Dear Friends,
I write to you all from Amman, Jordan. A few Slifka colleagues and I are here along with some students in our “Yalies in Israel” summer program, having evacuated Israel this morning almost a week after our flights were canceled. We are grateful to Yale for making our evacuation possible. Despite the circumstances, crossing the Jordan River away from Israel felt like doing the Exodus backwards.
To the members of the Yale Jewish community who remain in Israel, I hope that you and your families are safe and continue to be so.
We arrived in Israel just over a week ago, as many of you know, as part of a trip with stops in London and Israel for the purpose of meeting with Jewish Yale alumni, parents, and friends. This past academic year was so challenging, and the prospect of discerning truth from fiction so daunting that we thought it would be helpful to show up in person to talk. We wanted to model the values related to being in community that we want our students to learn: show up in person, do a lot of listening, and share honestly and respectfully with others. In London and Tel Aviv, I think we accomplished that. I want to thank all those who hosted, organized, and attended those important events. In particular, it was amazing to talk face to face on the ground in Israel with Israelis about our work advancing the values of both Zionism and Pluralism at the Slifka Center. It seems that the conversation and the approach that I outlined to this work were well received.
We toured the Gaza envelope, bearing witness to the atrocities of October 7, 2023. Today is the 622nd day that our hostages remain in Gaza. We went to the site of the Nova festival, the Tekumah Car Cemetery where hundreds of burned out and bullet-ridden cars, trucks, and ambulances tell their own story. We had a guided tour of Netiv Ha’Asara – a moshav there – that was attacked by terrorists who flew in on gliders from Gaza. Our guide was a native of the moshav who is a soldier there – Netiv Ha’Asara is a closed military site for now.
I could see rubble just over the Gaza border, which made concrete for me all the hard questions about the lives of the Palestinians who had made their homes on the Gaza side of the border there on the one hand, and on the other hand the lives of the Israelis intentionally made their homes on the other side in order to advance a vision of peace and coexistence. So many have been killed, displaced, or taken hostage. Humanity is in a horrific place when these are the commonalities people share.
And then our situation changed with the beginning of Operation Rising Lion. We had to cancel our planned event in Jerusalem, and made plans to hunker down. Our team has spent the last few days in and out of bomb shelters with everyone else, and trying to figure out the best way to stay safe and get home.
I am struck by a few things as I reflect on the experiences of the last week or so:
- We encountered more anti-Israel protests over three days in London than we did in a full academic year at Yale.
- There are so many Israelis who reach out to us. They say how awful things must be at Yale and in the U.S. based on what they are hearing and reading – as if what we have experienced at home can compare with the war the Israelis themselves have been enduring. Our mutual feelings of empathy and concern are so strong.
- Yalies we met with in both London and Tel Aviv spanned the political spectrum. They appreciated the nuanced way we are handling our intra-community conversations among Yalies whose views differ on the conduct of war, responsibilities towards Palestinians, what long term security looks like for Israel so that none of this ever happens again, and the best way forward. Everyone is engaged in the process of how to make things better – together.
- As those of you who have spent time in Israel may have experienced, Israel often doesn’t feel like a warzone even when there is a war going on. The streets of Tel Aviv and its restaurants and cafes are full of people in between and around the sirens and the painful damage the missiles have inflicted there, among other places. The same is true back home just in a less acute way – things are mostly fine most of the time – except when they aren’t. And we carry on.
- The way the media and social media do their storytelling on both sides of the Atlantic obfuscates the truth – painting every moment and place with the same brush to stoke fear and anxiety. It’s not necessarily that this anxiety isn’t rooted in some aspect of truth – but it misrepresents the whole truth in its context. It is, therefore, incredibly difficult to communicate effectively about matters that are both important and complex without being misunderstood.
- When it became clear that our travel home was not going to happen as planned, a number of Israelis reached out to us to offer food, home, and company while we were there. This connection between Jews and between Yalies is powerful, and we’re so grateful for it. We’re all in this together.
I’m deeply tired – in part because of late-night sirens, but also because I feel like I spent most of this academic year in a “small-w” warzone and ended it in a “capital-W” Warzone.
While the physical dimensions of the war of ideas, division, and disinformation should never be actually compared with physical war of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and explosive drones, there are similarities. The attacks are relentless. They feel personal and existential, and the solidarity of the people going through them is part of what makes it possible to survive.
The ”capital-W” war is easier to explain: missiles, sirens, closed airspace, big “boom” sounds with no source we can see (best case), and constant anxiety about when and how we can go home and/or when this will all end. As a noncombatant, I’m trying to protect my physical body, our team and students’ bodies, and our mental states as best as possible.
The “small-w” war is the one to which I will undoubtedly return when I do eventually get home. What I’m trying to protect is the “Am Yisrael” part of the saying “Am Yisrael Chai.” “Am” in this usage is Hebrew for “People” as in the Jewish People. We can’t celebrate the survival of the Jews without all of us. Here are the characteristics of the challenge:
- Jews don’t agree on much, ever. We certainly don’t agree on things that are really complex and close to our hearts and simultaneously pull us in opposing directions. The assumption that Jews have to agree about Israel is absolutely false, and the assertion that people who hold other views on Israel lose the right to their Jewishness because of those views is just as false. The Rabbis say that the Torah has 70 faces, and also that God makes each of us in God’s own image and yet we all come out looking different. We’re all in this together.
- This effort to preserve the “Am” part of Am Yisrael Chai has gotten me and my colleagues accused of the most horrific things this year, and exposed us to a number of different types of threats. Most of these accusations were based on disinformation and/or intentional spinning of the truth followed by the viral spreading of the resulting salacious material by algorithm and word of mouth. May we not fall prey to the temptation to believe those stories just because they provide an outlet to vent anger and frustration. Falsehood almost always makes things worse.
- Yale is simply not like other campuses that get a lot of attention in the news. The administration has been better, enforcement of policies has been better, and support for the Jewish community has been better. May we not be overtaken by unsupported assumptions and assertions that cloud our ability to distinguish good (even if not perfect) from bad.
- In our society, trust in partners is at an all-time low. People are applying litmus tests in every direction to determine if “you are part of the problem or part of the solution” regardless of the quality of the rest of the relationship or the veracity of a claim that we don’t fully understand. May we not throw out friendships in an effort to be ideologically pure – that is blindness.
- As a society, we are losing our ability to stay together. Forces such as social media, social norms, and litmus testing are pulling us apart at the seams into silos where we only hear our own views and reinforce the idea that “those who are not with us are against us” This notion is profoundly un-Jewish, and we need to fight it at every turn – even about Israel. May we each be part of the solution to this problem, and continue the Jewish legacy of modeling a different way forward.
- We spent this year doing our best to be the “Am Yisrael” in “Am Yisrael Chai” – whether in high-profile instances like Naftali Bennett’s visit or in low-profile instances like the countless conversations that have happened in Kikar Schusterman (our dining hall) or Susman Hall (the purple couch room). Fostering conversations between students with differing views and opinions, we have sought to embrace our “70 faces” within our clear guidelines of Zionism and Pluralism. This is hard work, and we didn’t do it perfectly. But we are trying to do something that almost no one else is trying to do: to preserve the innate and historic quality of Am Yisrael – a People that is unified through its dividedness and long legacy of valuing and respecting differences of opinion.
As you look back at this year with us, our key themes of Pluralism and Zionism were on display in different ways. You’ll see diversity of Jewish cultural identities (such as the blossoming of the Asian Jewish Union, Black Jewish Union and Casa Shalom), religious identities (our minyanim and the “God Squad” that runs them are strong), travel to Jewish sites worldwide (such as Kosovo, India, and (of course) Israel), award-winning Jewish music (one of our Magevet soloists was recognized as “Best Male Soloist” at this year’s National Jewish A Capella competition), and food from across the Jewish world. You’ll also see Zionism on display in the form of speakers from a wide spectrum of political perspectives that support Israel’s right to exist. Students travelled to Israel, commemorated the October 7th massacres, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) and Yom Hazikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day), and celebrated Yom Ha’atzma’ut (Israel’s Independence Day). We had High Holiday services and Passover Seders, as well as pre-Hanukkah and pre-Purim celebrations (because these two holidays fell during breaks). Shabbat dinners were HUGE this year – ranging from 150-350 students each week.
Most importantly, Slifka engaged with more than 76% of the estimated Jewish undergraduates at Yale this year at least one time – which doesn’t include all the Jewish graduate and professional students we served. This is above Hillel International’s threshold of excellence in that metric. We won’t be satisfied until we’re at 100% – but for a year like this, 611 out of approximately 800 is an achievement of which we are very proud.
Overall, this year was incredibly vibrant, productive, and challenging.
It’s also worth pointing out that one of the reasons why we had the internal challenges this year was because we had the luxury to engage in internal dialogue. Other campuses have dealt with antisemitic crowds, disruptions, and violence – Yale had almost none. Campuses that are actively fighting violent antisemitism cannot, in that moment, afford to have much internal disagreement. We CAN because of the campus climate we have helped the Yale administration to build and maintain. We CAN because we mostly don’t have antisemitism in the public sphere. We CAN because our students are developing the skills to listen and talk to each other and not just lob verbal bombs or tweets or physical objects at each other. We CAN because we work hard at it. Sometimes we fail, and sometimes we succeed. That’s more than I can say for many other campuses out there. Yale has not been perfect, but Jewish life here is very good.
Jewish life at Yale continues to thrive and our partnership with the administration is strong. And this will be the case for a long time, if we all “will it” together. I am certain that the “small-w” war will last far longer than the “capital-W” War, so we need to hunker down and be disciplined to get through both.
I end by encouraging you to embrace the following practices we are working to model for our students:
- Focus on listening more than talking.
- Focus on asking others powerful questions more than on what answers you will give.
- Practice the Jewish value of Havdalah – discernment. We end each Shabbat with a Havdalah service to help us practice telling the difference between light and dark, what is true and what is less true, and what is “kosher” – physically or metaphorically. As real truth proves elusive, embrace careful and thoughtful discernment in any way you can.
- Don’t believe everything you read. Read multiple sources, especially first-hand accounts. The Torah has 70 faces – read a few so that you make sure you’re getting a variety of viewpoints.
- Embrace all three words of Am Yisrael Chai. We need all of us to live.
Thank you for reading this. Thank you for coming out to our events this year. And thank you to the many hundreds of you who contribute as donors. We rely on your support to continue investing in Jewish life at Yale, where (we hope) there will be Jews for many centuries to come. You are part of our “Am” and we are part of yours.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Uri