THREE GREAT TRUTHS
Three ideas that have permanently changed the way I understand the world.
The past three years have been world-altering for Jewish people and those who care about them.
As a non-Jew who has been immersed in the Jewish community where I live for about half my life, the months since October 7, 2023, have been profound in so many ways.
My work life has changed as I have gone from being a relatively passive reporter for Jewish media and an apparatchik in Jewish (and other) nonprofit organizations to becoming a far more public advocate against antisemitism and antizionism. Suddenly, I am getting invitations to speak before audiences where I would once have been in the audience, taking notes.
My social life has shifted no less significantly. Some of my oldest friends are now former friends, after they chose to side with rapists, baby beheaders, and kidnappers, rather than with those advancing peace, coexistence, nonviolence, and antiracism.
A larger number of my friends are no longer people I bother with, not because they have explicitly advanced despicable ideas, but because they have chosen to remain silent.
To be my friend now, to put a claim on my time, now requires a commitment — evidence of a proactive stand, however modest, indicating empathy for Jewish people and Israelis. If you haven’t demonstrated that, I don’t have the time for you.
Above all, at my advanced age, I have come to a number of life-altering realizations.
Three things in particular have become pillars of principle for me, the Three Great Truths that I probably always knew but which have been conclusively proven in the past three years.
Looking back over the (literally) hundreds of thousands of words I’ve disgorged since October 7, I realize almost all of them reflect these three principles.
First:
“When people tell you they want to kill you, believe them.”
The quote is commonly attributed to Elie Wiesel. Whether he phrased it exactly this way matters less than the underlying truth. Civilized people have an extraordinary tendency to explain away uncivilized intentions. We see threats of genocide and justify them with a bunch of unconvincing excuses.
“They don’t really mean it.”
“It’s just rhetoric.”
“It’s for domestic consumption.”
“It’s symbolic.”
“They’re expressing frustration.”
History suggests otherwise.
Hitler wrote a book. Hamas wrote a charter. Iranian leaders repeatedly speak about vaporizing Israel. Hezbollah tells us exactly what it believes. ISIS publishes magazines explaining what it intends to do.
They mean it.
And, while the terrorists who are most devoted to genocide of Jews have always promised rivers of blood, I and many others, I guess, always depended on the Israel Defence Forces to stand in their way. (This, BTW, is why I, who have always been basically a pacifist, now believe an armed-to-the-teeth Israel is the only thing standing in the way of another genocide of Jews.)
The IDF failed to hold back the forces of genocide on October 7 — something that will probably not be addressed appropriately until Israel has a new government that is not afraid of the answers an inquiry into this disaster might bring. But that’s not my main point here.
While the IDF eventually managed to prevent the wider genocide the terrorists imagined beginning that day, the world responded in ways that have shaken people like me to our cores.
They invented a fake genocide. And they chant “Globalize the intifada,” which is a call for worldwide genocide of Jews. (For the idiots in the back: They do really mean it. It’s not just rhetoric. It is for domestic consumption — ours. It’s not symbolic. They’re not expressing frustration. They’re expressing a familiar call for the extermination of Jews.)
And if you are silent in this moment, you are not my friend. But that, obviously, is the very least of your problems.
One of civilization’s recurring mistakes is assuming violent people are speaking metaphorically.
The worst atrocities in history did not happen because people failed to hear threats. They happened because people chose not to believe them.
October 7 should have buried that habit forever.
It didn’t.
Second:
“Yes, it is possible for the whole world to be wrong.”
I don’t know who first said those exact words. I do know that history demonstrates them again and again.
At times, pretty much everyone believed the Earth stood still and everything rotated around us. Almost everyone believed slavery was a natural state of human affairs. Almost everyone believed women shouldn’t vote.
Today, ubiquity is all the proof people require to believe the most outrageous lies. Near-unanimity, which should set off alarm bells for conscientious people, instead acts as a recruitment tool for braying mobs. The more people believe horrific fabrications about Israelis (and Jews) the more bystanders conclude they must be right.
Ergo …
“But the whole world says Israel is committing genocide.”
Entire societies once believed Jews poisoned wells. They believed the blood libels that Jews kill gentile babies and consume their blood. They believed Alfred Dreyfus was guilty. They swallowed race “science” because it was swaddled in the garments of modern ideas. They observed Jews disappearing from their villages and society and found ways to explain why intervention was impossible.
Mass graves are filled with the victims of majority opinion.
There is something deeply comforting about believing that if everyone agrees, everyone must be right.
Reality offers no such guarantee.
Civilizations are capable of collective wisdom. They are also capable of collective delusion.
Today, the whole world is wrong. The UN, Amnesty International, the professoriate, your green-haired niece.
And those who are the actual voices of morality and truth are called “genocide-deniers” and “baby-killers.”
That doesn’t make us wrong and them right.
It makes us the huddled protectors of civilizational values and them the barbarian hordes charging the gates of our battered redoubt.
Third:
Given the choice between laughing and crying… Laugh.
I have no idea who first expressed this idea. I know only that Jews perfected it.
I do not mean to diminish the seriousness or magnitude of this moment, but how else do you explain a civilization that produced the Book of Lamentations and Mel Brooks?
Laughter is not denial. It is defiance.
Humor says something no tyrant can tolerate: “You have not conquered my spirit.”
Throughout history, Jews have buried loved ones, rebuilt communities, fled persecution, crossed continents, survived inquisitions, pogroms and genocide…
…and somehow still managed to tell jokes.
One of the darkest, most defiant Jewish/Israeli jokes of the modern era is from the time of the Second Intifada.
To get the joke, you first need to know that Israeli students, like Jewish young people from the diaspora, routinely travel to the death camps of Europe on historical excursions.
A woman hears news of a suicide bombing at her niece’s favorite cafe. She frantically calls her sister. “Is Anat alright?” the aunt asks frantically.
“Oh, she’s fine,” replies the girl’s mother. “She’s in Auschwitz.”
This shocking, unexpected punchline is a kick in the face of fate, a moral triumph over both the enemies of the present and of the past.
A joke refuses to grant evil the dignity it demands.
There is something profoundly Jewish about answering despair with wit.
Not because suffering is funny. But because suffering doesn’t deserve the final word.
That is why I have increasingly tried to write with a certain amount of humor, even while discussing antisemitism.
People sometimes ask how I can joke about subjects this serious.
Because the alternative is surrender.
Hatred wants to occupy your imagination completely.
Humor refuses to surrender the space.
Looking at these three principles together, they are all really saying the same thing.
See reality as it is, not as you wish it were.
Believe people when they reveal themselves.
Question fashionable consensus.
Refuse to surrender your joy.
The first principle reminds us not to be naïve.
The second reminds us not to be intimidated.
The third reminds us not to become bitter.
Taken together, they amount to a remarkably practical philosophy.
Take evil seriously.
Take crowds skeptically.
Take yourself lightly.
I can’t think of a better survival guide for the strange historical moment we’re living through.
Or, for that matter, for life itself.
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Pat I read all your posts. You understand our reality to the nth degree which I can’t explain. No matter- this post is the most concentrated truth I’ve read since October 7. There are no “what abouts” which is a true deep inhalation of moral clarity. We also seek humour because we love life and the cosmic beauty that gives us freedom of will to laugh. How can I feel love about words on Substack?? That’s also pretty funny😂😍
Liberators found the following prayer crumpled among the remains of the Ravensbruck concentration camp where Nazis exterminated nearly 50,000 women:
“O Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill, but also those of ill will. But do not remember the suffering they have inflicted upon us. Remember the fruits we brought thanks to this suffering—our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, the courage, the generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of this. And when they come to judgment, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.“
Constantinople was once Christian, now is Istanbul. Lebanon was once Christian, known as “Paris of the Middle East,” full of shops and cafes, now it’s known as something far worse.
So sad what the weak and hypocritical leaders have allowed, and the fools who drank the BS Kool-aid.