A Judaism Worth Living For

In my senior year of high school, a friend pulled me aside and confessed something that had been weighing on him. “I just feel like being Jewish,” he said, “is like being a vegetarian. It’s just one unique lifestyle among many. They don’t eat meat, and I don’t eat anything unkosher.”

I intuitively understood what he meant. The Jewish identity we had inherited had been whittled down to little more than a set of dietary restrictions. It was superficial, more like a set of preferences than a 5000-year-old tradition. Frequently, it asked nothing more of us than odd cultural habits, representing one option among many in the vast American lifestyle department.

This past January, at twenty-two, I was standing in IDF uniform amidst the rubble of Shuja’iyya, searching for the remains of Ran Gvili, who was the last remaining Israeli hostage in the Gaza Strip. IDF intelligence indicated that Hamas had buried Ran, murdered on October 7, in a mass grave of dead Hamas combatants. My unit’s task was to find him. We compared the teeth of the corpses to Ran’s last dental scans. After more than two hundred bodies, we identified Ran’s corpse and repatriated his remains so that he could receive a Jewish burial.

I was supposed to be taking my finals at Bar Ilan Law School that week.

I sometimes wondered, half-cynically, how I had ended up there, and what seemingly had gone wrong for me along the way. After all, I grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts, in a loving family, in a comfortable house, wanting for nothing. I graduated high school at seventeen with a university scholarship waiting. By every visible measure, I was on track for the kind of life that American Jewish parents dream of for their children.

That Judaism asked that I go to Shul on holidays, feel pride in my heritage, and maintain some connection to culture and community. It never asked, however, that I prioritize it over anything that mattered to me. It never demanded that I give something real up, or that I sacrifice comfort, security, or the future that had always been assumed. Being Jewish in America was a convenient identity I inhabited, not a truth around which I centered my life.

Being Jewish in America was a convenient identity I inhabited, not a truth around which I centered my life.

My friend's vegetarian analogy gnawed at me precisely because it was accurate. I realized that my Judaism asked nothing of me, and I gave nothing in return. This history and tradition, often presented with the weight of a civilization, demanded very little in practice. This thing, that was supposed to mean so much to me, felt like something I could just shrug off. The hunger had always been there: an unplaceable feeling that something was missing. Over time, that feeling sharpened into an argument that I could not escape.

So at seventeen, I left. I moved to Israel alone, leaving behind my whole life. I was not running away from anything. Instead, I was running toward a Judaism that I hoped would be different.

If a Jewish lifestyle was true and right, it had to be lived comprehensively, not selectively. I could not justify participating in customs and traditions that came naturally while ignoring those that were inconvenient. It was all or nothing; for years, I had refused to question how my life contradicted both by choosing neither. I wanted to live somewhere that made those beliefs cost and mean something.

I could not justify participating in customs and traditions that came naturally while ignoring those that were inconvenient.

Enlisting in the IDF felt less dramatic than leaving America. I had already chosen my path, and the army was simply the next step. I served in combat as a paratrooper during the war, an experience whose weight is difficult to translate into ordinary language.

I spent countless hours posted in the darkness of night, standing guard by the windows of the buildings we were sheltering in. In the stillness of night, there was nothing to do but think. And what I came to understand, slowly, was this: throughout my life, I had not sacrificed because I was already committed. I had become committed because I had sacrificed.

Sacrifice does not follow from commitment; sacrifice creates commitment.

The willingness to search through mud for the remains of someone you never met, yet still call your brother, is not the expression of a pre-existing feeling. It is the feeling itself, generated through the act. Sacrifice does not follow from commitment; sacrifice creates commitment.

This discovery reframed everything. The emptiness I felt growing up within a Judaism that gave nothing back was not a failure of Jewish tradition. Instead, it was a failure of cost. I had never been asked to sacrifice anything for Judaism, so my Judaism never solidified into something that felt weighty.

This deep emptiness is a defining feature of contemporary American Jewish life. We have built a Judaism of sustainability and comfort. We invest in programming, in education, and in experiences designed to make Jewish identity broadly appealing and accessible. We believe that if we just explain our traditions clearly enough, make our rituals resonant enough, connect the idea of Jewish nationhood to people’s lives skillfully enough, young Jews will choose to build their lives around Judaism in its fullest sense. However, you cannot only think your way into deep commitment, and you cannot program it into existence. Sacrifice is ultimately required to build commitment, while optionality corrodes it.

What many American Jews practice today is not really a religion or even a tradition. It is a feeling, a cluster of typically dormant emotions that surface when they light Hanukkah candles, attend a Passover seder, or sing Kol Nidrei on Yom Kippur. There is nothing wrong with those feelings, but feelings are the fruit of deep commitment, not its root. The foundation of Jewish life is obligation: the sense that being Jewish exacts real costs on how you live, what you prioritize, and what you are willing to give up. When comfort becomes the organizing principle, obligation becomes negotiable. The foundation we have built erodes, and each generation holds the tradition a little more loosely than the last.

What many American Jews practice today is not really a religion or even a tradition. It is a feeling, a cluster of typically dormant emotions that surface when they light Hanukkah candles, attend a Passover seder, or sing Kol Nidrei on Yom Kippur.

Once the foundation is gone, the feelings eventually follow. You can pass down a belief, an obligation, or a way of life. Transmitting an emotion is harder. The feeling that surfaces when you hear the shofar blow is either earned through deep understanding of what stands behind it, or it is felt as an expression of genuine obligation to it. Each generation must arrive at it themselves, through their own sacrifice and their own choosing. Increasingly, they do not. And when critical junctures inevitably occur — meaning a moment when our religion might suddenly demand something of us — decades of opting for comfort may then push people away from Judaism entirely.

For most of Jewish history, this was not a problem, because Judaism was almost never optional the way it is today. Belonging to a Jewish community required adherence. Sometimes that adherence was chosen, but more often it was enforced, either by internal communal pressure or by a world that refused to let Jews assimilate. Obligation was not a virtue cultivated in isolation; it was, for centuries, the given condition of Jewish existence. Only in the open societies of the modern West, and in America most of all, has that pressure vanished. What remains, for many, is sentiment. And a Judaism built on sentiment alone will not survive the generations, because there is nothing concrete enough to pass on.

Obligation was not a virtue cultivated in isolation; it was, for centuries, the given condition of Jewish existence

Despite this, I do not believe that American Judaism is doomed, nor that comfort is incompatible with meaning. What I do believe is that we, American Jews and the institutions we have built in our own image, have lost something essential in our collective effort to make Judaism easy, enjoyable, and reducing it to little more than sentiment. That loss is why so many young Jews feel the same emptiness I felt at seventeen. It is why so many of my peers readily set aside the burden of Jewish identity. Many are drawn instead toward progressive political identities, secular individualism, or the frictionless path of assimilation into broader American culture. Others go the opposite way: making Aliyah or adopting very stringent Haredi Judaism.

Not every American Jew must move to Israel, serve in the army, and intentionally put themselves in harm's way. Although I do believe every Jew should, I know most won't; a demanding Judaism can't hinge on everyone making that choice.

A demanding Judaism, whichever form it may take, is a worldview and a way of life.

Instead, each of us must contemplate what our Jewish identity demands of us, wherever we are. Aliyah and service are one expression of that demand, not its only form. A demanding Judaism, whichever form it may take, is a worldview and a way of life.

A demanding Judaism means choosing a profession not only for personal gain, but also for what it contributes to the world. It means acquiring wealth not to build a larger house, but to invest in just causes and people in need. It means showing up to synagogue not for nostalgia or community alone, but to genuinely wrestle with the texts we claim to value and build an honest Jewish intellectual life accordingly. Above all, it means letting Judaism pave the path before us, rather than carving Judaism in our own image to fit the life we already desire.

My friend was right: the Judaism of our youth was like vegetarianism. One lifestyle option among many, costing nothing, demanding nothing, and ultimately meaning nothing. The question every American Jew must now answer is what their Jewish identity is demanding of them and whether they are willing to honor that debt. The commitment, the depth, and the sense of being claimed by something larger than yourself… none of these things arrive on their own. They must be earned, and the only currency Judaism accepts is sacrifice.

the only currency Judaism accepts is sacrifice.