I’ve been trying to put my finger on a phenomenon that has swept much of world Jewry over the past few weeks. I haven’t succeeded, because it’s been rather confusing.
Opposite things have been occurring simultaneously. On one side, we have the lingering trauma of the darkest day in Israel’s history, when more than 1200 souls were brutally massacred. And on the other, we have an alarming rise in Jew hatred that has instilled fear in many Jews.
We grieve, and yet we’re afraid. That’s confusing.
But as we fear this troubling rise of Jew hatred, we’re comforted when we gather with other like-minded Jews. That’s also confusing. These opposite stimuli can make us dizzy.
The nearly 300,000 people who attended yesterday’s March for Israel rally in D.C. have witnessed this rise in Jew hatred, but their hearts were surely comforted by the mutual empathy and support they felt at the rally.
Similarly, at the Jewish Journal gala on Monday night, nearly 400 people felt the warmth of community and Jewish solidarity, but no one could ignore the danger to Jews which all three speakers compelled us to see.
This is why it’s hard to put a finger on the moment: we feel hate and fear on one side, and love and warmth on the other.
How do we connect these dots?
It took a simple social media meme this morning to enlighten me.
Here’s what it said:
“If there’s one thing we Jewish people have learned in the past few weeks it’s this: The world doesn’t care about us as much as we hoped, but we care about each other a lot more than we realized.”
So simple, and yet so elegant.
The more hate the world has been giving to Jews, the more love Jews have been giving to one another.
As the bombs of hate are falling, Jews are looking for an empathy bunker. What safer space than to gather with like-minded Jews?
You might call it instant solidarity. You meet a fellow member of the tribe and you feel an immediate connection. It has happened to me countless times since Oct. 7, and there’s not much mystery to it: We all read the news. We all see the danger. We all see the hate.
We see the reports from campuses: the ugly images of haters tearing down hostage posters; the violent calls to “globalize the intifada.”
We see the blatant double standard Israel receives in media coverage and in institutions like the United Nations, while we are still grieving those we lost and praying for the hostages.
It’s painful to see so many groups and influencers apologize for the barbaric thugs of Hamas, a terror army sworn to Israel’s destruction that uses its own people as human shields. It’s painful to see how the world pays attention to Muslim victims only when Jews are involved. It’s painful and sobering.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that Jews have no allies. We have plenty, especially among those who understand the danger of a murderous ideology driven only to exterminate Jews. Those people get it.
But more and more people throughout the world don’t. The haters have used the massacre of Jews, and Israel’s attempt to eliminate the threat, as an opportunity to come after Jews with a zeal and venom that can be, frankly, terrifying.
But it’s also clarifying.
As the meme says, the world may not “care about us as much as we hoped,” but the flip side is that “we care about each other a lot more than we realized.”
Regardless of how the winds blow in the future, maintaining that spirit of solidarity would be very, very good for the Jews.
