In a world of globalized alienation, secular and religious Israelis alike remain proudly connected to their story as a people, through rituals as old as the Passover Seder and as new as the letters soldiers write before they go into battle
The numbers are in: Israel is a happy place. Despite constantly facing vicious enemies and enduring a year and a half of sustained fighting and funerals, Israel ranks in the top 10 countries with the highest levels of happiness, according to the newly released 2025 World Happiness Report. At No. 8, Israel contrasts sharply with other war-torn countries that are quite reasonably miserable: Ukraine sits at 111, and Lebanon, which opened a second front against Israel in October 2023, is third from the bottom, at 145. Even advanced Western nations such as Great Britain and the United States, in 23rd and 24th place, respectively, have a glee gap with Israel. How come?
An illuminating if perhaps counterintuitive datapoint is that, since Oct. 7, 2023, Israelis have rushed ahead with making babies. Baby booms often occur postwar, not in the middle of one. But Israelis have continued to affirm life even while mourning more than 1,700 dead. At almost three babies per woman, Israel already has the leading birth rate among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—a forum of 37 democracies with market-based economies—and in the final months of 2024, it witnessed an estimated 10 percent increase in births.
Another remarkable statistic explains Israeli optimism. On April 12, 96 percent of Israeli Jews will participate in the oldest ongoing ritual in the Western world: the Passover Seder, celebrating the exodus from Egypt three millennia ago. Few democracies, if any, match these participation rates. While 88 percent of Americans enjoy turkey on Thanksgiving, the ritual surrounding that meal is less elaborate and usually much shorter. Seders are often hours long, ritualized re-creations of the flight from Egypt, a reflection of how Jews live inside their history—and with their history. Prayers, songs, food, and other rituals invite Jews to see themselves as having been personally redeemed.
Most optimists are mission-driven. Feeling a sense of belonging, they progress confidently toward worthy goals. And as the best-selling British historian Paul Johnson, who wrote histories of the Jews, Christianity, and the American people, observed, “No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny.” Despite searing political divisions, Israelis remain united culturally. Cherishing family, community, country, and history shapes their faith in the future.
In democracies, meanwhile, happiness tends to evoke notions of peace, serenity, and the search for one’s personal bliss. Rather than singing their national anthem proudly, aspiring Western universalists dream of the paradise of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” where there is no heaven, no hell, and no countries. We have “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” Everybody is just “livin’ for today … aha aaa.”
Alas, living in the moment often strips those moments of meaning. Fewer people choose to become parents in this happy, peppy, borderless, self-indulgent utopia. The American birth rate in 2023 was the lowest in 40 years at 1.7 births per woman. The average birth rate of OECD countries has plummeted to 1.5 since 1960, when a more traditional, religious, and patriotic West had a birth rate of 3.3. Today’s runners-up to Israel’s birthrate of 2.9 in the OECD are Mexico and France, at 1.8. Although ultra-Orthodox and Arab women boost Israel’s rate, secular Jewish women average a chart-topping two children per woman.
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