Not Good PR, Good Jews: Kiddush Hashem Today

Is it good for the Jews or bad for the Jews? Does it make Jews look good or make Jews look bad?

We often judge actions, behaviors, and, especially, headlines through this prism.

I remember in elementary school, our teacher would tell us to behave on our trip to the museum since people will judge all Jews based on how we behaved. That’s a lot of pressure on a 7-year-old!

Being the “Chosen People” means having a unique responsibility. God gave us the Torah which includes the mission of being a light unto the nations. In particular, the Torah commands us to create Kiddush Hashem, sanctify God’s name in the world, while avoiding Chillul Hashem, desecrating God’s name.

We’ve gotten used to speaking about Kiddush Hashem and Chillul Hashem in the language of optics.

When Jews act nobly, it’s a Kiddush Hashem. We’ve made Judaism look good. When Jews act badly, it’s a Chillul Hashem. We’ve given Judaism a black eye. There’s truth in that. But if that’s all it is, then Kiddush Hashem becomes a kind of religious public relations strategy. And that is simply not how Judaism treats it.

The Talmud (Yoma 86a) gives a definition that is both simple and unsettling. It does not speak about headlines or global perception. It speaks about how a Jew lives. If a person learns Torah, speaks pleasantly, conducts business honestly, people say, “Fortunate is his teacher…this is Torah.” That is Kiddush Hashem. If not, that is Chillul Hashem. Rambam goes even further. For someone identified as a Torah Jew, even behavior that is technically permissible but ethically off can constitute Chillul Hashem. The bar is not legality; it is moral refinement.

In other words, the metric is not: What story is being told about us? The metric is: What kind of people are we?

We are living in a moment the Talmud or Rambam never had to imagine. Today, Jews and the State of Israel live under a magnifying glass. A single act, even by a fringe individual or group, can become a global headline within hours. There is intense scrutiny, not always fair, often selective, sometimes deeply biased.

So, we find ourselves pulled in two directions. On one hand, we feel the need to defend, to say: this is not who we are, this is not representative, this is a distortion. And that instinct is correct. But on the other hand, there is a temptation to minimize, deflect, or even avoid criticism altogether because “airing our dirty laundry” only makes things worse. And here is where we must be careful. If our primary concern is how Jews are perceived, we have already shifted the conversation away from Torah and toward optics.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks often returned to a simple but demanding idea: Judaism is a religion of responsibility, not victimhood. Yes, we are sometimes judged unfairly. Yes, there are double standards. But none of that lowers the bar. If anything, it raises it. Kiddush Hashem is not achieved when we successfully manage perception. It is achieved when we embody integrity - especially when it is difficult, especially when no one applauds, and especially when the world is watching with a critical eye.

Rabbi Yehuda Amital spoke with particular urgency about this in the context of a sovereign Jewish state. For most of Jewish history, we did not have power. Now we do. And power introduces new religious challenges. When Jews are powerless, the primary test is survival with faith. When Jews have power, the test becomes what do we do with it. Rav Amital insisted that moral failures by Jews - especially in positions of power - must be confronted honestly. Not because of what the nations will say, but because of what those actions do to us.

The danger is not only Chillul Hashem in the headlines. The deeper danger is Chillul Hashem in the soul of the people.

Should we criticize our own? There is a real concern that repeated public criticism can feed distorted narratives. It can make it seem as though Jewish wrongdoing is more widespread than it is. It can unintentionally strengthen those who already seek to delegitimize. But the alternative - silence, denial, or reflexive defensiveness - is not the Torah way either. The prophets of Israel were the fiercest critics of the Jewish people. Not because they wanted better press, but because they wanted better people.

The key distinction is not whether we criticize, but how and why. Criticism must be truthful, not exaggerated, not generalized. It must be rooted in Torah values, not in the desire for approval. It must be directed inward toward growth, accountability, and change. There is a difference between moral clarity and performative condemnation.

There’s a story told about a rabbi who was once approached by a congregant upset about how Jews were being portrayed negatively in the media. “What should we do?” the person asked. “How do we respond to this Chillul Hashem?” The rabbi paused and said, “The best response is to ensure that in your business, in your home, in how you treat people, you are the opposite of what they are describing.”

Not a press release. Not a campaign. A life. Because at the end of the day, the most powerful Kiddush Hashem is not a statement; it is a human being.

We must learn to live with a certain tension. We need to firmly reject false generalizations and unfair narratives and, at the same time, to take full responsibility for real wrongdoing. We need to defend our people and, at the same time, to demand more from our people. We recognize that not every act represents Judaism and, at the same time, to insist that every act by a Jew still matters.

It is also true and important that countless acts of goodness go unnoticed. Quiet acts of kindness. Ethical restraint. Compassion in moments of conflict. Everyday decency. Part of Kiddush Hashem today is to live those values consistently and to make sure they are not invisible. Not as propaganda, but as truth. As a fuller, more honest picture of who we are.

Kiddush Hashem is not about controlling what the world thinks of Jews; it is about ensuring that when people encounter Jews, they encounter something that reflects God.

Sometimes that will be recognized. Sometimes it won’t. But the question we have to ask ourselves is not: “Did this make us look good?” The question is: “Was this good?”

If we only care about Chillul Hashem when others notice, we have already misunderstood it. And if we live lives of integrity - quietly, consistently, courageously, then even in an age of headlines, we will be doing what Jews have always been called to do: To sanctify God’s name not by managing perception, but by embodying it.

The Sound of Sirens

There is a sound that stops a country.

The siren is a raw sound, piercing, unadorned, impossible to ignore. In Israel, it does something remarkable: It creates silence. Twice within the span of a week, the siren wails across the land - on Yom HaShoah and Yom HaZikaron. Highways halt. Conversations cease. An entire nation stands suspended between past and present, between memory and motion. And then, almost without transition, that same nation rises into the celebration of Yom Ha’atzmaut.

The emotional whiplash is real, but perhaps the siren is the thread that holds it all together.

The practice of a siren to focus attention traces its roots back to World War I, when a businessman in Cape Town proposed a moment of silence to honor fallen soldiers. The idea spread across the British Empire and eventually made its way to pre-state Israel, where British-installed air-raid sirens became, after independence, instruments not only of warning but of memory. At first, they were used sparingly: when the remains of Herzl were brought to Israel, after a significant tragedy struck a kibbutz. But over time, something profound took shape. The same sirens once meant to signal danger were transformed into a national language of remembrance.

On Yom HaZikaron, the siren sounds for one minute at night, and two minutes the next morning. During those moments, Israel becomes still. Cars stop in the middle of highways. People stand at attention. Tears flow openly. It is not orchestrated; it is instinctive, communal, sacred.

But the story of sirens in Israel is more complicated today.

They are no longer only ceremonial. They are also urgent and sound far too often. Red alert sirens send families running to shelters. Ambulance sirens signal crisis. In recent times, the sound of the siren has become frighteningly routine. So much so that the tones of ambulance sirens had to be changed to avoid confusion.

For adults, the distinctions are painful but manageable. For children, they blur. A young boy hears a siren in his kindergarten on Yom HaShoah and is terrified, convinced it means danger, that he must run and hide. Only later does he learn that this siren is not about present fear, but past horror. Not about what might happen, but about what did.

Perhaps that confusion is not something to dismiss too quickly. Because in truth, the sirens of Israel are meant to hold both meanings at once. They are about danger and memory. About fear and dignity. About what has been lost and what still must be protected.

A siren is loud, but what it creates is silence. And in that silence, something begins to emerge.

This week, we read about tzara’at, the spiritual skin condition often translated as leprosy. It is a halakhic paradox that feels, at first glance, almost incomprehensible. A small patch of afflicted skin renders a person impure. But if the affliction spreads to cover the entire body - if it becomes total, the person is declared pure. How can this be?

The Maharal explains with a principle that feels almost counterintuitive: Sometimes, total collapse is not the deepening of brokenness; it is the end of it. When something is partially broken, it still clings to its previous form. It can be patched, perhaps, but it is still defined by its dysfunction. When something collapses entirely, however, when the old structure dissolves, it creates a kind of emptiness. And that emptiness is not void; it is possibility.

The Maharal reminds us that creation itself begins this way. Darkness precedes light. Tohu va’vohu, chaos, comes before creation. A seed must decay before it can grow. Redemption emerges not from stability, but from rupture.

This is what the siren captures. It is not a gentle sound. It does not comfort. It does not solve. It breaks. It pierces the routine of daily life and leaves, in its wake, a kind of emotional and spiritual exposure. For those two minutes, there is no distraction, no buffer. Just memory. Just loss. Just the unbearable weight of what has been.

Those moments do not end in silence alone. They lead somewhere. From the siren of Yom HaShoah, we carry the memory of absolute devastation - the kind that seemed total, consuming, and final. From the siren of Yom HaZikaron, we feel the ongoing cost of existence, the lives lost in defense of a state. Then, almost impossibly, we arrive at Yom Ha’atzmaut. Celebration does not erase the sirens; it emerges from them.

Like the metzora whose affliction has covered his entire body - who stands not as a deeper expression of impurity, but at the threshold of renewal, the Jewish people have known moments when brokenness felt complete. Those very moments, however, became the clearing from which something new could grow.

The siren is not only a memorial. It is a transition point. It forces a pause, a confrontation with the fullness of pain. And in doing so, it creates the conditions for something else to follow. Not immediately. Not easily. But inevitably. A people who can stand still together in grief can also rise together in hope.

The siren creates silence. But silence is not emptiness. It is an invitation for us to choose what to place inside those two minutes. Perhaps this year, when the siren sounds, we can be a little more intentional about what fills that stillness. To teach our children not only not to fear the sound, but to understand it, to know that this is what it means to belong to a people that remembers. To take a moment to say a name or to recall a story, a face, or a life that might otherwise blur into history. To reach out to someone for whom these days are not symbolic but personal, someone who carries loss not as memory but as daily reality. Perhaps most of all, we must allow the siren not only to stop us, but to shape us, to ask what it means to build a life, a community, a State worthy of the sacrifices we remember.

The siren will sound whether we are ready or not. When it fades, will we simply return to life as it was or will we carry something of that silence forward, and let it shape the way we live?

Let’s listen closely and choose wisely.

The Challah Holds the Key

Who’s ready for challah again?

This week, however, it comes with a key.

There’s something curious about the first Shabbat after Pesach. After a week without chametz, the challah returns, but in some homes, it looks different. It’s shaped like a key. Sometimes there’s even a key baked inside.

It’s the Shlissel Challah.

At first glance, it feels like a quaint custom. Maybe even a little strange. But like many minhagim, it carries a powerful message - especially for this moment: the day after the Festival of Freedom, when we transition from inspiration to responsibility,

The idea traces back to Sefer Yehoshua.

When the Jewish people entered the Land of Israel, something dramatic happened. The manna, the miraculous food that sustained them in the desert, stopped immediately after that first Pesach. As the verse says, “On the day after the Pesach…they ate from the produce of the land.”

From that moment on, everything changed. No more food from Heaven. Now there would be plowing, planting, building. We leave a world of open miracles and enter a world of effort, where we work, but Hashem opens the door.

Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heshel, the Apter Rebbe, explains that on Pesach, the “gates” are open. Spiritual growth comes easily. Connection flows. But after Pesach, those gates begin to close - not as a rejection, but as an invitation. Now it’s our move. We make a key to remind ourselves we don’t need to open everything. We just need to open a little - through mitzvot, through Shabbat, through small, consistent steps, and Hashem opens the rest.

Pesach was a gift. Now comes the hard part. That “key” isn’t only about opportunity; it’s about how we live.

Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Teitelbaum noted that the Shabbat immediately after Pesach usually coincides with Parshat Shemini, which discusses kosher food. His message is what we eat - and how we conduct our physical lives - is itself the key to serving Hashem in every area. Others connect the key to parnasah, making a living. After Pesach, when the manna stopped, sustenance would come through effort - but only with Hashem’s blessing. The key becomes a quiet prayer: Open for us the gates of livelihood.

Different explanations. One idea. Life is back in our hands but not fully in our control.

It’s easy to misunderstand this custom. Bake a key, get blessing. But that misses the point. This isn’t magic. It’s mindset. We return to work after Pesach - back to schedules, pressures, responsibilities. It’s easy to slip into thinking: it’s all on me. The key interrupts that thought. We must put in our effort but don’t forget Who opens the gates.

On Pesach, we are meticulous. Every crumb matters. Every detail counts. And then Pesach ends, and the intensity fades. The Shlissel Challah quietly insists don’t let that disappear. Take some of that Pesach passion with you. Bring a little more intention into your week. A little more awareness into your routine. Open just a little.

Maybe it’s one small thing this week: a more focused blessing or prayer, an extra minute of learning, a bit more responsiveness in how we interact with people or simply pausing to remember Who really runs the outcome.

Pesach showed us what it feels like when everything is open. Shlissel Challah asks a simple question: What will we do now that it isn’t? The challah sits on the table like a key. Not magic. Not a shortcut. A reminder. We’re back in the world of effort, but the doors are still there.

Even beyond the Jewish world, this custom has drawn attention, becoming something of a modern trend. But long before anyone noticed it, the message was always the same: We don’t control everything, but we’re still holding a key.

This week don’t just eat the challah; use the key.