In this interview, I’m introducing you to Major Benni Gur a resident of the Gush Etzion community of Alon Shvut since 1986. He’s had a long and varied career in building up Israel both at home there and abroad. Son of a Holocaust survivor, Benni fought and was injured in the Yom Kippur War. He holds the rank of major in the IDF. Parenthetically, he has sons and a grandson serving in elite units in Gaza and Lebanon. He understands the high human cost of war, having lost five members of his high school yeshiva and 13 members of the Kerem B’Yavneh yeshiva during the Yom Kippur War.
His professional life has included being a shaliach for the Jewish Agency in the US. A vice-president for the Jerusalem College of Technology, CEO of the Friends of Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, a lecturer in the School of Social Work for the Hebrew University, and since 1996, the CEO of Mesimot, which offers guidance and training to managers of non-profit organizations in Israel and the Diaspora.
Of late, Benni’s focus has been on bridging perhaps the greatest social divide in Israel today – the gap between secular and religious Jews. Let’s talk about it.
Motti – Benni, it’s a pleasure to know you. You are clearly an “Ohev Yisrael”, a lover of Israel, both the land and the people. What’s the mood today?
Benni – Of course, we are pleased in a bittersweet sort of way for the release of the hostages. As always the price is a high one and the risks are equally so. But unlike our cousins who love death by their own declaration, we love life.
But I’ll jump to the bottom line. Oct. 7th was the greatest social shock we’ve experienced since the founding of the state. Questions abound – how it happened? What it means? Who are we on the other side of it? The old conception that this couldn’t happen today was pulverized. I believe any thinking and feeling Israeli suffers from some form, mild or intense, of PTSD over the shift of a paradigm in conventional thinking.
Motti – How do you compare Oct. 6th with Oct. 8th?
Benni – Great question. Oct 6th we were shattering each other into opposing factions. The court reform issue was the best-known divisive issue. But not the only one. Oct. 8th we were collectively shattered into bewilderment. Oct. 7th was a cruel instrument to force a new level of galvanization between these disparate factions. From my historical and sociological perspective, new opportunities have arisen for a bitter people to become a better people. In the work of a new project I’ve aligned with, I’m seeing not-to-be-believed breakthroughs in understanding, commonality, acceptance, and unity.
Motti – I presume this isn’t randomly happening. What’s the mechanism for this?
Benni – About eleven years ago, two Jerusalemites – Dr. Moshe Kaplan MD and his co-founder Rabbi Mordechai, one a physician, the other a physicist of sorts – launched a movement called “Be A Mensch” (beamensch.com). The aim was to enlist some high-profile influencers, through visual and print media, to inspire Jews to embrace the most basic notion of relating to one another in a menschlich manner. It worked. The high-profile phase was short. But the longer work of Be A Mensch continued. The founders realized that the secular-religious divide was metastasizing; they had to move quickly with a basic cure into some key sectors of Israeli life in a recovery effort.
Motti – What were or are those sectors?
Benni – For time’s sake, I’ll combine them, though they didn’t happen simultaneously. Mensch first got involved with HaTzofim, the Israeli scouting organization, which produces many of Israel’s future leaders. What does get involved look like? For the Scouts, it was and is weekly dialog encounters with religious Jews over the course of a year. The result has been a melting of misconceptions about “the other” as both sides realized how much they have in common.
This template of dialog that leads to mutuality, without any agenda to turn the one into the other, has been magical. And we’ve successfully applied this now in secular high schools where we have access – invited access – to 500,000 students. The students and teachers want to meet religious Jews! Imagine that!
We’ve also been given access to engage in dialog within branches of the IDF, including a significant cadre of fighter pilots who, by their own admission, see national unity among Israeli Jews as a top priority. We’ve been invited to host deep and meaningful conversations with some of the titans of Israel’s high-tech industry. They called us!
And more recently, we’re running for-credit courses in the Hebrew University and Reichman University where secular students meet with highly trained members of our Mensch team to explore difficult questions. I have to tell you that the bond between these conversationalists transcends any mere academic exchange. They become friends for life. They come for Shabbat. They attend simchas. And often, they deepen their own commitment to Jewish living and learning. None of this is by any coercion. They are led by their own compelling self-interest.
Motti – So you wouldn’t call Be A Mensch a Kiruv organization?
Benni – It depends what you mean by that. Our primary goal is respect, friendship, and unity between secular and religious persons. We are not out to “change people”. It’s that sincere agenda that allows us to be the welcome counterparty to the larger secular Israeli society which may be threatened by conventional kiruv organizations. We have been granted access to places others cannot enter. We have validated what solid research has shown, that the greatest predictive factor in a non-observant person becoming observant is the positive influence of a long-term relationship with an observant friend.
Also, the world has shifted. We have shifted. The people we meet with don’t care how much we know about Judaism. They want to know how much we care about Jews – them in particular. If we can discover how we are connected to day in caring, we can rediscover the historical and spiritual connections we share from the past. We see that real relationships one-on-one over time accomplish far more than any rapid-fire seminar could do.
Motti – That sounds labor intensive.
Benni – It is. And it’s costly. But let me summarize. We have a large team of sophisticated observant young men and women who are proficient in the worldview, mindset, language, and values of their secular counterparts. They are highly trained by seasoned leaders. Not just anyone can do this. That’s why before Oct. 7, they could go to a demonstration and neutralize the opposition by quickly finding common points of concern. And a bowl of cholent often helped, also!
Beyond the impressive team we’ve garnered, we have an approach that we refer to as “the disruptive business model” that allows us to be accepted as the counterparty in the dialogs we host or are invited to join. This model works. It could work in the Diaspora, but our focus is on damage control on the post-Oct 7th social front lines in Israel.
So the three-fold combination of our access, our proficient team, and our dynamic model of engagement is what has propelled Be A Mensch to the forefront of lasting social change within the spheres of influence we have today. We believe we are getting some “help from Above”, if you will, to keep going despite the many challenges involved in doing this. But I’ll leave you with this thought. Imagine the impact if we can influence 500,000 high school students, or dozens of pilots, or several scores of business leaders, or a few hundred university students to simply “be a mensch”. Imagine the organic unity that can flourish from that. And I have news for you – you can imagine it, but we are seeing it daily now. We have access to these sectors now. And the demand for expansion is significant. That’s what keeps me going and why we cannot stop. Disunity will kill us. Real unity will revive us. But it has to happen face-to-face, hand-in-hand, eye to eye, heart to heart.
Motti – Thank you, Benni, for these hope-inducing insights. Much success to you and to Be A Mensch.
Benni – And to you and your readers. Todah Rabbah.
