Before I made aliyah to Israel, I spent nearly a decade as a teacher. During my graduate studies in education, one of my professors assigned a book called Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon. The book explored the lives of people whose identities set them apart from their families and communities in significant ways — the apple, as the title suggests, falling far from the tree. After we finished reading, our professor had us walk around the room and respond to quotes printed on large sheets of paper hung around the walls. One of the quotes read something like: in my difference, I found the community I had been searching for all along. A beautiful idea, and a true one. Shared struggle has built some of the most powerful communities in human history. A fellow classmate wrote her reflection beneath the quote: “I wish I had that difference, so I could have a community too.”
I have thought about that comment for years.
She did not want the difference. She wanted the belonging. And she had become so convinced that belonging required some kind of outsider status, some identity that set her apart, that she could not see the communities already waiting for her. Call your mother. Join a house of worship. Talk to your neighbors. Show up somewhere, consistently, and let yourself be known. Community is not a diagnosis. It is a choice. That moment in the classroom comes back to me every time I see social media clips of college students who cannot point to Gaza on a map, wrapping themselves in keffiyehs and marching through campus quads, chanting slogans they could not begin to explain. They are not making a political statement. They are making a desperate one. There are terms for people like this: slacktivists, cause-hoppers. People who have found something that feels like tribe, cause, identity, community. They found it because no one ever gave them a framework sturdy enough to build real belonging on.
The Book of Judges saw this coming three thousand years ago.
This month, Israel365 is going through all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, one book a day, every day in June. Today is Day 7, and together we are studying the Book of Judges. Rabbi Mark Fishman, in his conversation for Bible Month, describes the period of the judges as one of the most turbulent and fascinating in all of Israelite history. After Joshua dies, there is no Moses, no Joshua, no centralized leadership, no single figure to hold the nation together. And what happens? Rabbi Fishman puts it plainly: it is a time characterized by political instability, spiritual confusion, and the absence of centralized leadership.
The book has a recurring refrain, appearing at the beginning and at the end, that functions almost as a diagnosis:
Read that carefully. This is not a description of freedom. It is a description of collapse. When there is no shared moral framework, no covenant that everyone answers to, no standard outside of individual preference, the result is not liberation. It is fragmentation. The tribes stop protecting each other. They start fighting each other. Rabbi Fishman describes it with a vivid analogy: imagine Mexico going to war with Texas, and California shrugging and saying, not my problem. That is the period of the judges. Radical individualism so complete that brothers watch brothers fall without lifting a finger. This is what a society looks like when it loses its moral anchor. And the Book of Judges is not subtle about the cause. The people abandoned the covenant. They intermingled with surrounding nations, absorbed their values, adopted their gods, and slowly lost the ability to recognize what was true, what was right, and who was worth following. They did not become unmoored overnight. They just stopped reading the book.
Which is exactly why biblical literacy is not an academic exercise. It is a survival skill. The person who knows the Book of Judges can look at the world today and name the moment they are living in. They can recognize the cycle: drift from God, spiritual emptiness, desperate grasping for identity and tribe in all the wrong places, oppression, and then, if the people are lucky, a cry for deliverance. Knowing the pattern does not make you cynical. It makes you clear-eyed. And it tells you what to look for next.
What indeed comes next in Judges is extraordinary. God does not abandon His people in their chaos. He sends leaders. And here is what is so startling about those leaders: they are a mess. Rabbi Fishman does not sugarcoat it: “The judges were deeply flawed characters. Yet God uses them in mighty ways to accomplish His will.”
Think about what this means. Up until now, the Bible has given us the forefathers, Moses, Aaron, Joshua. Giants. Men whose relationship with God is painted in sweeping, unmistakable strokes. But the judges? Gideon is hiding in a winepress when God finds him, paralyzed by fear, the last person anyone would pick for the job. Samson is, to put it gently, a cautionary tale about what happens when extraordinary gifting meets unchecked appetite. These are not the leaders anyone would have chosen. And yet God chose them. Rabbi Fishman draws the lesson out with characteristic warmth: “God works through imperfect people. God’s grace can work even through our imperfections to bring about His will.” This is not a permission slip for bad behavior. It is a description of how grace actually operates in a broken world. God does not wait for perfect vessels. He works with what is available, and He works anyway.
But here is the part that gets lost: the people still had to recognize the judges as leaders worth following. That took discernment. That took a framework. The tribes who retained enough of the covenant to cry out to God, to recognize a God-sent leader when one appeared, to gather around something real rather than something that merely felt real — those are the ones who survived the cycle. The ones who had completely lost the thread kept repeating it.
This is the gift that biblical literacy actually gives you. Not just knowledge of ancient stories, but the eyes to find real community, real leadership, real belonging. The kind that does not evaporate when the cause moves on and the crowd disperses. The kind that asks something of you, holds you to accountable to, something, to someone, and is still standing decades later. The kind my classmate was aching for when she picked up that marker and wrote on that paper, her deep longing to be part of something bigger than herself. The kind that has held the Jewish people together for three thousand years, and held the faith of millions who have grafted themselves into that story.
“In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes.” The Book of Judges is not just ancient history. It is a warning, a diagnosis, and if you know how to read it, a way home.
You can watch Rabbi Fishman’s full conversation on the book of Judges, here.
Bible Month is Israel365’s invitation to develop those eyes. Here is how to get started:
First, subscribe to The Israel Bible YouTube channel. Every day this June, a new video drops — Orthodox rabbis and leading Christian voices going through all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible together. Free, all month long.
Next, join us on June 14th for Open the Book: A National Conversation on Biblical Literacy, a free live event bringing Jewish and Christian leaders together around exactly this question: what do we lose when we stop reading this book? Register today.
And if you are ready to go deeper still, explore Bible Plus — hundreds of hours of Torah teaching from Israel-based scholars, this June at the lowest price of the year.
