Are Jewish People Responsible For Their Own PR?

At this week's Shabbat dinner, our gracious host refilled my glass of wine several times before asking another guest at the table to share some words of Torah. Ten minutes later, the guest was still talking, and it was remarked that none of the six people present were listening except for me. This was a joke because I had fallen asleep.

“You want me to listen? No problem, I’ll listen,” I responded, some annoyance in my voice. I rubbed my eyes open and addressed the speaker, asking him what he meant when he quoted the sages, saying that the entire world was created for the Jewish nation. He didn’t want to respond. Someone else at the table pointed out that it's always other Jews who have a problem with that statement, and nobody else. He is wrong about this. There have always been antisemites who comb through our sacred texts looking for signs of what today would be called Jewish supremacy. Recently, former Daily Wire host Candace Owens went on a deep dive, trying to demonstrate how many famous Jews, including the Lubavitcher Rebbe, were, in fact, Jewish supremacists. While Owens is an antisemitic grifter trying to appeal to a coalition of far-right followers, I still feel this question comes up all the time: What were the Rabbis telling us when they said that the whole world was created for the Jews?

I was seriously hoping that raising this point would lead to some thought-provoking discussions. We were seven Jewish adults sitting at a Shabbat table on the tenth floor of an apartment overlooking the East River. Sadly, no one besides my wife wanted to engage with me. But then someone at the table reminded me that there is another saying from the sages that instructs each person to consider as if the entire world was created for him or her.

This got the rusty wheels in my head turning. Clearly, the sages did not want me to literally think the world was created for me; they only wanted me to consider that in terms of not downplaying my abilities as a person. It is very easy to despair when you think about how ineffective the contribution of one person can be when sometimes the forces of the entire world seem to go against them. I’m not even talking about “changing the world”; that’s for high school kids. I’m talking about making even the most basic positive changes in your life—taking a walk in the park without checking your screen every two minutes, eating food that isn’t poison, or engaging in conversation that isn’t cynicism or gossip. Implementing any of these is literally going against forces much bigger than ourselves, and yet the sages tell me that I am the world. I am a force to be reckoned with, and I have the power and divine authority to run my own ship.

I’d like to apply the same type of thinking to the Jewish nation as a collective. For the past thirteen months, there has been a lot of talk about Jewish pride. Some of us feel it very strongly. Others don’t feel pride, going as far as to wonder if perhaps Israel doesn’t have the moral high ground in the current war. While I can reassure my readers that I personally believe we do have the moral high ground, I still think it's important to ask ourselves: are we nothing more than victims of prolonged persecution who miraculously got back our homeland and now will fight tooth and nail to hold on to it? If so, how does that make us special? Does survival alone make us special? How much should we care if large swaths of the world population oppose our goal? Is it our fault that they oppose us? Are we Jews responsible for our own PR?

This is a very tricky question. Throughout history, terrible things have happened to our people. Thankfully, I wasn’t there, and I would never try to assign blame to my own people for the atrocities that happened to us. But once again, we are losing the PR war. It’s not surprising when you see the cast of characters on social media who are the grifters that claim to represent us. These grifters, whom I won’t name, speak at a fourth-grade level and try to show the world that Hamas is terrible, that American college students are terrible, and that Israel is moral. And yet, so many are not convinced.

Personally, with my twenty years of study in yeshiva, I was never taught anything about how to present a case for Jewishness or Judaism to the world. I was taught only to be a good Jew myself and that my righteous Jewish actions would speak louder than any words. And if they don’t—and if I do the right thing and I get attacked anyway—then it is because of antisemitism, which is simply a fact of life that I can’t control.

And yet, it hurts to see yourself in a bad light. Whether it was Netflix's slew of high-budget anti-Orthodox content, such as the documentary “One of Us,” the mini-series “Unorthodox,” or the pathetic reality show of Julia Hart, each time the community cringed in response, loudly exclaiming, “You are getting it wrong. This is not who we are!”

The community has begun to respond. Following a series of investigative articles by The New York Times against Orthodox Jewish schools, Agudas Yisroel of America announced a public relations initiative to combat misperceptions of the Orthodox community in the secular and non-Jewish world. On a smaller level, countless younger Orthodox Jewish men and women took it upon themselves to represent what they consider to be good Orthodox Jews on Instagram and TikTok, who can be easily digested by a non-Jewish audience. There is even an entire organization called “Thank You Hashem” that spends close to a million dollars a year making Jewish content that is shared in the public square of social media and available for the eyes of the world. One can take a cynical view of this, but my gut says that this is actually the right approach. After all, didn’t Isaiah the Prophet foretell that we would eventually be a “light upon the nations”? In fact, “Thank You Hashem” recently released a high-budget music video featuring two unique artists who both possess followings outside of the Jewish community, namely Matisyahu and Alex Clare. The chorus of the song is “spread light, spread light, spread light, all around the world.” The video includes footage of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, who passed away in 1994, but to whom they attribute the message of the Jewish people taking the responsibility of being a light unto the nations.

So, are Jewish people responsible for their own PR? Absolutely. Going back to the statement of the Sages, regarding the world being created for the Jews; Countless Rabbis, including Rashi, Maimonides, Ramchal, Rav Kook, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, all explain the passage of the sages to mean that we Jews are appointed the collective responsibility of being a light to the world. If we do our job well, then the world will only thank us. And just being Jewish by accident of birth does not make anyone inherently “better.”

It is a strange time for us Jews. Having been allowed to prosper in the United States since World War II, we’ve managed to amass wealth, prosperity, and community. We built giant institutions of Jewish study and miraculously resettled and rebuilt our indigenous homeland, Israel, which was wrested from our hands two thousand years ago. Now, almost eighty years after the holocaust, so many of us are standing around, looking proudly at what we built but also asking, “what’s this all for?”

This entire domain needs a lot more exploration. We still need to understand what exactly it means to be a light. Are we sharing Torah? Are we sharing by example? All of this needs to be explored further. But I, for one, am happy with the premise that true Judaism is not something that is only practiced in the private confines of exclusively Jewish spaces. In fact, working on our PR does not mean coming up with a propagandistic elevator pitch that will throw our opponents off scent. Rather, by allowing ourselves to explore what our place in this larger world can be, we fulfill the prophecy of one day becoming a light. We demonstrate that our language can ideally become universal and that our unique Jewishness is something that can be shared with everyone.

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