Start with Why.
Author Simon Sinek argues that communicating your “why” – your purpose and motivation – is key to inspiring action. “Start With Why” defines why you exist and act as you do.
We began Denver Academy of Torah’s Faculty In-Service Week all together – teachers, administrators and school staff – gathered in the Beit Midrash. With the 2025-26 school year on the horizon, I began our introductory session with Mark Twain’s famous quote from his 1899 essay Concerning the Jews:
“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
Mark Twain captures something about us as a people that defies an easy answer, choosing to leave the reader to ponder as to the WHY of the Jewish people’s continued existence. I’ve been coming back to this quote repeatedly over the years in my teaching to capture the mystery, beauty, improbability and destiny of who WE are as a people and to frame the WHY of our investment in Jewish education and WHY we do everything we can to help our children and our students fall in love with being Jewish. It was a great springboard to begin our work together as faculty and staff at DAT, and it has been a strong, intense few days of planning and preparation.
And then, yesterday morning, I read a June 2025 essay by Alistair Heath, the editor of The Sunday Telegraph in the UK, titled “There’s something about Israel that makes people uncomfortable,” written a full 126 years (!) after Twain’s essay. It is a remarkable piece of writing, and, in my humble opinion, is the direct spiritual descendent of what Twain was getting at, but with a profound twist that we’ll get to in a minute. It deserves to be quoted in full:
“There’s something about Israel that makes people uncomfortable, and it’s not what they say it is.
They’ll point to politics, settlements, borders, and wars. But scratch beneath the outrage, and you’ll find something deeper. A discomfort not with what Israel does, but with what Israel is.
A nation this small should not be this strong. Period. Israel has no oil. No special natural resources. A population barely the size of a mid-sized American city. They are surrounded by enemies. Hated in the United Nations. Targeted by terror. Condemned by celebrities. Boycotted, slandered, and attacked. And still, they thrive like there’s no tomorrow.
In military.
In medicine.
In security.
In technology.
In agriculture.
In intelligence.
In morality.
In sheer, unbreakable will.
They turn desert into farmland.
They make water from air.
They intercept rockets in mid-air.
They rescue hostages under the nose of the world’s worst regimes.
They survive wars that were supposed to wipe them out, and win.
The world watches this and can’t make sense of it.
So they do what people do when they witness strength they can’t understand.
They assume it must be cheating.
It must be American aid.
It must be foreign lobbying.
It must be oppression.
It must be theft.
It must be some dark trick that gave the Jews this kind of power.
It must be blackmail.
Because heaven forbid it’s something else.
Heaven forbid it’s real.
Heaven forbid it’s earned.
Or worse, destined.
The Jewish people were supposed to disappear a long, long time ago. That’s how the story of exiled, enslaved, hated minorities is supposed to end. But the Jews didn’t disappear. They actually came home, rebuilt their land, revived their language, and brought their dead back to life – in memory, in identity, and in strength.
That’s not normal.
It’s not political.
It’s biblical.
There’s no cheat code that explains how a group of people return to their homeland after 2,000 years.
There is no rational path from gas chambers to global influence.
And there is no historical precedent for surviving the Babylonians, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust, and still showing up to work on Monday in Tel Aviv.
Israel doesn’t make sense.
Unless you believe in something beyond the math.
This is what drives the world crazy. Because if Israel is real, if this improbable, ancient, hated nation is somehow still chosen, protected, and thriving, then maybe God isn’t a myth after all.
Maybe He’s still in the story.
Maybe history isn’t random.
Maybe evil doesn’t get the last word.
Maybe the Jews are not just a people… but a testimony.
That’s what they can’t stand.
Because once you admit that Israel’s survival isn’t just impressive, but divine, everything changes. Your moral compass has to reset. Your assumptions about history, power, and justice collapse. You realize you’re not watching the end of an empire. You’re witnessing the beginning of something eternal.
So they deny it.
They smear it.
And rage against it.
Because it’s easier to call a miracle “cheating” than to face the possibility that God keeps His promises.
And He’s keeping them still.”
I’ll be honest with you: This essay has consumed me and has been bouncing around my mind and my soul all week, in between sessions on curriculum planning, student services, literacy, Ivrit, tefillah, and meetings on fundraising and marketing, communications and strategic goal-setting. I’ve been wanting to find some way of putting some of these thoughts together to share with our DAT community, but unsure as to how to do so.
Until this Thursday afternoon. Our shlichim Eliahu and Inbar Kramer asked to meet with me for a long-overdue meeting to really begin to get to know one another better and talk through some goals and objectives for the year. And the more we talked and the more we shared together, the more we talked about Torah and Israel and how we hope to inspire our students this year, the link between Twain and Heath became clear, and the WHY emerged.
When DAT invests in bringing shlichim to Denver, it’s not just to have religious Jews from Israel teach Torah and Ivrit, which in and of itself, is a noble and worthwhile objective. I think that’s just scratching the surface of what we are really doing, and what the real power of shlichut and a Jewish education really is.
Heath writes that “Israel doesn’t make sense.” And according to all reason, he is correct. To the outside world, we don’t make sense, and Israel really doesn’t make sense. But to our students and children, we and our extended family in Israel absolutely make sense. We make that which is abnormal to the world absolutely normal and healthy for our students. And the normalcy of these daily moments of Jewish learning and connections to Israel is what is truly miraculous.
At DAT, our mission is to share a Torah that embodies Hashem’s promise – a Torah mi’Tzion, Torah from Zion. We strive to help all our students realize, each and every day, that they are living through the most extraordinary era of our long and challenging history. After 2,000 years of harsh exile, Hashem opened the door a crack for us. As survivors of the camps and pogroms and centuries of oppression, hardship and deprivation in both Christian and Muslim lands, we seized that opportunity, reclaimed our Land, and took control of our destiny.
We, once likened to dry bones in Yechezkel’s vision, transformed as a People in our Land – fully actualized. In doing so, we have propelled ourselves, in Israel and in the Diaspora alike, closer to reishit tzmichat ge’ula’teynu, the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.
As a religious, Zionist Jewish day school, we are here to live every day fully understanding that we are Hashem’s children, and we are a people who by our very presence in the world today, defy all logic and reason. We want our students to know the Jewish story in their bones, that we, the biblical mamlechet kohanim v’goy kadosh, are a people who against all odds, improbably, returned home after 2,000 years to do remarkable world-changing things and to bring Torah from Zion into this world.
That’s our Why.
Shabbat Shalom u’mevorach.
Mar Abba
