A year ago, I put out two thousand words in an essay I titled The High Hat.
It was scary to hit publish. I was angry. Two years of constant post-October 7th pressure had changed my world completely. Being Jewish had stopped being a neutral characteristic. It shifted from being a benign piece of my identity to suddenly something that put a target on my back.
Over those two years, I watched people I knew and loved get tricked into supporting hate movements. I lost friends. I tried to take the high road for a long time. And then something broke.
The High Hat was a call to action, aimed especially at young adult Jews — the ones of us who’d been relatively complacent our whole lives. Rightfully so. We’d lived in wholly uninteresting times, at least as it pertained to our heritage. We were raised on stories of survivors, but it never occurred to us that threat would return in our lifetimes.
So I pleaded with my network to try different words, to step up, to become leaders. No one else was coming to save us. It had to be us.
The best thing to do is to lead by example. So for the last year, I tried to live those values that I was demanding of everyone else.
I am completely ordinary. But if I have a superpower it is that I suffer from just enough self-delusion that I genuinely believe I can make a change. We are all, in some ways, suffering from imposter syndrome.
So I started where I was. I thought and I spoke and I wrote about Jewish issues in ways that were, until then, impossible. I tried to leverage my voice — but most importantly, I rediscovered the strength of will to drag other people along with me.
I serve on the board at Beth Tzedec in Toronto. I spend most of my time there thinking about how to galvanize the community. We have over 1,000 members under 40. A year ago it felt like there were maybe twenty-five of us who showed up consistently. Today it feels like one hundred. Sure, that’s not a thousand. But it’s something.
Slowly but surely, incredible people — young leaders, doers, and change-makers — made themselves known. They stepped up. They validated every single late-night conversation I’d had with clergy, friends, and mentors about the intricacies of building something genuine.
A year ago, within the under-forty cohort, I could count on one hand the people I was confident could become change-makers. This year there’s a dozen at least, and they’re more talented, more capable, and younger than I am. In time they will be far better leaders than I ever was.
Next year, there will be more.
When I published The High Hat, I wasn’t banking on many people paying attention to what I had to say. Writing had only ever been personal therapy — journal entries, one page at a time, always in black ink. But as I kept writing, and putting myself out there, being vulnerable and honest, things changed. Peers started mentioning that they’d always wanted to write publicly and put something out into the world. So what started as accordingtoJacob became accordingto.ca.
A roster of writers started showing up, one at a time. They contributed, they made the site something. Their creativity and their intellect astonished me and motivated me to do even better. They’re all busy. They have lives and jobs and families, but a handful write regularly for the site now.
Next year, there will be more.
With accordingto, some people trusted us enough to sign up and hear from us regularly. accordingto’s subscriber list is modest, a hundred or so people. But we still haven’t even hit the site’s first anniversary. One hundred feels small. But two felt much smaller.
And next year, there will be more.
There are nights I feel like I’m screaming into the great aether — collaborators gone quiet, hours of work turning into a paltry number of site visits. But when I check the analytics, I can see that in less than a year, thirty thousand people have visited accordingto. That’s thirty thousand interactions, a sharing of ideas that, hopefully, made someone think differently about a topic, an issue, or about their life.
Thirty thousand people is a lot. But next year, at this time, there will be more.
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As Jews enter the Days of Awe, we are asked to take a spiritual accounting of our lives in the context of the year that has passed. I’ve always liked that the High Holidays carve out time for this important work. This year, for me, that accounting is more practical than usual. I’m thinking about how to effect change. I am thinking ahead. I am considering what I want to be able to say this time next year.
What will I have been responsible for? What will I have been most proud of? What difference will I actually have made?
I am standing at the threshold of some pretty big life changes. I live life with a clear-eyed understanding that none of us are here forever.
So whether you’re Jewish or not — on this Rosh Hashanah, I want to ask you another version of what I asked you last year. What difference can you make? And how do you make that difference?
Here is my promise to you. If you commit, and you stick to it, and you demand better of yourself and of your peers — for the right reasons, with real intentions of goodness and mutual prosperity — you will, very slowly, start to move the needle. You will start to make a difference.
If you’ve felt called to do more in your life, then seriously consider that call. Consider it not for yourself.
Consider it for the dozen people you might inspire to step up and lead. Consider it for the hundred or so who trust you enough to want to listen to what you have to say. Consider it for the thirty thousand who you might impact in passing.
The late great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks demonstrated that there are things — like power — that if you share, you lose. Zero sum. Sacks talked about love, but I will mention leadership. Because if you have love or leadership to share, and you do, then you are also enhanced. There will be more.
So if you consider those people, and accept the mantle of leadership, for yourself, for your family, for your community, or for society at large — I promise you that in a year from now, when you are doing your spiritual accounting.
There will be more.
Shana Tova