The American Jewish community’s reawakening after the Oct. 7 terror attack has brought those who felt distant from Jewish life searching for meaning, ritual and community. The question troubling philanthropists and communal leaders since then is how to respond with long-lasting solutions for durable Jewish living, not fleeting gestures of identity. 

As many have already noted, Jewish education is the answer. In a June article in Commentary Magazine, Dan Senor expressed this clearly: 

“But here’s what keeps me up at night: Only about 5% of non-Orthodox Jewish children in America attend Jewish day schools. For the Orthodox, Judaism is the center of their lives, as much a part of their moment-to-moment existences as breathing. For the non-Orthodox, living a Jewish life is a moment-to-moment choice. And it should be easier to choose.” 

I could not agree more, but as someone who was both raised and has lived within the Orthodox community, I think the relative successes of the Orthodox community should be more closely examined, specifically by Jewish leadership in the non-Orthodox world. 

Being Orthodox is not a panacea from religious burnout, boredom or frustration. We also choose — but the community has invested both culturally and institutionally in ways that have made many of those Jewish choices easier. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I believe the Orthodox Jewish community has accrued lessons in cultivating Jewish identity that are relevant far beyond the strict confines of the community. To be clear, I am not talking about kiruv or the (not-so-subtle) push to make everyone Orthodox. I am talking about existing Jewish communities with working models of religiously infused, culturally rich communities that provide meaningful Jewish living alongside a modern life. These models are not perfect, and they are not replicable in full. But they contain systems, practices and communal habits that can inspire and inform the entire Jewish world — without necessarily requiring anyone to become Orthodox.

There’s a moment in the Coen Brothers’ film “No Country for Old Men” when the antagonist, Anton Chigurh, gun in hand, asks: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

For generations, American Jewish life developed with a kind of unspoken cultural “rule”: Every community — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and everything in between — had its own rhythms, norms and forms of observance, yet certain models of intensive engagement became associated almost exclusively with the Orthodox world. Yes, there are outstanding non-Orthodox day schools like Solomon Schechter and Heschel, but as a broad communal expectation, sending children to day school remained largely an Orthodox endeavor. The same was true of weekly Shabbat observance and immersive Jewish practice more generally. The message many Jews absorbed, consciously or not, was simple: Those things belong to the Orthodox; we are not Orthodox, therefore they are not for us.

This instinct did not emerge from nowhere. The American Jewish community is still working through the rupture of the Holocaust and the subsequent emergence of the reorganized American Jewish community. Many families can recall an uncle or cousin who “became Orthodox” and, in family memory, became rigid or distant. And Orthodox families carry the symmetrical trauma of the relative who walked away and fully assimilated. I know these histories intimately; my own extended family contains both. Given this, it’s no wonder our denominational communities have often learned about each other rather than from each other.

We are not starting from scratch after Oct. 7, 2023. There are decades of accumulated communal wisdom, across all movements, about what builds resilience, meaning and Jewish pride.

We have to let go of the caricatures that cloud our judgment.

My friend Rabbi Diana Fersko, senior rabbi of the Village Temple in Manhattan, recently told me she loves the parsha sheets stacked in the lobbies of Orthodox shuls. They feature accessible ideas, questions for kids, a simple overview of the Torah portion. “Why don’t we have these in our synagogue?” she asked.

Neither of us has plans to turn her Reform congregation into an Orthodox one. But why shouldn’t we share good ideas? Why shouldn’t the parsha sheet be a cross-communal genre?

At minimum, we need formalized ways of sharing programming, strategies and educational tools across denominations. The Orthodox world does not corner the market on inspiration, but it has developed effective, time-tested mechanisms for transmitting Jewish content and culture — and some of those mechanisms could be translated, adapted or reimagined elsewhere.

The truth is that entering a community you weren’t raised in — whether you’re a Reform Jew walking into an Orthodox shul, or vice-versa — is intimidating. It requires fluency, cultural awareness and a sense of belonging that can’t be manufactured.

But today, something remarkable is happening online. Jewish influencers, podcasts and digital communities are quietly breaking down these barriers. For the first time, Jews of very different backgrounds can “sit in the back of the same classroom,” listening as others share how they pray, how they observe Shabbos, how they talk to teenagers about God.

This is one of the core missions of 18Forty, the online community I founded: to create a shared table where Jews of all kinds can listen and learn from one another’s Jewish life. We often repeat on the show that the purpose of Judaism is not to fight antisemitism; we fight antisemitism so we can focus on the purpose of Judaism.

We’ve hosted rabbis of every denomination along with scholars, seekers and families navigating identity. One listener told me: “This is the only place where I and my siblings can all listen to the same Jewish conversation.”

Yet I still sometimes get polite but wary queries from philanthropists: “Isn’t this too Orthodox?”

Maybe it is. But is denominational affiliation really a deal breaker at a moment like this when the entire American Jewish landscape is asking how to build nourishing Jewish lives?

Beyond the question of the Jewish awakening post-Oct. 7 lies another crisis affecting the entire Western world: the collapse of community. It has become almost cliché to cite Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone on the erosion of civic and communal life, but the human need for belonging is not cliché at all; it is urgent. And here is where the Orthodox world offers something genuinely instructive. 

So many people today feel lonely, untethered, longing for friendship, for someone who will bring a meal when they are sick or show up during a difficult moment. Of course, vibrant communities exist outside of Orthodoxy — and of course, there are those within the Orthodox world who feel lonely too — but what the American Orthodox community has built is nothing short of remarkable. Visit any neighborhood on a Shabbat afternoon, and you will see it in motion: children playing freely across backyards, families drifting in and out of one another’s homes, a density of connection that is increasingly rare in modern life.

I am not entirely convinced this is simply the product of theology or halachic stringency. Many Orthodox Jews I know are not guided primarily by theological depth or meticulous ritual theory, yet the communal structure they inhabit reliably generates engagement, responsibility and belonging. There are cultural mechanics, informal institutions and shared rhythms that make this possible. Even acknowledging the very real ideological differences within the Jewish world, there is so much to learn from observing — carefully and respectfully — how Orthodox communities cultivate connection. If we care about the future of Jewish life in America, we must pay attention not only to ideas but to the infrastructure of belonging that sustains people’s lives.

Decades ago, Reb Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, architect of the American yeshiva day school system, was asked how schools could satisfy both Hasidic and non-Hasidic families. He answered with an analogy: Two families rely on a wealthy father-in-law. One eats only meat, the other only dairy. As long as the father is wealthy, everyone gets what they want. But if he goes bankrupt, they all sit at the same table and eat potatoes. 

“After the Holocaust,” he explained, “American Jewry is sitting together and eating potatoes.”

He said this in an era of scarcity. Today, some sectors of the Jewish community have flourished, others have struggled — but the metaphor still applies. We need shared tables again. Not for theology, but for shared best practices. Podcasting, social media and digital platforms may be the most promising shared tables we’ve ever had.

This is not a plea for kumbaya unity or Orthodox triumphalism. It is a call for Pareto efficiency — a concept from economist Vilfredo Pareto describing a system that is so successful that it becomes impossible to improve one person’s situation without harming another. Too much of American Jewish life violates this principle. How is it that some teenagers are mastering Talmud while others barely know what Shabbos is? How can we accept such dramatic disparities in basic Jewish literacy, practice and connection?

Surely we can agree that many Jews — even without becoming Orthodox — could be meaningfully enriched with more Shabbos, more Torah learning, more Jewish peoplehood.

If the rules we followed brought us here, then it’s time for new ones. Not rules that flatten our differences, but rules that let every corner of American Jewry draw on the best of what already works. Rules that say we don’t thrive by staying in our silos — we thrive by learning from one another’s strengths.

Dovid Bashevkin is the founder and host of 18Forty, a media and educational platform exploring the ideas shaping contemporary Jewish life. He serves as assistant clinical professor of Jewish values at Yeshiva University’s Sy Syms School of Business and is a rebbe at Isaac Breuer College. Dovid has been rejected from several prestigious fellowships and awards.