When I arrived at Aish nine years ago there was one thing that was abundantly clear to me. That the Aish philosophy is and must become indistinguishable from the philosophy of Judaism. Rabbi Noach Weinberg, zt’l, our beloved founder and leader, operated on one basic premise. It was that every Jew must take responsibility. The Hebrew word for responsibility is “achrayus.” We must take responsibility for our fellow Jews on a physical and spiritual level. We must take responsibility for building our relationship with the Almighty. We must take responsibility for the betterment of the entire world.
So many organizations were started in the halls of Aish due to Rav Noach’s persistent culture of ‘Judaic entrepreneurialism.’ You can find Aish fingerprints across the Jewish world today in organizations like Momentum, Hasbara Fellowships, Project Inspire, OpenDor Media, Honest Reporting, Justifi, Birthright and many more. In many ways, Rav Noach is credited with starting a “Revolution of Responsibility.”
We are seeing this today in the efforts of so many of our alumni on university campuses. Led by our star alumnus from Harvard, Shabbos Kestenbaum, our students are making their voices heard trying to keep their brothers and sisters safe across North America. Aish is poised to assist their efforts in a big way in the coming weeks in connecting them to the government of Israel. Stay tuned for more information on that.
This past week I received a request to meet with another star alumnus, Jared Stern. He told me he had a project that he wanted to make me aware of and get my advice. One of my favorite tasks at Aish is meeting with our students to hear their ideas about how to change the world. Many times they have become so passionate because our current Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Yitzchak Berkovits, shlit’a, is constantly telling them that they must take responsibility for the world around them. So I readily agreed to meet with Jared and we got together in the Aish New York office.
Jared talked about a project that was started by Aish alumni, Jacob Bach and Jack Margolius to help those who did not have tefillin be able to procure them. Tefillin are holy accouterments which a Jew places on their arm and head each day to focus on the Almighty. My good friend David Heller once pointed out that tefillin were vessels for daily meditation. Jared told me that aside from raising the money to buy the tefillin, which can be as much as $1000 a pair, they would send one of their team anywhere in the world to hand deliver them. He then launched into stories from England, Portland, Tel Aviv, Paris, Miami, and the campuses of John Hopkins and Drexel University. The stories even include El Salvador where they delivered 13 pairs! I quickly realized that this was one of the more serious efforts I had encountered in recent years by our students. Their website is Thetefillinproject.co.
I was amazed how many of our alumni from EFG@aish and Yeshiva were involved in this project. Young men and women focused on spreading this precious commandment. It was overwhelming. One particular story moved me. The group traveled to Binghamton University to deliver a pair of tefillin to a young man. His parents traveled to celebrate the occasion. His father said that he had personally had a negative experience with his local synagogue and had not put on tefillin since his bar mitzvah 52 years earlier.
When I heard this story I thought of the verse in Malachi 3:24:
.והשיב לב אבות על בנים ולב בנים על אבותם
“The Almighty will turn the heart of fathers to their sons, and the heart of sons to their fathers.” This verse speaks of a future time when the Almighty will bring about a great reconciliation between the generations where children will inspire parents to come closer to the Almighty.
The father of the young man put on the tefillin and made a blessing “LeHadlik Ner shel Tefillin,” to light the candle of tefillin. This seemingly confuses the blessings of candle lighting and tefillin. Yet, this is what this team of young Jews are doing. They are kindling the spark of Judaism in the hearts of Jews who need the closeness to the Almighty.
My friends, this is what the world needs now. More Judaism. More Jewish values. More Jewish worship. More Jewish practice. The antisemitism and hate we are experiencing is because the world does not want the beauty of Judaism to thrive. We are the moral and ethical compass of the world. We are the light unto the nations. Without the Jewish people igniting the lighthouse of spirituality, the world would crash into the rocks of despair. We must meet the challenges before us with love. A love for each other. A love of humanity. A passionate love for the Almighty. Let us follow the path laid out by these young superstars and roll up our sleeves to bring all of our brothers and sisters closer to the palace of the Almighty.
