Few voices have carried the weight of this moment like Rabbi Doron Perez. The President of the World Zionist Organization and Chair of World Mizrachi, Rav Perez is also the father of Captain Daniel Perez הי״ד, who fell defending Israel on October 7th and whose body was held in Gaza for 163 days before being brought home for burial.

In this episode of Defining Moments, Rabbi Perez sits down with Rabbi David Fine for a conversation that begins, as it should, with Daniel. Who he was, what shaped him, and what the rest of us can learn from the way he lived and the choice he made on his final morning. From there, Rav Perez opens up about what it means to hold pain and privilege, חדווה and חרדה, in the same heart at the same time. Not as a contradiction to be resolved, but as the truest description of Jewish life in this hour. We also turn to the hard questions about Klal Yisrael, the Israel-Diaspora relationship, and the unity we have to fight for even when we disagree.

A conversation about one son, one people, and one heart big enough for both joy and grief.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Rabbi Larry Rothwach is one of the most respected pulpit rabbis in America. He’s been the rabbi of Congregation Beth Aaron in Teaneck for over twenty-two years. During that time, he watched twenty percent of his community make aliyah. They’d call him from Israel and tell him the same thing: we love it here, but we miss having a shul that’s really a community, a rabbi who knows our names, a kehilla that’s there for us in moments of joy and crisis. Now he’s making aliyah himself to build exactly that - a new community called Meromei Shemesh in Ramat Beit Shemesh. He’s also the Director of Professional Rabbinics at RIETS, which means he’s been training the next generation of American rabbis in pastoral care and community leadership - work that overlaps deeply with what we do at Barkai for Israeli rabbis. Today we talk about what American communities have that Israeli ones often lack, whether that model can actually take root in Israeli soil, and what it means to start over and build something from nothing at a stage in life when most people are slowing down.

הפקה: DABRU

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