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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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Trump Touts ‘Peace Through Strength’ in State of the Union, but Results Are Mixed
US President Donald Trump gestures on the day he delivers the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, Feb. 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/NATHAN HOWARD
“Peace through strength” is a foreign policy motto that has served President Donald Trump well — when he has adhered to it.
In his hyper-partisan State of the Union address on Tuesday, there was a rare moment of strength through unity. When Trump noted the return of all Israeli hostages from Gaza, Republicans and Democrats alike — except for Congress’s most noxious members — joined in a standing ovation. Among the many conflicts Trump took credit for ending in his speech, the Gaza ceasefire is, perhaps, the one for which he deserves the most credit.
Trump praised Hamas for working to recover the bodies of the last captives despite the fact that a high-ranking Israeli military official said that the terrorist group did not assist in the recovery of the body of Ran Gvili, the final hostage rescued from Gaza.
Trump noted Gvili’s mother’s relief to bury her son. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also humanized Israeli victims of violence by inviting as his guest the brother of an Israeli Embassy staffer gunned down in Washington, DC, while attending a Jewish event.
But what Israel watchers were looking for was a sign indicating whether Trump would strike Iran with military force. Not surprisingly, the president did not give the order from the dais or press a big red button to launch the operation. But he left his tea leaves out in the open.
Exaggerating somewhat, Trump noted the successful Operation Midnight Hammer from June 2025 that “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program” but acknowledged that Iran is busy rebuilding its nuclear weapons capabilities.
Iranians may be forgiven for a certain skepticism about Trump’s intentions going forward — whether he will indeed display the strength needed to keep the peace. In January, at the height of the protests against the Islamic Republic, the US president told the Iranians demonstrating in the streets that “help is on its way” and warned Tehran to “stop killing protesters.” But the Islamic Republic drowned Trump’s red line in a sea of its citizens’ blood.
In the weeks leading up to the State of the Union, the US military moved two aircraft carrier strike groups into the region and landed a group of F-22 Raptor jets in Israel — a lot of firepower. But to justify an attack, Trump wants to demonstrate that he has exhausted the diplomatic route.
Noting the negotiations with Iran, Trump declared, “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy.” But, Trump stated, the Iranians haven’t forsworn nuclear weapons. Trump additionally mentioned the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program and its support of terrorist proxies as causes for concern.
Trump has also undermined his mantra through his unwillingness to seriously challenge Russia to end its aggression in Ukraine during his second term, let alone within the 24 hours he promised on the campaign trail.
During his State of the Union address, Trump said his administration is working “very hard” to end the war. But the effort has not yet borne fruit.
He lamented “the killing and slaughter between Russia and Ukraine, where 25,000 soldiers are dying each and every month.”
That was the only mention of the four-year-long war in nearly two hours of speaking. Trump appears frustrated that his Midas touch in international peacemaking has exceeded his grasp. But he partly has himself to blame for rushing headlong into negotiations without first maximizing military or economic pressure on Russia, attempting peace without demonstrating strength.
Trump could have proactively built negotiating leverage against Russian President Vladimir Putin by strengthening Ukraine’s ability to withstand the Russian onslaught while applying stronger sanctions on the Russian economy. Instead, he slashed military assistance for Kyiv and waited nine months to impose sanctions targeting Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil. Even then, his administration has not enforced those sanctions, reducing their impact.
Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin in August for what he thought would be a productive one-on-one meeting. Instead, Putin embarrassed the president by lecturing him on Russian history while refusing to back down from his maximalist demands.
Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, have accomplished just as little in the same period. With Russia continuing to demand Ukrainian territory in the Donbas that its military cannot take by force, the White House has leaned on Ukraine to make territorial concessions, believing this will unlock peace. But that’s both unacceptable to Kyiv and insufficient to satisfy Putin, whose ultimate objective is to dominate Ukraine as a whole.
To his credit, Trump extracted a commitment from NATO members to spend 5 percent of their GDP toward defense and other security-related priorities, improving burden sharing. But Washington has added needless strain to transatlantic ties by meddling in European domestic politics, launching a self-defeating trade war, and attempting to bully Denmark into ceding Greenland to the United States.
As Trump put it in his speech, “We have to be strong, because hopefully we will seldom have to use this great power.” Washington can best deter its enemies when it applies its “peace through strength” approach forcefully and consistently and when it nurtures strong alliances rather than upending them.
David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Dmitriy Shapiro is a research analyst and editor. For more analysis from the authors and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay and Dmitriy @dmitriyshapiro. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
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Four Years After Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion, Peace Requires Leverage — Not Capitulation
Rescuers work at the site of the apartment building hit by a Russian drone during a Russian missile and drone strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Dec. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Viacheslav Ratynskyi
Four years ago, Russian armored columns pushed toward Kyiv, expecting a swift collapse of the Ukrainian state. That collapse never came.
Russia failed in its central objective. Kyiv did not fall. Ukraine’s government did not crumble. NATO did not fracture. What Vladimir Putin sought to prevent remains intact: a sovereign, Western-aligned Ukraine.
Russia today occupies roughly one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea and large swaths of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. Much of that territory was seized either in 2014 or during the early months of the 2022 invasion. Since then, Moscow’s gains have been incremental and costly, measured in devastated villages rather than decisive breakthroughs.
Ukraine, despite facing a significant infantry shortage, continues to hold Russia to incremental gains while inflicting heavy casualties. The war has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of soldiers and displaced millions of civilians. Cities such as Mariupol, Bakhmut, and Severodonetsk lie in ruins.
But the consequences of this war extend far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Europe has begun to rearm, addressing chronic underinvestment in defense since the end of the Cold War. As a result of the Russian invasion, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, doubling the alliance’s border with Russia, a strategic setback the Kremlin apparently didn’t anticipate. Energy markets have been reshaped as European states have largely weaned themselves off Russian oil and gas. Washington and its allies have been forced to rethink deterrence, force posture, and industrial capacity for sustained conflict.
In Ukraine, Putin faces a dilemma: he cannot impose the outcome he wants on the battlefield, yet he refuses to scale back his maximalist demands. So, the Kremlin has turned negotiations into another front in the war. Moscow has sought to use diplomacy to split the United States from Ukraine and Europe and enlist US help in forcing Kyiv to swallow Putin’s terms. The Kremlin demands that Ukraine cede the remainder of its eastern Donbas region, abandon its aspirations of joining NATO, accept limits on its military’s size and capabilities, and enshrine legal protections for Russian cultural influence. In short, Putin seeks to achieve through diplomacy what Russia has failed to secure decisively through force.
That approach only works if Moscow believes time is on its side. At present, the Kremlin appears to calculate that Western political divisions will deepen and that Russia can eventually exhaust Ukraine’s resistance. Until Putin’s calculus changes, diplomacy without leverage will not moderate Russian objectives. It will entrench them.
Shifting that calculation requires raising the cost of continued aggression and making Putin understand that neither Western will nor Ukrainian resistance will break. The United States retains significant tools to do so. Rather than slashing military assistance for Kyiv as the Trump administration has done, additional support can help Ukraine increase the price Russia pays for its battlefield advances. Strictly enforcing and building upon existing sanctions, particularly on the energy revenues that finance the war, can tighten economic pressure on the Kremlin.
Pressure, steadily applied, can shape negotiating behavior. Concessions offered prematurely are counterproductive. By leaning on Kyiv to bend to Moscow’s demands, Washington risks reinforcing Kremlin intransigence. And by rushing into negotiations without first establishing leverage, the Trump administration wasted valuable time.
Ending the war is a worthy objective. But the terms matter. A settlement that emboldens Russian revanchism or merely grants Moscow time to rearm for a follow-on war would damage US interests — with implications extending well beyond Ukraine. It would undermine the credibility of US security guarantees, destabilize Europe’s security architecture, and shift American strategic bandwidth away from higher-priority theaters.
Four years into this war, the lesson is not that diplomacy is futile. It is that diplomacy must be facilitated with strength. The United States still possesses the tools to create that leverage. Using them is not escalation. It’s smart negotiating.
Keti Korkiya is a research analyst in the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
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The Jewish Audacity to Have Vision Against All Odds
Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman in June 1953. Photo: Phto Birnfeld, Tel Aviv / National Library of Israel, Schwadron collection via Wikimedia Commons
We have all suffered the frustration of dealing with construction delays. But the news this week out of Spain should give us all pause. In Barcelona, cranes gently hoisted the final 12-ton section into place completing the central tower of the Sagrada Família cathedral, bringing the structure to its full height of 172.5 meters and officially making it the tallest church in the world. The construction project has finally been completed … after 144 years.
You read that right. Ground was broken in 1882. A year later, the eccentric architect Antoni Gaudí began the project in earnest. He devoted the remainder of his life to Sagrada Família, and died a century ago, in 1926, with less than a quarter of it built.
Wars intervened. Funding evaporated. Portions of his original models were destroyed. George Orwell dismissed it as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world,” and remarked wryly that the anarchists who controlled Barcelona while he lived there showed poor taste in not blowing it up.
And yet, finally, this week, crowds gathered to watch as cranes completed a vision that originated in the 19th century. It is hard to think of anything more bizarre in our age of instant results and overnight success than a project that spans nearly a century and a half — except perhaps the audacity of the man who designed it knowing full well he would never live to see it finished.
Gaudí once remarked, almost casually, “My client is not in a hurry,” meaning God. It was a line delivered with a shrug, but it contained his entire philosophy. What Gaudí saw in his mind’s eye would emerge, and he knew it.
What makes the story so extraordinary is that Gaudí was not sketching fantasy in the vague hope that some future engineer would figure out how to put it all together.
Gaudí constructed meticulous scale models. He calculated load-bearing curves with obsessive care. He suspended chains from ceilings and used mirrors to study how gravity naturally shaped arches, effectively reverse-engineering physics long before computer modeling made such things easy.
His vision was undeniably romantic — but it was also rigorously disciplined. He imagined something magnificent, and then he subjected that imagination to mathematics, materials, and method. He was planning, deliberately and patiently, toward a future he knew with absolute certainty he would never live to see.
The Jewish people understand that kind of vision very well. Amid the Second World War, as European Jewish life lay in smoking ruins and every yeshivah had been obliterated together with their students and rabbinic faculty, one man in Eretz Yisrael began speaking about the future in a way that made some of his contemporaries quietly wonder whether grief had unhinged him.
His name was Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, but he is better known as the Ponevezher Rav. He managed to escape the inferno of Europe, but his community in Ponevezh had been annihilated, along with his beloved yeshiva — once one of the crown jewels of prewar Lithuania.
The Ponevezher Rav’s world had been erased. Most people in his position would have focused on survival, on securing a modest foothold in a fragile new country, on mourning what could never be restored. Instead, he focused on rebuilding — not cautiously, but on a scale that seemed to defy the broken reality around him.
One day in 1944, even as the Holocaust still raged and the fate of millions hung in the balance, Rav Kahaneman climbed a barren hill in Bnei Brak and declared that he intended to build the greatest yeshiva in the world.
And then, astonishingly, he began raising funds. People thought he had lost his mind. There were barely any serious yeshiva students in Eretz Yisrael at the time. The economy was fragile. The British Mandate was unstable. Arab opposition to Jewish statehood was intensifying by the day. The idea of constructing a vast Torah citadel under those conditions felt detached from reality, almost delusional.
But the building went up anyway — stone by stone, floor by floor — until a grand edifice crowned the hill. When it opened, the cavernous beit midrash stood largely empty. A handful of students sat in a corner learning Gemara in a vast space designed for over a thousand yeshiva boys.
The image must have been surreal: a monumental structure with barely enough students to fill a corner. As it was going up, someone had asked the Ponevezher Rav whether this enormous building was not, perhaps, a touch ambitious. Would it not be wiser to start modestly and expand later?
His response has echoed through the decades: You do not build a small yeshiva and hope it becomes great. You build a great yeshiva — and then you fill it.
He could already see what others could not yet see — generations of students, the hum of Torah, and the glorious restoration of what was destroyed. Because the vision in his mind was so vivid, for him it wasn’t a vision; it was reality. And in time, it became reality.
It is precisely this energy that pulses through the Haftarah for Parshat Tetzaveh (Ez. 43:10–27), which contains one of Ezekiel’s most remarkable prophecies. He is not standing in bustling Jerusalem. He is in exile. The First Temple has been destroyed, its vessels looted, its glory extinguished, and the Jewish nation has been dragged to Babylonia in chains. The present is bleak, and the future seems hopeless.
And yet, in that very setting, God instructs Ezekiel to talk to the people about the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem. The prophecy is dazzling, comprising a meticulous blueprint for the Temple, down to the smallest detail. We are given architectural plans, dimensions, measurements, and procedures, along with a seven-day dedication sequence laid out with methodical clarity.
Can you imagine how this must have sounded to a beleaguered nation whose hopes for revival could easily have been dismissed as delusional? They are sitting by the rivers of Babylon, mourning what has been lost — and the prophet is discussing the floor plan of a Temple that does not yet exist. It borders on ridiculous.
But that is exactly the point. When you can picture the future clearly enough — when you can measure it, describe it, and it vividly inhabits your imagination — you begin, quietly but powerfully, to live differently in the present.
Gaudí did not live to see his church completed, but the clarity of his plans ensured that generations of architects, artisans, and engineers could continue his work long after he was gone. The Ponevezher Rav did not know how many students would one day fill his massive yeshiva, but his refusal to think small created the conditions in which greatness could take root.
Ezekiel’s generation did not rebuild the Temple, but they were handed something powerful: a design that made hope structured and concrete rather than sentimental and abstract. There is a profound difference between fantasy and vision. Fantasy floats, untethered from reality, comforting but meaningless. Vision, by contrast, submits itself to measurement. It accepts the discipline of detail. And most importantly, it draws plans.
In our own lives, we often hesitate to articulate what we truly hope for because we are afraid it may never materialize. We temper our ambitions, soften our aspirations, and downsize our dreams in order to shield ourselves from disappointment. We build small because small feels safer.
But Judaism has never been a small-building civilization. Three times a day we pray for the rebuilding of Jerusalem, in deliberate, specific language. It is blueprint before redemption. The Jewish story is about seeing beyond the current constraints, and then proceeding methodically in quiet determination.
And one day — sometimes decades later, sometimes a century later — the cranes come down, the halls fill with voices, and the towers stand complete.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.