When you’re under attack, the very first thing on your mind is to defend yourself.
What’s the second thing? There is no second thing. There is only the urgency of swinging your fists and fighting off your attackers.
The Jewish community has every reason these days to swing its fists. The attacks just keep coming: What choice do we have?
The bad news seems to follow Jews. A recent survey from the ADL informed us that almost a quarter of Americans said attacks against Jews were “understandable.”
An analysis from Honest Reporting told us that “Last year, antisemitism surged across American campuses like never before. What started as protest became open hate, fueled not just by students, but by the institutions meant to uphold academic integrity.”
Meanwhile, a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute revealed “How American and European Media Became an Uncritical Mouthpiece for a Designated Foreign Terror Organization (Hamas).”
And on and on.
For Jews today, there is no shortage of reasons to raise our fists and fight back.
But as we fight back, I’d like to suggest we add a second component — let’s also fight forward. Simply put, we can visualize our community as falling into two camps: those who fight back and those who fight forward.
Those who fight back are the pros — the many organizations whose mission is to call out and condemn antisemitism in all its forms, do everything possible to eradicate it and protect Jews and Jewish places that are most vulnerable.
This group is varied and endless. While some organizations and initiatives overlap, they’re all fighting back in their own way.
The second group — the one that fights forward — is not a group per se.
These are people like you and me who work during the day and cannot devote their professional lives to traditional activism. But they worry a lot about Jews and Israel and spend an inordinate amount of time following the news.
Here’s the point: Why not begin a movement of Jews who will spend less time following the news and more time fighting forward? Fighting forward means fighting for the Jewish future — strengthening Jewish identity, teaching the Jewish tradition, building Jewish pride, learning the Jewish story, gathering around Shabbat tables, and so on.
We’re blessed to have so many professional activists who fight back on behalf of the community so that we can fight forward. Fighting forward is something we can all do in our everyday lives. While the pros fight the bad news, we can create some good news in our own little worlds.
Fighting forward, in short, is not really about fighting. It’s more about inspiring, elevating, remembering, creating, honoring, connecting and doing whatever one can do to help strengthen the Jewish future.
Of course, the camps overlap. The “fight forward” camp includes Jews who donate and volunteer with the “fight back” camp, just as the “fight back” camp is as committed to the Jewish future. But this doesn’t preclude the need to delineate both missions and inject a “fight forward” mentality in our community.
Human beings need to stay busy. When something bothers us, we need to take action. When we feel threatened, we need to fight back. Given that so many Jewish groups are already fighting back, the rest of the community has an opportunity to complement that fight through an approach of fighting forward.
That’s community teamwork: Expert activists who fight back to defend our safety and dignity, and passionate Jews who fight forward to strengthen Jewish identity.
We have both. We need both.
