The Jewish community is in a state of high anxiety and exhaustion. How much more bad news can we take?
Before we dive into it, let me tell you about a Saturday night ritual my friend and distinguished UCLA professor Judea Pearl started a couple of years ago.
It’s a simple idea: Jews who love Israel get together and sing some old Israeli songs.
We also recite the Havdalah blessings to mark the end of Shabbat, share stories and break bread.
It’s the singing, though, that really animates the gathering.
Judea, who is a longtime choir director and has a deep knowledge of Israeli music, pretty much runs the show. Thanks to this weekly ritual, I have rediscovered songs I haven’t heard since my childhood days at a Zionist summer camp in Montreal.
Why am I bringing up this happy stuff in a column about Jewish anxiety and exhaustion?
Because many of us who gather Saturday night are also in a state of anxiety and exhaustion. Indeed, our lovely singing is often interrupted by discussion of bad news; in particular, the astonishing rise in anti-Zionism that marks Jewish life today.
No one in the group is against criticism of Israeli policies, just as with any other nation. What sobers us are the lies, the demonization of Israel and the brazen discrimination, best summarized by this number: from 2015 to 2025, the United Nations condemned Israel 173 times, more than all other countries combined.
This kind of unhinged discrimination helps us take things in stride and continue to sing.
We sing no matter what. When the hostages were held in Gaza, we sang in their honor. When another week of bad news hits us, we sing.
Our singing is our fact on the ground.
These days, many of us tend to overlook such positive facts in favor of those that signal danger. That’s a normal human reaction, but maybe there’s something about singing that leads us in a more uplifting direction — to facts that signal not danger but friendship and admiration.
Positive facts, for example, that remind us of the agricultural miracle that fed Israel in its early years; or the desalination miracle that brought clean water to the nation.
If you look at the media today, which we all do, those miracles might as well not exist.
We’ll never hear, for instance, that Israeli NGOs provide humanitarian aid in over 140 countries, spanning Asia, Africa, South America, Oceania, and Europe, with assistance that includes disaster relief, medical support, agriculture, and education.
We’ll never hear, in other words, that the most condemned country on earth does more to help the world than most countries.
Because of security threats that never go away, Israelis are keenly attuned to facts on the ground. Just as they must brave the constant rush to bomb shelters, they know that its primary existential threat, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is significantly weaker today than it was a few years ago. That’s a fact on the ground they appreciate.
Israelis would love to be loved by the world, but they also know it’s more important to be feared by its neighbors, and that one fact on the ground rises above them all.
Israel exists.
Israel is the Jewish answer to 2,000 years of abuse by a world that assumed we would stay intellectually strong but physically weak.
A Jewish nation that can defend itself, whose army is the envy of its enemies, is a remarkable development — an echo of biblical times.
As Israel turns 78, that is one fact we can be grateful for.
Our media-driven lives today take us away from facts on the ground. The news that feeds us lives in the air. Social media lives in the air. The lies live in the air. What takes up most of the space in our brains are narratives that live in the air.
Thus, we can easily lose sight of essential facts that live on the ground, such as Israel’s very existence. That reality makes many of us smile, which is why we call our Saturday night group the “smiling Zionists.”
We have no illusions about the rising threat to Jews around the world; we know there are PR battles Zionists may never win. But we also know that what matters most happens not in the air but on the ground.
No matter how many exhausting battles we must fight, when we gather to sing on Saturday night, we know there’s at least one battle we will always win.
