When the world saw a swell of support for Hamas after the terror organization attacked Jewish communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, it was a “secondary catastrophe,” the journalist Bari Weiss, founder of the Free Press, told about 3,000 people at an event in Toronto.
“You’ll see some of the most educated, prestigious, elite members of our society standing on the side of the terrorists,” Weiss, 40, a Jewish native of Pittsburgh, said at the Sept. 11 event, during which the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto launched its 2024 annual fundraising campaign.
The elite siding with terrorists has been “the major transformation to understand that we’re living in an age of just unbelievable moral confusion,” Weiss told attendees. “The most basic case for our civilization—and its fundamental goodness—has to be made.”
Weiss added that one could never imagine something “so morally depraved” as people supporting Al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
“The gift of the darkness of this year has been the clarity of that—the absolute clarity of this moment,” said Weiss, who hosts the podcast Honestly, and who formerly was an opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times who caused a national stir after she resigned from the Times in 2020, claiming an antisemitic backlash in the workplace. “Clarity about what it requires from us and a sense of purposefulness in the fight that we’re in.”
Rabbi David Wolpe, rabbi emeritus of Sinai Temple, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles and a former member of the antisemitism advisory group at Harvard University; and Israeli actress Shira Haas, of the popular three-season series Shtisel and four-part docudrama Unorthodox, also spoke at the event.
“The year made me much more binary,” Wolpe told attendees. “It’s like, if you’re a non-Zionist or an anti-Zionist, you’re in a different category in my Marvel kingdom.”
“The year was, in fact, both painful and clarifying, which are two things that often go together,” the rabbi added.
It is essential for Jews and for Israel to have allies in the battle between good and evil, he said.
“We have more friends than we think, and when you see any public figure standing up for Israel or standing up for Jews, all I can tell you is try to find out how to send them a note of appreciation,” he said. “We have a lot of building to do with other people who really are well-disposed towards us, and it’s incredibly important.”
Weiss told attendees that “our real allies” don’t necessarily identify themselves as such on social media.
“They are people who fundamentally understand that the West, for all of its flaws, is good, that liberal democracy has provided opportunity for more human progress and human flourishing than any other kind of system of government in the world,” she said.
Potential allies could be Catholic, evangelical, Hindu, Mormon or Chinese immigrants who fled Communist China, “and who understand where woke ideology can lead,” she told the audience.
“I really believe that in North America, our allies are in the majority,” she said. “They’re just the self-silencing majority, and part of what our job is to show up for them so that they can show up for us.”
‘A sense of tremendous purposefulness’
Haas, a Golden Globe- and Emmy-nominated actress, told attendees that she saw the “solidarity of the citizens” in Israel after Oct. 7, which “I think was never like that before.”
In the past 11 months, there has been “a sense of tremendous purposefulness, meaning, connection to our history and connection to one another,” she said, but she cautioned that there is more to be done than just unifying to fight Jew-hatred.
“We were put on earth to be Jews and to be part of the Jewish story,” she said.
Wolpe likened his hope and optimism to an archaeological discovery in the Jewish state in the Valley of Hinnom, from which the Hebrew word Gehenna, or “hell,” takes its name. Some 50 years ago, Israeli archaeologists were excavating at the site—in which Canaanites sacrificed children in ancient times—and found a house that was burned down during the destruction of the First Temple in the year 586 BCE.
In that house, they found the oldest partial text from the Torah—500 years older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wolpe said. The objects, part of the Israel Museum collection in Jerusalem, contain the priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24-26: “The Lord bless and protect you. The Lord deal kindly and graciously with you. The Lord bestow his favor upon you and grant you peace.”
“In other words, the oldest bit of Torah we have in the world is a blessing of peace that was snatched from hell,” Wolpe told the audience. “That is what we have done for thousands of years, and if you ask me what the Jewish mission and destiny is, I would say to you that I have no doubt that that is what both we and our brothers and sisters in Israel will do again today.”
Weiss said that she draws hope for history, noting that it was more difficult to live as a Jew after the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E.
“That perspective gives me such a sense—and I know this word has been so corrupted and neutered of its meaning—‘privilege,’ genuine, sincere privilege to live in a world where I get to have a mezuzah at my door, send my children to a Jewish school, have the police force in my city protect them rather than turn against them,” she said.
“All of these freedoms are things that even my great-grandparents would have thought were earthly miracles,” she added. “What gives me hope is looking backward and looking at all of the forgotten sacrifices that our ancestors made for every single one of us in this room.”
That view “gives a tremendous power and a sense of a gift that has been given to me, and a sense that I want to use that gift and the privilege of that gift and those freedoms as wisely as I can,” she said.
UJA in Toronto raised more than $50 million from some 12,000 donors since Oct. 7, the Federation announced at the event. It also sent 42 tons of medical supplies and essential goods to the Jewish state, it said.