“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” is how prominent scientist Paul Ehrlich began his 1968 international bestseller, “The Population Bomb.” “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Ehrlich, who died last week at 93, turned out to be spectacularly wrong, but his alarmism was spectacularly popular. His book sold over 2 million copies and became one of the most popular science books of the 20th century.
Why was the world so captivated by Ehrlich’s doom and gloom?
Because we’re wired that way.
“Humans process negative information more readily than positive, an evolutionary hangover that makes doomsayers inherently more compelling than optimists,” Bryan Walsh writes in Vox.
Yes, lousy news sells.
This is even more true today, when profit-seeking algorithms have turned many of us into compulsive doomscrollers.
One group that has taken full advantage of this propensity is the Trump-hating mainstream media.
Take their embarrassing coverage of Israel and America’s war against an evil Iranian regime. If you’ve been reading The New York Times since the war began, you’d think America is the evil empire losing a war against Sweden.
In this sea of anti-America bias, there’s hardly any mention of the Iranian-sponsored terror attacks that have killed more than 1,000 Americans and terrorized much of the world since 1979, or the 30,000 peaceful protesters who were mowed down just two months ago by the ruthless mullahs.
People with common sense don’t ignore Trump’s erratic and chaotic style, but they also don’t ignore that the world’s biggest sponsor of terror has been battered beyond recognition. Regime change or no regime change, a global existential threat has been defanged.
That’s not gloomy; that’s good news.
Of course, there’s been plenty of gloomy news for Jews lately. The alarming rise in antisemitism will likely be a top subject of conversation at our seder tables next week. “In every generation they arise against us…” and all that.
God knows the list is long. It would take a whole seder just to recap the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incidents of the past year. Our enemies keep us busy.
But with all this lousy news, is there any space left in our brains for any good news?
Not much.
Good news invariably loses to bad news. Bad news suggests danger, and danger always gets top billing. That’s why we’re wired for lousy news — it’s connected to our physical survival.
But there is another kind of survival, one that is no less essential: it’s the creation of a meaningful life, what we might call our spiritual survival.
In that spiritual realm, good news wins hands down because it connects us to the magic of gratitude.
Hakarat HaTov, recognizing the good, is a central Jewish value. We recognize blessings in everyday life, from large moments to small interactions.
Our first blessing in the morning, Modeh Ani, thanks our Creator for restoring life. Every time we eat or drink or see something new, there is a blessing.
Gratitude shapes our Jewish identity. The very name “Jew” (Yehudi) is derived from Leah’s son Judah (Yehudah), which means “I will thank.”
Gratitude also keeps us humble, reminding us that we’re not the sole authors of our successes.
So, while our survival instinct may draw us toward gloom and doom, our souls draw us toward the uplift of gratitude.
Just as bad news appears everywhere, so does the algorithm of gratitude. No matter where our life is at, we can find something to be grateful for. There is some magic in that simple idea.
Even during these gloomy days for Jews, we can find plenty of light shining through the clouds.
“The Jewish people are still here. Still building. Still arguing productively. Still investing in education, family, memory and life itself,” Brad Goverman writes in The Times of Israel. “Not because the world is kind. It never has been. But because Judaism is built for long games and bad centuries.
“Hope is not pretending things are fine. Hope is noticing that despite everything, the Jewish story keeps advancing anyway.”
Just like last year and the year before that, and just like last century and the century before that, the Jewish story will advance again this Passover.
Millions of seders will be held around the world; millions of Jews will remember we once were slaves in Egypt; millions of Jews will ask, “When do we eat?”
And regardless of the mass famine a scientist may have predicted in 1968, millions of Jews will be grateful for the food on their plates and the good news struggling to get out.
