The Return to Biblicalness

It’s been three years since impossible scenes, things that simply could not be happening, unfolded in real time over our phones and computer screens. Lifeless Israeli bodies heaped on sidewalks. Gazans rejoicing around Shani Louk’s broken corpse. Naama Levy in her bloodied sweatpants, forced into a van to cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Children’s bedrooms sprayed with bullet holes, splattered with blood. A great-grandmother, Yaffa Adar, staring stoically ahead as gun-toting abductors drive her in a golf cart across the desert into Gaza. The pure terror on the face of Shiri Bibas as she clutches two tiny boys with bright red hair.

It was like falling down a sinkhole into biblical times. Jewish suffering in the Holy Land, enhanced with modern weaponry, GoPro cameras and social media, was horrifically, eerily, back. The most secular, nonbelieving, and biblically illiterate of us couldn’t help but be shaken by where the Jews were being slaughtered: not Poland this time, but the Jewish ancestral homeland. The first mention of Gaza in the Bible comes in the tenth chapter of Genesis. It was the foe of the ancient Israelites, called out by prophets for its violence and slave-trading. It’s where Samson was imprisoned and blinded. All that was remote history if not fiction, until October 7, when it was all too here and now.

So the earth opened beneath our feet into the past, and the next day we kept falling. A second giant sinkhole had formed below the first. We watched in shock as ostensibly decent people around the world, people who care about trans rights and undocumented immigrants and whales, expressed their enthusiasm for the carnage. More gentle-minded souls lamented the deaths of Israeli civilians and, if asked, proclaimed their horror at chants like the one heard in Sydney: “Gas the Jews!” What none of them could do—what an astonishingly large part of the world did not do—was express unambiguous solidarity with the victims. Terrible as it was, they suggested, Israelis had brought their suffering on themselves. 

Three years on, we’re still falling. The war that Hamas provoked and begged for, the war that Israel couldn’t possibly avoid, has unleashed a global outcry against the Jews, reminiscent now less of the Bible than the Middle Ages. Jews are murdering children, they said, even as Israel paused the war to vaccinate over a million Gazan children against polio. Jews are starving Gazans, they said, even as Israel sent vast quantities of food into Gaza, even as the only emaciated people found there were either very sick, or Israeli hostages. Jews are destroying hospitals, they said, even as it was proven, time and again, that the damage was caused by misfired Palestinian rockets. Jews are committing genocide, they said, even as facts consistently showed this to be a gruesome lie. And there were the charges whose sheer luridness defied belief: the Israeli rape dogs.

It’s unfashionable in our secular age to talk about evil. That word belongs in the Bible, not Netflix. So when we fell down that sinkhole and into the past, it was bewildering to have it confirmed, so very conclusively, that evil exists. The rest of the world felt it, too. Except when they amassed to speak in one outraged voice against the enemy of humanity, their target wasn’t Hamas, but Israel. 

There is in the world an innate, subterranean need to hate Jews. It isn’t the point of this essay to get into the origins of this hatred (monotheism, most likely, and the Jews’ tiny numbers)—only that it exists. The Nazis demonstrated for all time where this hate may lead, but horror at the chimneys of Auschwitz couldn’t truly extinguish it. It only required a change of costume, a new cloak in the latest fashion. Here, antisemitism said. Try this one on, instead.

A few days ago, as I joined friends in a sukkah for dinner, the host asked us to say what makes us feel optimistic for the Jewish people. Some found it impossible. “Ask someone else,” one woman said. “All I see is doom and gloom.”  But another spoke with genuine passion about the record numbers of secular or disconnected Jews who have discovered or reconnected with their Jewish heritage. They’re newly adopting or resuming the traditions, learning or deepening their knowledge of the ancient texts. In the face of avalanching Jew-hatred, they’re finding new beauty and value in Jew-love.

I count myself in their number: someone with Jewish DNA but raised with no connection to Judaism or Jewishness, and who began an extraordinary new chapter after kindling it late in life. But I was also, not long ago, what Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy call an “un-Jew”: a leftist antizionist of the most extreme type. When I write about how “we” felt on October 8, watching protesters bay for Jewish blood, I’m acutely aware that for many years I was “them.” This will never stop being a cause of shame for me, but it’s a source of hope, too. To the guests in the sukkah who said there’s no point in fighting antisemitism—the haters aren’t going to change their minds—I said that if that were true, I’d never have been there, never have pledged myself to the Jewish people and its state. People can change. 

Shattering as it’s been, there’s something to be said for this abrupt return to biblicalness. By this awkward word I don’t mean belief in religion, necessarily, but appreciation for values that have fallen into disfavor in our supposedly enlightened age. As mentioned above: the ability to recognize evil, as well as good. Tribe. Truth. Our society worships “context,” but there’s really no complicated background, no extenuating circumstances, that make it somehow reasonable to take an eight-month-old baby hostage and murder him. We’d had it drilled into us that universalism is the way to a better world, but we were forced to recognize that this vision excludes the Jews, and sometimes we must go our own way. We’re taught by pious professors that no such thing as truth really exists—only “narratives,” all equally valid—but Jews, surrounded by so many threats, can’t afford such mistiness. 

Over the centuries, thinkers have expressed astonishment that the Jewish people, despite perpetual hatred, continue to not only survive, but thrive. Some argue that Jewish success ironically owes something to that hostility—because with it comes the stripping of illusions. So it is today, in the terrible aftermath of October 7. As another guest in that sukkah said: We go on living. We have no other choice. 

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”