Today is a day of mourning. Every day has been a day of mourning since October 7th, no matter which 'side' you take if either, but for 'our side', today was particularly acute.
For 2000 years, every day of a Jewish life was in some senses a day of mourning, but up we rose every day for millennia and always gave life our best shot: a simcha here, a responsibility there, observing the 613 laws as though each one of them matters as much as much as the commandment not to kill, while Rabbis would contort the Bible in every direction to make practical accommodations to these absurd laws for their congregants... or at least they did when the congregants shoved them against a wall.
If both Jewish history and the Gaza war are accurately recorded, then Jewish history is full of death tolls that exceed whatever's happened in Gaza. Gaza is far from over, but these death tolls are never *just* about the death toll for Jews any more than death tolls are just death tolls for other ethnic groups. It's as much about the humiliation of the experience, it's as much about the inherited trauma, it's as much about the double standards set for us.
...OK, that's a lie....
It's precisely because of those large death tolls that we are acutely sensitive to everything Israel. Every new murder of a Jew is not just the murder in itself, it is the doorway to worry about whether the moloch is coming for us that's come for every era of Jewish history until now.
I'm not a believer in that inherited trauma is particularly acute in Jews. If inherited trauma exists, then every human being has the trauma of pre-history encoded into their DNA: a period lasting god knows how many epochs when the wrong animal spelled the instant death of a loved one.
What is particularly unique in Jews is how murder is uniquely encoded into the narrative of our history. Our history is not just three thousand years of beautiful tradition, it's a three-thousand year recorded history of exile, beatings, theft, rape, show trials, hard labor, humiliation; but especially of mass murder. Moreover, it is a three thousand year history of how every success is a false promise--a divine test meant to show the entire world that all earthly achievement means nothing when your host countries can take it away from you with the snap of a finger. If God exists, then this is clearly what the supposed Av HaRakhamim, the Merciful Father, meant by making us his Chosen People. He chose us to spread his word, but the real word of God seems to be a much darker text than the gospel generally spread. No one believes in mercy more than Christians, and no one ever showed less mercy than Christians did to Jews.
But that was a different era, and we had a very different relationship to the world. We had no place to retreat to, no place we could really call home, we had no insurance policy in case our world burned down. In the BC era, when we had Israel and Judea, we were safer--not much, just a little bit. It wasn't the glorious period day schools teach us about: we were both terrible killers and the horrifically killed, our rulers were every bit as corrupt and incompetent as any ruler on earth, our supposedly glorious temple in Jerusalem stank of animal shit and rotting meat. We had our great men, and in between those great fathers of our faith we had hundreds of years of disgrace to our history.
But at least we had a fighting chance to make our own mistakes and not make our lives the forfeit of everybody else's.
We're now in the third millennium after Christ. We don't have that relationship to Christianity anymore--not for the moment at least. It seems that for now, the worst of Christianity is behind us. What we do have is radical Islam.
I don't doubt that all through history, there were millions and millions of virtuous Christians who not only hated their peoples' oppressive rulers and mobs, but particularly hated what these fellow Christians did to Jews. I'm sure many of them actively worked to aid Jews in need and sabotage attempts to abuse them. I'm equally sure there are millions in every era of European history who would have helped in an instant had the price to help Jews not been to treat caught helpers like Jews.
Furthermore, I have no doubt that all through history, there was a well-meaning educated class who saw the suffering of the peasants, and saw that many Jews were disproportionately successful, and drew a substantial correlation. They saw that so many Jews were tax collectors, money lenders, merchants, jewelers, and bankers (to say nothing of doctors...), and concluded that Jews were the oppressor class. So when Jews were killed en masse, they'd think it a tragedy, but in private, they'd put an asterisk next to these tragedies they would never put next to any other sort of mass murder: 'you see how Jews oppress those under them so willingly, you can't be too surprised that vengeance was taken against them. Even the innocent Jews were a little complicit!' What these enlightened classes neglected is that if Jews were disproportionately successful on someone else's back, it's because they were forced into these professions of success.
Just as we were forced into moneylending because the Church prohibited Christians from handling money and Jews from owning land, we were forced into needing Israel because country after country refused to make a space for us to feel at home, and in the case of the Shoah, a space for us to even survive.
Now that we have Israel, you'll have to kill us all before we give it up; and there's still a large number of world leaders trying to do just that; along with millions upon millions of acolytes who would go to any length to help them, and millions of educated people who fancy themselves on the side of the oppressed but advocate for solutions that would only replace one set of oppressors with another. This second set of oppressors would temporarily be more even more violent than the regimes they replace so they could establish their authority. That's the story of 1979 Iran, that's the story of 1917 Russia, that's the story of 1789 France, that's the story of dozens of other radical dictatorships around the world, where violent men were all but given the reins of power by left-liberals, progressives, and socialists who thought they could control the most militant among them.
What has the last ten years demonstrated above all other things? What has it shown that's above and beyond anything about social media partisanship or AI automation, above America's capacity for authoritarianism, above Russia's continued capacity to manipulate world affairs, and above China's ability to dominate the world?
It's demonstrated that this supposedly modern, safe era, protected from the vicissitudes of history, has the potential to be just as dangerous as any era has ever been. If this era is as dangerous as it seems, then do you really think Jews would be any more protected than ever before in a world without a Jewish state? A Jewish army? A Jewish lobby?
Take away all those things for the chance of a binational state on what once was Israel, and you'd replace Israel with a slaughterhouse: whether it's Muslims killing Jews or Jews killing Muslims, the entire Middle East could become an abattoir of genocide that makes Gaza look like Switzerland. The belief that Israel can be replaced by a functional democracy that fully respects the rights of both nations is one of the most naive political beliefs on earth, and millions of totalitarians depend on this binational idealism to make war all the easier to wage: Jews as well as Muslims.
Jews gave the world two-thousand years of chances to show that our society was welcome in diaspora, but over and over, the world showed their Jews that we were as welcome as a plague epidemic. If the world is as dangerous as it seems right now, Jews without a state are likely to be thrust back into the same maelstrom as we lived in for literal millennia.
We live the most prosperous, joyous time in the entire history of our people, and we hope and pray every day that we do not live at this period's dusk, because what history shows, in mind-numbing iterations, is that Jewish success is an illusion, because eventually we are punished for it in manners completely disproportionate to our sins.
Whether or not you believe that, experience shows that fact to be the most seminal element in Jewish history.
THEY... KILLED... US... EVERYWHERE
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