An Esther message to US Jews: ‘Do not imagine you will escape’
When word reached Esther that her people stood condemned, she hesitated. She was, after all, inside the palace. She had proximity to power, status, access, and the illusion of insulation. Mordechai answered her with one of the most unsparing sentences in the Tanach: “Al tedami b’nafshech l’himalet beit hamelech mikol haYehudim, (Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape because you are in the king’s palace)” (Esther 4:13).
I have returned to that verse again and again since October 7.
Not because America is Shushan. It is not. America has been, by almost every measure, the most generous diaspora home our people has ever known. Its promise has been real, its blessings extraordinary, its civic ideals worth defending. But gratitude is not blindness. And the palace was never a covenant.
For generations, American Jews believed that proximity meant protection. We were inside. We had become, by most external measures, the most successful diaspora community in Jewish history. And we mistook success for safety. We mistook access for belonging. We mistook America’s hospitality for an exemption from Jewish history.
That illusion has collapsed. Not gradually. Not politely. Not in the abstract. It collapsed on the campuses where Jewish students were told their grief was politically inconvenient; in the faculty lounges, unions, newsrooms, and feeds where rape was contextualized, kidnapping rationalized, massacre aestheticized, and Jewish fear treated as manipulation.
October 7 did not create the new reality. It revealed it. The massacre revealed the nature of Israel’s enemies. The reaction to the massacre revealed something more painful: the fragility of Jewish belonging in the West.
And still, too many American Jews do not understand what has happened.
That sentence is harsh, and I do not write it lightly. A rabbi should be careful with rebuke; there is a sharpness that wounds without healing. But there are also moments when pastoral softness becomes a form of dishonesty.
So let me say it plainly: many American Jews are clueless about the world in which they now live. Not stupid. Not bad. Clueless. They believe they still live in the America of their grandparents’ gratitude, their parents’ upward mobility, or the liberal imagination of their own university years. They believe that if Jews are useful enough, progressive enough, patriotic enough, polite enough, or sufficiently embarrassed by their own particularism, we will be spared the ancient verdict that has followed us across continents: that Jews are tolerated until we are needed as symbols, scapegoats, or sacrifices.
But the world has changed, and the old consensus is gone.
• • •
For decades, the architecture of American Jewish security rested on a comforting assumption: that Israel had a right to exist, that Jews had a right to defend themselves, that antisemitism was a civic evil. That consensus is now failing, and it is failing from both ends of our politics at once.
On the left the demolition is nearly finished. Israel has been recast not as a small country making agonizing choices in a hostile region, but as a flattened moral category: colony, apartheid, genocide. Many liberal Jews are only now discovering that the coalitions to which they gave their loyalty, their money, and their moral imagination never intended to reciprocate.
They marched for everyone else’s vulnerability and learned that Jewish vulnerability was subject to ideological review. Their dead were complicated. Their hostages were invisible. Their grief required context. The betrayal is not that the left criticizes Israel, for Jews have criticized Jewish power since the prophets. The betrayal is that, in too many progressive spaces, the only permitted Jew is the victim of the past or the dissenter from his own people. The living, sovereign Jew who refuses to apologize for Jewish survival is intolerable.
The development fewer of us have absorbed is occurring on the right. A growing faction now meets every alliance with a single transactional question: what does this do for America? It answers accordingly. The vice president has said aloud what had until now been said mostly in private, that while American and Israeli interests often align, they sometimes diverge, and Washington will follow its own. Israel may like that or it may not, he added, but the United States will pursue what it judges best for itself, because that is what the president was elected to do.
There is nothing inherently scandalous in that. Nations do not keep permanent friends; they keep permanent interests, and leaders are elected to serve their own people. The scandal, if there is one, is that we ever imagined ourselves exempt. The left increasingly calls Israel a villain. The right increasingly risks calling Israel someone else’s problem. The arguments could not be more different. The destination converges.
• • •
The Psalmist says it more plainly than I would dare: “Al tivtechu vinedivim, b’ven adam she’ein lo teshu’ah (Put not your trust in princes, in mortal man, who holds no power to save)” (Psalm 146:3).
No party owns us. We are not a political constituency in search of a permanent host. We are a covenanted people, and a serious Judaism judges every political movement from within the covenant rather than letting every movement sit in judgment over Judaism.
That is the first lesson we must relearn. The age of automatic alliances is over, and outgrowing it will serve us far better than mourning it.
Jews illiterate in Judaism
The second lesson is harder: our deepest crisis is not external. It is internal.
It is tempting to write only about antisemitism. That essay is easier; it places the danger outside the camp, and it asks nothing of us. And antisemitism is real and rising. But hatred from without is not our only problem. Our more dangerous weakness is that we have raised too many Jews who are fluent in America and illiterate in Judaism.
I choose that word with care, and I want to be precise about what it does not mean. Illiteracy is not disagreement. Some of the most serious Jews I know hold views very different from mine; they criticize Israeli governments and rabbinic leadership and communal orthodoxy of every kind, but they do it Jewishly, from inside the tradition, which is itself a form of fidelity.
The illiterate Jew is not the one who argues with me. He is the one who has no ground of his own and so stands on whatever ground is nearest: someone else’s history, someone else’s morality, someone else’s verdict on whether his own people deserves to live.
That is the Jew October 7 found unprepared. Not wicked. Not weak. Unarmed.
• • •
We handed a generation tikkun olam without Torah, identity without obligation, social justice without covenant.
We taught them to march for every vulnerable people on earth and to feel faintly embarrassed centering their own. Then the world demanded that they explain why Jews have a right to live, why a people returning to the one land it never stopped facing in prayer is not a colonizer, why abduction and rape are not resistance, and too many had no language with which to answer.
This is not their failure alone. It is ours.
We confused institutional affiliation with conviction. We mistook a rabbi, a preschool, a camp, a federation campaign, and a Birthright trip for the actual forming of Jews who could stand upright in a hostile world. We became experts at explaining Judaism to the world and amateurs at transmitting it to our own. We built museums to Jewish death more effectively than schools for Jewish life.
A thin Judaism may survive a hospitable America. It will not survive a thickening hostility.
Which is why the question beneath all the others is not how to fight antisemitism. It is why being Jewish is worth the fight. Why raise Jewish children when the world offers easier identities? Why defend Israel when it brings social punishment?
The answer cannot be that antisemites hate us. Hatred can alert a Jew to danger, but it cannot sustain Jewish life. We remain Jews because we are heirs to a covenant that has outlived every empire that tried to erase it. Because Torah teaches not only how to survive, but how to sanctify survival. Because Abraham still matters, as do Sinai, and Shabbat, and Hebrew, and Jerusalem, and Jewish learning and marriage and children and memory and argument and obligation and peoplehood.
• • •
Israel matters because Jewish sovereignty matters. After 2,000 years of dependence on the mercy of others, the Jewish people returned to history not as an idea, not as a tolerated minority, but as a nation responsible for its own defense.
Many American Jews still do not feel the moral weight of that transformation. They speak as though Jewish power were uniquely corrupting and Jewish powerlessness somehow noble. This is a diaspora fantasy. Powerlessness did not make us pure. It made us vulnerable. Jewish power, like all power, is dangerous, and must be disciplined and criticized and morally examined. But Jewish powerlessness was catastrophic.
Israel should be held to high moral standards. It should not be required to achieve moral perfection in order to justify Jewish survival.
This, too, we failed to teach.
We taught Israel as falafel and flags and summer trips, not as the most audacious renewal in modern Jewish history: the Hebrew revolution, the ingathering of exiles, the rescue of Mizrachi Jews, the burden of borders, the trauma of terrorism, the complexity of the Palestinians, the failures of Israeli leadership, and the sheer improbability that Jews now govern themselves in the land of their ancestors.
So our children arrived at college and were told that Israel is a project of settler colonialism, and many had never been given what they needed to see the inversion. A Jew who does not know his own history will borrow someone else’s.
You cannot inherit a covenant by osmosis
This is why American Jews must stop outsourcing Jewish identity to rabbis, schools, camps, federations, Israel and Holocaust memory. Every Jewish home must become more serious. We need more Torah, more Hebrew, more Shabbat, more Israel education, more peoplehood, more willingness to disappoint polite society, not less.
And we must become less embarrassed by particularism. This may be the hardest work of all.
We have been trained to believe the highest moral posture is universalism; we say easily that we care about humanity and uneasily that we owe something specific to Jews.
But Judaism never taught love of humanity as an escape from responsibility for one’s own people. Judaism demands both universalism and particularism, and much of American Jewish life has lost the balance, teaching our children to march for everyone else’s pain and to feel ashamed of centering their own. That must end.
You cannot inherit a covenant by osmosis. It must be chosen, taught, practiced, and renewed, at home, on purpose, generation after generation, or it thins to nothing in a single one.
So the task now is not first to defend Jews. It is to form them. That requires a massive reinvestment in learning because a people that cannot read its own texts will borrow its convictions from whoever is loudest. A return of the practices that make us distinct — Shabbat, the calendar, the dignity of obligation — not as nostalgia but as the architecture of resilience, the muscle memory that lets a person stand upright when the room turns against him.
• • •
We need rabbis who will speak honestly, educators who will teach deeply, parents who will stop assuming their children will remain Jewish by osmosis, philanthropists who will fund formation and not only crisis management, and young Jews with the courage to be unfashionable.
That courage is the gift I most want to leave my own children: the absolute confidence that the fleeting verdict of a university quad or a social media feed weighs nothing against the eternal chain into which they were born.
America is not Egypt, Spain or Germany. But neither is America exempt from history, for no nation is. “It cannot happen here” was never a Jewish sentence. It is an American article of faith, and Jews of all people should know the difference between faith and evidence.
Mordechai did not end his message to Esther with a warning. He told her that if she stayed silent, “relief and deliverance would arise for the Jews from another place” (Esther 4:14). Deliverance was coming; the only question was whether she would have the courage to take part in it.
That is our question, too. Deliverance will not arrive from the political princes we have spent decades courting. It never does. The palace was never the point. The covenant is.
The world has changed. The only question worth our strength is whether we will.
Steven Abraham is spiritual leader of Beth El Synagogue, a 450-family Conservative congregation in Omaha, Nebraska. Follow him on Substack at rabbistevenabraham.substack.com
