HOW GOOD OUR TENTS, IN UNITY

On Monday morning, a gunman opened fire on a busy street in Côte-des-Neiges, the heart of Jewish Montreal. When it was over, three people were dead: the shooter, a young police officer, and a 68-year-old Jew named Michel Mizrahi.

It matters to say what this was and what it wasn't. As far as anyone can tell, Mizrahi was not killed for being a Jew. The gunman — a 25-year-old who had driven in from across the country — appears to have been firing at an office building across the street; the manifesto he left behind raged at police, at women, at the modern world, at everyone. Montreal's own Jewish leaders asked the community not to call this antisemitism, and they were right to ask. Some reports suggest Mizrahi may even have been struck by stray fire in the chaos. We may never know exactly how he fell.

What we do know is who he was. Michel Mizrahi was born in Lebanon, lived in Israel, and spent more than thirty years in Montreal. He was a fixture at the local Chabad center. He leaves a son and two daughters in Israel, where he is now being brought for burial. And the sentence the people who knew him keep repeating is this: "He loved to celebrate together with everyone. Always smiling, always a kind word. He loved his family, loved Israel, and loved being a Jew."

He fell a few feet from Constable Mohamed Benredouane, a 34-year-old Muslim officer who had grown up on that very street and ran toward the gunfire to protect it — the first Montreal policeman killed in the line of duty in twenty-four years. A Jew and a Muslim, neighbors, gone on the same pavement in the same senseless minute.

A Man Whose Whole Signature Was Togetherness

I keep coming back to that line about Mizrahi. He loved to celebrate together with everyone. Whatever else this terrible week was, it took from the world a Jew whose entire signature was togetherness.

And it happened in a week when, back home, the picture was the opposite.

In Israel this same week, tens of thousands of Jews shut down highways — Jew blocking the road against Jew — over the question of who must serve in the army and who may stay in the beis midrash. I am not going to tell you who is right about the draft; people far wiser and far more pained than I am are tearing themselves apart over it. But I will say one thing. When the picture we broadcast to the world is Jews at war with one another, we have given away something no enemy could ever take from us by force.

The Torah of Exactly These Weeks

Two weeks ago we read Korach — the man who launched a fight he was certain was for the sake of Heaven, and the ground itself split open and swallowed it whole. The Torah doesn't draw disunity as a weakness. It draws it as a crack in the earth.

This Shabbos we read Chukas, and in it Aharon dies. Aharon — whom the Mishnah remembers forever as oheiv shalom v'rodef shalom, the one who loved peace and chased after it. He did not sit as a judge ruling who was right. When two Jews were fighting, he went to each one privately and said: the other one is aching to make up with you. He kept it up until they fell into each other's arms. When Aharon died, the Torah says the entire house of Israel wept — every man and every woman — because the man who held them together was gone.

And in the very same reading, in Balak, a king hires the prophet Bilaam to curse the Jewish people. Bilaam climbs the mountain, looks down at the camp, opens his mouth to curse — and what comes out is "Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov," how good are your tents, O Yaakov. Our Sages explain what he actually saw: the tents were arranged so that no doorway faced another, so that no one could see into his neighbor's home. He saw a people who guarded each other's dignity. And he could not find the crack to curse them. A unified Israel is, quite literally, uncursable. The only way in is the gap we tear open ourselves.

Ninety-Nine Years Ago, This Same Weekend

And this is no small thing: this Shabbos and Sunday are Yud-Beis and Yud-Gimmel Tammuz — ninety-nine years since the Frierdiker Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, walked out of a Soviet prison.

How did that release happen? Not by one man's merit alone. Jews of every kind — chassidim and their opponents, the deeply religious and the barely affiliated, from Riga to Washington — moved together to free him. And once he was out, he wrote a letter that has been quoted ever since: it was not I alone whom God redeemed on Yud-Beis Tammuz, but everyone who cherishes Torah, everyone who keeps a single mitzvah, and everyone who simply bears the name Yisrael. A personal redemption that he insisted was a national one. Achdus walked him out of that cell.

Why This Is Urgent, and Not Only Sad

Here is why this feels urgent now, and not merely heartbreaking. Anyone watching the world can feel that we are in the final stretch of a very long sorting — a birur. Good and evil have rarely been so naked, so willing to announce themselves out loud. A man writes a hundred-page manifesto and drives across a country to kill. Nations sign deals and break them in the same breath. The masks are simply off.

When the birur is this far along, the last work left is not to defeat the evil "out there" — it is busy exposing itself without our help. The last work is us. The one thing still in our hands is whether we close the gap between one Jew and another. That gap is the crack Bilaam hunts for in every generation. It is the earth-split of Korach. And it is the single weapon our enemies cannot manufacture, because only we can hand it to them.

We cannot give Michel Mizrahi back to his children. But we can do the very thing he was known for. We can be, to one another, what Aharon was. We can arrange our tents so that no one peers into his neighbor's doorway with contempt. We can make the picture the world sees of the Jewish people the one Bilaam saw against his will.

Ninety-nine years ago, Jews who agreed on almost nothing agreed on one thing, and a Rebbe walked free. The arithmetic hasn't changed. The final redemption is not waiting on our enemies to lose. It is waiting on us to look at the Jew across the road — across the argument — and run toward him the way Aharon did. The way a 68-year-old man in Montreal did his whole life.

Mah tovu. How good it could be.

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Sources: Côte-des-Neiges shooting, 22 June 2026 (Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, JNS), including the Jewish community's caution against assuming antisemitism and the errant-fire reports · the friend's description of Michel Mizrahi (Chabad MADA / Times of Israel) · Haredi anti-draft highway protests, 24 June 2026 (Times of Israel) · Pirkei Avos 1:12 and Avos d'Rabbi Nathan (Aharon, oheiv shalom v'rodef shalom) · Bamidbar 20:29 (all Israel wept) · Bamidbar 16 (Korach) · Bamidbar 24:5 with Bava Basra 60a and Rashi (Mah tovu; tents not facing one another) · Yud-Beis Tammuz 5687/1927 and the Frierdiker Rebbe's liberation letter.