Well Dad,
Four months today (yesterday). None of us believed it was coming except you, and as usual, you were right. It feels like you're still here, behaving with a combination of needling me constantly and laying down another gem of wit in half a second it would take me five years to come up with. In every aspect of my life save music and writing, you did it better than I do.
From my posts I'm sure people thought you were an incredibly happy-go-lucky guy, but in private you were a stern, almost authoritarian father, with an extremely specific way of doing everything and an almost complete inability to forgive people who did not do things as you wanted.
Nevertheless, if I'm being honest with myself, you were as great a father as you were impossible a father. I was harsh with you in my letter on the three month anniversary and aired our dirty laundry in public. For that you have my deep apologies: but as you often yelled at me as a kid when I tried to apologize--sorry means you'll never do it again. There are no circumstances in which I'd commit to that.
I was going to write today about the good memories, and there are thousands, but then Bondi Beach happened, and everything fun got put on hold.
I feel like the only person in my generation who wasn't surprised by the world's antisemitic turn. I'm sure every Jew my age has distant memories of grandparents warning us that there's antisemitism in every pile of mud, exploiting any difficult moment in world history to hatch out and slime its way into any brain stupid enough to be open to it. But most of us filed those warnings in the back of our minds, precisely because their experiences seemed so distant from ours. Now we see they weren't distant at all.
But it was you who prepared us for it particularly. You were born in Poland right after the Holocaust, you spent your life warning how fragile the world is, and in this sense, you died the moment you were proven right.
The orthodox always commented that religious Jews survived the Shoah more often, not only because their faith sustained them, but because they know Jewish history is a near-perpetual state of martyrdom. They chant the horrors of Yom Kippur's martyrology which describes how Rabbi Akiva's flesh was torn off, they chant the Unetaneh Tokef composed by Rabbi Amnon of Mainz as he was dying from his toes and fingers being cut off, they know about Chmielnicki and the story of the cat sown into the woman's body. Except for Yom Kippur and Ta'anit Esther, every fast day in Judaism commemorates some massacre or assassination, often in circumstances as horrifying as befell any Christian martyr, the only difference being that after a while, Christians generally became the martyrers. Nothing can prepare you for a Shoah, but they knew it's always possible, and every Jew who knows their Judaism reserves some tiny part of their brains to prepare.
You did not believe Judaism, but you observed it. Of course you had your famous comment about it: there is no G-d and He gave us the torah at Mt. Sinai. You believed in history, and you passed on that belief to me. History is the history of illusions shattered. You can reserve a religious believe for anything you want: God, honor, liberty, security, justice, equality, but history will dispel every belief you ever had as an illusion. Perhaps one day will prove that belief wrong. I hope it does, but it hasn't happened yet.
The old hubris started this trouble. A new technology arrives, people are unsued to it and grow untethered to the lessons of their past. They forget yet again how easily they can stir each other's passions: People forget how quickly beliefs can turn ourselves into something unrecognizable, and they don't realize how quickly we demonize each other. In the wake of the internet, we've become our beliefs rather than ourselves, and we inevitably believe that we're different than everyone who came before us, "Generations before us had the wrong priorities, but WE cracked the code." Every generation thinks that, but every new belief requires a blood sacrifice to make into a reality. Even civil rights passed because millions of African Americans served in the World Wars, and many Americans realized that people who die for us deserve the same rights. No matter what your belief, there are millions of people who will oppose it so fervently that they're willing to kill you for it, and if things get bad enough, they're willing to die themselves. Today's left demands absolute equality and justice as their inherent rights, today's right demands absolute freedom and liberty as their inherent rights, and the fact that millions would oppose them stuns them with rage. The new technology rubs the opposition in their faces every day, and every new opposing opinion they have to read makes people hate each other all the more.
The truth is, any group can rewrite reality's rules if they want it badly enough, from gun rights to socialized economy, from abortion bans to direct democracy, from unregulated capitalism to ethical non-monogamy, from anti-LGBTQ to anti-Zionism, if they want their institution badly enough, they're willing to fight for what they want, some are willing to die for what they want, some are even willing to kill for it. And that is inevitably the moment trouble starts for Jews.
Jews are inevitably at the vanguard of these belief systems, but they will never fit into neat realities. We are too unique, our condition too contradictory. We are a religion that's also a race. We're native to our countries of origin and also foreign to them. We're the chosen people of a God who threatened to destroy us multiple times. Everything about Jews has that slippery ambiguity which many mistaken for dishonesty, but being Jewish is too complicated for people who want to view things neatly. Nearly every gentile who tries to taxonomize the world grows to hate us, and nearly every Jew who tries the same grows to hate every Jew who differs from them. God warned us of His jealousy, and the punishment for joining a large movement can often seem inevitable in retrospect. To pledge one's all to any transformative movement is a kind of idol worship, and Jews are inevitably stunned when the movement announces it has no room for them.
The reason there's no room for them is not just because Jews are the grand exception, it's because the movement's beliefs are wrong. Every transformative movement's beliefs are wrong, including Judaism's. If the betrayal is bad enough that it stuns them, it doesn't just mean they're wrong about one thing, it means they're wrong about a lot of things. It is so much easier to diagnose what's wrong than find a solution that's right. As you once said to me: 'There are no solutions, only problems.' Beliefs like that didn't make you an easy father, but they did make you a very smart man.
You didn't give me this formula, inevitably you'd tell me it's messier than that, and of course you're right. History is not a monomyth, but it's a river where everything flows down the same banks from generation to generation.
I'll finish this one later...
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