A bush is burning in the desert. No one knows how long it has been burning, or how long it will continue to burn. No one knows who lit it on fire, or why.
Tending his flock, a shepherd approaches nervously. Years earlier, he had lived in a palace, surrounded by privilege most people could scarcely imagine. Now, his life could hardly be more different. He is out in the wilderness, far from everything he once knew.
Perhaps experience has taught him the wisdom of keeping his head down and staying out of other people’s business. Having fled his country after killing a slave master he’d come across beating his charge, he already knows what can happen when you make someone else’s problem your own. He has a family now, responsibilities of his own, a quiet life that asks far less of him than the one he left behind.
But the burning bush catches his eye. Something about it does not make sense. It burns, yet somehow it is not consumed. Bushes are not supposed to keep burning. For a split second—maybe without even meaning to—he turns toward it.
He could keep walking. He could register the oddity of a bush burning without being consumed and simply return to the flock. Instead, he moves closer.
In a few moments, he will utter a single word that will change his life forever:
Hineni.
Here I am.
*
When we first invited contributors to reflect on their own Hineni moments—those moments when something happening in the world becomes a personal summons, when the distance between a problem and our personal responsibility to solve it collapses and “someone should do something about this” becomes “I guess that someone is going to be me”—we thought we knew what the outcome would look like. We had invited a remarkable group of people of different ages, religions, cultures, and nationalities to tell us about the moment they felt called to act. Some had spent decades advocating, organizing, creating, teaching, or speaking publicly. Others had found themselves thrust into those roles just recently. Some were responding to horrors they had experienced themselves. Others stepped forward in reaction to events taking place across the ocean. What united them was not who they were, but the fact that, when the call came, they chose to answer.
Our goal was simple. We wanted to amplify the voices of people who had stood up in the face of darkness and, each in their own way, brought some light into the world. We wanted to bring their stories together, honor what they had done, and show the extraordinary things ordinary people can do when they decide to make a problem their responsibility.
But as the essays came in, we began to notice something we had not anticipated. Stories that appeared radically different on the surface echoed one another. A childhood memory in Israel spoke to a corporate meeting in London. An Egyptian activist inspired by an American comic book seemed to be describing the same psychological journey as an Israeli artist, an American professor, a Mexican activist, and a Christian family in Britain. Though they had all responded to different calls and had done so in different ways, the paths that led them to act began to look strikingly similar.
We had thought we were assembling an anthology of Hineni moments. What emerged, however, was something much more ambitious: a blueprint for how Hineni moments come into being. Once we realized that such moments can happen to anyone, anywhere, we began looking across the stories for the conditions that make them possible. To our delight, we found that these conditions are ones we can all cultivate within ourselves.
Condition 1: Pay attention.
Hineni moments do not begin with a solution. They begin with noticing a problem. Sometimes, paying attention means listening to an inner voice, as Yardenne did when she began to suspect that the vulnerability she had spent much of her life trying to overcome might actually be a source of strength. Other times, that attention comes with a jolt, as when a young Leat Corinne Unger felt an instinctive pull toward service while watching tired Israeli soldiers step off a bus. Still other times, it means noticing an absence that others have overlooked, as when Steven Phillips first noticed that Jews in the workplace were missing from conversations about inclusion.
Some people seem to move through life attuned to every call. Others notice only when something shakes them awake. But whether that recognition is sudden or gradual, what separates those who keep walking from those who stop and take a stand is often not what they see, but whether they choose to look closely. The first step toward saying Hineni is simply refusing to look away.
Condition 2: Know yourself.
Hineni moments do not create us so much as they reveal us. For historian Gil Troy, it was the sudden realization that it was his turn to step off the beaten path after years of studying the moments when pivotal figures did the same. For writer and editor Elissa Wald, it was hindsight that showed her how the stories of her childhood caretaker, a survivor of Auschwitz, had prepared her for work she could not yet imagine. Yet whether the recognition comes in real time or only years later, what ultimately separates those who answer the call from those who do not is often not what they discover about the world, but what they discover about themselves.
Hineni moments reveal what we truly value when values become costly, whose suffering we allow to interrupt our lives, how broadly we draw the circle of people we consider “us,” and what gifts, convictions, and reserves of courage have been quietly lying in wait inside of us. Sometimes, answering the call transforms us. Just as often, it reveals who we were all along.
Condition 3: Don’t wait until you feel ready.
There is no such thing as a Hineni personality—no particular combination of courage, confidence, charisma, conviction, or experience that predisposes a person to answer the call. Debbie Lechtman disliked the attention her work attracted and went out of her way to remain anonymous, yet eventually found herself speaking publicly on social media to hundreds of thousands of people. Adina Chelminsky intentionally tattooed the word Hineni on her wrist just days after the October 7 massacre as a reminder to never stop wrestling with fear, doubt, and uncertainty. Shabbos Kestenbaum arrived at Harvard Divinity School only to find himself confronting institutions vastly more powerful than he was.
Their personalities, proclivities, and politics could hardly be more different. Yet together, they reject the comforting myth that the people who stand up are simply born braver and more competent than everyone else. Hineni is not a personality trait. It is a decision. We do not answer the call because we have become that person. We become that person because we answered the call. If we wait until we feel like the kind of person who says Hineni, we may wait forever.
Condition 4: Use what you have.
Hineni moments do not demand that we acquire extraordinary abilities. They simply ask us to use the skills we already possess. When a frightened friend told Eitan Chitayat that she had learned to hide her Jewishness in Paris, he did what great storytellers do: he wrote. When Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid watched helplessly from New York as hostages were brutally dragged into Gaza, they reached for the language they knew best: they made art. When Cochav Elkayam-Levy saw the world denying, dismissing, and distorting evidence of Hamas’s use of sexual violence, she drew on her experience as a legal scholar, feminist, and human-rights advocate to correct the historical record.
None of them waited to acquire new talents. None of them stopped to wonder whether they had what it takes. They simply answered the call with what they already knew how to do. Each responded differently because each had something different to offer. The question, then, is not whether we have enough. It is whether we are willing to begin with what we already have.
The first step toward saying Hineni is simply refusing to look away.
Condition 5: Stand with others, + let them stand with you.
Hineni is spoken in the singular, but it is rarely lived that way. Almost none of the stories in this issue is truly about one person acting alone. Andrew Pessin was close to giving up when a petition supporting him drew more than ten thousand signatures from around the world, reminding him that he was not alone and restoring his determination to keep speaking up. Rosa’s urge to support the families of hostages strengthened her own voice, enabling her to advocate for herself and other survivors of sexual assault. Ramon Maislen moved from private anger into civic action and discovered what becomes possible when neighbors organize together.
Though their stories are very different, they all remind us that we create our communities even as our communities create us. When one person speaks, others realize they are not alone. And when one person acts, action become easier for others to imagine. No one says Hineni alone for very long.
Condition 6: Look beyond yourself, and beyond your own.
Hineni is a Hebrew word rooted in Jewish scripture, but the human capacity it names is neither bounded by Judaism nor limited to those who practice it. Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian Muslim activist who risked everything to make sure her humanist principles were applied universally, began her journey with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Daphne and Andrew Kirk—devout Christian mother and son who have turned service into a way of life—built their own ethic of Hineni around repeatedly saying “yes” to people in need, regardless of where those people lived or what they believed. Vanessa Hidary, a Jewish spoken-word artist, drew on her family history as a Mizrahi Jew and a moral worldview shaped by struggles for racial justice, women’s rights, and diversity to speak up for her own community when Jews became the targets.
Though their journeys began in very different places, their stories remind us that we do not have to share someone’s faith, nationality, race, gender, politics, or history for their suffering to make a claim upon us. Our principles are tested not when we apply them to people like us, but when we extend them to those we have been taught to see as the “other.” Hinenibegins the moment someone else’s call becomes our own.
Condition 7: Keep answering.
The Hineni mindset does not end when the moment itself passes. Often, the response outlives the emergency and becomes a calling. Though Sarri Singer had only intended to hold a press conference the morning after surviving a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem, her advocacy and support for victims of terrorism around the world became a lifelong endeavor. Trauma psychologist Miri Bar-Halpern had posted her phone number online in the wake of the October 7 Massacre as a way of fending off her own helplessness, but that single act evolved first into a network and then into teaching, research, testimony, and advocacy. Shai’s instinctive choice to speak out about support for terrorism on college campuses has grown into an extensive project of research, education, and public speaking.
Hineni moments do not merely change what we do. They change who we become. The first time we answer the call, we are responding to the moment. The second, third, and fourth time, we act as people shaped by that first decision. Eventually, for many people, answering the call becomes a calling.
By the time we finished reading these essays, the question that had launched this project had changed. We had invited people who inspire us to share what made them stand up, speak out, and answer the call. But as we read their stories, we found ourselves asking something different altogether: How can we help more people say Hineni?
There is no shortage of burning bushes in our world. Some blaze for all to see. Others smolder quietly, just off the beaten path. The question is not whether these fires exist—they do, and the heat is rising. The question is whether we will notice them, turn toward them, and make them our concern.
You may never hear a voice call your name from the flames. But that does not mean you have not been called. Don’t wait for someone else to tell you that you are needed. Pay attention to the raging fire, then look within. Can you feel the moral urgency? What is it asking of you? What are you prepared to do about it?
The essays that follow began as answers. Our hope is that, together, they will also become a call. Will you answer it? Will you say Hineni?
