We Are a Nation of Life, and So We Lift Our Heads

Waiting for the elevator at Bloomingdale’s, I was noticed by a stranger who saw my Star of David, my “Bring Them Home” necklace, and a yellow ribbon pin.

“Shabbat Shalom,” he said with a smile. I smiled back, grateful for that unspoken Jewish connection.

When the elevator arrived, he asked loudly, “Are you Israeli?” As others entered, I replied, “No, but I am Jewish.” Suddenly, he pressed his fingers to his lips — “shhh” — a gesture familiar to me as a Soviet Jew. Moments earlier, he’d wished me “Happy Shabbos” when we were alone. But now, surrounded by strangers, fear took over him.

I left shaken — not by an immediate threat of antisemitism, but by his quiet warning, as if to protect us both.

Judaism — with its single G-d — altered how future generations would view morality and codify it into law. The Ten Commandments outline foundational principles, but the tensions lie between the lines. Jewish wisdom reconciles contradictions with questions. Strangers to our faith may feel uncomfortable with that. Jews, given the blueprint of values, had to learn how to become a nation by making mistakes.

The Torah has shaped us into a nation of contradictions — yet also guided by reason. Six million Jews perished in the Holocaust, and today, the global Jewish population remains just 0.2% of the world’s total. We have fought for survival, yet never sought converts. Jewish tradition makes conversion difficult. As Rabbi Tzvi Freeman explains, Judaism is a covenant, not merely a religion: belonging is not defined by belief alone.

But why are non-practicing Jews still considered Jewish, while committed non-Jews must convert? The answer lies in the fact that Jews were bonded first by covenant, not religion. This covenant was not solely between the nation and their G-d; it was an intra-communal bond.

At Sinai, they accepted the laws directly from Him. From that moment onward, they could choose to carry the Torah’s voice through history — or not — but what became irreversible was the creation of a nation bound by shared values. Whether they upheld the commandments or not, their primary common denominator remained the values inscribed in those laws.

The acceptance of the Ten Commandments forever bound every Jewish individual to one another and to G-d, thereby creating the Jews — a nation whose Judaism resided in the fabric of its community, not solely in its religion. Rabbi Freeman captures this perfectly: “In religion, you belong because you believe. In Judaism, you believe because you belong.”

We are who we are, whether religious or not. Our very essence belongs to the Jewish nation because we are bound by that ancient covenant.

Yet one cannot simply decide to become Jewish by learning religious laws and traditions. Herein lies the difficulty of conversion: to become one with the Jewish nation, one must become a ger — “a stranger who comes to sojourn among us.”

The word Hebrews means “on the other side” or “an outsider.” Perhaps the fate of always being the “other” was predetermined by this very word. For centuries, we built worlds within worlds: ghettos, shtetls, synagogues. We lived beside, but never fully part of, the gentile world.

The paradoxes within Jewish faith have never ceased to unsettle me. Shouldn’t religion bring peace? Not Judaism — because it is not solely a religion but a self-identity. Our Jewish “I” exists outside conventional religion.

We revere numbers in math and in trade, yet the Torah frowns upon counting people. Though it acknowledges counting for specific purposes — a minyan, mitzvot, or a census — the Torah teaches that we are never reducible to mere numbers, as the Nazis believed when they tattooed digits onto our flesh, stripping Jews of their humanity and individuality. Thus, it commands: Nasso Es Rosh — “Lift the Head.”

This is Jewish self-identity: unapologetic, unerasable. We declare our identity by lifting our heads. Our Jewishness is the source of our pride because within it, we find life. And so, we have never been — and never will be — victims.

Growing up in the Soviet Union, surrounded by its cynical antisemitism — which worked tirelessly to suppress the minds and erase the identities of so many Soviet Jews — I never imagined that one day in America, I would encounter mainstream antisemitism, or that it would be facilitated by members of my own Jewish community, whose Jewishness and Zionism have been hijacked by various progressive ideologies that frame Western Jews — and Israeli Jews in particular — as white colonial oppressors.

Yet antisemites must know this: we are here to stay. Antisemitism lingers like a virus, but it is no longer a death sentence, thanks to those who say: “NO MORE!”

Today, as Israel fights an existential battle, as its most ethical army in history removes — with surgical precision — some of the world’s greatest evils one by one, and as the Jewish nation defends not only every Jew in the Diaspora, but also every person who yearns for a free society, every Jew must lift his or her head and reaffirm their Jewishness through that sacred covenant forged millennia ago in a scorching desert, on the journey to the Promised Land.

Anya Gillinson was born in Moscow, Russia, into the family of a renowned physician and a concert pianist. When she was thirteen years old, her father was killed during a botched robbery on his first and last visit to New York. Two years after his death, Anya moved to New York with her mother and younger sister and went on to graduate from high school, college, and eventually law school. She considers it a privilege to practice law and to be able to be useful to people, but literature has always been her true calling. In 2015, she published a volume of poetry in Russian, Suppress in Me the Strive To Love. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

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