On our way to the airport to fly back to Cincinnati, we kept saying to each other that we have to turn back. How can we leave with these babies in Gaza, as if by being in Israel we were somehow attached and could perhaps, in some measure, give them protection, if in no other way then through our prayers.
Now we’re here in Cincinnati amidst family and friends, my team at work gets to see my face, and yet my wife and I are homesick for Israel. We hold these necklaces that say “Bring Them Home,” close to our hearts, these necklaces that represent our hopes and prayers for our hostages. And we cry our prayers.
We’re returning to Israel tomorrow. My wife was cooking in a kitchen, preparing hot food for the soldiers and displaced families. It was prepared with love and tears for, as she said, “How will I know if they will return?” I have my soldiers to look after as head of Nahal Haredi (we support Haredi soldiers in IDF), and I guess the truth is, that’s where our hearts are. But before we go a parting word.
This war has unleashed evil. It’s not just the evil that you think, that monstrous blight on civilization called Hamas (which in Hebrew means violence). No, it is the evil that comes when civilization becomes untethered from morality. “Cry havoc and loose the dogs of war,” those terrible beasts that kill for the joy of killing. In our world, in these days, these beasts have taken human form.
Nor is the war confined to Israel. There is a worldwide march of the forces of evil against their perennial foe, the Jew. And it’s right here in River City! Campus harassment of Jewish students is following the national pattern where our universities, citadels of intellectual dissimulation hiding political and social agendas in the fabric of free speech and intellectual freedom, are educating our children that black is white, good is evil, and the values that built our country are specious and need to be overturned. And these same intellectuals inform our media and instruct many in government.
At UC, my alma mater, the student union voted 26 to 4, passing a resolution condemning Israel for what happened to them on October 7th and sanctifying Hamas. Is that crazy? No, just a symptom of a problem.
With the majority of students feeling this way, we’re not talking about a bad president here or there, though, for sure, they’re culpable, along with their boards. It’s indicative of a deterioration in the value system that built those very institutions. After all, Harvard began as a Divinity School.
We’ve lost our connection to universal truths and the concept of right and wrong. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. We then created a Constitution based on these truths, in large part taken from the Hebrew Bible. In those heady days of establishing the foundations of our country, and for most of the last several thousand years we believed that it was self-evident that these rights were bestowed upon us by a Creator, not made up at a conclave of the wise and wonderful, or in a university think tank, nor voted on by Congress. Those rights came with responsibilities and consequences when behavior crossed the line.
You may ask, “but why pick out the Jews?” Many reasons are given, religious and, more recently, racial. There was a time when we were a hated minority. Now that minority status is a badge of honor we’ve become part of the white overlords. Now it’s “Israel” and, by extension, all Jews. We’ve become the enemy. It doesn’t matter. Times change; reasons change; but in the end it boils down to one problem. We’re labeled by the Bible as the Chosen People, the people who have carried the banner of G-d’s morality through the ages at great cost, and occasionally, we Jews are made to remember who we are, where we came from and to ask serious questions about “Who am I? What do I stand for? Where do I belong?”
You might not agree with that label nor want to be included under its rubric. It doesn’t matter, because “they” believe it and they don’t care whether you’re Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or just a plain, bagel eating Jew. They lump us all in the same category and, in extremis, send us to the gas chambers and crematoria, or more recently, behead our babies and rape our beautiful daughters before brutally killing them.
Fortunately, there is a remedy. Just stay on mission! That mission is to be a “Light unto the Nations.” It doesn’t mean that we can fix all the world’s problems, that’s not our job. Our job is to light the way, and show the world that the morality we Jews represent, the absolute right and wrong, good and evil of the Bible, works.
Our Sages teach us that the beginning of wisdom is fear of Heaven. They also state that Tikun HaOlam, fixing the world begins with Yiras Shomayim, Fear of Heaven. What it means is that the prerequisite for wisdom is understanding our place in the cosmos. We have a choice, we’re the boss, or we subjugate ourselves to “The Boss,” the Master of the Universe. If we put ourselves as the arbiter of right and wrong, then we get the world as we have it, school shootings, massive deaths from drug overdose, teen suicides and a student population that believes that the Hamas massacre on October 7th was justified. We live in a world of competing narratives, which means my narrative is just as good as yours. There is no clarity to right and wrong because “it all depends on context.”
The other option is to hold onto what sustained us through the ages, the Torah that we held close to our breast and sang and dance with on that Simchat Torah, now called the Black Sabbath of October 7th. It was that Torah that Hamas attacked, even though the actual targets were left wing Kibbutzim, where many members believed in and worked for Palestinian rights. One of the hostages actually took sick Gazan children to Israeli hospitals for treatment, irony of ironies. For Hamas, we all represent evil, something to be debauched and destroyed.
If we want things to change, we must first change. Shucks, if they’re gonna hang us, we might as well hang for being a Jew who stands for what we as a people always stood for. Fortunately, we now have Israel, which has shown us that we no longer have to cower in corners, we don’t have to, once again, leave Anatevka. The United States of America has been a Malchus shel Chesed, a Kingdom of loving kindness for the Jews, and we owe it to our country to do our job. So, let’s stand together, stand for the morality of our Torah, insist on our rights as citizens of this great country and work with our many allies to right the ship. Let’s start with UC and clean up our little part of the world so our students are once again honored, respected, and part of the community of good that a university should be.
As for my wife and me; we’re going home tomorrow!