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How many of you have seen the play or the movie Golda\u2019s Balcony?\xa0 If you have, you know about that powerful moment, early in her career for Israel, she is Golda Meyerson at the time, it is January, 1948, it is three years after the Shoah, it is five months before Israel\u2019s independence would be declared and the war for independence would start, and Golda is with American Jews, at the General Assembly of Jewish Federations, held in Chicago on January 21.\xa0 Her mission was to inspire American Jews to support the incipient Jewish state and the Jewish army in the war for its very existence.\xa0 She was supposed to raise $25 million.\xa0 She ended up raising $50 million.\xa0

Make no mistake.\xa0\xa0This is our Golda moment.\xa0 Golda\u2019s secret sauce contained three ingredients.\xa0 They apply to us with equal force.

First, American Jews in 1948 learned of horrors and atrocities, murder and death, that befell innocent Jews of Europe.\xa0 Slaughter.\xa0 It made American Jews angry, sick to their stomach, nauseous, worried, grief-stricken, and determined to fight back.

Check.\xa0 American Jews in 2023 woke up last Shabbat morning, and every day and every sleepless night, through our insomnia, through the pits in our stomachs, we read stories that claim us, stories of horrors and atrocities, murder and death, that befell innocent Jews in the towns and villages near Gaza.\xa0 By the way, none of these areas were settlements.\xa0 None of these areas could in any remote way be called occupied lands.\xa0 None of these areas carry moral complexity.\xa0 These were indisputably and properly Jewish communities whose Jews, celebrating Simchat Torah, celebrating a peaceful music festival were slaughtered precisely because they are Jews living in Israel.

There was a second secret sauce to Golda\u2019s success: \xa0American Jews in 1948 knew that\xa0if Jews were to make good on their promise of Never Again, we would have to create, sustain,\xa0and defend the State of Israel. Europe was a killing field for Jews.

Part of the infinite tragedy of the Simchat Torah massacre was that\xa0Israel also became a\xa0killing field for Jews; and that peaceful Kibbutzim and villages were soaked through with Jewish blood.\xa0 The Kishinev pogrom came to Israel.\xa0 It was not supposed to be that way.

Hatred of the Jewish people continues in these shores.\xa0 Elias and Lorena are in New York, with Mikey at Columbia for a freshmen parents\u2019 weekend.\xa0 But in our Talmud conversation yesterday, Elias shared that on Thursday night Mikey called him and Lorena and was very rattled.\xa0 New York, and Columbia, have a significant Jewish population. You would think in the week that Hamas had committed these atrocities, Columbia would be a safe space where Jewish students could protest.\xa0 Two hundred Jewish students showed up.\xa0 But there was a counter protest of 700 Palestinian students and sympathizers.\xa0 Campus police were so concerned about the safety of Jewish students at Columbia that they were whisked away to the Kraft Hillel Building, where the 200 students could continue their protest, in private, behind locked doors.

What?

How could it be?

How could it be that 700 people at Columbia University, or the Harvard students that signed that odious statement,\xa0would walk with Hamas?\xa0

The American Jews to whom Golda spoke knew what we now must also know: that evil is real, hatred is real, and if never again was to be real, it would take a partnership between Israeli Jews and American Jews.\xa0 Israeli Jews, then and now, are on the front lines.\xa0 What do we do to help?

Which leads to the third ingredient of Golda\u2019s secret sauce: we are not helpless and we are not hopeless.\xa0 We have agency and we have power.\xa0 That\u2019s what those American Jews on January 21, 1948 understood when Golda raised 50 million dollars. David Ben Gurion, Israel\u2019s first Prime Minister, called Golda Meir the \u201cJewish woman who got the money which made the state possible.\u201d

Golda\u2019s generation in America\xa0helped create\xa0the state.\xa0 Our generation in America now can\xa0help sustain\xa0the state.\xa0