In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of the “10,000 Hour Rule”: the concept that achieving world-class expertise in any skill is, to a great extent, a matter of practicing for 10,000 hours. While Gladwell breaks 10,000 hours into the theoretically digestible increments of 20 intentional hours of work a week for 10 years, after jumping in with both feet the Jewish people as a whole are about to reach 10,000 hours of things no one wants to be good at. 

On Nov. 29, we will arrive at the milestone of 10,000 hours since the Oct. 7 massacre:

• 10,000 hours of living with the existential loneliness of having witnessed and felt the pain of the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust — an attack on the foundation of the modern State of Israel — and reeling from the silence of so many who we thought would be allies.

• 10,000 hours of carrying living ghosts with us everywhere we go; of donning yellow ribbons and dog tags and giving our names in Starbucks as Hersh and Kfir and Na’ama. 

• 10,000 hours of doomscrolling. 

• 10,000 hours of missing people we have never met and crying for people we will never meet.

• 10,000 hours of making decisions for the Jewish people and in self-preservation. Do I check the news when I wake up in the middle of the night, or do I run the risk of seeing whatever the latest headline is and being unable to get back to sleep?

• 10,000 hours of making Jewish decisions under the dark shadow of antisemitism. 

• 10,000 hours of questions swirling around, answers changing with every new headline, and uncertainty being our constant companion.

In short, to have lived the last 10,000 hours as an American Jew is to have built expertise in vulnerability, in making sense of the senseless and in navigating a present that we thought we had left behind in the past. 

Some of this expertise has been sought intentionally — there has been a surge of interest in Jewish communal life and connection and learning, and individuals, families and whole subsets of the community have actively taken on new rituals, practices and commitments as part of the 10,000 hours we have lived. But other elements have been less intentional, more involuntary: the nervousness that has set in for many, the instinctive decisions about when to hold back from expressing the totality of who we are, the moments of tears or anger or unbridled pride. 

Everyone in the world who was alive on Oct. 7, 2023, and still is today will have experienced 10,000 hours. For so many, perhaps nothing has changed. But for those of us who have been forever, indelibly changed at the core of who we are by Oct. 7 and the new era it has ushered in for the Jewish people, this time has meant something different. It is part of the transformation of who we were in our Oct. 6 selves, to who we will become whenever the proverbial tomorrow arrives. 

As a Jewish educator, I, like so many of my colleagues, entered the field that is my calling to serve the Jewish people. I chose the path of Jewish education because I believe in the power of the inherited wisdom and tradition of Judaism, and the value that Jewish joy can bring to each of us. And I sought to share this joy with the next generation of the Jewish people. I continue to believe everything that I believed on Oct. 6, 2023, about Jewish joy and wisdom and the beauty of the legacy that we have inherited. But after 10,000 hours makes me — makes all of us — reluctant experts on Jewish vulnerability and pain, and on antisemitism, I am ready to call on the field of Jewish education and the families and communities who we serve to channel our expertise into the work that we and our world need: Jewish pride.

Jewish pride — the ability to live with Jewish confidence, stemming from a connection to Judaism that provides value-add and meaning-making to one’s life — has long been a byproduct goal of Jewish education. Parents have said that it’s important to them that their children are proud to be Jewish, and organizations have included pronouncements like “We create confident Jews” in their mission statements. But to intentionally educate for Jewish pride, beyond hoping that it will come alongside Jewish knowledge, experiences and relationships, has not been a focus the way that it needs to be, now more than ever. 

Jewish pride must allow for self-expression, dissonance and multiple manifestations that are authentically reflective of diverse Jewish journeys and identities. Jewish pride is timely and timeless and speaks to the core of what is needed at this moment: strength, personal and collective grounding, and an understanding of self that is unapologetic in the face of an ever-changing world. The Jewish Education Project has recognized the craving for ways to actualize and express Jewish pride, and to educate and enculturate towards this goal. We recognize that pride is not one size fits all, and cannot be measured solely by external factors such as how prominently one wears a Jewish star, or how many times one posts on Instagram sharing Jewish content. 

These acts and others are indeed expressions of Jewish identity and the desire to share one’s Judaism with the world, and they can be seen as building blocks on the pride journey. But when thinking about outcomes like “Proud Jews have a positive self-image,” this can be actualized in a variety of ways. Proud Jews having a positive self-image can encompass a multitude of lived experiences. It may be an adolescent not opting to get a nose job because they have been able to successfully commingle “looking Jewish” with “being pretty,” or an individual bringing the lessons and values of Jewish history to the secular spaces they spend time in because they are able to meaningfully integrate the Jewish aspects of themselves with the totality of who they are and how they present in the world. Jewish pride is an individual feeling a positive affinity with the particularism of Jewish identity, along the lines of “This is special because it’s mine,” and the internalized self-actualization of “This is who I am.” Each pride outcome is a call to action, centering the internal power of our individual and collective identity in moments of strength, and moments of vulnerability. 

After 10,000 hours of expertise on vulnerability, I will hold all that I have learned in the last year as we look forward to what’s next — because of course we can’t move on from our Oct. 7 selves, not until the hostages come home, not until Jews can feel safe walking the streets of New York, Amsterdam or Tel Aviv as our authentic selves. But we can build the foundation for the expertise that we want to gain: Expertise in pride. Expertise in joy. Expertise in complexity. Expertise in wisdom. 

Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath is the senior director of knowledge, ideas and learning at The Jewish Education Project.