This time next week, the Jewish new year 5786, will be 4 days old. Our prayers and aspirations for the new year will still be fresh and hopeful at this time next week. But, they will be expressed in words fashioned by the collective Jewish heart thousands of years ago and repeated since then, each year at this time. And relevant, since then, each year at this time. As well as urgent.
The dark, menacing shadow of Jew hatred that “October 7” cast when Hamas murderers blocked out the sun, seems to be settling wider and deeper across freedom-loving countries. We have every right to be worried. But we have no right to abandon age-old, entrenched responsibilities to our children, our parents, and our people to march forward and to “fight back”.
The “weapons” in this fight are our mutually sustaining communal support, our values and our belief in the truth.
Indeed, in some ways, the struggle against the haters who vilify the Jewish state and its supporters, is a struggle to save the truth. They seek the end of truth. We seek its preservation. They seek the re-writing of history. We seek its affirmation.
The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his typically elegant, concise manner, reminded us of one of Judaism’s key beliefs on the third page of his essay on Rosh Hashana in Ceremony and Celebration: Introduction to the Holidays, (Magid Press, OUPress, 2017).
“No people has believed as lucidly and long as have Jews that life has a purpose; that this world is an arena of justice and human dignity; that we are, each of us, free and responsible, capable of shaping our lives in accordance with our highest ideals. We are here for a reason.”
That reason has many iterations. One such iteration appears near the end of this week’s Parsha, Nitzavim (Deut.30:19): “I have put before you, life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.”
Of course, what the injunction really means is: choose Jewish life. We must choose to live proudly as Jews despite our worries and because of our historic responsibilities to our people and to the world.
To live as a Jew requires us to know who we are as Jews. To know that, requires Jewish education. Jewish education is the first step to preserving and affirming truth. Not only for our sakes, but for the sake of democracy and the rule of law.
As an antidote to the occasional in-creeping of feelings of despair that often accompany excessive worry, we reproduce a statement that appeared in the weekly update of September 27, 2029.
“In Creating the Jewish Future, a publication of the proceedings of a conference by the same name held at York University in 1996, the late Prof. Michael Brown who was then the director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, wrote: North American Jewry cannot allow blind forces to determine its destiny. It must create its own future out of the legacy of the past and the realities of the present. McGill University professor, Morton Weinfeld added: the future is not determined; it need not be accepted passively; it can be shaped and created….”
May we be able to say at this time next year that we did indeed act during these days of turmoil and blatant antisemitism, to shape our own future, to determine our own destiny, to call out the antisemites, to preserve truth and to protect our democratic way of life. And that we succeeded.
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GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong, in September 2024, to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision of August 2023 that had allowed our case to proceed.
If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com
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Shabbat shalom
Shana tovah tikateivu v’techateimu
Am Yisrael Chai
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)
September 19, 2025
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 