For almost three years now, hundreds of Israelis have been murdered and thousands seriously injured. Buses, stores, restaurants and hotels are under constant attack. How can people carry on like this with their daily lives?

The goal of our enemies is to cripple Israel's will through fear and suffering. With the paralysis that follows each attack, how much more can we bear?

Let's think back; we've been here before. Our ancestors have faced major threats, yet they survived, and we are their descendants.

Our ancestors saw the events in their time as a challenge to overcome, and considered their spiritual response equally important to political, military or media strategies against their oppressors. They believed that radical personal and communal change helped bring G-d's help.

It is painfully obvious that this conflict is not only about specific territories. It is about Jews. Polls report that 70% of Israelis and 80% of Palestinians view this as a battle over Israel's existence.

The Jewish response to "Death to the Jews!" has always been to "Live as Jews!" If evil targets us because we envision a world built on different values, then our answer must be to live even more passionately by those values.

Anti-Semitism today has donned the cloak of anti-Zionism, and its attack on Israel's existence should prompt us to do some serious personal and national soul-searching.

In 1948, the world looked on as we emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust and returned to Zion. What would they create? Many saw Israel as a safe haven from anti-Semitism. But Israel was meant to be something much more than an escape hatch. It was meant to be the springboard from which we would develop and carry forth our destiny.

Facing repeated attacks, Israel's citizens spent most of their waking hours worrying about survival. When there was time to come up for air, they had to build the country from ground up: roads, schools, infrastructure, and institutions. Who had time to think about a higher national purpose?

Back then, it was enough to know that Israel would be a place of refuge for Jews around the world if another holocaust threatened. Who could imagine that the threat of destruction would actually come from within Israel's own borders?

Elie Wiesel compares contemporary Jewry to a messenger who was hit on the head and knocked out. When he woke up, he couldn't remember the message, who had sent him, to whom he had been sent, or the very fact of his being a messenger.

Have we lost sight of our destiny? Judaism is much more than just a national identity. It is to be a Light unto the nations, to repair the world and be a source of blessing to humanity, through Jews living out their tradition in their ancestral land.

How can a tiny Jewish nation be a catalyst for world repair? Christian scholar and historian Paul Johnson wrote in his bestselling History of the Jews:

"One way of summing up 4,000 years of Jewish history is to ask ourselves, what would have happened to the human race if Abraham had not been a man of great sagacity; or if he had stayed in Ur and kept his higher notions to himself, and no Jewish people had come into being. Certainly a world without Jews would have been a radically different place.

All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the ideas of equality before the law, divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience, and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience, and so of social responsibility; of peace as an ideal, and love as the foundation of justice."

We always had faith and hope in the future. We looked forward to Redemption. We stayed focused on our purpose even when we were exiled from one country to another, suffering cruelty even as we taught the world about a loving G-d. We strove to bring good to the world, thereby being targeted by the greatest evils.

The Middle East situation calls out to each and every Jew. Whether in Israel or in the Diaspora, whether Jewishly knowledgeable or ignorant, religious or not, it is a wake up call to reaffirm our Jewish identity and mission. Just as our enemies do not differentiate between Jews, we too must not make any exceptions. It's time to wake up! We're all in this together.