Ve’ahavta was established, in part, because of the belief there was a need for the Jewish community to be less insular.

For many years following the Holocaust, the actions of our people on an international and humanitarian basis were clearly focused inward.

We fought arduously on behalf of Soviet Jews and we “purchased” men, women and children from Romania and Syria.

We worked hard to find peace and better lives for Shoah survivors.

In those days, while we strengthened ourselves by ourselves, places such as Cambodia and Biafra weren’t on our “crisis radar.”

All of this made sense, though. Six million of our people had just been murdered. Accounting firms and medical schools wouldn’t accept us. Community centres banned us. Why would we trust the average non-Jew, and especially nation-state?

Furthermore, Jews were literally being held hostage all over the world awaiting our ransom payments, leaving few resources left over for others.

(The exception to this inward focus could be found in in the State of Israel. In the early 1950s, Golda Meir launched Mashav, which was once the highest financed department in the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Mashav’s mandate was/is to provide crisis relief, and medical and agricultural education and training internationally, particularly in Africa, regardless of a country’s ties with Israel, if any.

Golda was wise. She understood that “friends” could be made on the ground in ways they couldn’t be in the political arena. But it’s important to remember, too, that Golda had a confident new country behind her.)

Despite all of this, however, I never entirely understood our mistrust of the “other’’ – that is until a recent meeting with a native Canadian activist and friend.

While we sat together and sipped coffee, I asked him if his community and mine could partner in a project, something geared to enhancing the lives of native Canadians.

His response was abrupt. Angrily, he stated that the native Canadian projects he oversees are doing fine and don’t need any help from others. He added that he would no longer allow his people to be used by “the white man.”

My friend then told me about family members and friends who were suffering terribly because of the horrendous pain they had experienced in residential schools. They are survivors. We are the white man.

It took me a few days to digest my friend’s words. Initially I was hurt, as we had once worked together and accomplished a lot. I felt saddened knowing that, for him, as a Jew, I was like any other “white man” and thus responsible for much suffering.

But then I got it.

My friend was really telling me that “it’s time for native Canadians to strengthen ourselves from within. Leave us while we do that. Just like you, the Jewish People, took care of your own, so will we.

“Just like you lost trust in the gentile, so have we in the white man.”

I called him one night and told him: “I get it,” and I let him know that he had helped me understand the Jewish People, and that I had been too critical of my own kind.

I told him that my offer to help really stemmed from my own need to do so, and that it was an imposition.

Sometimes it makes sense to be insular. We were, and we should allow others to be as well.