A few nights ago, I had a dream.
In the dream, I was standing right here, somewhere in the middle of this speech. Miraculously, people were listening. Nobody had checked their watch in at least three minutes.
Then someone came up to me and whispered, “Noam, Elisheva is in labour.”
So I ran downstairs.
But as I was running, one thought crossed my mind:
What a difficult birthday for a child to have.
Every year: no cake, no candles, no party. The whole family is fasting. At best, the birthday meal is an apple… tomorrow.
I woke up laughing. But the dream stayed with me because it raised a serious question:
What would it mean to begin life on Yom Kippur?
Not on a day that asks, “What can I get?”
But on a day that asks, “What is my life for?”
Not on a day that measures us by our schedules, our titles, our comfort, or even our achievements—but on a day when all of that is stripped away, and we stand before Hashem and ask:
What am I doing with the life I have been given?
There is a beautiful insight taught by Rabbi Michael Lasri about the words we read today:
כִּי בַיּוֹם הַזֶּה יְכַפֵּר עֲלֵיכֶם לְטַהֵר אֶתְכֶם מִכֹּל חַטֹּאתֵיכֶם לִפְנֵי ה׳ תִּטְהָרוּ.
“For on this day, forgiveness shall be granted to you, to purify you from all your sins; before Hashem, you shall be purified.”
Rabbi Lasri suggests that we listen to the sentence with a different pause.
כִּי בַיּוֹם הַזֶּה יְכַפֵּר
“On this day, Hashem forgives us.”
But then:
וַעֲלֵיכֶם לְטַהֵר אֶתְכֶם
“And it is upon us to purify ourselves.”
Hashem does His part. But we must do ours.
Yom Kippur is not magic. It is a partnership.
Hashem opens the door. We have to be willing to walk through it.
I grew up in Israel, where Jewish identity was simply part of the atmosphere. The language was Hebrew. The calendar was Jewish. The streets became quiet before Shabbat. And on Yom Kippur, the country became almost unrecognizable.
No traffic. No noise. If you go to Tel Aviv, you will see children riding bicycles in the middle of roads that, just hours earlier, had been packed with cars.
In Israel, Jewish identity was not something I had to search for. It was in the air.
Later, I served in the IDF as a combat soldier and medic. I learned there that responsibility is not an abstract idea. When someone beside you needs you, you do not ask whether it is convenient. You carry them. You show up. You understand that their safety is, in some real way, your responsibility.
After the army, I worked in media and public affairs, including with Minister Gilad Erdan. At the time, I thought that influence meant policy rooms, cameras, headlines, and big public conversations.
And those things matter.
But if you had asked me fifteen years ago where I would be today, I do not think I would have said Jewish education. I certainly would not have said that some of the most meaningful conversations of my life would happen with teenagers after Shabbat dinner, or with a young person asking a question they have been carrying quietly for years.
But that is where I found something deeper.
Because education is not about transferring information. It is about helping someone discover that their life belongs to a story.
When Elisheva and I moved to Vancouver, I understood something I had never needed to understand in Israel.
Here, Jewish identity has to become intentional.
Not because this community does not care, this community cares deeply. Look around this room. Look at the families, the schools, the organizations, the generosity, and the commitment.
But because the wider world offers our children a thousand ways to define themselves, and every one of them asks for loyalty.
The question is not whether our children will have identities. Of course they will.
The question is whether Judaism will be one of the deepest sources of meaning in their lives, or merely one of the things they remember about their childhood.
Rav Soloveitchik spoke about two covenants.
בְּרִית גּוֹרָל — Brit Goral: a covenant of shared fate.
When Jews are threatened, when Israel is under attack, and when antisemitism rises, we feel that we are connected. We may live in different countries and vote differently, but we understand instinctively that what happens to one part of our people touches all of us.
But Rav Soloveitchik also spoke about בְּרִית יִעוּד — Brit Yi’ud: a covenant of shared destiny.
Not merely: What has happened to us?
But: What are we choosing to build together?
That is the question for a Jewish community, and perhaps especially for parents and grandparents.
What will our children inherit from us?
Hopefully, they will inherit opportunities. Hopefully, security. Hopefully, family stories, photographs, recipes, and memories.
But the most important inheritance is something else:
Will they inherit a reason to believe that their lives are connected to something larger than themselves?
Will they know that Judaism is not only about what Jews have survived—but about what Jews are here to build?
At NCSY, that is our work.
NCSY is not merely about programming. It is not a political organization, and it is not a place where we teach teenagers what to post online or how to win every argument.
NCSY is about building a Jewish home in the heart of a young person.
It is about Torah that is intelligent, demanding, and relevant. It is about Shabbat as a different way of living. It is about friendship, mentors, learning, singing, service, hard questions, and the discovery that Judaism has something serious to say about how we live, whom we love, what we owe one another, and what kind of people we want to become.
A tradition must be credible to an adult, lovable to a child, and serious enough for a teenager.
And Israel is part of that story, an essential part of it.
Our young people need to know that loving Israel does not mean pretending it is perfect. Mature love has room for complexity, pain, and disagreement.
But mature love does not become detachment.
When we face Jerusalem in prayer, we are not facing a metaphor. We are facing an address.
When we say לְשָׁנָה הַבָּאָה בִּירוּשָׁלָיִם—“Next year in Jerusalem”—we are saying that Jewish history has a home.
And our teenagers are being asked questions about that home every day.
At JSU programs in schools such as St. George’s and Eric Hamber, Jewish students are not only learning about Israel and Judaism. They are learning how to speak about them with confidence and humanity.
Let me share a composite story, one built from conversations that happen more often than people realize.
At a JSU program, a non-Jewish student stayed behind after everyone else had left. He said to one of our teen leaders, “I have to be honest. Everything I knew about Jews and Israel came from social media. I thought Jews only cared about themselves, and Israel was just the bad guy in every story.”
Our student did not shout. He did not give him a slogan.
He said, “You can ask me anything. But first, let me tell you what Israel means to my family.”
And he spoke about grandparents, Hebrew, fear, hope, service, loss, pride, and a country that is complicated, but beloved.
At the end, the student said, “I still have questions. But I realize I was thinking about headlines, not people.”
That is not a small thing.
Antisemitism thrives when Jews become an abstraction. Education gives people a chance to encounter Jews as human beings, and gives Jewish young people the confidence to stand with both knowledge and dignity.
That is what it means to create ambassadors. Not young people who can “win” every argument, but young people who know who they are; who can speak with humility, depth, and courage; and who understand that Torah, the Jewish people, Israel, and moral responsibility are not competing parts of their identity.
They are one story.
And this work happens because of partnership.
I want to thank Congregation Schara Tzedeck, our parents and families, the incredible teens of Vancouver, and the supporters who make this work possible: the Arnold and Anita Silber Family Foundation, the Diamond Foundation, the Lohn Foundation, the Kahn Foundation, the Mel and Geri Davis Charitable Trust, the Jonathon and Karly Leipsic family and the Karen Leipsic ז״ל Fund, Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, and our many individual partners. Your trust, generosity, and commitment allow young people to learn, ask questions, lead, and discover a Jewish future that feels like their own.
The Psalm says:
דּוֹר לְדוֹר יְשַׁבַּח מַעֲשֶׂיךָ וּגְבוּרֹתֶיךָ יַגִּידוּ.
“One generation shall praise Your works to another, and tell of Your mighty acts.”
It does not say that one generation lectures the next.
It says that one generation praises to the next.
We have to give our children more than warnings about what could be lost. We have to give them something beautiful enough to love. Something deep enough to question. Something strong enough to carry.
I am deeply hopeful.
Because I see what is happening in this community. I see children running through these halls with joy. I see teenagers choosing leadership. I see parents and grandparents who understand that continuity does not happen by accident.
The future is not waiting somewhere down the hall.
It is already here, in the young people we educate, the homes we build, the questions we welcome, the values we model, and the commitments we make.
May Hashem do His part for us today: forgive us, renew us, and give us life.
And may we do ours: build, teach, show up, invest, love, and give the next generation a Judaism worthy of their devotion.
So that one day, they will be able to say about us:
They did not only tell us that we belonged.
They made us feel that we belonged.
גמר חתימה טובה.
Noam Fogel
