Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt trains the most distant Jews to embrace their blessings

Photos: Mendel photography

Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt, founder of Aish UK and popular educator and author, has been involved in kiruv for decades, but these days, even unaffiliated Jews have begun asking questions about their core identity. After facing his own crisis, learning how to find the good even in the most challenging situations, and penning Why Bad Things Don’t Happen to Good People, he’s inspiring a generation to latch onto their blessings, even when things look dark

Why the Jews? That sounds like a question many members of the Tribe would prefer not to answer, especially for those who are doing their best to be just like everyone else in the world. It’s a question about age-old anti-Semitism, but it’s also a question with a positive answer: Why the Jews? Because Jews have a mission in this world. And Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt calls for those in his orbit to discover what that trust is and embrace it.

Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt, popular author and podcaster, founder of Aish UK, the Tikun organization, and currently director of the Rabbinical Training Academy, has been involved in kiruv for decades, but there was probably never a more defining moment for his outreach groups than October 7. Suddenly, even unaffiliated young people began asking existential questions about their very core identity.

At a recent event to address this complex and sensitive topic, Rabbi Rosenblatt asked the audience — made up of frum Jews, secular Jews, and some non-Jews as well — to consider why anti-Semitism, with its age-old history of expulsions, persecutions, and massacres, is a hatred that’s had greater longevity and intensity than any other, is universal, and is generally irrational.

Is it because Jews are wealthy? Because they’re different? And if it’s because they supposedly killed the Christian deity, then why do Muslims hate the Jews?

To answer the question, Rabbi Rosenblatt quoted from none other than Hitler himself, who referred to the Jews as “the historic people of the spiritual G-d.” The Nazis, it turns out, were quite conscious of why they were targeting the Jews.

“If Hitler wanted to rid the world of our religion,” Rabbi Rosenblatt asks, “couldn’t he just have targeted the leadership, the rabbis, the elders, the teachers? But no, he came at every last little child, whether religious or rich or smart or none of the above. He believed there was something in a Jew’s soul, that in our very spirit we represent G-dliness. The Nazis believed that, again quoting from Hitler’s writings, ‘even if there were no synagogues or Jewish schools, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is not a single Jew who does not personify it.’

“Who else besides Hitler believed that? Well, actually, we do,” Rabbi Shaul says. “We’re a people with a higher mission, but we’re also the target of hatred for that.” (Sinai, he says, quoting the Gemara, is similar to the word “sinah,” hatred; when we received the guidelines at Sinai for an elevated life, it drew a level of hatred of us into the world.)

Rabbi Rosenblatt explains the trigger: “Most people prefer not to live a higher, more elevated life — they’d rather follow their drives and instincts and be controlled by their animal selves. And so, who wants to acknowledge the Jew and what he represents if it has implications for them?”

At the registration to one such event, Rabbi Rosenblatt was surprised when someone called Abs Majid, clearly a Muslim fellow, decided to sign up. Could a gathering be a target for a terrorist attack, especially given the current atmosphere? Rabbi Shaul got in contact with CST, the local Jewish security agency, who suggested Rabbi Rosenblatt request some ID. Abs sent Shaul his driver’s licence, and there it was: Abdullah Mohamed Majid, born in Iraq. CST suggested they change the venue, but Rabbi Rosenblatt — whose Tikun organization attracts non-Jews as well as Jews for charitable and community service projects — hesitated.

“That felt disrespectful to a person, that he should show up to a non-venue — and I had no idea if there was even anything sinister about him,” Rabbi Rosenblatt says. “It’s not who I am, I don’t work like that, I figured I’d do it the menschlich way and see what would happen. So I called Abs and asked if we could have a conversation.”

He asked Abs what motivated him to sign up.

“Well,” Abs told him, “I come from the Middle East, and have always seen so much hatred for the Jews. It didn’t make sense to me, like who are these people and what have they done? And now you’ve got this thing running, Why the Jews? That’s exactly what I want to know.”

Rabbi Rosenblatt, who has all kinds of people at his large Shabbos table, wound up inviting Abs for a Friday night meal. “It so happens that he’s a car mechanic, and he asked if there was anything he could do to help us. He wound up doing quite major repair on two cars, free of charge. I asked him if he would at least let me pay for the parts, but he told me, ‘You contribute, you care about the world, the least I can do is give something back.’ ”