Samuel J. Abrams. | Jewish News

The theology of a simple basket

Samuel J. Abrams. — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:44:59 +0000

A visit to the Simon Family JCC inspires.

During the Thanksgiving holiday, I visited the Simon Family Jewish Community Center of Tidewater (the JCC), a place I had visited before, but never truly experienced as it was meant to be lived. My earlier encounter had been during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Jewish spaces, like so many others, felt provisional and restrained: masked, socially distanced, outdoors, muted and careful. This time was different. The building was open, alive and rooted again in the steady rhythms of communal life.

And what I saw inside offered both beauty and quiet instruction.

There was much to admire: a thoughtful space designed for human presence, a K–5 school alive with children’s voices, a room honoring the
Shoah, an Israeli flag flying with confidence. It was a place that carried history and purpose without spectacle, continuity without self conscious display.

But what stayed with me most was not architectural or ceremonial.

What moved me was a simple basket near the entrance, filled with challahs for Shabbat and made available to all. A simple sign said, “Fresh Challah.” No explanation.

No campaign language. Just challah, resting there quietly, offered without fanfare or qualification.

It was a small gesture, and yet it contained a world.

We spend enormous time debating the future of Jewish life—continuity, affiliation, belonging, identity. There are reports, strategies, task forces, demographic studies. Much of this work is well intentioned, even essential.

But standing there, looking at that basket, it was hard not to feel that something far simpler was quietly doing more.

That challah was not merely bread. It was rhythm, memory and care braided into form: the inheritance of Friday afternoons and family tables. It represented nourishment and connection, linking memory and presence.

I was reminded of something I once wrote: Bread is one of Judaism’s oldest civic technologies. It binds memory to practice, heritage to the week’s rhythms. It is how the ordinary becomes sacred without spectacle. Seeing that basket felt like the lived version of that argument—a small, steady act carrying centuries of meaning.

To place challah at the threshold of a Jewish community center is to communicate something elemental: You are not entering a bureaucracy.
You are entering a home. You are not first evaluated. You are first welcomed.

There is a moral confidence embedded in that choice. It’s something that is\ rare today, when institutions often operate out of caution, when belonging can feel conditional and kindness procedural. Even communal life can feel fraught or transactional.

This basket assumed none of that. It extended care before expectation. It trusted rather than tested.

Judaism has always understood that holiness lives not only in text or ritual, but also in the sanctification of everyday life. Bread becomes blessing. Ordinary space becomes sanctuary. Hospitality becomes covenant.

We speak of chesed, lovingkindness, as if it were abstract. Here it was embodied: tangible, quiet, present. No sermon. No explanation. Just an instinctive expression of what Jewish life knows how to do when it remembers itself.

Ambivalence is not leadership when Jews are targeted

Samuel J. Abrams. — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:30:42 +0000

The protest outside Park East Synagogue in New York was not a complicated sociological moment. It was a group of demonstrators shouting slurs, taunts, and explicitly hostile language at Jews entering a house of worship.

That should be the starting point for any analysis. And yet, some commentary—notably a recent Forward essay—treated the episode as an expression of Jewish diversity or internal contradiction. The piece even suggested that if we want leaders who “represent all of us,” we should accept their “ambivalence,” because Jewish communities are strongest when their internal tensions are openly acknowledged.

This framing sounds sophisticated, but it collapses under the weight of its abstractions. Jewish pluralism is real and often a source of genuine vitality. But none of it is relevant to whether it is acceptable to create an environment of intimidation outside a synagogue. Jews disagree about Israel, theology, immigration policy, and nearly everything else. That diversity does not transform threatening chants into legitimate discourse, and it does not change the basic civic expectation that Americans should be able to enter their houses of worship without harassment or fear. A functioning liberal society requires predictable norms; this is one of them. These are the guardrails that allow communities with deep differences to live together with trust.

Anchoring the event in internal Jewish complexity is not nuance; it is an evasion. It shifts attention from conduct to context, as though pluralism could reframe behavior that, in any other setting, would be recognized as inappropriate. If a group had surrounded a Black church, a Sikh gurdwara, or a mosque and shouted degrading epithets at worshippers trying to enter, no responsible observer would call the incident a window into the community’s “rich contradictions.” They would identify it correctly: a breach of norms and a moment requiring institutional clarity and reassurance. The fact that this basic observation becomes contested when Jewish institutions are involved says something unsettling about the current climate.

The call for “ambivalence” from public officials is even more misguided. Leaders face hard tradeoffs constantly. Free speech, public safety, protest rights, and community trust do not always align neatly. But this is not one of those ambiguous cases. The core question is simple: should people be able to walk into a synagogue without being shouted at because they are Jews? That is not a partisan puzzle. It is a baseline norm of a pluralistic society. When leaders cannot affirm that plainly, the issue is not that the situation is complex—it is that moral clarity has been replaced with political calculation.

This hesitation is occurring in a moment when American Jews already feel unusually vulnerable. According to the ADL, antisemitic incidents reached historic highs in 2024 and have remained elevated in 2025. FBI hate-crime statistics continue to show that Jews—two percent of the population—are targeted in nearly 70 percent of reported religion-based hate crimes. On college campuses, FIRE and the AMCHA Initiative have documented sharp rises in incidents where Jewish students report feeling singled out or pressured because of their identity or perceived political views. These trends do not mean every confrontation is motivated by antisemitism. But they underscore why clarity, rather than ambivalence, is required when harassment does occur, particularly in sacred spaces. Communities cannot rely on norms that leaders are unwilling to defend.

Pluralism depends on boundaries. It requires institutions that can distinguish between protest and menace, disagreement and demeaning behavior, dissent and targeting. The Forward’s argument erases those distinctions. It implies that because Jews are a complex community with internal rifts, external hostility deserves a softer reading. But no amount of internal disagreement licenses the degrading treatment of Jews entering a synagogue, and no amount of rhetorical sophistication turns intimidation into cultural reflection.

The Park East incident does not call for grandstanding. It calls for accuracy and for a reaffirmation of the norms that allow diverse communities to live together: every American has the right to enter a house of worship without being subjected to hostility because of who they are. Leaders who cannot say this plainly are not preserving pluralism, they are undermining it.

Internal Jewish debates will continue. They should. A community that wrestles openly with its values is a healthy one. But those debates cannot be used to reinterpret moments of targeting. The safety and dignity of a religious community are not “contradictions” to be managed. They are commitments to be upheld.

And when a line is crossed—like at Park East Synagogue—leaders owe the public something better than hesitation. They owe clarity. Ambivalence may have its place in politics, but safeguarding the ability of Americans to enter their houses of worship without fear is not one of those places. It is a basic civic obligation, and it should never be negotiable.

This article first appeared on American Enterprise Institute’s website.

Samuel J. Abrams is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at AEI. He lives in New York City, blocks from Park East Synagogue.

Purim in 2025

Samuel J. Abrams. — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 21:33:35 +0000

Of the many Jewish holidays that dot the calendar, one of my son’s favorites is Purim. For children, Purim is celebrated with costumes, festival foods like hamantaschen, donations to those in need, and a community reading of the Book of Esther, which joyously celebrates the bravery of Esther and Mordechai and the deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman’s decree of death.

With our children, the Jewish community’s celebrations around Purim have generally glossed over the deep dangers and threats represented in the Book of Esther and have favored levity and celebration of community. This year, however, I spoke with my son about a deeper meaning of Purim. As he has become aware of the omnipresent antisemitism around us, the Purim holiday has lessons for both him and the Jewish community to learn.

A major lesson of Purim involves Jews experiencing antisemitism, standing up to hate, and fighting off existential threats. Rabbi Robert Goodman notes that Esther 3:8 may be the first such written record of antisemitism. This verse presents the antagonist advisor, Haman, asserting to the regent Persian, King Ahasuerus: “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws; and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them.” Haman argues that because the Jews are different, they must be suspect although they followed the law of the land.

Haman’s influence directly led to the persecution of the Jews and the call for those in Persia to kill their Jewish neighbors. The King’s wife, Esther, reveals that she is Jewish, and the plot of Haman ends with his death. What is important to note, however, is that the call to kill Jews in the kingdom was never actually rescinded; the impending genocide remains.

What is not often shared in Chapter 9 with children is that while Haman’s plot is foiled and he is killed, the Persian Jews are still in danger as the King’s decree to kill the Jews has gone out and cannot be repealed for some unexplained reason. In response, the Jewish community was armed and sanctioned by the King to deal with this existential threat. The story goes that the Jewish community then defended itself, fighting those who tried to destroy it, resulting in the death of 75,000 Persians across the empire.

I shared this lesson of self-defense with my son this Purim. The lesson is not to murder or seek revenge against your enemies. Purim celebrates and recounts the miracle of Jewish survival despite the efforts of our enemies to wipe us off the Earth. Chapter 9 of the Book of Esther is salient this year given the hate-filled chants promoting the same hate of centuries before; mobs and terrorist groups actively seek the death and destruction of Israel and Zionist Jews around the world through acts of violence against the Jewish community from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh to New York.

The question to ask is what should the Jewish community do about it; will the Jewish community fight back appropriately and stand up by holding the line on American values of freedom, faith, and association? Or will the Jewish community remain fairly quiet, inactive, and throw up its hands and ask what’s the point, as few have stood up in the government and privately to stop this madness? While the Trump Administration’s aggressive position on antisemitism is welcomed by many Jews, the Jewish community has been far too passive since the October 7 massacre in Israel and in the current era of so much hate and antisemitic violence.

Dr. Michael Berenbaum of the American Jewish University observes that the Purim holiday is about human action and not waiting for others, outsiders, or G-d, to intervene and help the community, for “the fate of the Jews is dependent on human initiative and action.” Berenbaum notes that “Esther risks her life to plead with the powerful King to confront his Prime Minister [Haman] and overturn the evil decree.” Even with Haman gone, the Book of Esther shows that “the Jews cannot depend upon the King and the powers that be to protect them” for “Jewish history is in Jewish hands” such that action—force in the case of Purim—must be used against enemies if the Jewish community is to survive.
This is the lesson I taught my son this Purim—the Jewish community must confront threats, dangers, and bullies. We collectively have been far too passive to our detriment, and we will not thrive in a world with so much antisemitism unless we are actively pushing back and demanding the right to exist as part of the global community.

This originally appeared on AEI.org. The American Enterprise Institute is a public policy think tank, where Samuel J. Abrams is a Nonresident Senior Fellow. Abrams is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jewish News.