You Can’t Break Up With Your Father
The Shema and the Illusion of Choice—At the Start of a New Year
Hi friends, wishing us all a strong conclusion to 2025 and a much better 2026!
2025 has been hard—the normalization of antisemitism, attacks on Jews, the expanding Overton window. But it has also held blessings: the weakening of Israel’s enemies, especially Iran, and the return of hostages (we continue praying for the return of Ran Gvili’s z”l body).
Through it all, one of my greatest blessings has been this community. Committed has become more than a newsletter—it’s grown into a space for learning and conversation. Your questions, pushback, and insights make this work meaningful. Thank you.
This week, we conclude Genesis with Parashat Vayechi. We’ve journeyed from creation to the formation of a family—next week we enter Exodus, where that family becomes a nation. The transition invites us to reflect on what binds us together.
May the words of Torah continue to illuminate our lives, and may 2026 bring us all renewal, strength, and peace.
You Can’t Break Up With Your Father
The Shema and the Illusion of Choice
Most of our communal conversation right now has focused on antisemitism and anti-Zionism in America. But another concept has also entered the conversation: the Surge.
Researchers found a measurable increase in Jewish engagement after October 7. For many, “the Surge” has become shorthand for October 8 Jews—those who responded to the massacre by doubling down on Jewish life.
The explanation seemed obvious: Antisemitism rises; Jews pull closer together
But this week, I found myself wondering whether the Surge deserves a more careful explanation. Is it really so obvious that antisemitism leads to renewed commitment and interest in Judaism?
Historically, it hasn’t always done so. In modern Europe, rising antisemitism often coincided with mass conversion or assimilation. And even today, alongside the surge, there are newly alienated Jews and newly disengaged Jews.
So the question remains: Why this time? Why does antisemitism now coincide with a surge in Jewish life rather than an exodus from it?
There’s something in this week’s Torah portion that I think helps answer that question. It’s also something I came to see more clearly after watching the award-winning medical drama The Pitt.
If you haven’t seen The Pitt (you should), it’s an ER drama set over a single 24-hour shift in Pittsburgh.
Toward the end of what was supposed to be a 12-hour shift, the story reaches its climax. The ER has been overwhelmed by a mass-casualty shooting. The pediatric ward has been turned into a makeshift morgue.
And there, when he should be commanding the chaos, is the head of the ER: Dr. Robby.
Throughout the season, we’ve known him as brilliant and resilient. But not tonight. He’s curled on the floor. Shattered.
Then the show makes a surprising choice.
Dr. Robby clutches something at his chest: a gold Star of David necklace long hidden beneath his shirt. This man, who has shown no visible connection to religion or Jewish identity, begins shaking on the floor, covering his eyes with his right hand, and whispering words in shaky Hebrew:
Shema Yisrael, Ado-nai Elokeinu, Ado-nai Echad.
Hear, Oh Israel. The Lord is our God. The Lord is One.
Later, Dennis Whitaker, a Catholic medical student who witnessed the breakdown, approaches him.
Dr. Robby shrugs, embarrassed, and tries to explain. He doesn’t really know why those words came out. He isn’t even sure he believes in God. But when he was a kid, he lived with his grandmother. Every morning, they said the Shema together.
This week’s Torah portion, Vayechi, helps make sense of what Dr. Robby couldn’t.
Jacob lies on his deathbed. A midrash imagines the scene: as Jacob lay dying, his sons proclaimed their faith with the words Shema Yisrael.1
The sons say: Shema Yisrael—Hear oh Israel, hear our father;
Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad—the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
These words are so familiar and beloved by us that we forget how radical and how consequential they are.
The Shema binds three things: loyalty to a parent, faith in God, and loyalty to one another (expressed through “our God”). It binds faith to belonging.
You can struggle with your siblings. You can struggle with God. You can doubt, question, and feel uncertain. But you can never opt out of your parents. You cannot stop being Jacob’s child.
This is why the Shema is what Jews say at death, on Yom Kippur, in moments of terror and martyrdom. It is not primarily a theological statement, at least not in the Protestant sense of the term.
Dr. Robby was doing what Jacob’s sons did thousands of years ago. In his moment of collapse, when everything else fell away, what surfaced wasn’t doctrine. It was belonging.
He loved his grandmother and was faithful to her memory—and so he said the Shema.
How does this connect to the Surge?
My father, Rabbi Yosef Bitton, who grew up in a largely assimilated home and devoted his life to helping Jews recover lost traditions, offered a simple metaphor.
In the past, he said, Judaism was experienced like a parent. You might argue with your parents. You might feel distant from them. But they are not interchangeable, and they are not replaceable. You don’t “shop” for new parents when the relationship becomes inconvenient.
Modernity, he argued, taught us to experience Judaism like a romantic partner. Romantic partners, especially in our Western liberal culture, are chosen. They must feel expressive and fulfilling. And if they stop doing that—if they no longer align with who we think we are—we move on.
Parents bind us whether we feel it or not. Partners bind us only as long as the relationship works.
So how does this help explain the Surge?
For centuries before emancipation, Jews had little choice but to be Jewish. Judaism was legally enforced and socially unavoidable. When antisemitism arrived in that context, the equation was simple: New freedom plus old hatred produced mass exit.
American Jews in 2025 inhabit a different reality. We have lived with Judaism-as-choice on steroids since the 1960s or 1970s. Many of us believed we had already left—or at least achieved a comfortable distance.
We learned to say “I’m culturally Jewish” to signal that Judaism was meaningful, but not binding. It was the romantic partner we discarded, ignored, or visited once a year.
So when antisemitism arrives now, it doesn’t combine with newfound freedom. Instead, it collides with the discovery that what we thought was optional never fully was.
The equation has inverted—I thought this was a choice plus I’m being targeted anyway produces a different realization—that this was never simply a partnership.
This is what antisemitism does. It strips away the illusion that Judaism is optional. Antisemites do not negotiate degrees of belonging. They do not care how Jews self-define. They assign Jewishness from the outside as something unchosen and non-optional. And that assignment, however hostile, forces a reckoning.
For many, this realization arrives instinctively, not intellectually. We reach for words, symbols, gestures learned long before we consented to them—that Magen David under the shirt.
The Surge is not Jews encountering Judaism for the first time. It’s Jews remembering something they didn’t know they’d forgotten. It’s a form of tacit, inherited knowledge that resurfaces when the conditions that enabled forgetting are stripped away.
October 7 shattered the illusion that our deepest commitments are endlessly optional. And that recognition, once it happens, resists silence—once you hear your father calling your name.
Wishing us all a Shabbat Shalom and a happy 2026!
Mijal
Read last year’s Committed on Vayechi - exploring assimilation, ethnic renewal, and the way Jews save each other:
🎧 🎧 🎧 Noam and I shared some reflections on Jewish life in 2025 ✡️ ✡️ —and what we’re carrying with us into 2026. Give it a listen (or watch) below👇🎧 🎧 .
The Shema is found in Deuteronomy as Moses offers words about collective faith.
Strikingly, Maimonides—usually skeptical of taking midrash literally—treats the rabbis placing the Shema in Genesis as historical fact . This bedside moment, according to received tradition (Heb: Masoret), really happened. Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Keriat Shema, 1:4. My thanks to Rabbi Nathan Dweck for pointing this out.
Jews cannot forget that we are jews because the world always reminds us of that fact. In His covenant with Abraham, He says that the world will be divided into those who curse us and those who praise us. He didn't mention that most would hate us. The Shema is the ultimate cry in overwhelming circumstances - there is Purpose.
Spot on!
Now all we can hope is that those who have rejoined the tribe that they never really left, actively join us as a community. Offering strength to one another. We need them.
Blessings for a joyful and safe 2026.