Why I’m so proud to be Jewish, in good times and bad

It’s not always easy explaining to non-Jews why it’s great being Jewish. After all, we have to deal with industrial-strength guilt, no Christmas, and a ban on lobster thermidor, not to mention two millennia of antisemitism.

But it becomes a lot simpler when you explain we’ve got a community so rich and deep and nourishing that, at its best, it makes you feel like you’re floating in an ocean of chicken soup.

In 2020, when I visited Poland’s Treblinka extermination camp, I was powerfully reminded of that connection between all of us.

I’d gone with my mum to film a documentary about the Holocaust, and we were blessed to be in the company of Leon Ritz, the last living survivor of that place.

Rinder GettyImages-491442232

Rob Rinder (Photo: Getty Images)

I wanted to recite kaddish for my grandfather’s brothers and sisters who’d been murdered there, but, just as I was about to begin, Leon touched my shoulder and said, “When you say kaddish here, you say it for kol Yisroel”, that is, for all Jewish people.

On that day, in that moment, Leon reminded me of something I’d known but had needed that touch to remember: that we Jews sometimes have a greater duty in our remembrance, one that is bigger even than our own families.

That’s not only true in our grief. Though suffering has played a part in forging our particular sense of belonging (especially relevant as we think back to Tisha b’Av last week), it exists alongside a much more joyful understanding: that we must always remember to engage with the living.

It’s a part of our religion, our community, that when we see a problem, the Jewish response is to try to fashion a solution.

Because — and this is key — there’s a consciousness within our history and in the Torah about the buck ending ultimately with us.

Through our painful inheritance, we’ve an incomparable understanding — constructed through centuries of being precarious guests in societies which treated us atrociously — that we need structures to take care of our own, to become a miniature Jewish welfare system.

Judaism, as Rabbi Sacks once wrote, has a preference for society rather than the state because it recognises that “it is what we do for others, not what others or God does for us, that transforms us”.

Our community is key to who we are. I see it constantly, not least because I’m lucky enough to spend time with many wonderful Jewish charities across our country and beyond.

Angela and Robert Rinder on Loose women

Angela and Robert Rinder on Loose Women (Photo: ITV)