10 Million Jews Are About To Spiritually Die - Do You Care?

[music] >> Have we gotten to a point in our history that assimilation is so rampant that it doesn't even bother us anymore? Have we gotten to a point where our Jewish communities are so robust and secure and sheltered and insulated that the 10 million Jews outside its walls are completely [music] irrelevant to us? Does it bother you right now that there are millions and millions of [music] Jewish children who have never heard of Avraham Avinu? Does it bother you that there are millions and millions of Jewish girls who have never seen a Shabbos candle? Does it bother you at all that there are millions of Jews who have [music] not had a bris milah? Does that bother you at all? You live in Brooklyn. Depending on the estimates, there are somewhere between 200,000 and 350,000 unaffiliated Jews walking around Brooklyn. 300,000 Jews. Does that bother you? Not let me go sit shiva. Not let me go cry. Does it even bother you? You go to Los Angeles, there's possibly 400,000 Jews disconnected from Torah there. Does that bother you? There are 200,000 Jews unaffiliated in Chicago. Does that bother you? There are over 100,000 unaffiliated Jews in the greater Toronto area. Does that bother you? There are over 150,000 unaffiliated Jews in London. Does that bother you? All over the world, whether you go to Miami or Dallas or Atlanta or Berlin or Moscow or Melbourne or Vancouver, there are millions of Jews who don't know what a lulav is. They never heard of fillin. They have absolutely no idea what Mishnayos are, what Gemara is. They have no idea the light that they are carrying inside of them. Does that bother you? There are currently two tragedies happening to the Jewish people right now. One tragedy is that millions of Jews are growing up completely detached from Torah Judaism. The second tragedy is that most of us don't care. And maybe somebody will say, "Okay, [clears throat] what do you want from me? Why should I waste emotional energy on a problem I can't solve?" But maybe that's exactly the point. Maybe the reason it's a problem we can't solve is because too few people are willing to donate emotional space to caring for it in the first place. You can't solve a problem no one cares about. The first step is to care because caring creates movements. [music] Caring creates organizations. Caring creates invitations. Caring creates action. And by the way, who exactly told you there's nothing you can do? Why can't you learn with one Jew, one Thursday night, one Shabbos meal, one Sukkah, one coffee, one conversation? Why not? If your response is, "I just don't have time in my schedule," then maybe it's time to loosen up your schedule because if your schedule has room for everything else in your life but no room to save a Jewish soul from spiritual suffocation, then something is very wrong with your schedule. Nobody's asking you to move to Omaha, become a full-time kiruv rabbi tomorrow morning. But to learn on the phone with for with one Jew for one hour, one invitation, that we can't do? Just say it out loud. The reason there is no room in your schedule is because you don't care enough about it. But that's a problem. Sometimes the difference between a Jewish soul disappearing forever and a Jewish soul coming home [music] is one person who cared [clears throat] enough to make space in their schedule. All over the Torah and Chazal, we find the same idea repeated over and over again. One of the greatest litmus tests of how much a person loves Hashem is how much he loves Hashem's children. You can't claim to love a father while feeling completely indifferent to his kids. A Jew who really loves Hashem cannot comfortably watch millions of Hashem's children drift through life completely disconnected [music] from their inheritance and feel nothing. That's not a haveas Hashem. That is religious self-absorption. Real Yiddishkeit was never just about perfecting your own dalet amos while ignoring the rest of all of klal Yisrael. Real Judaism feels pain when another Jew is spiritually starving. We are not a nation of spectators. [music] We are a nation of doers. We are Hashem's soldiers. We are a nation that crossed oceans for Torah. We are a nation that walked through blizzards for Torah. We are a nation that cried rivers of tears for Torah. We're a nation that gave up comfort and wealth and sleep and safety and life itself for Torah. We are the people who carried Gemaras across continents, the people who whispered Shema in bunkers, the people who rebuilt yeshivas on the ashes of Europe, the people who refused to let Torah die no matter how many times history tried to bury it. And now? Now? Now millions of Jews are going to disappear quietly into spiritual darkness while we sit comfortably on our couches convincing ourselves that somebody else will handle it. There's no crusader stopping us. There's no Cossacks chasing us. There's no government banning Torah. The door is wide open. We have a chance to care. The question is, will we? Or will we be deaf to the shrieks and the screams coming from heaven, from the grandparents of unaffiliated Jews looking down at their uncircumcised grandkids and crying for them? Jews who were beaten for Torah, burnt for Torah, exiled for Torah. They were murdered for their Torah. And now they stand at the edge of shamayim with a megaphone CRYING OUT TO ANYONE WHO'LL LISTEN, "PLEASE, SOMEBODY SAVE MY GRANDCHILD. PLEASE, SOMEBODY LEARN WITH MY GRANDSON. PLEASE, SOMEONE TELL MY GRANDDAUGHTER WHO SHE IS. PLEASE, MY GRANDCHILD IS 77. HE HAS NO BRIS MILAH. PLEASE, MY GRANDDAUGHTER IS 84. She never kept Shabbos. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING, PLEASE. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING. SO, when you look out at our generation drowning in assimilation, don't begin by asking yourself, "Can I save them all?" You can't. That was never the question. The real question is far simpler, far more uncomfortable, and far more important. The question is, does it even bother you? >> [music]