The DC rally was one of two prongs— spiritual and activist— of the communal response
Hamas’s murderous rampage on October 7 created an indelible link between Simchas Torah and Jewish martyrdom; it also unleashed a wave of Torah and tefillah across the American Orthodox world. Yeshivos returned to zeman early, batei medrash resounded with the sounds of Tehillim, a widely observed fast day was held, and hundreds of initiatives bloomed as part of the spiritual fightback that is the core of the Jewish armory.
As anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment spreads widely across a long-benevolent country in the shadow of the Gaza war, last Tuesday saw American Jews of many stripes utilize another tool, that of political shtadlanus with a massive gathering of Israel supporters at the National Mall for the “March for Israel” rally. At the event’s peak, the National Mall was a sea of blue-and-white. The unprecedented turnout harked back decades to the peak of the Soviet Jewry struggle, and was notable for the diversity of the participants, which brought together a rare spectrum of American Jews and non-Jews, including feminist and evangelical groups.
One of the rally’s organizers, Rav Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, highlighted the fact that the DC rally was one of two prongs — spiritual and activist — of the communal response. And while many Orthodox Jews, including numerous “black hatters” and chassidim, made the trip to DC, others preferred to activate spiritual forms of protection by fasting or increasing tefillos and Tehillim.
“While we could not see it with our own eyes,” Rabbi Hauer wrote, “we knew that across our entire community, people were dedicating extra efforts to tefillah, that shuls and schools everywhere were saying extra Tehillim, and that in places like Brooklyn and Lakewood, you would have to search to find a minyan that was not reciting the expanded tefillos of Yom Kippur Katan.
Create a free account to keep reading.
