And if not now, when?
On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, I spoke of the moral legitimacy, indeed necessity, of honoring our own self-interest as Jews. “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I spoke of the moral legitimacy, indeed necessity, of recognizing and honoring the human needs of others, even of others—especially of others—with whom we are engaged in deadly conflict. We do this not only because as human beings, they have an inalienable right to that respect; but equally important, because we diminish our own humanity if we denigrate theirs. “If I am only for myself, what am I?”
Tonight, I will address the concluding trope of that famous mishnah. You all know it: “If not now, when?”
But what does that mean? If not what now? What is it that we are supposed to do now, with such implied urgency? The text itself does not say. But I say: If we do not look at the world as Jews now, if we do not think as Jews now, if we do not act as Jews now, when will we ever do so? I can think of no situation more demanding of our spiritual depth, our mental skills, and our passionate solidarity than the situation in which we find ourselves right now. And if we are not prepared to Jew up now, G-d help us.
What does it mean to Jew up? It means first of all to recognize that modern American pragmatic fantasies to the contrary, the world is a complex place, where choices are often not between right and wrong but between wrong and even more wrong. Consider the Talmud. In its 2000 pages, there is not a single page that does not contain an intellectually deep and morally ambivalent argument. But in regard to Gaza, everybody imagines it’s a problem for which there is a right solution, if only we could get there. Let me clarify why there isn’t.
Here are your choices: you can a) risk the lives of the hostages, b) risk the lives of the brave soldiers of the IDF, of whom nearly a thousand have already been killed, c) maintain the war in the quixotic quest to continue the fighting until Hamas is utterly obliterated down to the last man, d) only to rise up again in some new configuration the very first time some kid gets on Palestinian TV and brags about how his mission in life is to kill as many Jews as possible, and in the process e) alienate not just the rest of the world—probably a lost cause in any case—but f) alienate generations of young Jews who will see the continued war as a confirmation of the world’s worst slanders of the Jewish people, not to mention g) tearing apart the body politic in Israel.
Some solution.
Or….you can bend over backwards to ransom the remaining hostages, at the price of a) releasing thousands of murderers who will b) enthusiastically rejoin Hamas which will c) celebrate its victory over the Jews and d) starting gearing up for Oct. 7 2.0—as they have publicly and repeatedly sworn to do. And if you think that won’t happen, allow me to remind you that it already did. Yahya Sinwar, yemach shmo, the mastermind of Oct. 7, was released in exactly the same kind of prisoner exchange a few years ago. As Faulkner wrote, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result. Oh, and what all that means is that e) you have to tell Ayelet Shmuel, about whom I spoke on Rosh Hashanah, she who insisted “I will not live like this,” you have to be the one to tell her: “Oh yes you will, you and the rest of Israel with you.”
Some solution.
Which is the right choice? I have no earthly idea. And neither should any serious Jew. But don’t worry. AOC knows. So does Marjorie Taylor Green. And President Trump. And Tucker Carlson. And the UN, Amnesty International, and the New York Times. They all know. Sure. The one thing I can tell you without any shadow of a doubt is that whichever choice you make, you’re wrong. You may not be as wrong as the other guy, but you’re still wrong.
What would I personally do? I am reminded of the story of an Israeli politician during a similar hostage situation in the past. She was asked what she would do if it were her kid who was kidnapped. She answered, “I would stand outside the Knesset with the protesters demanding that Israel make every possible concession to get the hostages back; and then I would take to the podium in the Knesset and urge my colleagues not to listen to the people who were protesting outside.”
So point one: recognize, and reconcile yourself to, the reality of moral complexity, and leave the sound bites, cartoons, memes, tweets, and talking heads behind.
The second point: Jews need to be more concerned with being alive than with being loved. If not now, when? We take note, for example, of those who in their infinite wisdom have decided that Israel should be cut off from offensive weapons. They believe that this will temper the military force Israel is exerting on Gaza. Spoiler alert: it won’t. The irrationality and immorality of this policy boggles the mind, and I will take a few moments to unpack it. First, this policy sends an unmistakable message to Hamas—keep doing exactly what you are doing, and we will weaken Israel for you. Hamas will most assuredly oblige. Second, and more important, is the utterly unrealistic distinction between offensive and defensive weapons. Consider this: Right now, as I speak, my daughter Dahlia is 11 miles from Syria, currently under the leadership of an ISIS terrorist. 11 miles is less than the distance from this shul to the Concordia Shopping Center. So the policy geniuses in Washington are of the opinion that if ISIS should threaten to attack Israel and lines up at the border, getting ready for Oct. 7 2.0 Syrian edition, it would somehow be sufficient to supply Israel with the defensive weapons that maybe, hopefully, can within say a half an hour deflect and turn back a well-planned 11 mile incursion. Maybe. Hopefully.
Thanks a lot.
I beg to differ. I want the Israelis to have enough offensive weaponry to blow those threatening to attack Israel to the other side of the moon.
It’s bad enough when the people supporting this madness are non-Jewish congressmen like our own Bonnie Watson-Coleman, from Trenton, New Jersey, or on the other side of the spectrum, Marjorie Taylor Green, from Double-Digit-IQ ,Georgia. And the very fact that you could have an unholy alliance like that from right and left should tell you there’s something wrong with this picture. Nothing unites right and left better than contempt for Jewish lives. But—and this is the crucial point—when the people supporting this meshugas are Jews endangering the lives of Jews, like Senators Jeremy Raskin or Bernie Sanders, we have a Jewish problem much greater than mere military tactics along the border.
The Talmud teaches, “When someone seeks to kill you, you must—I repeat, you must—rise up to kill them first.” It’s not “nice,” in the way our Jewish mothers taught us to be nice. That’s too bad. The time for nice is over. That ended on Oct. 7. Or more specifically in the aftermath of Oct. 7 when we were betrayed by so many of our supposed allies. We have spent way too much time seeking to be loved. Now, I am not ashamed to say, it is time to be feared—not by innocent Palestinian women and children, I hasten to point out, but by politicians and diplomats who expect us to come hat in hand and beg to be treated nicely as human beings. Recognizing that is the second crucial choice that needs to be seriously considered tonight. We may have all sorts of justifiable critiques of the destruction of Gaza. So be it. But in the future, Hamas reborn will suggest attacking Israel once again. If some Palestinian finally grows a backbone and says “Are you crazy? Don’t you remember what happens when we try to kill Jews?” it will all have been worth it. So the second point: proudly embrace the mitzvah of self-preservation.
A third point: for G-d’s sake, stop believing every single lie you hear about Israel. We’re supposed to be smarter than this, with an acute, and uniquely Jewish moral sensibility and a broad historical perspective based on our 4000 years of experience. Recognize the truth and proclaim it. If not now, when? The media echo chamber reverberates with studies and learned proclamations from so-called human rights groups. Which add their own anti-Semitic biases to the information that has been spoon fed to them by Hamas—exactly as trustworthy a source as the Stasi secret police of East Germany. How could supposedly intelligent Jews, with even an iota of a sense of Jewish history, possibly be so naive?
Let me take just one glaring example, the recent UN Human Rights Council’s report on Gaza, which found, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that Israel was committing genocide. Here’s what that report leaves out, according to the wonderful insights of John Spencer, arguably the world’s foremost expert on urban warfare. The UN report never describes Hamas as a military force with tens of thousands of fighters and an elaborate infrastructure. It never mentions Hamas rocket launchers, command posts, or tunnel entrances, all hidden in civilian areas. It mentions the word tunnel exactly once, in 80 pages, but only to question whether Sinwar was killed in one. It never mentions the way Hamas illegally and immorally embeds itself within civilian infrastructure, even though we now know that virtually every school, hospital, and mosque was transformed by Hamas into a hub, and therefore legitimate military target. It describes Oct. 7 –if I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’–as an Israeli assault on Gaza, not a Hamas attack on Israel. And the word “hostages” appears only 4 times, either peripherally, or to deny that freeing them is a legitimate strategic objective for Israel. Finally, it omits entirely any mention of the 2 million tons of aid Israel has delivered into Gaza, or the two million vaccinations for children, and on and on.
This report could be compared to a description of computers that never mentions the terms CPU, RAM or Hard Drive. Someone described the impact of these distortions this way: imagine a video of a prize fight where one of the fighters was digitally edited out. All that would be left would be a single boxer making all sorts of violent and incomprehensible moves.
We must not underestimate the power of this intentional distortion. The impact is to portray Israel as obsessed with violence, attacking innocent Palestinian civilians and only innocent Palestinian civilians because there are only innocent Palestinian civilians, and doing this out of irrational genocidal hate.
This disgusting disinformation is not random. If you Jew up and activate your Jewish historical sensibilities, you will realize that this report has intentionally manipulated its readers into echoing the very earliest, most pervasive, and most dangerous of anti-Semitic stereotypes: the Hellenistic calumny of Jews being brutish misanthropes, haters of mankind; the Christian insistence that Jews, like our supposedly wrathful Old Testament G-d, are obsessed with violence and hatred; and the medieval blood libel that we wish to wallow in, indeed drink, the blood of our enemies. Especially children.
And Jews—supposedly educated and discerning, the intellectual elite, or so we keep telling ourselves—we buy into this garbage?! We trust them rather than our selves? Shame on us. Let us remember that the very concept of genocide was invented by one of our own, Raphael Lemkin. And when he did so, he envisioned hundreds of thousands of Jewish children lining up to be shot by Nazis. He did not envision hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children lining up to get the polio shots facilitated by Israel.
If we do not develop a heightened sense of Jewish history and Jewish moral exactitude now, if we do not engage with the great ideas that have been our gift to the world, when will we?
And that brings me to a fourth point. We have every reason in the world to ignore the hypocrites and blood libelers who slander us. We must rely on our own moral judgments. But with that insistence on going it alone, we bear an awesome responsibility to keep ourselves in line morally. We have to be able to trust ourselves. And that includes, if necessary, raking our own moral, spiritual, and political Jewish leadership over the coals if they succumb to immoral temptations, or, spin in obviously disingenuous ways, or frankly, lie. The classic joke says that if a politician’s lips are moving, he’s lying. We can’t afford that. This is beneath us. As Seth Eisenberg recently wrote—and I envy him for his succinct formulation: “The world will continue to judge us…But we must judge ourselves with the integrity that power demands. The soul work [that’s s-o-u-l work] of a sovereign people is to ensure that our might never outpaces our moral imagination.” Let me say that again: “The soul work of a sovereign people is to ensure that our might never outpaces our moral imagination.”
Finally, and perhaps most important, we must remember that being Jewish is not ultimately about defending ourselves from accusations of genocide. Being Jewish means celebrating our holidays, reveling in our children, dancing at our weddings, engaging with our sacred texts, seeking to bring kedushah, holiness, into every space we inhabit and every activity in which we partake, and finding it in the face of every human being we see.
So here we find ourselves on the Day of Atonement, balancing and debating, trying desperately to find our footing in moral quicksand. Insisting on our right to live without apology, while recognizing the rights of others to live as well. Accepting the necessity for strength, while accepting the responsibility that goes with it. Ignoring the world and its lies, while demanding of ourselves a searing confrontation with the truth. Celebrating our power, while remembering that power brings with it the possibility of abuse. And above all, above all, finding the strength and vitality, in the midst of all the horror and all the complexity, to dance again as proud and engaged Jews. We must fight the good fight, to be sure, but do so not with grim resignation but rather with inexhaustible hope. And speaking of hope, tomorrow, at Yizkor, I will offer for your consideration what may be the single most hopeful thing you have ever heard in your life.
In the meantime, just Jew up.
If not now, when?