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From ‘how to’ to ‘why bother?’: Michael Strassfeld writes a new guide to being Jewish
(JTA) — “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” That’s known as Hansen’s Law, named for the historian Marcus Lee Hansen, who observed that while the children of immigrants tend to run away from their ethnicity in order to join the mainstream, the third generation often wants to learn the “old ways” of their grandparents.
In 1973, “The Jewish Catalog” turned Hansen’s Law into a “do-it-yourself kit” for young Jews who wanted to practice the traditions of their grandparents but weren’t exactly sure how. Imagine “The Joy of Cooking,” but instead of recipes the guide to Jewish living had friendly instructions for hosting Shabbat, building a sukkah and taking part in Jewish rituals from birth to death. Co-edited by Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld and the late Richard Siegel, it went on to sell 300,000 copies and remains in print today.
Fifty years later, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld has written a new book that he calls a “bookend” to “The Jewish Catalog.” If the first book is a Jewish “how to,” the latest asks, he says, “why bother?” “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century” asserts that an open society and egalitarian ethics leave most Jews skeptical of the rituals and beliefs of Jewish tradition. In the face of this resistance, he argues that the purpose of Judaism is not obedience to Torah and its rituals for their own sake or mere “continuity,” but to “encourage and remind us to strive to live a life of compassion, loving relationships, and devotion to our ideals.”
Strassfeld, 73, grew up in an Orthodox home in Boston and got his master’s degree in Jewish studies at Brandeis University. Coming to doubt the “faith claims” of Orthodoxy, he became a regular at nearby Havurat Shalom, an “intentional community” that pioneered the havurah movement’s liberal, hands-on approach to traditional practice. He earned rabbinical ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College when he was 41 and went on to serve as the rabbi of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side and later the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Manhattan flagship of Reconstructionist Judaism.
“To be disrupted is to experience a break with the past and simultaneously reconnect in a new way to that past,” writes Strassfeld, who retired from the pulpit in 2015. This week, we spoke about why people might find Jewish ritual empty, how he thinks Jewish practices can enrich their lives and how Passover — which begins Wednesday night — could be the key to unlocking the central idea of Judaism.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: I wanted to start with the 50th anniversary of the “Jewish Catalog.” What connects the new book with the work you did back then on the “Catalog,” which was a do-it-yourself guide for Jews who were trying to reclaim the stuff they either did or didn’t learn in Hebrew school?
Michael Strassfeld: I see them as bookends. Basically, I keep on writing the same book over and over again. [Laughs] Except no, I’m different and the world is different. I’m always trying to make Judaism accessible to people. In the “Catalog” I was providing the resources on how to live a Jewish life when the resources weren’t easily accessible.
The new book is less about “how to” than “why bother?” That’s the challenge. I think a lot of people take pride in being Jewish, but it’s a small part of their identity because it doesn’t feel relevant. I want to say to people like that that Judaism is about living a life with meaning and purpose. It’s not about doing what I call the “Jewishly Jewish” things, like keeping kosher and going to synagogue. Judaism is wisdom and practices to live life with meaning and purpose. The purpose of Judaism isn’t to be a good Jew, despite all the surveys that give you 10 points for, you know, lighting Shabbat candles. It’s about being a good person.
So that brings up your relationship to the commandments and mitzvot, the traditional acts and behaviors that an Orthodox Jew or a committed Conservative Jew feels commanded to do, from prayer to keeping kosher to observing the Sabbath and the holidays. They might argue that doing these things is what makes you Jewish, but you’re arguing something different. If someone doesn’t feel bound by these obligations, why do them at all?
I don’t have the faith or beliefs that underlie such an attitude [of obligation]. Halacha, or Jewish law, is not in reality law. It’s really unlike American law where you know that if you’re violating it, you could be prosecuted. What I’m trying to do in the book is reframe rituals as an awareness practice, that is, bringing awareness to various aspects of our lives. So it could be paying attention to food, or cultivating attitudes of gratitude, or generosity, or satisfaction. My broad understanding of the festival cycle, for example, is that you can focus on those attitudes all year long, but the festivals provide a period of time once in the year to really focus on, in the case of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for example, saying sorry and repairing relationships.
In “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century,” Michael Strassfeld argues that the challenge of each generation’s Jews is to create the Judaism that is needed in their time. (Ben Yehuda Press)
Passover is coming. Probably no holiday asks its practitioners to do so much stuff in preparation, from cleaning the house of every trace of unleavened food to hosting, in many homes, two different catered seminars on Jewish history. Describe how Passover cultivates awareness, especially of the idea of freedom, which plays an important part thematically in your boo
The Sefat Emet [a 19th-century Hasidic master] says Torah is all about one thing: freedom. But there’s a variety of obstacles in the way. There are temptations. There’s the inner issues that you struggle with, and the bad things that are out of your control. The Sefat Emet says the 613 commandments are 613 etzot, or advice, that teach us how to live a life of freedom. The focus of Passover is trying to free yourself from the chains of the things that hold you back from being the person that you could be, not getting caught up in materiality or envy, free from unnecessary anxieties — all these things that distract us or keep us from being who we could be.
The Passover seder is one of the great rituals of Judaism. We’re trying to do a very ambitious thing by saying, not, like, “let’s remember when our ancestors were freed from Egypt,” but rather that we were slaves in Egypt and we went free. And at the seder we actually ingest that. We experience the bitterness by eating maror, the bitter herb. We experience the freedom by drinking wine. We don’t want it just to be an intellectual exercise.
Unfortunately the seder has become rote. But Passover is about this huge theme of freedom that is central to Judaism.
I think some people bristle against ritual because they find it empty. But you’re saying there’s another way to approach rituals which is to think of them as tools or instruments that can help you focus on core principles — you actually list 11 — which include finding holiness everywhere, caring for the planet and engaging in social justice, to name a few. But that invites the criticism, which I think was also leveled at the “Catalog,” that Judaism shouldn’t be instrumental, because if you treat it as a means to an end that’s self-serving and individualistic.
Certainly rituals are tools, but tools in the best sense of the word. They help us pay attention to things in our lives and things in the world that need repair. And people use them not to get ahead in the world, but because they want to be a somewhat better person. I talk a lot these days about having a brief morning practice, and in the book I write about the mezuzah. For most Jews it’s become wallpaper, but what if you take the moment that you leave in the morning, and there’s a transition from home to the outside and to work perhaps, and take a moment at the doorpost to spiritually frame your day? What are the major principles that you want to keep in your mind when you know you’re gonna be stuck in traffic or a difficult meeting?
And a lot of traditional rituals are instrumental. Saying a blessing before you eat is a gratitude practice.
But why do I need a particular Jewish ritual or practice to help me feel gratitude or order my day? Aren’t there other traditions I can use to accomplish the same things?
Anybody who is a pluralist, which I am, knows that the Jewish way is not the only way. If I grew up in India or Indonesia and my parents were locals I probably wouldn’t be a rabbi and writing these books.
But a partial answer to your question is that Judaism is one of the oldest wisdom traditions in the world, and that there has been a 3,000-year conversation by the Jewish people about what it means to live in this tradition and to live in the world. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom there.
So much in Jewish tradition says boundaries are good, and that it’s important to draw distinctions between what’s Jewish behavior and what’s not Jewish behavior, between the holy and the mundane, and that making those distinctions is a value in itself. But you argue strongly in an early chapter that that kind of binary thinking is not Judaism as you see it.
Underlying the book is the notion that Rabbinic Judaism carried the Jewish people for 2,000 years or so. But we’re living in a very different context, and the binaries, the dualities — too often they lead to hierarchy, so that, for example, men matter more than women in Jewish life. And we’ve tried to change that. We are living in an open society where we want to be more inclusive, not less inclusive. We don’t want to live in ghettos. Now, the ultra-Orthodox say, “No, we realize the danger of trying to live like that. We don’t think there’s anything of value in that modern world. And it’s all to be rejected.” And it would be foolish not to admit that in this very open world the Jews, as a minority, could kind of disappear. But I think that Judaism has so much value and wisdom and practices to offer to people that Judaism will continue to be part of the fabric of this world — the way, for example, we have given Shabbat as a concept to the world.
You know, in the first 11 chapters of the Torah, there are no Jews. So clearly, Jews and Judaism are not essential for the world to exist. And that’s a good, humbling message.
OK, but one could argue that while Jews aren’t necessary for the world to exist, Judaism is necessary for Jews to exist. And you write in your book, “If the Jewish people is to be a people, we need to have a commonly held tradition.” I think the pushback to the kind of openness and permeability you describe is that Jews can be so open and so permeable that they just fall through the holes.
It certainly is a possibility. And it’s also a possibility that the only Jews who will be around will be ultra-Orthodox Jews.
But if Judaism can only survive by being separatist, then I question whether it’s really worthwhile. That becomes a distorted vision of Judaism, and withdrawing is not what it’s meant to be. I think we’re meant to be in the world.
Your book is called “Judaism Disrupted.” What is disruptive about the Judaism that you’re proposing?
I meant it in two ways. First, Judaism is being disrupted by this very different world we’re living in. The contents of the ocean we swim in is very different than in the Middle Ages. But I’m also using it to say that Judaism is meant to disrupt our lives in a positive way, which is to say, “Wake up, pay attention.” You are here to live a life of meaning and purpose, and to continue as co-creators with God of the universe. You’re here to make the world better, to be kind and compassionate to people, to work on yourself. In my mind it is a shofar, “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep!” “Judaism Disrupted” says you have to pay attention to issues like food, and justice, and teshuva [repentance].
You were ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. Do you think your book falls neatly into any of our current denominational categories?
[Reconstructionist founder] Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s notion of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization is the one that I feel closest to. But I feel that the denominational structure isn’t particularly useful anymore. There’s basically two categories, Orthodox and the various kinds of liberal Judaism, within a spectrum. The modern world is so fundamentally different in its relationship to Jews and Judaism that what we’re seeing is a variety of attempts to figure out how to respond. And that will then become the Judaism for the next millennium. It’s time for a lot of experimentation. I think that’s required and out of that will come a new “Minhag America,” to use Isaac Mayer Wise’s phrase for the emerging custom of American Jews [Wise was a Reform rabbi in the late 19th century]. And we don’t need to have everybody doing it one way. As long as people feel committed to Judaism, the Jewish tradition, even if they’re doing it very differently than the Jews of the past, they will be writing themselves into the conversation.
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Iran Was Never Just Israel’s Problem
Iranians take to the streets during nationwide rallies on Nov. 4, 2025, marking the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy by waving flags and chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Photo: Screenshot
Some criticism of this war is justified.
If leaders want Americans to support military action against Iran, they must explain clearly why the threat is not merely Israeli, but American. They must define the objectives honestly and explain why the costs are worth bearing.
When they fail to do that, skepticism is not a vice. It is common sense.
But much of the commentary around this war has not been serious skepticism. It has been historical amnesia.
Too many Americans now speak as though Iran were chiefly Israel’s problem, and that the legitimate threat from Tehran was mainly the product of lobbying, hawkish paranoia, or another foreign entanglement sold under false pretenses.
This view appears on parts of the Left and on parts of the Right alike. It is a genuine horseshoe: one side speaks in the language of anti-colonial grievance, the other in the language of “America First” suspicion, but both often arrive at the same lazy conclusion — that Israel is the primary author of the crisis and Iran’s own record is somehow secondary.
That is not realism. It is illiteracy (or anti-Jewish bias) masquerading as restraint.
The Islamic Republic of Iran introduced itself to the United States in 1979 not through diplomacy, but through humiliation and hostage-taking. The seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis were not a misunderstanding. They were an opening statement.
From the beginning, the Iranian regime announced that ideological confrontation with America was not incidental to its identity. It was central.
What followed only confirmed this. For decades, the regime paired annihilative rhetoric with action: terrorism, proxy warfare, hostage-taking, intimidation, and subversion across the region and beyond. Iran did not merely talk like a revolutionary power. It behaved like one.
Americans should remember what that looked like in practice. Some of us knew it through Iraq.
I remember the explosively formed penetrators used in catastrophic IED attacks against American forces. Those weapons were not an abstraction. They were part of the same Iranian model of deniable warfare that allowed the regime to bleed its enemies while pretending to stand one step removed from the violence.
Iran is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. That’s not an Israeli “talking point” — it’s something that Americans need to hear.
Nor was Iran’s model of violence confined to one battlefield. Its partnership with Hezbollah, and the operatives who helped turn that relationship into a durable instrument of terror, showed that Iran’s strategy was never simply defensive. It was regional, ideological, and expansionist.
The nuclear issue tells the same story of denial colliding with evidence. Iran has insisted for years that its nuclear program is peaceful and civilian. But enrichment at levels far beyond normal civilian requirements tells a different story. Americans do not need a degree in nuclear physics to understand that.
One need not endorse every tactical choice made in this war to recognize that Tehran’s claims about its intentions have repeatedly collided with the evidence.
The missile issue is similar. For years, Iran presented supposed limits on its missile range as though they reflected meaningful restraint. Yet its actual capabilities and behavior have repeatedly revealed a larger reach and a more aggressive intent than its public narratives suggested.
This is why the old Waltz-Sagan political science debate still matters. Kenneth Waltz argued that nuclear weapons can stabilize rivalries because states fear annihilation and therefore behave more cautiously.
Scott Sagan warned that proliferation can make catastrophe more likely through accidents, weak controls, organizational failures, and the conduct of dangerous regimes.
In the Iranian case, Sagan’s warning is plainly the more relevant one.
The problem is not that Iranian leaders are cartoonishly irrational. The problem is that too many Western analysts assume every regime calculates risk, death, survival, and martyrdom in roughly the same way. They do not.
A revolutionary regime that has spent decades pairing annihilative rhetoric with proxy warfare, terror sponsorship, nuclear deceit, and regional coercion should not be analyzed as though it were simply another status quo state with ordinary preferences and ordinary inhibitions.
That is also why the phrase “regime change” should not be treated as morally disqualifying in itself.
Everything depends on the regime in question. When a government has spent nearly half a century brutalizing its own people, threatening its neighbors, sponsoring terrorism, and lying about capabilities that could turn regional war into mass destruction, its removal is not inherently a dark or reckless aspiration.
There is nothing morally sophisticated about treating the survival of such a regime as the default prudent outcome. This is not merely an external menace. It is a regime that terrorizes its own population as well.
At the same time, serious people should say plainly what force can and cannot do. Decapitation strikes and threat-reduction operations are not a political end state. They are, at most, an opening salvo. They can degrade command structures, reduce immediate dangers, and create opportunities that did not previously exist. They cannot by themselves produce legitimacy, restore sovereignty, or build a stable successor order.
That harder phase, if it ever comes, will depend above all on Iranians themselves — on brave people willing to reclaim their country from a regime that has held it hostage for nearly half a century.
This is the point too many critics still miss. Yes, there has been a communications failure. Americans were not told clearly enough, consistently enough, or persuasively enough why Iran is not just Israel’s problem but America’s problem too. And that failure created space for the horseshoe. On the Left and on the Right, anti-Israel fixation has too often displaced sober analysis of the regime itself. The language differs, but the impulse is similar: minimize Iran’s agency, magnify Israel’s, and collapse strategy into slogans.
But the communications failure does not make the danger unreal.
Nor does the war’s messiness. If the war had gone better — if it had produced a cleaner strategic result, a more visible collapse in regime capacity, or even the early signs of a successful internal uprising — some of today’s criticism would undoubtedly be quieter. That much is true. But it does not follow that the underlying threat was invented. It means only that strategic disappointment always gives selective memory more room to operate.
Iran was never just Israel’s problem. It has been an American problem since 1979. It has been a regional problem for decades. And it remains a wider strategic problem wherever revolutionary terror, nuclear deceit, long-range coercion, and genocidal rhetoric are treated as tolerable, so long as they are aimed at someone else first.
This was not only a failure of statecraft. It was a failure of recognition. Too many Americans looked at the crisis and somehow forgot they were dealing with a regime that has spent decades announcing itself through terror, deceit, and exterminationist intent.
David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).
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Shabbat HaGadol and the Story of Elijah
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
“Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great awesome Day of God, and he will reconcile fathers to children and children to fathers” (Malachi 3:24).
This is part of the Haftorah for Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. But who exactly was Elijah? It is true that in terms of stature and his place in our tradition, he was the greatest of the prophets, even if no book is attributed to him. His public victory over the prophets of Baal during the reign of Ahab and Jezebel was his most famous triumph. But just as significant was the Chariot of Fire that took him up to Heaven when he died, which became the symbol of mysticism with which he was always associated.
In the Talmud, Elijah figures prominently in the debates about messianism and whether he was to be the messiah, or the pathfinder and precursor. Eventually, it was settled that Elijah would pave the way for a messianic era and instruct us what to do and what parts of our tradition would be revived or survive when it came about.
In the Talmud, there are many episodes in which Elijah is said to appear to rabbis and guide them, and he is associated with solving unresolved halachic issues.
Elijah has multiple associations with Pesach. The most obvious being when towards the end of the Seder, we dedicate the fifth cup of wine to Elijah, and we invoke his presence in asking God to remove our enemies.
Why is this fifth cup specifically Eliyahu’s?
Explanations range from the rational to the mystical. According to Maimonides, the coming of the messiah is a time in which oppression and hatred are removed, and we are free to explore our spiritual lives unimpeded. That’s the mystical.
Practically, there is a debate about if we should drink four or five cups of wine at the Seder. Those who advocate for four cups say it is done for the four terms used in the Torah to describe the process that gave us our freedom from slavery — “I freed you, I saved you, I redeemed you, I took you out.” But others believe “I brought you” counts as a fifth.
Are there four or five words, and should there be four or five cups?
The debate is left unanswered. Although we are obliged to have four cups of wine, we add an extra one just in case — and our tradition happened to dedicate that one to Elijah.
This year we have much to be sad about. So many beautiful young and not-so-young lives have been killed by our enemies. So many more lives have been injured or ruined. And yet there have been so many examples of deliverance, self-sacrifice, and heroism.
Is this the year the messiah will come? We can hope. But in the meantime, we have to do our best to reconcile and heal the chasms amongst us, and to come together to go forward united with pride and joy. Thank you, Eliyahu.
The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.
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Unreported: Palestinian Authority Brags It Killed More Jews in Second Intifada Than Hamas
Palestinians, including children, celebrating the Second Intifada. Photo: Screenshot.
The Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) had the largest number of terrorists in the Second Intifada, boasted a senior PA official.
PA Tulkarem District Governor Abdallah Kmeil bragged how the number of PASF members killed fighting Israel far exceeded the number killed by other terror organizations combined during the PA-led terror campaign of 2000-2005:
“Tulkarem District Governor Abdallah Kmeil: Let’s speak in a scientific language, in the language of numbers, which is the strongest language. There were 2,089 Martyrs from the [PA] Security Forces in the second Intifada … The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades of Fatah had 632 Martyrs, the Al-Quds Brigades of the [Islamic] Jihad had 415 Martyrs, and the [Izz A-Din] Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas had 378 Martyrs.”
[Tulkarem Governorate, Facebook page, Feb. 13, 2026]
By comparing PASF casualties to those of recognized terror groups, Kmeil showed that the PA Security Forces — who were trained and funded by the West to fight terror — were actually the leaders of Palestinian terror.
The Second Intifada was the PA-directed and controlled terror campaign, during which Palestinians carried out thousands of terror attacks, including suicide bombings on buses, in shopping malls, and on main streets, murdering more than 1,100 Israelis.
Last year, PA TV aired an interview with a PASF member jailed by Israel for terror offenses during the Second Intifada, who explained that the PASF “responded to this call” — to join the terror organizations in fighting Israel:
Released PA Security Forces terrorist prisoner Naji Arar: “I was a member of the Security Forces, of the security establishment. When we responded to the call of the homeland – we responded to this call through the Security Forces.
Do you remember the Al-Aqsa Intifada? The ones who resisted there were the Security Forces members, of course, in cooperation with our people and the factions.
I was arrested in Ramallah and sentenced to 18 years… It was shocking. But for Palestine, everything is insignificant. We were released… and met the security establishment through which we launched [our activity back then]. It welcomed us.”
[Official PA TV, Giants of Endurance, May 30, 2025 and Sept. 20, 2025]
Most importantly, the PASF leadership role in terror continues today unabated, as exposed in the June 2025 report by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) titled “Terrorists in Uniform.”
In 2023, after calling the killing of 12 Israelis that year “acts of resistance,” Fatah-run Adwah TV reported that “the members of Fatah and the Security Forces form the core and the arms of the resistance [i.e., terror] groups in the West Bank, together with the other Palestinian factions.”
PMW has likewise documented Fatah honoring dead PASF members who were terrorists killed while attacking Israelis.
Therefore, Kmeil’s words were surely no slip of the tongue. They were a public expression of what the PA and Fatah know: that PA Security Forces members take a leading role in Palestinian terror, a role that is a source of pride, to be celebrated.
This is all the more reason why any talk of parts of Gaza being handed over to the PASF to police the Strip is misguided and unacceptable, since it would be simply replacing one terror group, Hamas, with another — PA Security Forces.
Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Ahron Shapiro is a contributor to PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.