The Expanding “Us” - Aliyah Then and Now with Noah Efron3,000 years after Abraham heard the call to go forth (Lech Lecha), the host of the Promised Podcast shares insights from his group aliyah in the 80's and into the present.
 A Personal Lech Lecha
We sat down with Noah Efron to explore the parallels between Abraham’s biblical journey to Canaan and the modern-day aliyah (immigration to Israel) experience. What emerged was a fascinating discussion about identity, community, and the unexpected ways we are influenced and can influence the places we call home. Noah’s story begins as a teenager in Young Judaea—and continues with a garin, a group committed to building a settlement together. This communal frame mirrors the rabbinic note that Abraham and Sarah “made souls” and formed a group in Haran before their journey. Scripture accounts it unto them as if they had made them (Genesis Rabbah 39:14) וּמַעֲלֶה עֲלֵיהֶם הַכָּתוּב כְּאִלּוּ עֲשָׂאוּם Noah shared with us that not only was his future wife part of this twenty-something cohort but that after recording the podcast he would be joining a weekly Zoom call made up of members of his garin group around the world. I was profoundly struck by this, to me, novel social phenomenon. Speaking of how his children manifest this unique group “us” that is Israel he gushes:
As any fan of The Promised Podcast knows, Noah is extremely passionate, idealistic and the consummate optimist. In our conversation regarding his Lech Lecha experience, he is more so! The Power of PerspectiveNoah’s outsider-insider lens lets him savor Israel in ways that can fade for natives:
That sense of wonder extends into his classroom at Bar-Ilan University:
It’s a portrait that challenges clichés about Israeli religious life and highlights the country’s often-overlooked diversity. Learning from the HaredimOne of the most surprising and refreshing parts of Noah’s conversation was his deep respect for Israel’s Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community — a group often portrayed in stark or divisive terms in Israeli public life. While many of his peers are quick to criticize the Haredim for avoiding military service or participation in the workforce, Noah sees something else entirely: a countercultural moral vision that the rest of society could learn from.
For Noah, this isn’t about romanticizing insularity — it’s about recognizing values that resist market logic: study over status, depth over speed, and community over consumption. He connects this appreciation to a broader cultural critique. Israelis, he notes, are famously self-critical — to the point of exhaustion. Every sector caricatures the other:
In that context, Noah’s empathy for the Haredim becomes a kind of model — an invitation to see beauty where others see only dysfunction. Their commitment to learning for its own sake, he suggests, keeps alive an ancient Jewish tension: between survival and sanctity, between being in the world and being for something beyond it. Noah’s view challenges listeners — religious, secular, and everything in between — to resist the easy narrative of judgment and to approach even their ideological opposites with curiosity and respect. A Softening of HeartsOver decades, Noah has witnessed a broad cultural shift, and surprisingly, not in a bad way:
From rapidly improving LGBTQ+ inclusion to growing acceptance among different ethnic and religious communities, Noah offers a refreshing and surprisingly counter-narrative to headlines that only spotlight fracture. From Silence to Shabbat Dinner: Israel’s LGBTQ+ TransformationWhen asked how Israeli society has changed since his arrival in the 1980s, Noah rejects the common narrative of moral or political decline.
Noah’s most vivid example of this quiet revolution is the transformation of LGBTQ+ life in Israel — a change that, for him, symbolizes the softening of the national heart.
That hidden life, he explains, has given way to a very different reality:
For Noah, this shift is not just social — it’s spiritual. It represents a widening circle of empathy, an expansion of what it means to belong. Where there was once secrecy and shame, there is now visibility and welcome. His observation reframes Israel’s moral arc not as decline but as maturation — a slow, uneven, but undeniable broadening of compassion. It’s a story, as Noah might say, of a society learning to see itself through softer eyes. The Expanding “Us”Noah’s optimism looks forward:
Stretching our imagination, he even imagines future debates centering not on divisions but on (wait for it) …. interfaith marriages—a striking contrast to today’s geopolitical tensions. The takeaway: seemingly fixed conflicts can evolve in surprising ways. As if this was not enough, I also was witness to Noah and Adam realizing that they had gone to the same Hebrew Academy of Greater Washington “on 16th Street”! The written word does not do justice to Noah’s passion and uplifting message and I encourage you to click above on the YouTube link or listen on you favorite podcast platform. What We Can Learn from Noah’s JourneyBesides wanting to join a garin and make aliyah, here are some more general take-aways.
Rabbi Adam framed it with Abraham’s self-description, “ger v’toshav”—resident alien. That dual identity can bridge divides and generate fresh insights. Sefaria source sheet: https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/684491 Transcript: Geoffrey Stern: Picture standing on the edge of an unfamiliar land. No map, no guide, no guarantees. Only a voice, mysterious, persistent, that says, go forth. As he crosses the border, he looks around. He doesn’t see paradise. He sees people sweating, planting, weeding, working the soil, cultivating the land. And something clicks. Abraham doesn’t choose the land of Canaan because it’s empty or easy. He chooses it because it’s alive, because this is a place where something is happening, something that resonated with Abraham to the depths of his soul. Three thousand years later, other men and women make the same journey, not on Camelback, but on commercial airlines. They, too, are answering a call, not divine, but deeply personal. They land not in mythic Canaan, but in modern Israel. And like Abraham and Sarah, they find a country bustling, complicated, and endlessly in motion. A land and a people that deeply resonate. And yes, did I say complicated? This week on Madlik Disruptive Torah, we sit down with Noah Efron from the Promised Podcast. A progressive American who in the early 80s made Aliyah at the age of 24 with his future wife. He is the founding chair of the Interdisciplinary Program on Science Technology at Bar Ilan University. He raised a family, entered local politics, and hosts the Promised Podcast. We’ll explore what it means to go forth in our generation. Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern. And at Madlik, we light a spark, shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform, and now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. This week we read Parashat Lech Lecha. We use the narrative of Abraham’s aliyah to Canaan as an opportunity to talk with Noah Efron, a friend and a progressive American who made aliyah to share his story and insights. Welcome, Noah. It’s great to see you. Noah Efron: I am so delighted to see you and to be here. Love this podcast. Geoffrey Stern: Thank you so much. And I love the Promised Podcast, and I will say it again later, but if you haven’t listened to it, you should listen to it. It’s amazing. But am I right? I mean, you and your cadre on the Promised Podcast all kind of made aliyah around the same time, you all Anglos. And it really is an insight into what the experiences are of progressive American Jews, passionate as you are and your experience in Israel. And so I think that’s the weight on your shoulders today, Noah, you are representing that aliyah. You know, there’s an amazing thing on YouTube you can find it, of when each aliyah used to have its own name. The first aliyah, the second aliyah, and this has Arik Einstein and what Uri Zohar is in it. And each new aliyah looks back at the new one coming. And of course, they disparage them. Noah Efron: It’s an excellent question. Yeah, what the fifth aliyah was in the 1930s. So I don’t know, the 25th aliyah. Adam Mintz: Well, we have to say 1984 is a long time ago. So you’re definitely part of Israeli culture. Noah Efron: Yes. Geoffrey Stern: Okay, so we always start by looking at a few of the verses and the rabbinic commentaries and using that as a way to segue into the subject matter. So today, as I said, is Parashat Lech Lecha. And God said to Abraham, go from your land, from your birthplace, from your father’s house to the land that I will let you see. And Rashi says, for your own benefit, for your own good. And the way I take that for today’s discussion is that every Lech Lecha is personal at the end of the day, and everybody who makes a migration in general, but certainly coming to Israel, it’s going to be your story, Noah, that we’re going to be discussing, but it is a personal journey that we all take. And he says, and in coming to this land, you will have the privilege of having children. And it is known for giving you teva haba olam, your nature, your character in the world. And my guess is that your aliyah to Israel was without children. You started a family in Israel, and then I’m sure you were who you are today when you came. But certainly, the experience has had an effect on who you are. And the last thing that I’ll say before we get into the first question is I said before that you must have come in the 73rd aliyah. But the point is you came as a group. I think that not every, I mean, different aliyot have their different characteristics. And what it does say about Rashi. Noah Efron: Says. Geoffrey Stern: And he says that Abraham and Sarai made souls in that they had made in Haran. And I take that to mean they came in a group, they were passionate, they somehow discovered themselves, made their own background. So with your permission, Noah, I’d like you to use this as a segue to really describe your story, whether it’s Young Judea, to give our listeners a sense, if you could, of your aliyah. Noah Efron: Well, thank you for that beautiful introduction. And it’s so resonant in so many ways. What you said about children, for instance, in the end, one of the reasons why I know I’m in the place where I want to be, where I feel like I’m meant to be, is because of how beautifully my children have grown up. And I think it was Aristotle who said that you cannot tell whether a man is happy until you see how his children turned out. He wrote this in the Nicomachean Ethics, and I understand that as well. I feel that way as well. And my children have turned out beautifully, and that’s how I know that I’m happy. Noah Efron: I’d also add that another thing that’s resonant is that the commandment is to, as you said, among other things, to leave the house of your father, to leave the house of your parents. And that is a very, very big part of my aliyah as well. And something that changes over time, continues to change to this day as I every month make a trip back to the United States to see my parents, who are now in their late 90s, and measure myself as a son and as a human being, in part by the distance between us. So it becomes complicated. But my aliyah story is a very happy aliyah story. Noah Efron: And it starts, like you said, in Young Judea that I joined when, I don’t know, I was 12 years old, a yeshiva bocher who was looking for something beyond just religion, just shul, through which to understand my Judaism and enact my Judaism. And my older and very beloved sister had been involved in Young Judea. And I joined that and found the people who, it turns out, are the people that I spent my life with, that I have spent my entire life with. Noah Efron: Tonight, after we record this podcast, I have a weekly Zoom with friends that I made when I was 12, 13, 14 years old in Young Judea. And one of them was, until recently, a member of the Knesset, Alon Tal. And another, my friend, Bill Slott, was the maskir, the secretary-general of Kibbutz Ketura, and other friends as well. We have, it turns out, we began our lives before we were adults together, talking about what we wanted to do, what we hoped for from our lives, what we hoped for from this place. And we came. Noah Efron: I came with what’s called a gareen, which is a group of people committed to building a settlement together. And from Young Judea, right after college, my wife was one of them and other close friends from the movement, and we went to Kibbutz Ketura. I was 21 and my wife was 20. And when we first arrived and went into the army together, and have since we’ve moved around the country and at different points in time, moved around the world. But we have spent a life together in this remarkable place, seeing it change around us and being part of that change, which is one of the miraculous and extraordinary things about Israel. Noah Efron: How given it is to being influenced by people who decide to join their life with this place. You do that and then suddenly you have a voice, and suddenly you can make things be this way rather than that way. And you can create, as my friends and I did, your own Jewish community. It can be egalitarian. It can not have a rabbi if you don’t want. And you can build a new school, as we were involved with. Noah Efron: And you can, as I am now, you know, get elected to city government and be in charge in Tel Aviv of environmental policy and animal rights policy and pluralism policy. You can do those things. I don’t know exactly what it is about this place that makes it so amenable, that makes my friend Alon Tal somehow find his way to the Knesset because he wanted to. But it’s a feature of this place. Noah Efron: And I’m going on at great length. I just would add. Would go back to what I said about my children. There is something for someone who grew up like me, like I said, a yeshiva bachur, but very much an American football fan and a baseball fan, very much an English speaker. There’s something about seeing your children toddle around speaking their first words in Hebrew and seeing them grow up. Noah Efron: And the world of associations of theirs is a world of Hebrew association that pricks your heart. That’s so beautiful. And also seeing them grow up very different than any American kid grows up. Seeing them grow up, not exactly knowing where they end and the people around them begin, being much more porous. I remember, you know, from when the kids were in second, third, fourth grade, you’d walk into a room with a bunch of kids and they’re all over each other on the sofa, and they’re completely involved in each other’s lives. Noah Efron: And there’s no such thing as a paper that you write in school that’s your paper. It’s always done in a group. And this idea that it’s us, not me, that you see in your children in the most pedestrian ways, you see their concern for the people around them. They’re feeling that who they are is a function of who they are with. It’s really astonishingly beautiful and moving for someone like me. Geoffrey Stern: Amazing. I’m going to jump in for a second. I must say, I did mention you recently. My grandchildren go to Camp Ramah, and my oldest grandson, Adam, is 16, and he decided to go to Young Judea for the first month of the summer. And I said to his parents, do you know what Young Judea is now? I don’t know if it still has the power, but I said, you know, you better be prepared. I think my friend Noah joined Young Judea and moved to Israel. I didn’t grow up with any of that. Rabbi, were there groups around you that you had the opportunity of kind of joining? For some reason, I just wasn’t. Wasn’t in part of that. Noah Efron: Yeah. Adam Mintz: I mean, my world was a little different. I grew up in Washington, D.C. The Zionist world that I was part of was a B’nei Akiva world, B’nei Akiva and Camp Moshava. And it’s interesting that many of the people who I grew up with also moved to Israel. You know, I don’t know, Noah, you know, you have a direct line from Young Judea at 12 years old. What city were you from? Noah Efron: I’m from the Washington area as well. From Maryland, outside of Washington. And I. Adam Mintz: Did you go to Jewish Day school? You went to Hebrew Academy? Noah Efron: No, Silver Spring. Adam Mintz: And that’s amazing, Geoffrey, because I went to the Hebrew. Noah Efron: I went to the Hebrew Academy and. Adam Mintz: On 16th Street. It sure was. I’m a little older than you are. Noah Efron: But we have a WhatsApp group of my class at the Hebrew Academy, and half of us are here in Israel, in fact. Adam Mintz: Yes. So do we. And half of my class is in Israel, too. That’s fantastic. Geoffrey Stern: So I just really want to jump in and say this concept of being this group. I didn’t even realize when I asked the question how powerful it is. But I really do think it’s amazing. It comes almost out of that Rashi where they came as a group and you’ve stuck together. I think that one of the other questions that I have is, and maybe I’ll just give you my personal experience, if I used to walk into a Masorti synagogue in Israel and I heard English, I would walk out because if Masorati Judaism or Liberal Judaism is gonna have a chance in Israel, it needs to be organic in Hebrew. And then I caught myself and I said, you wouldn’t do the same thing if you walked into a Moroccan synagogue or you walked into Azerbaijan synagogue. And so what I’d like to do now is talk about the impact of American Jews like you on the Greater Israel. You know, we talk about Mizrahim, we talk about this. And certainly there’s a whole bunch of, I think maybe Anglo Americans in Yehuda and Shomron, and they have their voice. What is the voice of your cadre? Because you are, I’m not misidentifying you as a progressive American, but also a very traditional Jew. And I think the cadre of people that I hear on the Promised podcast is a strong group. And when I go to your Chavura in Tel Aviv, is your voice being heard along with the other symphony of other voices in other Aliyot in Israel? Noah Efron: It’s funny that you mentioned this. I spent last night in a long Zoom meeting planning an academic conference about the 120-year relationship between American Jews and Jews in the Yishuv and how deeply interpenetrated the histories are from the very, very beginning. So I think that American Jews have had an enormous influence here and have an enormous influence. And I used to get skittish too about hearing English in the streets and think, oh, we ought to be real Israelis. Noah Efron: And then I had the same experience that you just described of realizing, no, what we are is an Eidah. We are an ethnic group in Israel of English-speaking former Americans and Brits and Australians. In fact, in Tel Aviv today, one of every 40 people who live in this city is a native English speaker from one of those three countries between the ages of 20 and 30. Which is to say we’re a big, big, big group. And there are, like all ethnic groups, we have tended to concentrate in certain areas, so go to any university, and you know, it’s full of us. Noah Efron: But also environmentalism in Israel, and I’m an environmentalist, and that’s my political identity as well. I ran with a Green Party for city council. Environmentalism was something that was more or less brought to Israel by Americans. Also human rights NGOs. In fact, all NGOs are things that our ethnic group brought to the country in the ways that other ethnic groups brought the things that they brought. Noah Efron: And I think that there’s an enormous amount to be proud of once you get over the feeling that somehow it’s not legitimate to not speak Hebrew without an accent. Of course, once you make that psychological change yourself and you realize that it’s fine for you to have an accent, you can give a speech at the city council with an accent, and everyone will listen to you. Noah Efron: Once you realize that that’s fine, you start to notice that a lot of other people around you have accents, too. They have Russian accents, and they have Ethiopian accents, and they have Moroccan accents and all sorts of things. And that’s fantastic. So I was just reading about the kibbutzim up north in the Galil in the 1950s, like Kibbutz Hasololim and Kibbutz Sassa. There are five or six kibbutzim that were predominantly American back then. I was reading newspaper articles about the softball league that was so popular in the 1950s in Israel. The American Marines, when they’d come to Haifa, would come and play against the Noah Efron: teams of American pioneers living on kibbutzim up north. It made me feel proud. Geoffrey Stern: Talk to me a little bit about the fact that you are a traditional Jew. You teach at Bar Ilan University. But of course, what you teach is, as far as I know, the philosophy of science. And you’re in the, what’s it called? Noah Efron: The interdisciplinary studies, where they. Geoffrey Stern: Interdisciplinary studies. But you do walk a line sometimes. On the Promised Podcast, I think in a recent episode, one of your peers said, stop with the rosy-eyed look already. I mean, sometimes when maybe the Haredim are disparaged, you seem to have a sweet spot where, yes, you understand issues like the draft and things like that, but there is a sweet spot in you for maybe the institution of the past. Maybe you just seem very middle of the road. Sometimes in the conversations, you seem to have that kind of role. Is that unique? Is that something that you own? Talk to us about that for a little bit. Maybe talk about teaching at Bar Ilan. Noah Efron: It’s funny, I don’t particularly consider myself middle of the road, though I know exactly what you mean. My grandparents, my father’s parents, when I was just a tiny kid, moved to Bnei Brak, and I grew up visiting them. Then, when I was in the army, I stayed with them when I had time off from the army in Bnei Brak and really fell in love with ultra-Orthodox society. Noah Efron: I have a different view than many people about the ultra-Orthodox in particular. To me, they seem as though they offer an alternative way to understand a great many things that would be helpful for all of us to understand. For instance, the idea that study is more valuable than making money is something that it’s true a nation could not survive if everyone decided that they were going to abandon work and study Torah or study poetry or study physics all day. I understand that. But there is something beautiful about this ideal that I think is astonishing and a great resource for all the rest of us. Noah Efron: The reason why it’s unusual is one of the infuriating and yet still beautiful and sweeping characteristics of Israel is that we are, as a society, evisceratingly critical of everything. This is not unique to Israel. This is a Jewish characteristic as well, of everything. You know the old joke about the woman Noah Efron: whose boy is swept out to sea, and she raises her hands up to heaven and says, God, God, please give me back my boy. I’ll never complain about anything again. Then a wave comes and deposits the boy right in front of her, completely dry. And she looks up and says, he has a hat. This is what this country is like, where we complain about everything. It has all sorts of implications, including implications that for Noah Efron: our international position are quite disastrous, where we are always broadcasting our flaws or each other’s flaws to everyone, all the time in the most immoderate ways. It’s a cultural matter that the ultra-Orthodox leftists are portrayed by us, to us, as malingerers, and leftists are portrayed by us, to us, as people Noah Efron: who are unpatriotic, and right-wing people are presented by us, to us, as messianists who have no concern over the feasibility of what they are insisting that all the rest of us do. They’re dragging us to our doom all the time. All of our descriptions of ourselves to ourselves, and hence to the rest of the world, are so evisceratingly critical. There’s something wonderful about that. There’s something bracing, there’s something Noah Efron: exciting, there’s something I think morally useful about always criticizing everything. But I think that it allows some of us to forget how astonishingly successful this country is. The project of this country is. It’s partly because I came from far away, because mine is a story of Lech Lecha that I Noah Efron: do not fully ever manage to forget. That is one of the great gifts of being an ole, of having a Lech Lecha story, of being an immigrant, is that you are never capable of fully forgetting how astonishing the place where you find yourself is, how surprising it is, how beautiful the beautiful things are, how profound the profound things are because you never fully get used Noah Efron: to them. Hebrew is. I don’t have the best Hebrew, and so reading poetry for me is work, and for other people, it’s natural. But I don’t know if it’s possible for anyone to love Hebrew more than I love Hebrew. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to scan the street, you know, the street I live on, Ben Yehuda, and I live on Nordau, the corner of Ben Yehuda in Tel Aviv, to scan the coffee shops. Noah Efron: I don’t think it’s possible anyone looks at the coffee shops and thinks more than I do, my God, what a beautiful people. I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that the comedy here is more surprising or funnier. That is because I come from there, and I came here, and always I am seeing things as I think I feel like quite an insider. I’m also seeing things through the eyes of someone who came from Noah Efron: somewhere else. You asked about Bar Ilan. I’ll say Bar Ilan is the Orthodox, the religious university in Israel, and it is an astonishing meeting place of ultra-Orthodox Jews and modern Orthodox Jews and completely secular Jews and Palestinians and Muslims and Christians and, you know, lesbians and just everyone that Noah Efron: you can imagine. The day-to-day life of trying to learn something about the world, about how cells work, about what the meaning of the Talmud is, or about how we ought to live our lives, or why society is the way that society is. In a group of people that looks like so many different people at once, but have this common purpose, is this astonishing gift. I get to bike over to Bar Ilan every week and meet this remarkably heterogeneous colloquy of people asking questions together, each of them bringing their own Lech Lecha stories to this endeavor. Noah Efron: You end up hearing some pretty astonishing things from these brilliant students and from my colleagues as well. Geoffrey Stern: I think you’re really emphasizing the Lech Lecha part in terms of you. I’d like to think Adam and I, when we look at the texts that we look at, we discover something new. The last thing you can do is generalize. The last thing that you can do is talk about what Rabbinic Judaism stands for when it’s so multifaceted. You do the same thing, whether it’s at Bar Ilan or at a café. It’s just a multiplicity. The fact that you came to it from outside, you have a special lens and I think that’s amazing. Every week I find some texts that kind of surprise me. This week, I want to share with you a beautiful text from the B’reishit Rabba. It says that Abraham was told to go and to go to a land that God will show him. It doesn’t say Canaan. So Rabbi Levi said when Abraham was traveling through Aram Naharaim and Aram Nahor, he saw them eating, drinking, and reveling. He said, “Would that my portion not be in this land.” When he reached the promontory of Tyre, he saw them, the Canaanites, engaged in weeding at the time of weeding, hoeing at the time of hoeing. They were hardworking people not given to merrymaking. He would that my portion be in this land. So first of all, it seems to be amazing that in the eyes of this rabbinic piece, the Palestinians, the Canaanites, the people that were in this land were actually inspirational, were talked about in flattering terms on the one hand, and the other part is the industry of the land. The startup nationness of this land is recognized in this Midrash. So much in here. But let’s talk for a second in the closing minutes that we have about what your perceptions are when you came here and now through the years, and especially through these last two years of this being able to look at this land that I’m sure when you came, you had certain perceptions of how it could be a shared society, and certain perceptions of how we can resolve some of the big issues. Has that changed in the last two years? Has it changed since you’ve come here asking you to say this? Of course, Al regel echad (on one foot). Noah Efron: I don’t know if it’s changed in these wretched last two years. I guess what I have gotten from these last two years is a fuller sense of just how vexed, how difficult the challenge is, how much pain there is for so many people, and now more than there was two years ago. Even though what happened over the last two years is a product of the pain that came before. So I’m left with a greater sense of the gravity of the situation. But I think that what hasn’t changed is my confidence that, in the fullness of time, whether it’s in my children’s lifetime and not my lifetime or just later in my lifetime, I think that we will reach a resolution. And I don’t claim to know much about the souls of Palestinian friends of Palestinians, though I’m very eager and always probing my Palestinian friends to try to understand more. But what I have seen in my lifetime in Israel has been a single overarching narrative now that I see from the heights of my advanced age, and what it is, is that since I have come to Israel, I have seen the hearts of Israelis grow softer and gentler and more open continually. I know that this conflicts with a lot of people who tell themselves the story of Israel as a story of decline, of how at the beginning there were socialists, it was this progressive place, and then, since then, it’s become more right-wing and more exclusive and more racist and less open-minded and less open to the world and less modern and less progressive. But what I have seen over the course of my lifetime is exactly the opposite. I have seen, I came to a country where, for instance, if you were gay, then you had no place to be public at all. I live near Independence Park here in Tel Aviv, and that was the place that was known for being the park where gay men could meet each other and surreptitiously have sex under trees in the park because there was no place to gather. I have seen the story of LGBTQ rights, or the position or the culture of these people. The acceptance of these people in Israel is a very, very dramatic story of having gone from being utterly unutterable, utterly unable to say that you exist, to one where people are just warmly accepted at Shabbat dinner by their Orthodox parents with their husbands if they’re men or with their wives if they’re women. So we’ve all seen that change. That’s really simple. But what it is like to be Russian here, what it is like to be Ethiopian here, frankly, what it is like to be a Palestinian, Israeli also, in every way, there is so much more acceptance. The academic year started yesterday, and 30% of the new students in the medical schools are Palestinian Israelis. It’s an astonishing thing that would have been unthinkable. When I came to the country, it was illegal to speak to a Palestinian who was not a citizen of Israel. And now just the degree to which people accept one another, people value one another. If it’s Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, if it’s Ethiopians, if it’s Russians, if it’s just everyone, it has changed so dramatically. And it’s hard for me to believe. You know, Israelis are geniuses at embracing us. We’re geniuses at us. We saw that on October 8, how the entire country rose as if at once, everyone seeking ways to help everyone else. We’re geniuses at us. And what I have seen in my lifetime, the story of my life, is seeing the us in this country grow and grow and grow. When I came here, it was, you know, kibbutznikim. It was Ashkenazi, kibbutznikim. And I’ve seen it grow to include Sfaradim and include immigrants of different sorts and include Christians and include Muslims who are citizens of the country, at the very least. And I do not see any reason to expect that that expanding notion of us has reached its limit. So I envision, I think, that the next generation, the problem that they’re gonna be talking about on their podcast 35 years from now is gonna be the problem of assimilation. I’m worried that my Muslim child is gonna marry a Jew. I’m worried that my Jewish child is gonna marry a Christian. That’s gonna be the problem that they’re talking about on podcasts because I think that we will by then have managed to find a way to create a bigger us, like in Bereshit Rabbah, like you were talking about, to appreciate the people who are working hard and to understand that we all have a portion in this land. Adam Mintz: I’ll just say, first of all, thank you so much. And your perspective, I think Geoffrey will agree, your perspective here and on your podcast is, you know, so refreshing and so broad and so, you know, so optimistic. And I’m sure that’s true in Israel, but we know when we listen here in the United States from far away, it’s something that, you know, gives us an optimism that we don’t always hear. And I just want to, you know, just maybe we can close with a verse that we both learned in the Hebrew Academy on 16th Street many years ago, and that is that Abraham says at the beginning of Chayei Sarah, he defines himself as being a ger v’toshav. Means that I’m both a citizen, but I’m also, you know, I’m also someone from a distance. And, you know, you’re describing yourself as being someone from a distance, but someone who’s very much part of society. But what we just heard from you in the last few minutes is that the society is a society of ger v’toshav, of people who are there, but people who at one time didn’t quite fit in, and now they fit in exactly. And you’re talking about a situation where it’s going to be mixed up. And that’s what you said in the podcast. They’ll be talking about assimilation. We won’t know who the ger is and who the toshav is. And we’re going to, we’re not going to know exactly how they merged the two of us. So Abraham was really prophetic when he described not only himself but the Jewish personality as being that of a ger v’toshav. Noah Efron: That is beautiful. I’m gesticulating wildly for those who are just listening saying yes, yes, yes, that is a wonderful description and exactly what I believe and thank you for that. Geoffrey Stern: Okay, I don’t want to jump in on this alumni reunion here, but I do want to thank you both for being on the podcast. This was an exceptional episode. I want to encourage every listener of Madlik to listen to the Promised Podcast. You get this refreshing, uplifting voice every week, and you get a front seat at the 73rd Aliyah. I’m going to call you to the land of Israel by coming patriots from America. So Shabbat Shalom, thanks for joining us, Noah.
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Wednesday, 29 October 2025
The Expanding “Us” - Aliyah Then and Now with Noah Efron
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