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Judaism doesn’t want you to wander and live just anywhere — or does it?
(JTA) — I was a remote worker long before the pandemic made it a thing, but it was only last month that I really took advantage of it. Early on the morning of New Year’s Day, I boarded a plane from Connecticut bound for Mexico, where I spent a full month sleeping in thatch-roofed palapas, eating more tacos than was probably wise and bathing every day in the Pacific. I’ll spare you the glorious details, but suffice it to say, it wasn’t a bad way to spend a January.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself again and again coming into contact with expats who had traded in their urban lives in northern climes for a more laid-back life in the tropics. There was the recently divorced motorcycle enthusiast slowly wending his way southward by bike as he continued to work a design job for a major American bank. There was the yoga instructor born not far from where I live in Massachusetts who owned an open-air rooftop studio just steps from the waves. There were the countless couples who had chosen to spend their days running beachfront bars or small hotels on the sand. And then there were the seemingly endless number and variety of middle-aged northerners rebooting their lives in perpetual sunshine.
Such people have long mystified me. It’s not hard to understand the lure of beachside living, and part of me envies the freedom to design your own life from the ground up. But there’s also something scary about it. Arriving in middle age in a country where you know nobody, whose language is not your own, whose laws and cultural mores, seasons and flora, are all unfamiliar — it feels like the essence of shallow-rootedness, like a life devoid of all the things that give one (or at least me) a sense of comfort and security and place. The thought of exercising the right to live literally anywhere and any way I choose opens up a space so vast and limitless it provokes an almost vertiginous fear of disconnection and a life adrift.
Clearly, this feeling isn’t universally shared. And the fact that I have it probably owes a lot to my upbringing. I grew up in an Orthodox family, which by necessity meant life was lived in a fairly small bubble. Our house was within walking distance of our synagogue, as it had to be since walking was the only way to get there on Shabbat and holidays. I attended a small Jewish day school, where virtually all of my friends came from families with similar religious commitments. Keeping kosher and the other constraints of a religious life had a similarly narrowing effect on the horizons of my world and thus my sense of life’s possibilities. Or at least that’s how it often felt.
What must it be like — pardon the non-kosher expression — to feel as if the world is your oyster? That you could live anywhere, love anyone, eat anything and make your life whatever you want it to be? Thrilling, yes — but also frightening. The sense of boundless possibility I could feel emanating from those sun-baked Mexicans-by-choice was seductive, but tempered by aversion to a life so unmoored.
The tension between freedom and obligation is baked into Jewish life. The twin poles of our national narrative are the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai, each commemorated by festivals separated by exactly seven weeks in the calendar, starting with Passover. The conventional understanding is that this juxtaposition isn’t accidental. God didn’t liberate the Israelites from slavery so they could live free of encumbrances on the Mayan Riviera. Freedom had a purpose, expressed in the giving of the Torah at Sinai, with all its attendant rules and restrictions and obligations. Freedom is a central value of Jewish life — Jews are commanded to remember the Exodus every day. But Jewish freedom doesn’t mean the right to live however you want.
Except it might mean the right to live any place you want. In the 25th chapter of Leviticus, God gives the Israelites the commandment of the Jubilee year, known as yovel in Hebrew. Observed every 50 years in biblical times, the Jubilee has many similarities to the shmita (sabbatical) year, but with some additional rituals. The text instructs: “And you shall hallow the 50th year. You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.”
Among the requirements of the Jubilee was that ancestral lands be returned to their original owners. Yet the word for liberty is a curious one: “d’ror.” The Talmud explains its etymology this way: “It is like a man who dwells [medayer] in any dwelling and moves merchandise around the entire country” (Rosh Hashanah 9b).
The liberty of the Jubilee year could thus be said to have two contrary meanings — individuals had the right to return to their ancestral lands, but they were also free not to. They could live in any dwelling they chose. The sense of liberty connoted by the biblical text is a specifically residential one: the freedom to live where one chooses. Which pretty well describes the world we live in today. Jewish ancestral lands are freely available to any Jew who wants to live there. And roughly half the Jews of the world choose not to.
Clearly, I’m among them. And while I technically could live anywhere, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to. I like where I live — not because of any particular qualities of this place, though I do love its seasons and its smells and its proximity to the people I care about and the few weeks every fall when the trees become a riotous kaleidoscope. But mostly because it’s mine.
A version of this essay appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Recharge Shabbat newsletter. Subscribe here.
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Will Anything Change After Bondi — and How Will the Story End?
A man lights a candle as police officers stand guard following the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, December 15, 2025. REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
Jews arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788. That is the Australian equivalent of the Mayflower, albeit with convicts.
From their earliest days, Australian Jews integrated into national life visibly, with patriotism and confidence. They built their shuls without apology, established businesses without resentment, and raised families with great pride.
They were disproportionately represented in the military, academia, medicine, and commerce. They embraced their Australian identity fully, while remaining true to their Jewish faith and seeing no contradiction between the two.
Australia was once a country that understood how integration worked. Newcomers were welcome, but they were expected to participate in a shared civic culture. Loyalty, contribution, and respect for Australian society were not considered controversial demands — they were the price of admission. For more than two centuries, Australian Jews lived by that bargain.
This is why the massacre at Bondi Beach during a public Hanukkah celebration seems like more than an act of terror. It feels like a betrayal. Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman, 92, shielded his wife of 57 years in the crowd before dying. That is the Jewish-Aussie spirit that symbolized this community.
Hanukkah is, by design, a public holiday. It commemorates a minority preserving its identity while remaining part of a broader civilization. Light is placed deliberately in the public square. Faith without withdrawal. Cultural continuity without separatism. That is the message of Hanukkah.
That such a celebration was targeted in one of Australia’s most iconic public spaces is not incidental. It was an attack on a place and a community that exemplified successful integration during a festival that celebrates cohesion and tolerance.
Speaking to Australian Jews over the past two years, a new theme has emerged — not only of fear, but abandonment. The country they love increasingly hesitates to defend them, is embarrassed by its own culture, and is unwilling to confront hateful belief systems it has imported.
This is not an immigration crisis. It is a governance crisis.
Great countries are built by immigrants. The Greeks, Romans, and Americans all understood that growth comes from outsiders who want to become insiders. But instead of importing entrepreneurs, innovators, and builders, we have incubated an endless supply of cultural resentment. A nation cannot transmit to its citizens what it no longer values. Assimilation requires national pride and confidence in one’s own civilizational values.
Deterrence is dismissed for fear of “sending the wrong signal.” Enforcement is denounced as cruelty. Borders are discussed endlessly but defended reluctantly. Politicians still perform the language of control, but with the conviction of actors reciting lines they no longer believe.
Western governments have not failed to implement their will. They have abandoned the idea that they are entitled to have a will in the first place. The result is a system engineered for failure while absolving those responsible for it. Illegal entry is rewarded. Removal is treated as a scandal. Integration becomes optional.
What emerges is grievance without gratitude, and hate without consequence. Flags become suspect. History is reduced to a catalogue of sins. Elites perform ritualized shame as a marker of sophistication. A country that cannot defend its own identity cannot plausibly ask newcomers to adopt it.
Bondi was not a random eruption of violence. It was the predictable outcome of a system that encouraged hate, refused to do anything about years of incitement and terror attacks on Jews, and will likely change nothing after this attack.
The bitter irony is that the community that proved integration was possible is now among the first to feel the consequences of a society that has stopped insisting on it.
Nations do not decline in a single dramatic moment. They erode through a thousand small capitulations; each defended as compassion.
Bondi was not an aberration. It was a warning. The only question is whether the warning arrived too late. The story of Hanukkah ends with our salvation and spiritual redemption; how will this story end?
Philip Gross is a Manhattan-born, London-based business executive and writer. He explores issues of Jewish identity, faith, and contemporary society through the lens of both the American and British experience.
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Why Are Greek Media Erasing the Murder of a Greek Priest from the Barghouti Coverage?
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was part of the Global Sumud Flotilla seeking to deliver aid to Gaza and was detained by Israel, gestures as she is greeted by supporters upon her arrival to the Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport, in Athens, Greece, October 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki
Father Germanos, born Georgios Tsibouktzakis in Greece, was a Greek Orthodox monk-priest who moved to Israel in the early 1990s to serve at the St. George Monastery in the Judean Desert. He was widely respected and known for maintaining warm relations with the local community.
On June 12, 2001, while returning to the monastery from Jerusalem, Father Germanos was ambushed and murdered by Palestinian terrorists. The attack was carried out by Fatah-affiliated gunmen, making him one of more than 1,000 Israelis and foreign nationals killed in Palestinian terror attacks during the Second Intifada.
In 2004, arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti was convicted in a Tel Aviv court and sentenced to five life sentences for orchestrating a series of attacks that killed five civilians, including Father Germanos.
200+ celebrities want Marwan Barghouti freed. But the man they’re calling a “Palestinian Mandela” is a convicted murderer. pic.twitter.com/b9Ak4vJUAy
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 10, 2025
Since 2004, calls for Marwan Barghouti’s release have become a cause célèbre among those willing to overlook terrorism and murder, clinging to the idea that he could somehow emerge as a unifying figure in Palestinian politics or even a partner for peace with Israel.
Support for Barghouti has ebbed and flowed over the past two decades, but the past few months have seen a marked resurgence in articles, commentary, and sympathetic profiles of the Palestinian terror leader. His release was floated in the lead-up to the most recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and more recently, 200 artists and celebrities publicly endorsed freeing him.
This renewed wave of attention has not been limited to English-language media. Coverage of Barghouti has been widespread, appearing in news outlets across the world.
The Greek media has been no exception to the renewed global interest in Marwan Barghouti. Over the past few months, several Greek outlets have published pieces spotlighting the imprisoned Palestinian leader.
Yet one striking omission appears across these articles: none of them mention Father Germanos. The last time a mainstream Greek news outlet referenced his murder in connection with Barghouti was in November 2023.
A review of recent Greek-language coverage shows that these articles devote minimal attention to the actual reasons for Barghouti’s imprisonment. Instead, they focus largely on the arguments being advanced for his release, while entirely overlooking Father Germanos and the other victims whose deaths led to Barghouti’s conviction.
These Barghouti-centered pieces have appeared in numerous major publications, including Business Daily, Kathimerini, ERT News, ProtoThema, Naftemporiki, Skai, and Ethnos.
Instead of highlighting Barghouti’s responsibility for the murder of one of their own countrymen, these Greek news outlets dedicated only a few brief paragraphs to Barghouti’s record of terrorism and violence. Their coverage focused largely on the campaign to free him.
By omitting Father Germanos from recent reporting on Marwan Barghouti, Greek-language media organizations are doing a disservice to their audiences. They present Barghouti’s potential release as an issue confined to the Middle East, rather than one that also carries profound resonance for Greece. What is lost in this coverage is the simple truth that this story is not distant at all, and it is tied directly to the murder of a Greek citizen whose name deserves not to be forgotten.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Hamas Rejects Disarmament, Threatens Another October 7 — Media Silence
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Two years after Hamas’ horrific massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — and barely two months after the terror group agreed to the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan — Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal delivered an unfiltered message in Arabic: no disarmament, no relinquishing rule of Gaza, no acceptance of any international authority, and a renewed commitment to Israel’s annihilation.
Yet not a single major Western news outlet reported the speech.
Meshaal’s comments were delivered remotely in Arabic at a conference in Istanbul titled, “The Commitment to Jerusalem.” According to experts, his statements were not rhetorical flourishes. They were a clear repudiation of the peace plan Hamas supposedly accepted.
And the silence surrounding them is staggering.
Hamas in Its Own Words
The speech directly contradicted the commitments Hamas has agreed to or said it would consider under the US-brokered ceasefire deal: disarmament, transfer of Gaza governance to an external body, and cessation of hostilities.
Meshaal instead declared: “The time has come for the nation to decide on the liberation of Jerusalem as a symbol of the liberation of Palestine, the cleansing of the Al-Aqsa Mosque … And Gaza, which started ‘Al-Aqsa flood’ in 2023 and turned into the pride of the nation and the conscience of nations, this mighty Gaza deserves more from us.”
On the ceasefire itself, he dismissed it outright: “Yes, two months ago, a ceasefire was announced, but the war is not over.”
He called for “rejecting all forms of guardianship, mandate, and occupation over Gaza, over the West Bank, and over all of Palestine.”
And on rearming, he was very clear: “The resistance project and its weapons must be protected. It is the right of our people to defend themselves. The resistance and its weapons are the honor and strength of the nation.”
According to researcher Idit Bar, who specializes in the Arab and Islamic world, Meshaal’s words amount to a strategic declaration: “Meshaal, one of Hamas’ prominent leaders, says here very clearly, he puts all the cards on the table: No to disarmament, no to relinquishing Hamas’ rule, yes to the annihilation of Israel, yes to the liberation of Jerusalem. He even uses the term ‘cleansing’ al-Aqsa from impure Jews.”
Bar added: “He also calls for the release of prisoners, which he calls captives, from the Israeli prison, which is literally a call to kidnap hostages, because he saw on October 7 that it’s worthwhile. As far as he is concerned, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there’s space for only one state, an Islamic state, clean of Jews. That’s why he says the war isn’t over.”
What’s Behind the Media Silence
There are only two explanations for the omission: a lack of Arabic-speaking reporters or bias.
But major news organizations do have Arabic-speaking reporters across the Middle East. They could understand Meshaal’s words. They would have known he was speaking — it was all over Arabic social media feeds, and Al-Jazeera covered it. They should have reported it.
Which only leaves the second option as a viable explanation: those “reporters” chose not to publish what they knew. It was easy to hide that choice from editors who do not speak the language. And when newsworthy events or statements go unreported, they effectively cease to exist for the public record.
The bias is all the more striking because the AFP had a reporter covering the conference, yet chose to highlight only the more moderate remarks of Gaza Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, who claimed the group would accept governance by a UN force.
The agency even sought clarification from Hayya, who — knowing his comments would be quoted in English — added that Hamas would disarm only if the “occupation” ended. Meshaal’s far more explicit rejection of disarmament and peace was omitted entirely.
Media outlets have committed a journalistic sin — a manipulation of reality. Meshaal’s speech was a rare glimpse into Hamas’ true intentions: unfiltered, unambiguous, and damning. It contradicted diplomatic assumptions, exposed the fragility of the ceasefire, and signaled preparations for future violence.
But Western audiences, including policymakers, never heard a word about it.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.