October 13, 2023
Let me tell you about the Jews of today. It’s taken thousands of years, but we are no longer a meek and timid people who will obediently board a train, be separated from our loved ones, and walk into a gas chamber believing we’ll have a nice shower after our arduous journey. It is precisely these tragic events in our collective Jewish past that inform the present and somehow will inform our future.
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The catastrophe that unfolded this past weekend in Israel was surreal for all decent humans with a pulse—excluding pro-Palestinian groups celebrating in Gaza, London, Sydney, and New York, as well as low-IQ individuals with undeserved diplomas and a platform for ignorance like Sonny Hostin of The View.
As Sukkot came to an end, Jews around the world looked forward to celebrating Simchat Torah, where the entire Torah is raised up and completely unrolled so that the Creation in Genesis connects to the final chapter of Deuteronomy when Moses takes his final breaths while looking out over the land of Israel, contemplating the future of his people. No rabbi ever told me this, but it seems clear that our unknowable future hearkens back to our lived past, as well as to the time before man walked this Earth. And that past is also connected to a future we don’t yet know.
Linking the hope and optimism of a future to the toils and even the infamies of the past is a theme that repeats in Judaism. It’s even reflected in how we name our children—after the dead to commemorate their memory and life, keeping them alive in our hearts and minds and for our futures through our children.
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Seeing the images this weekend. Hearing the stories. Suddenly, the future hangs in a delicate balance between survival or death with a shocking throwback to the horrors of the Holocaust. Yes, in a matter of hours, Hamas and the Gazans unearthed the unthinkable inhumanities of the Nazis and even, I’d say, tried to give the Nazis a run for their money.
I imagined the young people enjoying the music festival. They must have watched parachuters descend from the skies with curiosity, thinking at first it was a stunt for the show or military exercises, then they were most certainly overcome with shock, then disbelief, then abject terror as evil touched down, poured out of vans, and began to shoot indiscriminately.
They ran. They hid. They didn’t have guns or any other means to fight back. They were literally sitting ducks, and the enemy relished that expectation. Hear me on this. The enemy, Hamas, the Gazan people, the Iranians, and their supporters on the streets and in our universities, relished slaughtering young people listening to music.
We saw the horrifying and unforgivable. Babies in cages. Cages! For animals! Most certainly awaiting death. At a time in my life, when I didn’t think my heart could break anymore, the little bits I have left broke into ever smaller pieces. For most, the Holocaust is a collection of stories in history books or passed down from older generations. This is in real-time.
They took glee in their murderous acts (a sure sign of madness, as we have witnessed countless professors, protesters, students, and political commentators openly celebrate the carnage, the kidnappings, the rapes, the beheadings). The Nazis took similar pride in the horror they unleashed on Europe’s Jews, keeping detailed records of every capture, every internment, every murder, every sick experiment, and every act of torture. Today’s Gazan-Hamas Nazis recorded everything and posted it all online for the world to see, then paraded dead bodies and rape victims still bleeding from the violence throughout the streets of Gaza with cheers from the crowds—all out of a twisted Nazi-like sense of pride.
Well, pride cometh before the fall.
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Next is an elderly Holocaust survivor with a gun in her lap, giving a peace sign to cameras, no doubt under duress from a monster. Did she fully understand what was happening? Perhaps she had dementia? Or was paralyzed with fear at an uncertain future that had to conjure memories of her Holocaust past.
Forty babies were slaughtered. Many beheaded. Bewildered teens scrambled for safety at a music fest. 260 dead.
They were young. This was Israel’s future. This is our future.
The elderly who were slaughtered are our links to the past—some having survived the Holocaust or persecution in the USSR, others the children of parents escaping pogroms throughout the Pale of Settlement. They were living testaments to past evils. Their pasts informed their future in Eretz Yisrael.
Yet, countless Muslims deny the Holocaust ever happened.
In one nauseating fell swoop, they tried to wipe out our future and whitewash our past.
To those professors and the morons on The View; to those imbeciles in the Biden administration who posted then quickly removed calls for Israel to show restraint; to the brain-washed masses who protest in Sydney and call for the gas chambers, or celebrate the “achievements” of Hamas in New York City; to the hypocrites in our universities who call themselves “Students for Justice in Palestine”; to the Squad and BLM: what happened this past weekend is what “from the river to the sea” means; it means doing whatever barbaric acts it takes to eliminate our future and make sure no Jews live to see tomorrow. That’s on you.
Our fury and disgust are at least as loud as your applause.
If your God is okay beheading babies, ripping them from their mother’s breasts, killing their mothers in front of them, and mowing down innocent citizens (some of whom support you), then your God is no God at all.
Hear this Ilhan Omar, Secretary General Guterres, Sonny Hostin, and all your fellow travelers: the country Israel and Am Yisrael (which is the whole of the Jewish People scattered in the Diaspora) will never go quietly into that dark night ever again. Next time, and that next time is here, we will fight to the bitter end.
We Jews may squabble in academic circles, at the dinner table, in the Knesset, or in the courtroom, but two things that unite us are existential threats and the collective knowledge that the one thing we can count on in life is for history to repeat itself. That is why we are so big on “never forget.” In fact, Passover is focused on “never forgetting” when we were slaves in Egypt—again, our past informing our future.
America, which has been a beacon to oppressed Jews everywhere and the establishment of a Jewish Homeland in 1948, are the two best things ever to happen to the Jewish People. One gave us an opportunity to start anew in the land of opportunity on streets paved with gold and strive for the American Dream; the other gave us an opportunity to return to our ancestral homeland (“The Land of Milk and Honey”), and to live in kibbutzim and ancient cities, fulfilling our destiny as the Chosen People.
We weren’t “chosen” because we are better. We were chosen to bring to the world the notion of one G-d, the word of G-d in the form of the Old Testament, including the Noahide laws and the Ten Commandments, and an inexorable drive towards peace.
Our entire religion is predicated on living a moral and peaceful life on Earth, as G-d would expect of those He made in His image.
We brought the world a code of ethics that would lead to human ingenuity and prosperity, all with the goal of eliminating human suffering in this world. To that end, as a small and continually shrinking number of people, we have made disproportionate contributions to all aspects of life. Sure, we have our idiots and detractors and, sadly, too many far-left loonies for my taste, but you cannot deny that, while on this Earth, the Jewish People made it a better place despite our small numbers, despite the hate, and despite the repeated attempts to exterminate us.
This, again, is our past informing our future. Whether that future will be to flourish or perish, will not be up to G-d. It will be up to how Israel and the world respond to these crimes against humanity, more of which are sure to follow.
Image: Paratroopers at the Western Wall in 1967. Public domain.
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