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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
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The post Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What’s funny about living next to a Nazi?
This article contains spoilers for the film My Neighbor Adolf.
In the oddball fiction film My Neighbor Adolf, a Holocaust survivor living in 1960s South America believes his new neighbor is Adolf Hitler; in fact he’s so sure, he sets out to prove it. As he researches and compares notes, we learn a lot about Hitler — his aversion to drinking and smoking, his short temper, his love for chess. Yet somehow, the film has little to say about the Holocaust itself.
The film, directed by Leon Prudovsky, opens in 1934; title cards tell us, vaguely, that we are in Eastern Europe, but savvy audiences will be able to recognize it is Poland from the language. There, our protagonist, Marek Polsky (David Hayman), is a champion chess player with a big loving family. Then, the film flashes forward to 1960; now, he lives alone in South America — exactly where is unclear — the sole survivor of his family.
The film’s writers have an aversion to specifics. Most of Marek’s experience during the war is obscured, with the exception of a few small hints. When he’s in the shower, a number tattooed on his arm is visible. He asks his neighbor Hermann Herzog (Udo Kier) to keep his dog — a German Shepherd, of course — under control, because, he says, “I don’t like dogs,” an allusion to guard dogs in concentration camps. That’s about it.
Not all Holocaust films go into graphic details about the horrors their characters experienced. But they generally provide enough basic details to give the story some substance, like what camps they were at, when they were separated from their family, how they ended up in their new country or what kinds of emotional scars they now bear. My Neighbor Adolf skips all of this, making the Holocaust more of a rushed plot point than a source of emotional depth. Even Marek’s Jewish identity feels sidelined; it’s primarily limited to his visits to the Israeli embassy — where he is trying to convince officials that Hermann is Hitler — his penchant for homemade pickles and a few books he owns in Hebrew.
Still, whatever unspecified horror Marek went through in the Holocaust, it made him bitter and paranoid. He decides Hermann must be Hitler after seeing the man’s eyes, which he usually hides behind sunglasses; Marek believes he met Hitler at a 1934 chess tournament and tells the Israeli embassy he could never forget those eyes. While doing intensive research on Hitler — including buying a copy of Mein Kampf — Marek also notes that Hermann shares other qualities with Hitler, such as being left-handed and enjoying painting.
In order to get closer to Hermann and prove he is Hitler, Marek strikes up a friendship with his neighbor. In a series of events that feel more fitting for a buddy comedy than a film about Hitler, the two play chess, share pickles and even spy on an undressing woman together (coincidentally). For the sake of finding the truth, it makes sense that Marek would be willing to play a chess game or two with the person he believes is responsible for the Holocaust. But it seems improbable that it would go as far as sharing heartwarming conversations.
The film’s eventual big reveal is as underdeveloped as the rest of the film: Hermann tells Marek that he was forced to be a Hitler impersonator and now makes money from Nazi fanatics around the world. But he doesn’t quite explain how or to what end. Did the Nazi government force him? Did a non-governmental Nazi fan club see a way to market Hitler?
If the premise wasn’t already confusing enough, Hermann also reveals it was actually him, not Hitler, at Marek’s long-ago chess tournament. Is the film suggesting Hitler died before 1945, and a body double was used to keep the Reich alive? Or was Hermann just a stand-in for Hitler at events the Fuhrer didn’t want to actually attend?
Either way, this implies Hermann was cooperating with the Nazis. Yet for some reason, this revelation seems to win Marek over. Though at the beginning of the film Marek mutters “Bloody Krauts” under his breath multiple times every time he sees his neighbor, even before suspecting he is Hitler, by the end, Marek has become fond of Hermann, even going so far as to warn him that the Israeli Embassy is sending officials to his house.
It seems as though the movie wants us to think that, in the end, both men are victims of the Third Reich in their own ways. They have more in common than they have differences. It’s a lesson in empathy and humanity.
Except for one problem: Hermann is an antisemite.
In what is apparently meant to be a heartwarming moment, he tells Marek: “You may be a Jew, Mr. Polsky, but you are a good neighbor.” But, of course, this indicates that Hermann shares the prejudices that led to the slaughter of Marek’s family. Yes, he’s not the Fuhrer, but how much does that actually matter when the ideology is the same? Even Hitler had Jewish friends — that doesn’t negate his actions. Perhaps Hermann is meant to be the embodiment of the culpability of every German, that they all could be Hitler no matter how congenial they are. But even if that’s the case, it’s unclear how Marek, after losing his whole family due to the culpability of everyday citizens, is able to ignore the man’s prejudices and continue the friendship.
The expectation that Marek would ignore Hermann’s antisemitism trivializes the harm such beliefs can cause. An antisemite that likes homemade pickles is still an antisemite.
My Neighbor Adolf opens in theaters on January 9.
The post What’s funny about living next to a Nazi? appeared first on The Forward.
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A Message From the Torah for 2026: Live Now in a Way You’ll Be Proud of Later
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
I have always cherished Ludwig van Beethoven’s last words, spoken on his deathbed: “Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.” “Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.”
This kind of blunt honesty only comes from people facing their final moments. The masks drop, the posturing stops, and what’s left is pure truth.
Steve Jobs was diagnosed with terminal cancer in October 2003. Remarkably, he lived for another eight years, during which he became deeply reflective, increasingly conscious of his legacy and of life’s meaning in ways he had never been before.
In the address he gave at the Stanford commencement in 2005, he told the graduating class and their families, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward — you can only connect them looking backward.”
He didn’t say it explicitly, but his words came from a deep awareness of his own mortality. The message was clear. He was looking back on his life, taking stock, and seeing patterns that only become clear near the end. When death feels real, clarity follows.
Jobs also talked to the Stanford students about his failure, about being fired from the company he started, and about death itself. Looking back, his speech feels less like a graduation talk and more like a final message. It wasn’t about money or material things, but about meaning. Some things in life matter. Others don’t. Some things are just noise. Others have real substance.
History is full of moments like this, when great figures, as their lives are coming to a close, suddenly see what really matters. Near the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his beloved daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, “The last pang of life is in parting from you!”
What worried him most about death wasn’t losing power or fame, but the pain of being without those he loved. When all is said and done, relationships with our loved ones are what really matter, and our career or achievements pale into insignificance by comparison.
Sir Isaac Newton expressed something similar, though in a different way, as he looked back on his incredible life. Newton, whose discoveries changed how we see the universe, spoke with great humility: “I do not know what I may seem to the world — but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Even after a lifetime of achievement, he didn’t focus on his success. Instead, he saw clearly how much was still unknown, and how even greatness can feel small when you look at life’s bigger picture.
This is the emotional and moral setting at the start of Parshat Vayechi, which holds the Torah’s great final conversation. Jacob is dying, and he knows it. In his last moments, he gathers his children and speaks to them — not as a nostalgic father looking back, but as someone who truly understands who they are and what each one needs to hear.
If we expect deathbed speeches to be warm and fuzzy, Jacob’s version of one will come as a surprise. Some of his words are blessings, but others are more like rebukes. Reuven is reminded he didn’t reach his potential. Shimon and Levi are called out for their violence. Yehuda is elevated to family leadership, but is also reminded that this role comes with responsibility, not privilege.
This isn’t a “feel good” speech. It’s a speech that values truth over comfort. And that’s exactly the lesson of Jacob’s last words: legacy isn’t about saying nice things, but about saying what’s needed. Jacob isn’t focused on how his sons feel right now. He cares about who they will become after he’s gone, and how his words will echo through their lives and future generations.
Which brings us to today’s world, where we tend to focus more on our image while we’re alive and often don’t think about how we’ll be remembered. Social media in particular has taught us to always project an image that’s curated and perfect in the here and now, with no thought about the long term impact.
Everything is about appearances and how things are seen in the moment. We tell our own stories as they happen, believing that if we control how things look, we can control the outcome.
Vayechi breaks that illusion. Jacob reveals something uncomfortable: you can’t write your own legacy. He is brutally honest with his sons, and in doing so, he also faces his own role as a father. He doesn’t hide the truth. He points out their patterns, their tendencies, their choices — not to shame them, but to help them see both their strengths and weaknesses, take responsibility, and grow into the best version of themselves.
Vayechi is honest, but it is not hopeless. Yaakov doesn’t say, “This is who you are, and you can’t change.” He says, “This is who you have been — now choose what to do with it.” Steve Jobs ended his Stanford speech with the famous line, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
But the line before is even more telling. He called death “life’s change agent,” the force that clears away what doesn’t matter to make room for what does. The message is clear: it’s better to let that kind of clarity shape our lives now, instead of waiting until the end.
Vayechi teaches this lesson. When we reflect honestly, death doesn’t make life smaller — it makes it sharper. It removes pretense and leaves us with what really matters. Seeing our lives from a distance can be cleansing. The key is to live that way now, so we won’t need to revise it later.
It’s an idea that finds a moving expression in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl describes a woman who was his patient reflecting on her life, a life that was shaped by suffering and sacrifice as she cared for a severely disabled son.
Viewing her life as if from its end, she concludes — through tears — that it was not a failure. On the contrary, it was filled with meaning. The pain had turned her life into one of love and responsibility.
Frankl’s point is devastatingly simple: when life is seen through the lens of its conclusion, meaning often emerges where none had been visible before.
Steve Jobs was right: you can only connect the dots of a life by looking back. But Parshat Vayechi shows us we don’t have to wait until the end to start that process. Jacob connects the dots for his sons while he’s still alive — but more importantly, while they all still have many years to live.
The challenge he gives us is simple: live now in a way that will make sense later, when we look back. Because when the full story is told, the dots will connect, whether we like the picture or not. The only thing we really control is how we choose to draw them from the start.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Israel Cannot Outsource Its Survival
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip, as seen from Sderot, Israel May 13, 2023 Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Israel’s security doctrine has been shaped by a harsh but undeniable reality: hesitation invites criticism, but delay can invite catastrophe.
This is not a posture of arrogance or defiance; it is an expression of responsibility toward all of Israel’s citizens. For Israel, the cost of miscalculation is not theoretical, it is measured in lives. From its founding, Israel has faced existential threats that no other modern democracy has had to confront so consistently or so closely.
Surrounded by hostile actors, terrorist organizations, and regimes that openly question its right to exist, Israel has learned that survival depends on clarity, preparedness, and the willingness to act when necessary, even when such actions are unpopular internationally. Waiting for consensus or permission has historically proven to be something that could endanger Israel’s very existence.
This does not mean Israel rejects peace. On the contrary, Israel has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to pursue peace where peace is genuinely possible, and cooperation where cooperation enhances security. Peace treaties with former adversaries, regional partnerships, and humanitarian initiatives all testify to Israel’s desire for stability and coexistence. But peace cannot be built on unenforceable promises or blind faith in actors who have repeatedly violated agreements and norms.
Israel will not gamble its existence on assurances that cannot be guaranteed or enforced. Sovereignty, in this context, is not a symbolic concept or a political slogan. It is the concrete ability to defend oneself when no one else will, or when others cannot act in time. Sovereignty means maintaining independent judgment, operational freedom, and the resolve to protect one’s population under all circumstances.
History has taught the Jewish people an enduring and painful lesson: ultimate responsibility for Jewish survival rests with the Jewish State itself. Centuries of persecution, abandonment, and broken promises culminated in a clear understanding that security outsourced is security endangered. Israel’s independence is not only political; it is moral and existential.
Alliances matter. International partnerships, shared values, and moral clarity play an important role in strengthening Israel’s position and legitimacy. Israel values its allies and understands the importance of cooperation in a complex global environment. But when survival is at stake, alliances cannot replace independent decision-making.
No ally can assume responsibility for Israel’s existence, and none should be expected to.
When Israel acts to protect itself, it often ends up protecting others as well. By confronting extremist ideologies, disrupting terrorist networks, and standing as a frontline defender against radicalization, Israel contributes to global security, even when this reality is uncomfortable or inconvenient for the international community to acknowledge.
In the end, Israel’s guiding principle remains clear: peace where possible, strength where necessary, and sovereignty as the final shield.
History has shown that when Israel defends itself decisively, it not only safeguards its own people but helps prevent greater instability beyond its borders. Whether the world is ready to admit it or not, Israel’s self-defense has often served as a defense of shared values and global security itself.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.