Why would anyone remain Jewish in a world that has spent millennia making Jewish life difficult? That is the question Jerold Levoritz takes up in an essay for American Thinker, and his answer is not theological in the usual sense. It is, in his telling, evolutionary.
If Judaism offered no advantages, Levoritz writes, “Jews and Judaism would have disappeared over the millennia.” Instead, he argues, the faith embedded a set of mechanisms that made staying inside the fold not merely tolerable but desirable — and many of them have as much to do with social insurance, literacy and leisure as with doctrine.
A legal code that assumes safety inside the group
Levoritz begins with the Ten Commandments, but he reads them as a practical charter. Take “You shall not murder.” Because the prohibition applies to every member of the tribe without exception, he writes, everyone is safer — no one has to resort to the blood-revenge customs common in pre-Biblical societies to obtain justice. An expectation of safety within the community, he says, has always been part of Jewish communal life.
He gives similar treatment to “Honor your father and mother.” The commandment discourages parents from abandoning children, and it enshrines reciprocity across generations: parents who care for their children with steady affection may find those children feel obligated to care for them in old age. Levoritz calls it a form of social security.
Shabbat as a civilizing bargain
The Sabbath gets the most detailed treatment. Levoritz notes that violation of Shabbat restrictions once carried the death penalty by stoning — and that only one such case is reported. Even so, he writes, the Jews had to be coerced into taking one day in seven for rest, perhaps because the rest applied not only to the householder but to wives, children, slaves, servants and work animals.
He frames Shabbat as a significant step toward civilization. A sanctioned day away from labor was essentially unheard of in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, and skipping work one day in seven was costly. But the payoff came in rest, health and joy. In Temple times, singing and instrumental music were proper activities for the day, as recorded in the Psalms of King David, and observant families still sing at Friday night and Saturday meals.
The domestic consequences matter to Levoritz. Husbands and wives get time together. Children see their parents as full human beings rather than exhausted, irritable providers. The day creates regular occasions to host guests and build ties with neighbors. One day of rest in seven, he concludes, became a force for family and community building.
Dror: liberty as fragrance, not just politics
From there Levoritz turns to language. The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia quotes the Bible — “Proclaim liberty throughout the land” — and the Hebrew word behind it, dror, does not map neatly onto political independence or free time. He traces its root to deerah, an apartment or place to live, and to dor, a generation — a defined span of time. Together, he suggests, they describe a freedom in space and time, the ability to move about figuratively like a bird without fear.
A third sense of dror sharpens the point: a sweet fragrance released freely by perfumed flowers. When people have their own time and space, Levoritz writes, that freedom lets them both experience and express sweetness in their relationships — considerably more than political liberty, and something closer to pleasantness in daily life.
Literacy, yeshivas and the AI question
Jewish fathers, Levoritz notes, were commanded to teach their children to read and write — usually sons, but not exclusively — so literacy was presumed. The result was that past learning did not dribble away; it could be referenced and used to shape the future. Forgetting the past makes life simpler, he concedes, but also more primitive and more vulnerable to what he calls our barbaric origins.
He then pivots to an institution that predates the destruction of the two Temples: the yeshiva, or learning academy. Levoritz argues the modern yeshiva system deserves attention from secular authorities, particularly as artificial intelligence reshapes work and daily life. Unless the kind of back-and-forth discussion found in a yeshiva is encouraged across all levels of society, he warns, people may fall by the wayside as AI comes to dominate human activity.
His proposal is a hybrid: yeshiva-style learning paired with AI. He imagines professors publicly arrayed against an AI application in a forum, or pairs of students questioning an AI and being questioned by it as a way to master difficult material. Done right, he suggests, that combination could serve as a guardrail against AI veering in non-human or anti-human directions.
Individual worth, from North Korea to a lost four-year-old
Levoritz contrasts Judaism’s emphasis on the individual with what he describes as the left’s tendency to prioritize the state and its apparatus — a belief he says inevitably leads to the abuse of individuals. His sharpest example is North Korea. At the time of writing, he notes, North Korean troops were fighting in Ukraine alongside the Russian army, and before their departure, the North Korean government reportedly ordered its soldiers to kill themselves rather than surrender to Ukrainian forces. He cites a reported death rate above fifty percent, with many more wounded, and argues that less extreme callousness toward individuals abounds in Western Europe and America as well.
Against that, he sets a recent episode in Israel. A four-year-old wandered away from his family on a camping trip. Within hours, about 1,000 people volunteered to search, and they kept at it for more than 24 hours. Government officials supplied military helicopters. When Yuval Cogan was found alive and well, the country exhaled — headlines in the national media, singing and dancing among the volunteers and the boy’s neighbors.
It is, for Levoritz, a demonstration of what a society looks like when the individual is treated as the unit that matters.
Singing, memory and the choice not to slaughter
Song runs through the essay. Jews have been singing since Temple times, with instruments or a cappella, Levoritz writes — one of the first recorded national acts was the song sung with Moses after Pharaoh’s soldiers drowned. That norm carried into the modern state, where thousands gather in three-part harmony for the pleasure of it. He describes Israelis buying tickets to singing events where they are simultaneously performers and audience, and recalls a group of more than 12,000. He links to a video with English captions about Ori Ansbacher, killed in a terrorist attack, whose elementary school sings in her memory.
The list, he admits, is incomplete. Jewish practice, in his account, continuously replays Jewish history in Jewish lives. He offers one example: a Jerusalem family in which the person leading the Passover retelling of the Exodus holds a long wooden staff that has been in the family for generations, carried from Europe to Israel in the late 1800s. The theatrical reenactment has always been central to how children structure their Jewish world.
But the underlying principle, he insists, should be plain. The Jews walked away from slavery. They did not escape or sneak off, and they might have slaughtered their weakened tormentors instead. Choosing not to begin a national life with mass killing, he writes, represented a better set of values. Living as non-barbarians was apparently a goal in forming a Jewish worldview — and, he adds, we remain barbarians or near-barbarians unless civilizing experiences shape us.
Levoritz’s essay is a defense of staying, written for those weighing whether to. His case rests less on divine command than on what the tradition built: rules that made the group safer, a day that made families closer, a habit of literacy that preserved memory, and a stubborn insistence that the individual counts. Whether or not that settles the question, it is a reminder that the customs under attack are also the reasons people stay.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/why-be-jewish-in-a-time-of-rampant-antisemitism/