The fringe, fundamentalist sect Neturei Karta does it from one theological extreme, arguing that Jewish sovereignty is illegitimate until messianic redemption. Parts of the contemporary Jewish far left do it from the opposite direction, arguing that Jewish peoplehood can and should be detached from national self-determination altogether. The ideologies are different. The outcome is remarkably similar: the severing of Judaism from one of its deepest historical and collective commitments.
Both positions remain marginal for a reason. That is where these fringe ideologies belong.
The overwhelming majority of Jews did not arrive at Zionism because of propaganda, tribalism, or political conformity. We arrived there because Jewish history arrived there, urgently. After centuries of exile, vulnerability, longing, persecution, return, language revival, cultural rebirth, and collective reconstruction, Zionism became the primary way modern Jewish peoplehood expressed itself in history, demanding dignity for Jews not only in our reclaimed indigenous homeland but wherever we make our lives.
Ahad Ha’am, the founder of Cultural Zionism, understood this long before statehood. His dream was not political sovereignty but the creation of conditions conducive to original Jewish creativity. That is precisely what Israel has become: a center of Jewish language, culture, scholarship, ethics, argument, technology, music, literature, and communal life unfolding in Jewish time and Jewish space.
The Israel Parade today reflected that reality. Some want a “Jewish parade” instead of an “Israel parade,” as though these are competing categories. But the tens of thousands who filled Fifth Avenue did not experience a contradiction between their Judaism and their Zionism. They experienced them as intertwined realities. Not identical. Not interchangeable. But inseparable.
That does not mean every Jew must agree with every Israeli government. It does not mean criticism is forbidden. It does not mean Israel is beyond moral scrutiny. It means that the effort to redefine Jewish identity by removing Zionism from its center is not representative of Jewish life as it is being lived by the Jewish community. Importantly, it also means that any ideology that denies the joy and pride of Jewish self-determination belongs on the sidelines of Jewish life.
The crowd on Fifth Avenue today made that unmistakably clear.
The future of Jewish life will contain many voices. It always has. But the claim that Zionism is somehow external to Judaism, or merely one optional preference among many, was answered not by polemic but by presence.
Sixty thousand people showed up and answered it together.
May 28, 2026
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May 8, 2026
Olam Chesed Yibaneh | The Lauder-Morasha School | in Warsaw, Poland | May 8, 2026
I share a deep and enduring connection with the Zespół Szkół Lauder-Morasha (The Lauder-Morasha School) in Warsaw, Poland, a relationship that began at the very start of its life. In 1995, just a year after the school opened, I traveled there with Pizmon, the Jewish a cappella group from JTS/Columbia. We were part of an extraordinary moment in Jewish history, as Jewish life in Poland was beginning to rebuild itself with courage and love. Singing with those children in those early days left a permanent mark on me. Their voices, their presence, their very existence in that space of renewal shaped my own spiritual path. They helped inspire the way I sing, the way I reach for the Divine, and ultimately the rabbi and composer I have become.And then, this morning, that circle of connection came alive again in a way I could never have imagined. My beloved friends Mark Medin and Kim Hartman were visiting the school as part of a UJA-Federation of New York delegation, and heard the students at that same school were singing my song, Olam Chesed Yibaneh, including a Polish translation!, led by the Head of School Karolina Szykier-Koszucka, moved me profoundly. [CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO]
Those children, in a historic place that helped form my own voice decades ago, are now giving voice to my music once again. It is a powerful, full circle moment, a living expression of continuity, creativity, and love.
Am Yisrael Chai!
May 6, 2026
Masks, Moral Certainty, and the Collapse of Restraint
Masks, Moral Certainty, and the Collapse of Restraint
Rabbi Menachem CreditorA Rabbinic Reflection on the season finale of Daredevil: Born Again, Season 2
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Last night two things happened. The “Daredevil: Born Again” Season 2 finale aired on Disney+, and Antizionist protesters once again chanted for Israel’s demise outside Park East Synagogue in New York City.
Let’s start with Daredevil. (Major spoiler alert.)
In the season finale, Dr. Heather Glenn, a disturbed and corrupt mental health professional, testifies in court while cloaked in the authority of her expertise, by reading from her own book, “Men in Masks: The Psychology of Vigilantes” (Chapter 2, Page 35 - the level of constructed detail in the Marvel miniseries is remarkable).
“The mask does not conceal, it reveals. The vigilante’s true self, she argues, is not the one hidden behind fabric and shadow, but the one that emerges when accountability is stripped away.”
In cross-examination, Attorney Matt Murdock’s, himself the hidden vigilante known as Daredevil, asks Dr. Glenn,
"Does a vigilante need a mask, if she never cultivated an alter-ego?"
His question lingers in response, almost like a quiet challenge to the premise itself: what happens when there was never an alter ego to begin with?
The show does not leave that question in the abstract. It answers it with images. A crowd gathers, animated by a sense of justice, fueled by righteousness. The target is clear (the Mayor of NY, also known as Kingpin), the moral lines feel clean, and the energy builds with a familiar and dangerous momentum. A powerful element of the crowd is that they’ve donned cardboard Daredevil masks in solidarity with their champion. (They also wear gaiter facemasks, from the neck to the middle of their faces.) And then, when they’ve got Kingpin cornered, the crowd becomes a mob and attacks him violently (the scene is gory and not easy to watch). The masks remain, but something else is revealed. Not just anger, but permission. Not just protest, but chaotic release. Without giving the ending away, suffice it to say that Daredevil intervenes and demonstrates actual heroism on the deepest level, especially according to the rabbinic maxim that true might is restraint.
It would be easy to dismiss this as comic book storytelling, as the genre’s reliance on presenting and challenging stark binaries of hero and villain. But that would miss what feels uncomfortably close to the surface. The visual language is not accidental. The gaiter masks, the slogans, the sense of collective moral clarity, all of it echoes scenes that have become part of our own civic landscape. In cities across the country, including here in New York, protest has increasingly taken on this aesthetic and this psychology.
The rationale for the masks is the fear of being recorded, identified, and harassed (“doxed,” in today’s parlance). The instinct toward self-protection in a hyper documented public square is understandable.
But masks do more than protect. They can also transform, creating distance between the individual and their actions. They lower the cost of escalation, inviting a kind of moral outsourcing, where responsibility absorbed into the anonymity by the group, removing personal accountability through collective identification.
What we witnessed outside Park East Synagogue last night, where protesters rallied outside for the second time in six months, including some scuffles between the police and Antizionist demonstrators was not an isolated eruption. It was part of a pattern that is becoming harder to ignore. A crowd that sees itself as righteous can begin to act as if self-determined righteousness itself is license. When Israel, and the Jewish commitment to national self-determination in Israel more broadly, are cast as embodiments of evil (a this-worldly stand-in for Kingpin, as it were), the complexity of reality is flattened into something far more combustible. Social media accelerates this, feeding narratives that reward outrage and certainty over nuance and truth.
And then there is leadership, or the absence of it. The recent veto by Mayor Mamdani of the city-council affirmed buffer zone bill which was designed to safeguard houses of worship and vulnerable communities, sent a message that the line between protest and intimidation is negotiable. That the burden of navigating that line falls not on those who gather, but on those who must endure the gathering.
The most unsettling part of the Daredevil sequence and most Antizionist protests is not only the violence itself. (I speak from personal experience, not only as the rabbi. Of UJA-Federation of NY during the last 3 years of incessant attacks on our local community but also having served as a congregation rabbi in Berkeley, California for 11 years, where such intense dynamics have long been at play.) The true danger is the self-perception of the crowd. They do not see themselves as a mob. They see themselves as a force for justice, as necessary, even heroic. That is what makes the moment so resonant. The danger is not only in what people do, but in what they believe they are justified in doing.
A mask can hide a face. It can also reveal a willingness to act without being seen, without being known, without being accountable. The question is not whether protest is legitimate. Protest is an essential response to the abuses of power. The question the mask represents is what happens when the structures within the protestors’ worldview that sustain nuanced, moral thinking begin to erode.
We are living in a moment when the line between conviction and absolutism is under strain. The language of “good and evil,” “hero and villain,” has its place, but when it becomes the only language available, it leaves little room for restraint. And without restraint, even the most deeply felt sense of justice can tip into something else entirely. Quickly.
Antizionist crowds, who scuffled with the NYPD last night and seem to see themselves as a vigilante army, ready to violently battle their perceived arch-enemy, are not a demonstration of justice. They are misguided and dangerous, vigilantism barely concealed behind ubiquitous masks.
May 3, 2026
Antizionism Is Not Normal, Nor Should We Normalize It
Antizionism Is Not Normal,
Nor Should We Normalize It
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
I am a child of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
List College, class of 1997. The Davidson School, 2002. The Rabbinical School, 2002. My father walked those halls. My sister did too. My family’s story, like that of so many American Jews, is braided into the sacred mission of JTS since its founding in 1886. My family dried pages of books, one by one, from water damage after a fire ravaged the JTS library stacks in 1966. So for me to speak of JTS is not to speak of an abstraction. It is to speak of a living covenant between generations of Jews who believed that Torah, peoplehood, and the Land of Israel are inseparable threads of an enduring, unbreakable fabric.
So let us speak plainly.
The decision by JTS to honor President Isaac Herzog as a commencement speaker is not a betrayal of Jewish values. It is an affirmation of them.
The recent controversy, amplified beyond all proportion, tells us far more about the current moment than it does about JTS. Six graduating seniors signed a letter opposing Herzog. Six. Twenty-four, four times as many, signed in support. Four JTS rabbinical students, none of them even graduating this year, added their names to the protest letter. This is not a groundswell. It is not a generational rupture. It is a small but loud dissent that is being misrepresented as something larger, something normative.
It is not.
And we must not pretend otherwise.
JTS has never been neutral about the Jewish story. Nor should it be. From its earliest days, shaped by figures like Rabbi Sabato Morais, himself heir to the trauma of Iberian exile, the Seminary understood what too many now forget. Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile. Jewish dignity without a homeland is contingent. Jewish learning untethered from Jewish peoplehood is incomplete.
Zionism was not an ideological add-on to Judaism. It was from its inception and remains its historical and spiritual unfolding.
To deny that is not nuance. It is willful amnesia.
There is a dangerous confusion taking root in parts of our community, a claim that one can stand within the tradition of serious Jewish learning while severing Judaism from Zionism. That one can graduate from institutions built on the covenantal relationship between people, Torah, and land, and then declare the Jewish state a moral aberration.
This is not intellectual courage. It is a rupture with the very foundations of Jewish existence.
No serious student of Jewish history can miss the pattern. From the destruction of Jerusalem to the expulsions of Spain and Portugal, from the ghettos of Europe to the ashes of the Shoah and the Shavuot 1941 Farhud in Iraq, Jewish vulnerability in exile is not theoretical. It is the central fact of our past. The founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination. They carried its urgency in their bones.
And now, in a moment when Israel is under sustained assault, militarily, morally, rhetorically, we are told that honoring the President of the Jewish state is somehow beyond the pale.
No.
As current junior at JTS’ List College Noah Lederman put it, “commencement is not a “safe space.” It is a sacred space. It marks the transmission of responsibility from one generation of Jewish leader to the next. To invite the President of Israel is to remind graduates that their learning is not detached from the fate of our people. It is bound up with it.
President Herzog does not represent a political party. He represents the State of Israel and the Jewish people. To refuse to hear him is not an act of conscience. It is a cowardly refusal to engage the complicated reality of Jewish sovereignty itself.
We can and must debate policies. We can and must wrestle with moral complexity. That is what Torah demands of us. But there is a line, just as rooted in the Torah and tradition, that must not be crossed. When critique becomes a denial of Israel’s legitimacy, when it echoes the language of those who seek not reform but eradication, it ceases to be Jewish discourse.
It becomes something else.
Let us be honest about the stakes. In a world where antisemitism is resurging with terrifying clarity, antizionism offers a convenient vocabulary through which ancient hatreds can be reframed as moral virtue. When Jews lend their voices to that project, even in the name of justice, they do not purify it. They legitimize it.
We dare not offer that gift.
Zionism is not political preference. It is the modern expression of ancient covenant. It is the insistence that Jewish life, Jewish memory, and Jewish destiny require a home in the world. To strip Judaism of that commitment is not to refine it. It is to hollow it out.
JTS knows this. It has always known this.
That is why it sends its rabbinical students to study in Israel. That is why Israel remains central to its mission. That is why honoring the President of Israel at commencement is not controversial in any deep sense. It is consistent.
The real danger is not that a handful of students dissent. Dissent has always been part of our tradition. The danger is that we begin to treat antizionism as just another legitimate Jewish position, one among many, equally rooted, equally valid.
It is not.
Antizionism is not normal. Nor should we normalize it.
To the graduates of JTS, I say this with love and with urgency: You are heirs to a tradition that refused to disappear, that commits to a Jewish evolutionary tradition. You are beneficiaries of generations who dreamed not only of surviving, but of returning, rebuilding, renewing Jewish life in its fullness, the deepest meaning of three words that have become, once again, defiance: Am Yisrael Chai!
Do not be the generation that forgets why that dream mattered.
Stand in the fullness of your inheritance. Study deeply. Argue fiercely. Care about justice. But never sever yourselves from your people. We were once denied our national identity as the cost of emancipated thinking. Do not imagine that Judaism can be disentangled from the reality of Jewish sovereignty without losing something essential, something irreplaceable, something necessary.
Zionism is not an accessory to Jewish identity.
It is one of its core expressions.
And JTS, in honoring the President of the State of Israel, is not betraying its mission.
It is fulfilling it.
May 1, 2026
Apr 23, 2026
Testimony and Presence on Long Island: A Yom HaShoah Reflection
Testimony and Presence on Long Island: A Yom HaShoah Reflection
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
I am still sitting with the strangeness of it.
I stood as keynote speaker at a Yom HaShoah VeHaGevurah commemoration on Long Island, the place of my childhood, and I am not a survivor. I am not the child of survivors, nor their grandchild. I carry no direct familial testimony of the Shoah. And yet, I was entrusted with words in a space defined by memory that is as sacred as it is searing.
And perhaps that is precisely the point.
Shoah Survivor Egon Salmon z”l spoke through recorded testimony, his voice bridging the abyss between then and now. My beloved friend, Shoah Survivor Ben Stern z”l, was with me in spirit, as he so often is, his moral clarity still marching, still teaching. And I felt, with unusual force, the truth of Shoah Survivor Elie Wiesel z”l’s teaching that to be witness to a witness makes one a witness. That sacred chain does not end with biology. It extends through sacred listening, through carrying, through refusing to let memory dissipate into abstraction.
Returning to Long Island for this moment carried its own emotional weight. This was not only a communal gathering. It was, for me, a kind of homecoming into responsibility. To stand there and help articulate a response to the Shoah, to hatred, to the persistence of antisemitism, while also insisting on Jewish beauty, on Jewish life that is not only reactive but generative, felt like a delicate and necessary balance.
The purposes of Yom HaShoah VeHaGevurah are many. Education. Moral formation. Historical clarity. But the ritual itself is profoundly clear. Testimony. Knowledge. Awareness. Honoring the dead. These are not abstract ideals. They are acts. They are obligations.
I was deeply moved by the presence of Scouts BSA Troop 240, who sang the national anthem. I shared with them that I, too, was once a Long Island Cub Scout, formed in part by the values of that movement. And then I noticed something that stayed with me. There were no identifiable Jewish scouts in that troop. There were boys and girls. One scout was wearing a hijab.
I found myself speaking not only to the Jewish community gathered there, but to her. To all who were listening from outside the boundaries of Jewish identity. I spoke about the blasphemy of the Shoah as the denial of the full humanity of the Jewish people. And I spoke about what Judaism demands of us in response.
Our ethical reflex is ancient. Emerging directly from the memory of our own enslavement in Egypt, the Torah commands us not to oppress the stranger, precisely because we know the experience of being othered. That memory is not meant to harden us. It is meant to sensitize us.
And then Hillel, under Roman occupation thousands of years later, sharpens the teaching even further. What is hateful to you, do not do to another. Not only to your fellow Jew. To another. Full stop.
At one point I locked eyes with that scout. I wanted her to know that I saw her, not as a symbol, not as a contrast, but as a human being standing in a sacred space of Jewish memory. And I wanted her to feel that the values I was teaching demanded that I see her that way. Just as her presence there suggested, to me, that she saw me.
Was it a full reckoning between communities, histories, and identities? Of course not. That is not what a single gathering can accomplish. But there was something real in that moment. Something intentional. A shared willingness to be present within a structure that asked something of us. That held us steady for the moment.
It was not the chaotic, unbounded, often dehumanizing space of public discourse we have grown used to. It was a ritual. And ritual, when it works, creates the conditions for truth to be carried with care.
I left feeling humbled. Grateful. A bit unsettled in the way that sacred responsibility often leaves a person.
And I pray that, in some small way, it brought honor to the memory of the six million.
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Photo: Jewish Community Relations Council - Long Island (JCRC-LI)/Congregation Shaaray Shalom Holocaust Remembrance Service, April 19, 2026 (photo: Raya Creditor)