Years ago, at a conference on combating antisemitism, the discussion turned to how best to train the police officers assigned to guard Jewish institutions. When my turn came, I offered something less ambitious: make sure they have coffee, a sandwich, and a smile.
The room laughed. I was not joking.
Shammai taught that one should receive every person with a pleasant face (bsever panim yafot, Avot 1:15). He was not describing manners. He understood that the way we meet another human being decides what becomes possible between us.
My own thinking was shaped by the experience of the Jewish community in Turkey. In November 2003, terrorists bombed two of Istanbul’s synagogues, Neve Shalom in Galata and Beth Israel in Şişli.
Among the dead were members of our community gathered for Shabbat prayers and people who happened to be passing, including Yoel Kohen Ulcer, and also Turkish police officers and guards, men who had spent their shifts standing outside Jewish houses of worship, protecting a community that was not their own. I have never forgotten them.
It changed how I think about Jewish security. Not whether we need it, because we do, but what it asks of others. The guard outside our synagogue is not an abstraction. He stands on Yüksek Kaldırım, the steep lane that climbs from the Golden Horn toward the Galata Tower, close enough to hear the call to prayer from the Bereketzade Mosque just above him.
That mosque was founded by a guard of its own. Bereketzade Hacı Ali Efendi, who built it, was a watchman of the Galata Tower under Mehmed the Conqueror, and a muezzin who called the prayer himself.
Our guard stands in the cold, gives up holidays with his family, and carries a responsibility he never chose. When tragedy comes, men like him are often the first line of defense and the first to fall.
The Mishna teaches that the human being was created alone so that no one could say “my lineage is greater than yours,” and to teach that whoever saves a single life is regarded as having saved an entire world (Sanhedrin 4:5).
The guard at the door is one such world. We owe him more than a security plan. We owe him gratitude, and we owe our neighbors honesty about what our safety costs them: closed streets, lost parking, barriers where there were none.
The lesson the Lubavitcher Rebbe teaches us
As Jews mark the yahrzeit of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, I keep returning to a lesson that has guided my work in Turkey and across the Muslim world. The Rebbe taught that darkness is not defeated by being fought but by the addition of light. Evil must be confronted, and communities must be defended. But a purely defensive answer is not an answer. It must also build, teach, and repair.
I thought about this recently when I met Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun at the State Department, on the sidelines of the Living Legacy Conference held in the Rebbe’s honor. Rabbi Kaploun serves as Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism. One might expect such a conversation to stay with threats, incidents, and statistics. Those things matter. Those conversations are important. Yet I left thinking about something else.
As we left the State Department, I noticed Rabbi Kaploun greeting each of the security personnel we passed. It was a small gesture, easy to overlook. Yet it reflected a deeper truth: before we can build trust, teach, persuade, or disagree, we must first acknowledge the person standing before us.
Perhaps that is why I found myself thinking about the guard outside the synagogue.
Much of our security is carried by people who are not Jewish, and much of our future depends on people who do not yet know us. Since October 7, many Jewish organizations have stepped back from governments and institutions they judged hostile or unfair. I understand the impulse. I am not persuaded that it can last.
We are all here to stay. The question is not whether we will go on living beside people who disagree with us. We will. The question is what those relationships will look like when the present crisis passes, and whether disagreement will take place between people who know each other or strangers who fear each other.
Becoming more present
Hillel warned us not to separate ourselves from the community (Avot 2:5), and he held up Aaron as the example to follow, one who loved peace and pursued it, who loved people and drew them closer to one another (Avot 1:12).
Engagement that reaches only the already friendly is not engagement. The harder and more necessary work is the kind with the students, journalists, clergy, and officials whose view of us is sharp or simply mistaken.
Recently I welcomed more than 120 theology students from the Faculty of Theology of the Istanbul Marmara University to the Ashkenazi Synagogue on Yüksek Kaldırım. They arrived with questions – some curious, some built on assumptions they had never tested against a living Jew. We listened, we answered, and we explained.
Not all of them left agreeing with us, which was never the point. The point was that none of them would leave thinking of Jews as an idea rather than as people they had met.
The Talmud says of Rabban Yohanan Ben-Zakai that no one ever greeted him first, not even a stranger in the marketplace [Berakhot 17a]. Long before anyone convened a conference on antisemitism, he grasped something plain. Relationships begin with the willingness to be the one who says hello.
Jewish history gives little reason to believe that withdrawal works. The answer to antisemitism cannot be the slow disappearance of Jewish life from public view. The Rebbe taught the reverse. Confronted with darkness, a Jew does not shrink; instead, he becomes more present.
The guards at our synagogues are not standing watch over an empty building. The students who visit do not come to meet an abstraction. Our neighbors cannot befriend people who have chosen to vanish. Strong laws and serious security are necessary, yet they are not enough. The most durable response to antisemitism is the confident and visible presence of Jewish life, lived in full view of the people around us.
Before we teach the guard at our door about Judaism, we might begin by learning his name. That will not end antisemitism, but it is where the healing starts.
The writer is the Ashkenazi rabbi of Turkey and chairman of the Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States.