The Light Within The Darkness

By: Hillel Scheinfeld

I sit on the floor this morning in Beit Shemesh on Tishah B’Av, the day established by our Sages as the Jewish people’s national day of mourning. My mind is filled with conflicting and complicated thoughts about this day, particularly in light of the period in which we are living.

These thoughts did not begin today. The past three years, and especially the past several months, have brought me to a clearer understanding of the new reality in which the Jewish people find themselves.

Over these years, I have spoken with people from nearly every part of the Jewish world. Despite their very different backgrounds and beliefs, many express similar fears:

“We are heading toward a civil war.”

“The world hates us.”

“Why can’t we all just get along?”

“We are living through terribly dark times.”

These fears are compounded by the political, religious, and social conflicts facing our country, which include the future composition of the government, the lack of broad Charedi participation in military or national service, and concerns that progressive, secular Israelis are attempting to redefine the values and identity of the Jewish state.

There are, of course, countless additional issues, and every one of them contains layers of complexity and nuance. But the general feeling is the same: We are trapped in an endless national conflict with no end in sight.

For many people, this makes the mourning of Tishah B’Av feel painfully immediate. It reinforces the sense that, even after returning to our homeland, we still must sit on the floor each year and grieve.

And yet, after living in Israel for nearly 25 years, I must admit something that has troubled me for a long time. For at least the past fifteen years, I have found it increasingly difficult to experience the deep national despair that many associate with this day.

I want to be clear. I’m not speaking about the personal pain of those who have lost children, parents, spouses, siblings, friends, or fellow soldiers to war and terror. That pain is real, immeasurable, and sacred.

I’m speaking about something different: the national despair of a people who spent almost 2,000 years homeless, powerless, and dependent on the mercy of other nations.

At first, I felt guilty.

I consider myself someone who carries the pain of the Jewish people deeply. Why then did I feel less consumed by national mourning on Tishah B’Av? Why did I find myself focusing so much on the gift of living in this extraordinary period of Jewish history? Why did the difficulties of our time not lead me to the same sense of hopelessness that I heard from so many others?

Over time, I began to understand that I was not feeling less; I was beginning to learn that light and darkness can coexist.

We can celebrate everything we have regained while mourning everything that remains incomplete.

One does not cancel the other.

Perhaps the challenge of our generation is to learn how to hold both truths at once.

For nearly 2,000 years after the destruction of the Second Temple, Jewish life was largely organized around survival. We lived as minorities in foreign lands, among nations that repeatedly sought either our physical or spiritual destruction.

And then, 78 years ago, everything changed.

The Jewish people regained sovereignty in our G-d-given homeland. We entered a new stage of our long journey.

The central challenge was no longer on how to survive; it was how to rebuild. How we could transform the ashes of exile, persecution, and destruction into a living nation. How we could create a country capable of protecting the Jewish people, sustaining itself economically, and bringing moral and spiritual light both to itself and to the world. How we could reclaim our calling as an am segulah, a mamlechet kohanim v’goy kadosh, a treasured nation, a kingdom of priests, and a holy people.

When we step back and look objectively at what has been accomplished, it is nothing short of miraculous.

In an extraordinarily short period, the Jewish people have become a significant global force economically, militarily, technologically, culturally, and spiritually.

I have witnessed a small part of this transformation. When I moved to Israel nearly 25 years ago, there was no modern tunnel entrance into Jerusalem. Highway 6 was only beginning to reshape the country, and roads such as 431 and 531 did not yet form the transportation network we know today. The skyline of Tel Aviv looked entirely different. There were far fewer yeshivot, educational institutions, and pre-military academies combining Torah learning with national service.

The country has grown in almost every imaginable way.

Despite all our problems, the Jewish people may be living through one of the most remarkable periods in our history in our homeland.

So, with everything we’ve built and achieved, why do so many of us feel fear and despair?

I believe part of the answer lies in the way we learned to survive during exile.

For two thousand years, Jewish communities developed distinct worldviews, cultures, customs, institutions, and protective boundaries. Each community found the approach that allowed it to preserve Jewish identity under its particular conditions.

At times, the distance between those communities was enormous. Yet one dream united them: one day, we would return to our land and rebuild Jerusalem: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

For generations, those words expressed a distant hope. Then suddenly, that hope became a reality.

Jews returned from the four corners of the earth. At first, we were too busy fighting for survival to confront the full depth of our differences. There were immediate and urgent tasks before us. We needed to defend the country, absorb immigrants, establish an economy, build roads, hospitals, and schools, cultivate the land, and feed a rapidly growing population surrounded by enemies. And against all odds, we succeeded.

We may therefore have assumed that the most difficult part of the journey was behind us.

But the higher a nation climbs, the larger and stronger it becomes, the more complicated its challenges become. The problems we face today may feel greater not because we have failed, but because we have grown.

In many ways, the issues we solved during the state’s early decades were more concrete. Today we face something deeper: we must learn how to live together.

We must move from thinking only about the survival and success of our own communities to taking responsibility for the growth and destiny of the entire nation.

When Jews returned home, we did not bring only our bodies. We also brought the walls that had protected our communities in exile.

Those walls served an essential purpose. They preserved us.

But walls that protect a vulnerable minority in exile can become barriers when that minority returns home and must build a shared society with millions of other Jews.

The walls cannot simply disappear. Nor should every community abandon its identity. But we must learn where the walls remain necessary and where they prevent us from becoming a nation.

That change is frightening.

It forces each community to ask whether the institutions, assumptions, and strategies that brought it safely to this point are sufficient for the next stage of Jewish history.

Every generation has its defining challenge. For centuries, ours was survival: how could the Jewish people live in foreign lands without losing their identity, their Torah, or their relationship with Hashem?

Now that we have returned to our homeland, and as an increasing share of the Jewish people live together here, we must rise to a new challenge.

How do we educate our children to apply the Torah not only as a means of surviving exile, but as the foundation for building a moral, responsible, unified Jewish society in our own land?

Unity does not mean sameness.

The Jewish people began as twelve tribes, each possessing its own strengths and characteristics. The choshen breastplate worn over the heart of the Kohen Gadol contained twelve precious stones. It was not fashioned from one uniform stone.

Each tribe had something unique to contribute. Each needed the others.

Our diversity is not an accident to be overcome. It is part of our national design.

The challenge is learning how twelve different stones can be carried together over one heart.

Perhaps that is the source of much of the fear we experience today. Every part of Israeli society senses that what brought its community to this point may not, by itself, be enough to carry the entire nation forward.

We will all need to move beyond an exclusively communal outlook toward a broader national one.

That does not mean surrendering our beliefs. It means understanding that we have responsibilities beyond our own camp.

People ask, “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Because profound change takes time.

Change is difficult. It can be frightening. It can feel like a rejection of everything that protected us and brought us to where we are.

But perhaps we need to look at how far we’ve come and recognize that the difficulty of the next challenge does not mean we are lost.

It may mean that we are ready for the next stage.

That stage will require not only a new national mindset, but also new kinds of political and religious leadership.

Even Moshe Rabbeinu, the greatest leader in Jewish history, was not the leader who brought the people into the Land of Israel. A new stage required the leadership of Yehoshua.

And Yehoshua’s leadership, which conquered and settled the land, was not the leadership that ultimately united the tribes around Jerusalem and laid the foundations of the Beit HaMikdash. That process took generations and ultimately required the leadership of David Hamelech.

Different stages of national development demand different forms of leadership.

I look with awe and gratitude at what our leaders and citizens have built over the past 78 years. They made mistakes, as every leader does, but they transformed a displaced and devastated people into a powerful nation.

At the same time, the leadership that brought us here may not be the leadership that can take us into the next stage.

That is true of our political leadership, and it is also true of our religious leadership.

We need leaders who can remain deeply rooted to their own values while recognizing the legitimacy, contribution, and responsibility of other parts of the Jewish people. We need leaders who can help their communities move from fear of each other to trust in each other.

Why then can I look at our current reality with hope?

Because many of the problems that cause us such anxiety are at least in part the problems of success.

They are the problems of a people that has returned home.

They are the problems of sovereignty, growth, power, responsibility, and permanence.

An exiled people can remain separated into individual communities; a sovereign nation cannot.

A people fighting merely to survive can postpone the question of how different tribes will live together. A people that has returned home must eventually answer it.

This reality does not make our conflicts less serious. It does, however, place them within a larger and more hopeful story.

We are not necessarily witnessing the collapse of the Jewish national project.

We may be experiencing the painful transition to its next stage.

I do not pretend to have the answers. I offer only a change in perspective.

It is permissible and perhaps necessary to live within the duality of light and darkness.

On Tishah B’Av, we can mourn what is still missing while giving thanks for what has already been restored.

We can grieve the hatred, division, bereavement, and destruction while recognizing the miracle that Jewish soldiers defend a sovereign Jewish nation, that Torah is studied across the land, that Hebrew is once again a living language, and that Jews from across the world have returned home.

Holding both realities may be the beginning of a healthier national mindset.

From there, perhaps we can teach our children how to live together again in our homeland. We can teach them mutual respect without demanding agreement, appreciation without erasing differences, and responsibility that extends beyond the boundaries of their own communities.

The essential foundation must be trust: the belief that even when we disagree profoundly, we remain responsible for one another and committed to a shared future.

Today, the institution that most powerfully brings together Israelis from different religious, political, ethnic, and social backgrounds is the Israel Defense Forces.

Two soldiers may disagree about almost everything, yet they stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the battlefield. Each may be willing to risk his or her life for the other.

That willingness creates a foundation of trust strong enough to hold profound differences.

It is therefore deeply painful when any community separates itself from the shared responsibility of protecting the country and its people. It is similarly painful when participation in the country’s defense is presented as conditional upon political agreement.

The details and obligations of service may be debated. The forms of contribution may differ. But no part of the nation can place itself entirely outside our shared responsibility for one another.

October 7 revealed both our vulnerability and our greatness.

It showed what happens when we fail to protect one another, but it also revealed the extraordinary strength that emerges when the Jewish people remember that we are one family.

Soldiers, reservists, volunteers, communities, and ordinary citizens rose with remarkable courage. For a moment, many of the walls between us became less important than the people standing beside us.

That spirit should not exist only during emergencies.

It must become part of the way we build our national future.

As I sit on the floor on Tishah B’Av, I see an extraordinary country that has already accomplished more than previous generations could have imagined and still has so much work left to do.

That should inspire neither complacency nor despair.

It should give us strength.

It should give us humility.

And it should give us hope.

Rav Yosef Zvi Rimon concluded a kina composed after October 7 by thanking Hashem for all that He has given us and praying for the guidance and strength to complete our journey.

Perhaps that is the prayer of our generation.

Thank You for bringing us home.

Help us learn how to live here together.

Help us transform survival into responsibility, division into trust, and sovereignty into redemption.

And help us see, even on the darkest day of the Jewish calendar, the light already beginning to emerge from within the darkness. 

Hillel Scheinfeld moved to Israel 22 years ago. He has worked in banking and the high-tech sector for 27 years in various leadership positions and is now the COO of Aish.