A close friend of mine serves in an elite combat reserve unit. One of the soldiers in his unit is Druze. Several members of their team were killed shortly after the October 7 massacre. Several more were wounded.
When the Druze soldier had recovered, more than a year later, from his own wounds, he convened a seudat hodayah, a thanksgiving meal, and composed the text himself. My friend WhatsApped the invitation to me.
It opened: B’shevach v’hodayah la-Hashem yitbarach (In praise and thanksgiving to God, may He be blessed) and continued in the cadences of a hesder yeshiva graduate, the Hebrew of a religious-Zionist son returning whole from the front. My friend asked him why he had written it in that language. He said he liked it. He said he connected to it.
A Druze reservist, halachically not a Jew by any rabbinic standard, reaching for the highest religious register in modern Hebrew to mark the most consequential moment of his own life. The older sorting categories cannot account for this. He is one of the Reshuffled.
I have been trying to think of a name for this phenomenon for months. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens called them the October 8 Jews: the cohort awakened on the morning after the massacre.
Jewish-American podcaster Dan Senor, in his June essay in Commentary, refused the term, worrying it implied these were not Jews until that morning. He was right to refuse. The alternative he offered, a Jewish “adrenaline” he warned would fade, undersells what is happening here, and so does the awakening frame itself.
The October 7 massacre did not awaken Jews. It moved them. The mistake in the October 8 reading is to imagine traffic flowing in one direction, from disengaged toward engaged, from secular toward religious, and from indifferent toward attached.
That is one lane on a much wider highway. Every other lane is moving too. The deeply religious are loosening. The deeply secular are tightening. The Right is fracturing. The Left is realigning. The Diaspora is showing up. Israelis are turning inward. Some Jews are doing teshuva. Other Jews are doing the opposite of teshuva. Both are Reshuffled.
The deck is the same. October 7 dealt a different hand to every one of us.
I know religious-Zionist women who have started using their phones on Shabbat. They have not stopped being religious. They keep Shabbat in every other respect. The phone sits face down. They glance at it twice an hour.
They do this because their husbands are in Khan Yunis, or their sons are in Lebanon, and they want to know that the men they love are alive. They tell their rabbis what they are doing. The rabbis, mostly, understand. The label says Orthodox. The practice has loosened.
I know members of secular kibbutzim that were attacked on October 7 who began praying when their friends were taken into Gaza. Some of them are still praying. Are they religious? They will tell you no. The label says secular. The practice has tightened.
I know hesder yeshiva graduates with biblical verses tattooed on their forearms. The tattoo is a violation of Halacha. The verse is a declaration of belonging. Both are true at once. The man wearing the verse keeps Shabbat, lays tefillin, learns Daf Yomi, and is a Reshuffled Jew because the act of getting that tattoo could not have happened in his community three years ago.
There are roughly 10 to 13 Knesset seats’ worth of National-Religious voters who can no longer be predicted by the parties built for them, Bar-Ilan University sociologist Asher Cohen said this week on Army Radio. They are right-wingers. Most of them will not vote for the Likud. A smaller faction was considering Naftali Bennett, although Cohen believes most of them will not, ultimately, follow through. They will not vote for the Religious Zionist Party either, because that party did not oppose the haredi exemption from the draft.
This group has the highest rate of combat soldiers and reservists in Israeli society. They have buried their sons. They will vote, in the next election, on the question of who will share the burden, not on the question of which side of the political map they stand on. They have always stood on the same side. They have just stopped letting that side decide for them.
Earlier this year, a taxi driver told me he had been a left-wing voter and a vocal opponent of the judicial reform until October 7. After October 7, after the army’s failures became clear, after he watched what he called “the same people who said the army would protect us” tell him next that the courts would, he became an activist for the reform.
There is a man on the Tel Aviv Left who wants Bennett to be prime minister. The same Bennett who once led the Yesha Council, the political body of the settler movement. The man on the Tel Aviv Left did not change his mind about settlements. He changed his mind about who he could trust to fight a war.
We are all unexpectedly reshuffled
I myself never invested time in the judicial reform debate. I have a more critical perspective on it now than I did. Each of us, I think, is a Reshuffled Jew on something we did not expect to be Reshuffled on.
The data is starting to catch up to the anecdote, but it captures only one lane. Jewish People Policy Institute’s most recent survey found that 31% of Israeli Jews and 38% of those under 25 are praying more since October 7, without changing how they describe their religious identity. The same survey found that one in five secular Jews report a decrease in their belief in God.
Both findings are the Reshuffling. Tzohar performed 747 bar mitzvahs in 2023, 999 in 2024, and was on pace for 1,218 last year, drawn largely from families who do not consider themselves religious. Rabbi David Stav, Tzohar’s chairman, said he was seeing a search for meaning. “People are looking for something meaningful,” he told The Times of Israel. “The connection with God comes through prayers, comes through behaviors, not necessarily through religion in the traditional sense.”
That is the Israeli highway. The Diaspora highway runs alongside it, with traffic in directions of its own. The American Jewish Committee’s 2024 survey found that 57% of American Jews feel more connected to their Jewish identity since October 7. Nineteen percent began wearing visible Jewish symbols.
Dan Loeb, the hedge-fund manager who never had a bar mitzvah, launched the Simchat Torah Challenge, a weekly commitment to read the Torah portion in memory of the murdered. About 15,000 people signed up within months.
A young mother in California named Suzy who had drifted from her synagogue for a decade came back, started lighting Shabbat candles, and discovered her five-year-old had been watching. “I forgot one Shabbat,” she told an interviewer. “She asked, ‘Where’s my prayer?’”
Other American Jews are moving the other way. They are looking, in the words of one I quoted in JTA last year, for a synagogue that embraces non-Zionists. They are leaving political coalitions. They are quitting boards. They are showing up at Chabad Houses and J Street meetings in the same week. The Reshuffling does not have a destination.
The American Jew is becoming more visibly Jewish without becoming more religious. The Israeli Jew is becoming more religious without becoming more visibly Jewish, because in Israel, visibility was never the variable. The two roads run in opposite directions and meet at the same place.
The Reshuffled are not a soft cohort. They are also the British Jew who, two years on, is more attached to Israel, more morally conflicted about Gaza, and less safe in his own city than at any point in his adult life. They are the Israeli reservist who distrusts the government and reports for duty anyway.
The labels did sorting work. In their absence, every Jew is doing more of the work himself.
The institutional question follows. The legacy organizations of Jewish life were built for a population that sorted itself by labels. They are not yet built to receive the religious-Zionist mother whose phone is face down on a Shabbat table, or the hesder yeshiva graduate with a verse on his arm, or the secular kibbutznik who has started praying, or the Tel Aviv leftist who has changed his mind about Bennett but not about settlements, or the Druze reservist composing in yeshiva Hebrew.
One reason Chabad has succeeded with so many of these Jews is almost embarrassingly simple: It does not begin by asking which box they belong in.
These days, I often think of a story I heard early in the war. A non-Jewish Russian atheist in Israel, the father of two soldiers, walked into a jewelry shop the morning his sons were called up. He bought each of them a silver Magen David necklace. He told them it was for protection. He did not pick a label. He did not have to.
The deck had been shuffled around all of us.
