That Little Man

Art is a muscle. 

It's easy to say that art comes from God. It certainly feels that way if it's any good. You don't know where it came from. You sometimes read what you wrote ten years ago, and even if the good pieces are objectively... 7 out of 10? Maybe there's an occasional 8 in there if the aims stay modest enough; you're amazed they're as good as they are. They certainly don't feel as though they came out of a nonentity like you. 

You have been staring at the page for more than two months, wondering where the instant connection between brain to finger went after it wrote those two 'wrestling with genocide' posts, two of the best things you ever wrote: two of your extremely rare 8.5's. Most of what you write averages around a 5.8, and you have the extreme bad sense to make it published. Why do you publish it? It's certainly not because anybody reads it--of that there is literally twenty years of no evidence. You do it because it consoles you to know you're sufficiently talented to fart out something that, when kept sloppy and unreflective, is as good with four hours work as the average person can do with forty. 

Writing may be a miracle, but it's also a muscle, and those four hours have always exhausted you. You train that humunculus to run from head to keyboard just like you'd train your arms to lift and legs to run, and just like lifting weights, you don't lift a novel all at once. You start by lifting sentences, just the burdensome work of making sentences, one after the other, weighing the sounds of words against each other until they come together in ways that sound a little bit musical. 

Not that your music is any better than your writing, but writing is less daunting. At least with writing, you know what to do with it: where to deposit it, where to preserve it, how to keep it in a readable, not particularly attractive archive on that off chance that, one day, someone will come upon this trove of gold plated aluminum and extract enough exorbitant dust from it to call this mediocrity a writer. 

You've always chosen to hit that publish button at the first possible opportunity. It's the only way you could force yourself to keep writing. The pressure of a longer writing campaign was always too onerous. There were all those plans for novels, plays, popular histories, translations of parts of the Bible, anything that wouldn't top out around 4,000 words. You stare at the page. You stare at the screen. You stare at youtube, facebook, substack, the blogs, the times, the post, the guardian, drudge, arts and letters daily, and nothing comes. Oh the ideas most definitely come, but every reader who admires a writer knows the ability to endow thoughts with words is more elusive than they should be: it's only writers who sometimes forget it. 

You're not forgetting it right now. You're worried you'll never forget it again. 

How did you ever convince yourself to write all that shit? All those fauxp-eds, all that music writing, all those forays into other cultural and historical subjects that you told yourself you would learn much more methodically, even, god help you, political subjects, what inspired you do it? It wasn't like you got all that many writers. 

No, the point was that you were training. By lifting all that small shit, you told yourself you were getting ready for some larger work that meant more than just a piece of internet outrage of the day ephemera. You resolved writing as an every day practice back in 2011. It's now 2025. Where is the larger work? Literally nothing is stopping you from writing anything that isn't this shit nobody reads except that same homunculus, who apparently doesn't want to write anything more sustaining to the human essence than that equivalent to a tiny piece of bread. 

Maybe there's a separate homunculus in your head. A second one. A Homunculi? A Homuncules? A Homunculwo aching to get out and make his voice heard separate from the voice that has come to be known as Evan Tucker, or AC Charlap: a Buddy Love, a Ziggy Stardust, a Slim Shady, a Tony Clifton. 

How did Evan Tucker will yourself  to say things on the page? By saying things in 2012 that you yourself could never countenance saying in 2025: things you knew were shocking, things you knew would lose you friendships, things you knew would raise your adrenaline and agitate your hippocampus. 

You have lost that ability by 2025. Are you too well-adjusted to say them anymore? Doubtful. Do you believe them anymore? Did you ever?

You go through old posts and an egomaniac burns through the page who chokes your breath away. Did you really believe so many people were so bad at so many things? Well, probably, because why would you feel the need to get pen to paper unless the way things are were so very bad. Sometimes you're so embarrassed by what you wrote that you disappear it into non-publishdom, knowing that no one will miss it because everybody missed it at the time. 

Yeah, it was done in part for effect, but what amazes you is remembering who you were at the time, and knowing that even if it was discharged for effect, effect was maybe 2% of the reason. The rest of the reason is that you really did believe a lot of that. You were a highly ungenerous human being. No doubt you felt the world had been ungenerous to you, and there was a homunculus in you who felt the duty to pay it back. 

Nowadays you feel a little more generous. That was true long before you know who came into the picture, but the death of you-know-who-2 put the changes in you into perspective. Your life is different now, and a different person now puts thoughts to screen. A different person requires a different homunculus, the daemon, whatever you want to call him.

There were times in your life when you were so manic that you honestly believed that God Themself told you what to create. The 'voice' is still there, still shouting to you madly the punishments in store if you do not do according to Their bidding. Is the voice the same as the homunculus? Dear god, I hope not. But somewhere in there, there is still that little man, and he is listening, making a dossier of the world, to be filed in report after report. 

But waiting for this guy to get ready would try to patience of a turtle. 

More Kings

I'm going to No Kings. Of course I am. You don't live through all this without choosing a side, and the idea that I would ever be anywhere in this but with the anti-Trumps is so unthinkable that the very idea makes me wretch. Parts of this side don't thrill me, people who've read a while know what they are, but most people reading this know what needs to be done.

I have very little love for a left that can't be bothered with how they oppress Jews, views traditional Democrats just as oppressors with a human face, and treats every moderating criticism as the equivalent to violenc*. But the difference between them and conservatives is that conservatives have power! They control all three branches of the government even as they represent a clear minority of the population, and the more power they have, the more phantom threats they see while ignoring real threats all the more. Apparently a couple campus radicals are cause for a hundred times the alarm they sound over Russian interference in a Presidential election, or even than they sound about how the Chinese government uses our very technology to spy on us and all levels of our government (assuming they look on Silicon Valley's spying with approval...).

Churchill said 'If Hitler had invaded hell I should find myself making favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.' Well, I'm not thrilled about marching with a left who will no doubt coopt some of these demonstrations for Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, even while we currently live in the best hope for peace since Oslo. One day, traditional liberals like me may have to fight a vastly turbocharged version of the worst among them, but right now, they're our allies, even if I feel like I have to wash my hands in their company.

On the one hand, the silence of the Left over the Gaza peace deal is absolutely deafening. The devil must get his due if he is not to come for us, and the Trump administration did something heroic: they got the hostages home, and 2000 Palestinian prisoners are coming home too. Some of these prisoners are heinous terrorists who will try to kill Jews all over again, some were thrown in jail indiscriminately just for appearing at demonstrations or throwing a rock, and some who were senselessly thrown in jail are now radicalized into potential terrorists.

On the other hand, the idea that this deal will probably work is madness. We're supposed to believe that Hamas will unilaterally agree to leave, but Hamas didn't even wait a day before starting to execute any opposition: some in public. Reuters claims the number is 33, but I'm sure that number will climb precipitously. Meanwhile, Hamas accused Israel of killing another 30 since the treaty. This is peacetime?!

The hostages are home, and it says something that all the living hostages are now men. What happened to the women? I have a bad feeling I need to spell it out, so read the rest of this paragraph at your peril........................................... I think it's pretty clear that any forensic exam would show that sexual violence was done to them. They were killed so they wouldn't talk about it, and Hamas will inevitably claim that the bodies were irrecoverable.

On the other hand, what changed in the last month? Why now?

It wasn't about the Nobel Prize, or it wasn't 'just' about the Nobel Prize. Even an idiot like Trump knows very well that he'd have to maintain the peace as well as stop the war before he would ever be considered, but he could, as always, feed his not getting it as another grievance to his base. No, the reason is still more selfish.

What happened was that Israel bombed Qatar, a country that very shrewdly gifted Trump a giant plane in public and god knows what else in private; and Israel did so without even telling the US that they would. There's no question, Qatar is an Israeli opponent who helps fund everything from Hamas to Yemen's Houthis to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who broadcasts antisemitic propaganda every day on al-Jezeera, but client states don't go behind their protectors' back to bomb an opponent who tries so hard to stay in the Godfather's grace.

Yes, Trump caused peace in the Middle East, at least for a week, but he did it by doing what Biden and Obama never dared: bring Israel to heel. Force Israel to accept peace, pledge that America would never let Israel annex the West Bank. Behold, the most pro-Israel President...

The truth is, by the standards of historic fascism, Trump has still barely scratched the surface. I think everybody's a little nervous about tomorrow, but this is still so far from 20th century fascism. Fascism used to mean the wholesale ban of any political opposition with no political party allowed but the ruling party: all critics of the government are thrown into jail immediately, all suspected critics are too. It doesn't stoke vi*lence by subtle implication, it tells you outright what it wants to do, then it does it. Within the first six months of H*tler's rule, 30,000 political prisoners had been thrown in prison. Not Jews, just government critics. That would be the equivalent of Trump throwing roughly 200,000 of his critics in jail by July.

No, Trump is not H*tler, he's not even Franco or Mussolini, not yet at least. But he does bare a passing resemblance to Kaiser Wilhelm: a bombastic idiot who blunders his way into dominating a continent by dumb luck, only for the huge risks he takes to eventually ruin his country for generations and potentially take down a hundred million people in his wake.

Whomever Trump resembles, he's capable of so much worse than he's yet done, and even if it turns out he isn't (unlikely), he's so taken the lid off of society that someone with still much worse machinations can do still much worse with impunity, left as well as right. We're still in Year 1 of a very long four years, and potentially much, much longer.

Connection

I've developed something truly horrible in the last little while: an addiction that once acquired, is nearly impossible to shake off; one of the most destructive forces there is which eats its way through American life and lays waste to hundreds of thousands of lives every year. It destroys families who can only watch helplessly as the lives of people they love are torn apart forever, their loved one unrecognizable to themselves, and can only wonder whether they too may eventually fall to the same addiction:

I'm leaving internet comments.

Long ones: practically letters and essays in themselves. Comments that I can only hope are read, but finally, unwashed comments meant to be read by the unwashed: exposing the world to my bombastic self I've left only to friends to endure.

I haven't the will lately to get things on paper for regular consumption. Few essays, just procrastination as I have for the same ambitious ideas as ever, but writing is more than ambition. Writing takes will, writing takes nerve, writing takes the ability to persist in spite of no support. I don't have much of that right now.

What I need is connection. In some ways I've done a better job of that than you even know, but in others, I haven't done well enough. Mourners need to be out of their heads, consistently, deliberately, we need the replenishment only supportive friendship provides.

A lot of social interactions can be deeply unfulfilling. You know how it is. All it takes is one person who doesn't mean well and the night out makes things worse. Even as you get all kinds of invitations, you become shy and the urge to withdraw grows. Particularly because you remember all those times when you were probably viewed as that person who meant ill, and you worry about your ability to be an affirming flame in a period of grief.

But I have been so lucky in the face of my father's passing. I found love: a friend of thirteen years who is the best thing to happen to me in... has anything this good happened? Warm and beautiful, affectionate and loving, the most supportive person I know. I now have reason to affirm the flame. I'm happy even as I have to grieve and that fills me with guilt, but I shudder to think what this period might have been without R____. I feel healed around her/them, secure and embraced. The longer I spend in her company, the more my ambition grows slaked, and I no longer feel the need to prove my worthiness to the rat racers I know. If I write a good book or choral work: great, but I suddenly find it more important to have connections with whom I can fan out.

If only they were around in time to meet Dad, if only my Dad could have charmed them even while prodding for our weak spots. I miss Dad terribly, I even miss the ways he tormented me for decades. So many people expose themselves to internet comments because it's a way to make oneself vulnerable to their pathological wounds in a manner that's relatively safe rather than exposing the wounds in real life. Trauma is trauma, pathology is pathology; it's not going away without years and years of work. Part of the reason online discourse is so fraught is that we now have a place to deposit our pathologies, yet at the same time, expectations of in person behavior have gone up. Yelling is less tolerated, manipulation too, tolerance for bad taste jokes is down, so is intolerance and prejudice, yet so too is nearly any disagreement at all. All these trends are utterly enmeshed. We are less tolerant of in-person disagreement because people online are so fearsome that we all fear the shameful nature of online discourse spilling over into our private lives. Is all this a good development? It doesn't matter. It just is.

So even as I'm calmer and happier, no trauma's revealed itself online. I do not troll, I certainly don't plan it, and have only been trolled ever so slightly. The biggest problem of all this? Elon Musk liked my comment: precisely the comment meant to be a high-road response to people's attempts to rage against my thank you to NPR for doing a story on the psychological effects of the Gaza War on Israelis. If Elon Musk likes the comment, does that mean that you should have done the opposite?

I tell myself that the point of leaving comments is to find inspiration for eventual writing, but I know that's bullshit. I leave the comments because I want to be read and responded to. I want an audience, not an audience of anonymous readers, but an audience of potential friends, with whom I can discuss the subjects that obsess me.

At this point, it's fruitless to pretend you can't have friends you never meet in person. In person is obviously preferable, but as we become ever more addicted to social media, the media becomes more and more social, and we find those people who respond to the same niche interests as we do. Some of them act like mole people, and there is no greater friend online than the block button.

And yet the two friends I talk to more than any others are people I've never met but found in facebook groups: one in Chicago with whom I discuss music, the other of whom from Melbourne with which I discuss literature. My life is inestimably richer for their presences in it, however incorporeal.

Yes, I'd rather have friends like this in person, but the internet can make pen pals so easy and rewarding that it's very easy to forego attending to real life friendships for people with whom you can discuss the very small nuances of your niches no one else can find.

And yet the psychic price of these online connections is incalculable. The more holed up in your niches you become, the less you have in common with those who don't share them. Without common frames of reference, people become isolated from those nearest to them. The gulf in values that separates them culturally, politically, philosophically, is unjumpable: even perceptions of facts become incompatible. Even the truth itself becomes a matter of opinion.

Just as one generation passes and another comes, so do forms of communication and connection. This world is so badly in need of connections. Until we can see and touch our friends elsewhere, we are locked in isolation, and nothing can replace the somatic, physiological connection we and I have to people like R____. I was insanely lucky to find them, and it is only luck that brings love together. It makes bearable any form of isolation and grief. I can only wish I found a connection like this one a long time ago, and wish the same to you.

Amen

Vespers by Spivakov

 Confession: I've always kinda hated the Rachmaninov Vespers... until today.

One at a time, the Vespers are a magnificent experience. They're so beautiful, so spiritually deep, but they all sound the same... One chorus of Godiva chocolate after another, until they all blur into a pool of generic, monotonous beauty, like angels floating around a church.

Rachmaninov may sometimes wear on ears like mine, but the Vespers's beautiful reflection pool is so unlike the musical personality we know so well. Rachmaninov's piano playing is tightly coiled, cast in bronze, so rhythmic, so dynamic, so solid. Richter called him 'an oak.' Rachmaninov the composer is a born architect, always terracing every moment of a piece so that we know exactly where are its peaks and valleys. There's a story of the young Rachmaninov conducting Mozart 40. Everybody was used to hearing Mozart 40 in Dresden Doll dress: slow tempi, legato phrases, monodynamic gentleness. Rachmaninov apparently intuited the modern way with faster tempi, full dynamic contrasts. It came upon the Russian audience like a revelation.

Today I heard Vladimir Spivakov conduct the Vespers and my view of it completely changed. Spivakov is a violinist first, conductor second, and choral conductor tenth... He clearly has a unique perspective on a work lead by every choral conductor in the world, most of whom have their paint-by-number interpretation, no different than anyone else's.

This Rachmaninov dances, it has percussion and angles. This is the country of the Trepak and Troika, the Barnynya, the Kamarinskaya and the Kalinka. There is plenty of spiritual beauty to offer the Lord, but here is also beauty of the earth. This is the oaken Rachmaninov of our memories.

Compare this performance to a performance like Robert Shaw. Shaw's singers are so exquisite, so beautifully matched to the church's echo. Shaw conducts like the brilliant choral conductor he is, with blend, intonation, diction, matched so euphoniously that it attains a kind of perfection.

The only problem is that Rachmaninov is not a choral composer. He is an instrumental composer who made but two major ventures into the choral world and otherwise returned to the piano and orchestra. What shape does this music have in most performances? In most Vespers performances, the formlessness coagulates like a luminescent amoeba.

This Rachmaninov has imperfect intonation. It also has spine, it has development, it has a plot and expresses something more specific than merely the ineffable. Dostoevsky was as much a creature of the Russian earth as of the Orthodox heaven. Why should Rachmaninov not be the same?

Spivakov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9ylzdggQzk

Shaw: Robert Shaw - Vespers (All-Night Vigil), Op. 37: I. Come, Let Us Worship (Official Audio) - YouTube

I'm not in the mood for peace....

Well of COURSE this isn't peace. That's a given. But it may get the hostages home, it may get a thousand longtime Palestinian prisoners home, and even if it will inevitably be the most radicalized Hamasniks who arrive, this progress is a miracle in itself.

Don't credit Trump. He obviously didn't do shit except yell at his underlings. Credit Jason Greenblatt, David Friedman, Avi Berkowitz, and of course, Jared Kushner. These are the true authors of this peace plan, and just those names tell you this is not serious, it also tells you just how authoritarian the Republican party now is that the most insanely pro-Israel hawk team of Middle East operators just arranged a deal that they would find loathesome until yesterday on general principle.

Of course, the chances of it sticking is less than 5%, but it will give everybody time to heal just a little bit, maybe only enough to gather sufficient resolve to resume fighting, but it's still an accomplishment.

On the other hand still, well, this is almost worse news. It is the first proof we truly have that American authoritarianism can truly function, hold onto power, and use it properly. There won't be much proof of it, but from now on, all MAGA has to do is point to this deal, and they will be sufficiently convinced to never relinquish Trump's hold on them.

That is... if it lasts past tomorrow...

.....................................................................

On this respite of peace, at least a brief one, I feel no relief. I feel anger. Overwhelming anger.

Believe it or not, I've gotten through the last two years by suppressing the vast majority of it, telling myself over and over again, 'this is history, this is just how it works.' People have a death wish, they steer themselves right toward the storm then grow stunned when the storm turns in their direction. We are the storm we've been waiting for.

Life is precious, life is delicate, life can be great, but it can all be over tomorrow and you'll never have time to say goodbye.

It's that uncertainly of life that's the ultimate condition, the uncanny valley between life and death, love and hate, belief and doubt, right and left or left and right or right and wrong. Believe too fervently in one or the other, life is ruined. Life is life, and over its course we're meant to feel all those things. Put too much belief in one or other pole, you court the death of the state you love.

Now apply that to politics, apply that to history, apply that to religion and even science. You now have ideology, the stablest force of belief on earth, and therefore the most unstable force of action. When you believe too fervently in your solution, you provoke those who disagree with it, and thus does the situation continue until both sides are destroyed and a critical mass of those left relinquish their beliefs.

In order to provide for a future, you have to plan for all contingencies. No ideology does. It can't. Embrace an ideology and you can't expand your mind to accommodate any possibilities but the one you are certain will happen.

I don't see a lot of friends I miss, but it's so difficult for any Jewish person but an anti-Zionist to hear people we once trusted excuse one of the most totalitarian organizations on earth as an understandable Palestinian response to mass murder while lumping every Zionist together as some monolithic force we don't recognize known as "Israel," knowing that it may come up at any moment, and even a glance of protest could start the fight of the century.

It's equally difficult to go around family in that state of terror, including your own mother, knowing that any moment could be the one that starts a heated, personal contest of one-upmanship that could end with weeks of tension, knowing that any single word against Israeli policy, any defense of Gaza's defenseless, can be the one to do it.

I know, I know, don't talk about politics, and compared to what goes on over there, this is nothing. Even if it's nothing, it's still something. Politics finds you even when you're not looking for it, we all know that at this point. Even the most apolitical animals have been politicized now, hell, the apolitical ones are the most liable to radicalize.

That susceptibility to radicalization is exactly the problem. 98% of people aren't evil, we're just dumb. We know what we think we know, and we can't be talked out of it.

For all the irritability of my natural temperament, I have changed my opinions so many times that I can reasonably acquit myself of closed-mindedness, and have worked so hard to be more agreeable, and still find it this hard...

People wonder how I stopped towing the progressive party line as early as college, made life difficult for those who generally agreed with me, did not properly gauge all my fire toward the Republicans where they think it all belongs, but the answer is so simple: I'm a Jew.

Most people aren't antisemites, including most accused of it, but you cannot possibly go into any comment section or progressive hotspot and not hear the oinking throats of people who claim to love all humanity yet carry hatred for Israel. Dig just a foot and you see that they equate Israel with all Zionists. Dig just another foot and you see that they equate all Zionists with 90% of Jews. They know nothing about the conflict: you point things out to them and every single fact you name they dismiss as 'propaganda.' Turn just a few degrees left, and millions turn into Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson, turn a few degrees right, and millions begin to sound like Chapo Trap House and The Young Turks.

When people simply hate what Israel does, it's easier to deal with. They might sometimes misinterpret Israel's actions, but the idea that they're antisemites is willful madness of the type that only ideology accommodates. And yet, among those disgusted by Israel these days, say, probably 15% of them, there would be no difference had Israel sued for peace consistently for a hundred years. They hate Israel because it exists. Israel is the only country in the world which people demand it ceases to be. Sometimes they merely demand Israel to cease as a Jewish state, but we all know what they mean. This is antisemitism, purely and simply, and those who believe it could take account of the hatred in their souls, but they choose not to. Why? Because ideology makes them not themselves. Once you subscribe to a movement, a part of you IS the movement, and prohibits you from questioning why you believe what you believe.

But even more troubling than that is their excuses for Hamas. 'What do you expect? Of course an organization like Hamas will happen when Israel acts like that!' Well, of course they're right! That's not the point. They expect Israel to deal with Hamas cooly when they can't even let Charlie Kirk die without dancing on his grave. Hamas just killed 1200 people, filmed it, and sent the videos to their families. What did YOU expect? Once upon a time the left excused Marxists, and eventually, as many as 148 million people were killed because of their excuses.

But we're not in imminent danger of a Hamas-like ideology killing 148 million any time soon. More on them in a moment, because we have to talk about the 'other' ideology, because willfully stupid as those who excuse Hamas are, they have a point.

Is Israel as evil as Hamas? Of course not. Is Israel as deadly as Hamas? Of course not. It's much deadlier. The power differential between Israel and Hamas is the difference between the British Empire and the Boers or Mau Mau rebels. Even if Israel's motives are purer than the British Empire (not anymore...), they exceed Hamas in power so vastly that they could decide on a dime to turn overnight from a power like the British Empire to a power like the Belgian Empire and not a person on earth could stop them from slaughtering and enslaving every Arab in the Middle East.

They're not going to slaughter every Arab in the Middle East, but keep going on this trajectory... they will slaughter millions of them, and no one will stop them. No one in the world could, no one in the world with power would.

The world is not in danger of an authoritarian left-wing takeover any time soon. However, right-wing authoritarianism is an imminent threat, just in time for the Ages of AI, drastic global warming, internet misinformation, and mass weapon proliferation. The entire world stands on the brink of authoritarian takeovers, and not from those supposedly omnipotent campus radicals, but from septuagenarians who long for absolute power, from tech utopians who want to transform humans into computer hybrids, from nativists who aren't just anti-immigration but view immigration as an existential threat.

Whether or not you see it, we are potentially on the cusp of death that makes the 20th century look like heaven itself. Will we get it? Probably not yet, but a horrific level of it announces itself that makes Gaza look like Vermont, probably in our lifetimes, and whether such murder continues from the left, it is instigated by the right.

This is what ideology has always wrought over the long contemptible unfurling of human history. The beliefs themselves change, but the fervor never does, and the mental repression to stop it never lifts until it's too late.

So no, I feel very little joy at all this. When I hear of peace, I can't find it in me to be happy yet. Maybe when the peace proves longer than a week. All I can think of right now is how much it took us to get here, who would benefit from it, and what they would do next.

A Message This Yom Kippur

 My favorite thinker, Isaiah Berlin, warned of the dangers of something called 'monism.' He divided the world between 'foxes' who know many things and do not overly subscribe to one, and 'hedgehogs' who know one big thing and see the world in one overarching rubric. Foxes are 'pluralists' who see the world as being able to accommodate many sorts of values, many of which fall into contradiction with one another and still see some value in them all. Hedgehogs, however, are 'monists', who believe that there can only be one solution, and in Berlin's opinion, which happens to be mine too, 'in politics, these are the most dangerous of men.'

There are many things to recommend about 'hedgehogs.' Their belief animates the passion for action that foxes usually don't have, and if their belief is correct, they implement solutions that work. But their inability to consider alternatives usually guarantees that they're beliefs are incorrect. And it's also true that lack of commitment leads to complacency: sectioning off the oppressed so we can go about our lives untroubled--but better the complacency of oppression than the silence of death.

This leads to the paradoxical contradiction: those of us who believe in value pluralism, right and left, see that those who disagree with them are not inherently our enemies, but at the same time, we have to act as though those who believe differently than us are very much our enemies. Your beliefs are what lead to fanaticism, and fanaticism leads to death: deaths many times more frequent than the world even experiences now.

Even if your beliefs are correct, your inability to accommodate disagreement is what provokes those who oppose you with every fiber of their being to support leaders who enact measures you find the ultimate in murderousness. Your beliefs can only lead to the exact opposite of what you seek.

But to those who oppose Israel's actions with every cell in your bodies: your inability to realize how much Hamas has enacted the Gazan predicament is precisely what leads Gazans to squalor and death, and half culpable for what enables Netanyahu's stranglehold on Israel. All this could have been avoided, and your beliefs in the sole culpability of Israel are what kept Hamas in power. Hamas had 38 billion dollars in foreign aid and used it solely for self-enrichment and tunnels into Israel they do not permit their citizens to enter even as they're being slaughtered. You may be anti-imperialism, but you are pro-totalitarianism. You are as much what enables the left-wing dictators of today as people who excused Stalin in the 1930s and lead to the deaths of literal tens of millions. How many other regimes will you support in your vendetta against the West which gave you everything before you get it into your heads that your beliefs are the opposite of productive to your goals?

To those who support Israel's actions with every cell in your bodies: the extremity of your vitriol against the Palestinian goals has lead you into the hands of a government that may strip the country you love into becoming precisely the sort of authoritarian regime you excoriate in Gaza. By thinking no act of the Israeli government is worthy of accountability, you've made the country you supposedly love into an authoritarian state where a demagogue can game a dysfunctional system for more than fifteen years to stay in power nobody wants him to have. He incurs the worst defeat in Israeli history and still, two years later, nobody can still get rid of him. He's oppressive not only to Palestinians but to Jews. The offensive part of this war should have ended a year and a half ago. Netanyahu knows that prolonging the war is to his electoral advantage: he dooms the hostages and any number of IDF troops who senselessly die even as they unnecessarily kill. Netanyahu and Likud may not have anything like as extreme beliefs as Hamas and their supporters in Gaza, but Israel is hundreds of times more powerful, and every inch of your extremism carries so much more capacity for death and mass murder than the extremism of Gazans. It is probable that the future of the West is exactly the sort of authoritarianism you mean to eradicate elsewhere. You are simultaneously pro-imperialism and pro-authoritarianism. Your extremism will lead to our time's equivalents to Franco, Mussolini, and yes, the other guy. How many more will you insist on killing before the murder is visited on us?

Whatever your beliefs, if you believe so strongly in your own convictions, your inability to consider alternatives can only lead to the death of democracy, peace, and liberal rule of law, because there is no action extreme enough that you cannot convince yourself to support them, and convince yourself much faster than you think you can. The realities of the moment change us all, and even if we think we're immune to propaganda, we never are, and judgement altering anger can rise up so quickly that the heart inevitably dictates the head, and the head inexorably loses the facilities of judgement you're meant to have.

There is no way to be diplomatic about this, and if God holds me accountable for being so self-righteous before Yom Kippur, so let it be written.

Even as I write all this arrogant screed, I know I need to atone for my self-righteousness and on my knees I ask for your forgiveness and God's. But you too have to atone. And if you don't atone now, you will be made to atone in a generation when your beliefs have only wrought violent death and murder on a scale so past this.

G'mar chatima tova. History is watching you.