*The Children of Us All | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | July 17, 2026*
Last Saturday, I led a morning study session at the Maccabiah. Sitting in a circle around me were athletes, coaches, and other members of the Maccabiah community, and together we asked: What does it mean to be Jewish today? I read excerpts from my book *The Wandering Jewess*, alongside writings by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, each of whom, in his own language, tried to shine a beam of light on that very question.
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Neither I nor the athletes were religiously observant, and this was not, of course, a religious question. It was a question of how to live as Jews now. What do you do when it feels as though the whole world has turned its back on you? What do you do when it seems that most people cannot summon even a trace of empathy for what you are living through, your grief, your loneliness, your fear? If, out of darkness and fog, you choose to reach toward the light, how do you do that? And how do you do it together?
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It is a question that troubles many Jews throughout the Diaspora, and it led us to speak about ourselves, as I wrote here last week, as the descendants of a tribe that, to this day, still feels something of its shared destiny. How else could it be that in one circle sat Jews from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, South America, and of course Israel, and yet we all recognized the very same emotions?
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And how could it be that although we look different, speak different languages, and live differently, the world still recognizes us as the sons and daughters of the same tribe?
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Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik wrote in his groundbreaking essay *Kol Dodi Dofek* that even if one of us is a wealthy man living in a palace while another is a poor man living in a cave, *"Our fate is one. When the Jew in the cave is struck, the security of the Jew standing in the courts of kings is undermined.... Either we are all persecuted together, or we are all redeemed together."*
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As we read that passage, everyone in the circle nodded. "How do you experience this shared fate where you live?" I asked them. After all, like me, not all of you lead particularly Jewish lives.
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Then each person shared where they felt that sense of shared destiny. They said many beautiful things, but it was one sentence from one of the participants that brought tears to my eyes. She was a woman in her forties. She told us that every summer she works in the administration of Jewish summer camps. Every year, parents drop their children off at the entrance to camp. Every year they hug them goodbye. And every year, before they leave, they look at her with worried eyes and say, "Please take good care of my child."
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If you're unfamiliar with the tradition of summer camps in North America, these camps can last anywhere from five days to several weeks. During that time, children have no computers and no phones. Their only connection to home is through letters they receive from their parents. They themselves cannot make contact. That challenge is part of the magic of camp.
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So of course parents are anxious when they entrust their children to someone else's care for weeks at a time. I've done it myself. I've looked at the counselor with that same expression, and I've asked her to watch over my daughter.
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"But I've never understood it," the participant in our Maccabiah circle said. "Why do they need to ask me to take special care of them? The moment those children walk through the camp gates, and we're all Jews, they're no longer only their parents' children. They're our children. All of ours."
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The moment she said it, everyone nodded at once. I could feel the tears rising in my throat.
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I've carried that sentence with me ever since. And it surprised me, because in Israel we hear that phrase all the time: "the children of us all." Sometimes it is used in heartbreaking moments, such as when speaking about the hostages. Other times it is invoked in ways that feel manipulative, to excuse juvenile offenders or stir sympathy for them. For years, it was a phrase that genuinely irritated me. It felt like an attempt to manipulate my emotions.
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But that was not at all what I felt in that circle last Saturday. Across from me sat a woman who said, almost with pain, "I don't understand why they have to beg me to treat them well. They're my children." I almost cried. Maybe because I no longer have a mother, and I needed to hear a sentence like that. Or maybe because I, too, feel that in some profound sense, all the children of my tribe are my children. The children captured in black-and-white photographs eighty years ago in the camps. The wounded reservists are my husbands. The worried mothers are me. Of course I care deeply about other children in the world, about other women and men. But before all of them, I feel a particular closeness and a shared destiny with my own tribe. That runs deeper than any universal slogan, however beautiful it may sound.
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By the way, my dear friend Shay sent me this week to watch a Netflix documentary about gorillas. David Attenborough returns, fifty years later, to the gorilla family he first encountered in Rwanda and sees what has become of their descendants. It is an excellent and fascinating film, but not because it is about gorillas. There are countless films about gorillas. What makes it gripping is that it continually returns to that same family, to Attenborough's visit fifty years earlier, and to a moment that profoundly shaped his own life.
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In a way, he feels that this is *his* tribe, and because of that he feels a deep emotional bond with them. That feeling is passed on to us, the viewers. For a little while, they become something like our tribe too.
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I thought about that a great deal this week. About how my heart opened toward a family of gorillas in Rwanda simply because I came to know their story. Because a shared story creates belonging. A story creates a tribe. In some ways, the Jewish story is like that too. Even if you tried to distance yourself from it, the world reminds you that you are part of it. And although you never chose it, you discover that it has beautiful and luminous sides as well. There are circles of people studying together on Saturday mornings. There are mothers who say that the children belong to all of us, and who make you, even at the age of fifty-one, feel a little less like an orphan. A little more like somebody's child.
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Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*