Dear ORT Friends and Leaders,
Dear ORT Friends and Leaders,
Tomorrow, many of us in the United States will prepare to celebrate Independence Day.
While not everyone reading this email is American, the idea of independence belongs to all humanity. Every nation tells its own story of freedom. Every people knows what it means to long for the ability to shape its own future.
I was speaking recently with a group of educators about the difference between eyesight and insight.
Eyesight allows us to observe the world.
Insight allows us to understand the forces that shape it.
In an ORT STEM classroom, students learn about gravity, atoms, and climate. You can’t (mostly) see these things with the naked eye, but every one of them profoundly influences our lives.
Education teaches us to recognize realities that are invisible but unmistakably real.
In an ORT Jewish studies classroom, students develop that same kind of insight.
We can’t see memory, but it binds generations together.
We can’t see identity, but it shapes our choices.
We can’t see community, but it gives us strength.
Freedom is like that. Political independence may be marked by flags and celebrations, but the deeper foundations of a free society are invisible. They’re built on trust, responsibility, education, moral courage, and the belief that every human being is created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine Image
I remember learning once that that’s why freedom isn’t presented as an end in itself in the Torah. When the Jews leave Egypt, they’re not just liberated from slavery; they’re liberated for responsibility.
In Pirkei Avot we’re told: “There is no one truly free except one who occupies himself with Torah.”
Freedom isn’t merely the absence of chains. It is the presence of purpose. That’s the mission of ORT.
Every day, across the world, we help people discover possibilities they can’t yet see, skills they haven’t yet mastered, careers they haven’t yet imagined, futures they haven’t yet believed were within reach.
Education begins with eyesight.
Transformation begins with insight.
As our friends in the US celebrate Independence Day this weekend, may all of us, wherever we live, continue building societies where freedom is strengthened not only by what is visible, but by the enduring values that cannot be seen.
Shabbat shalom,
Dov
Dov Ben-Shimon
Chief Executive Officer, World ORT