Some memories can be lethal to the psyche. Every reader of the Bible knows that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt, the stuff of tears, when she turned to face the firestorm engulfing Sodom. Who can blame her for disregarding the angel’s warning: Get Out, Don’t Look Back? She must have been grieving the daughters she had left behind, whose husbands had laughed in disbelief when their father-in-law told them of God’s plan to destroy the city. These women wouldn’t be the last in the line of Abraham who perished because their families failed to appreciate the seriousness of their predicament.
It’s a risky business for a people to remember the grievous wounds they have suffered, especially when they are still raw and the evil that would destroy them rages on. But tomorrow, Israelis and diaspora Jews will be compelled to think about the mass murders, tortures, rapes, and kidnappings that 6,000 Gazan invaders perpetrated a year ago. On the liturgical anniversary of the deaths of 1,200 victims, relatives will say Yahrzeit prayers to commemorate them. And even secular Jews will pause to grieve an event that plunged Israel into a war on multiple fronts and ignited worldwide displays of antisemitism.
The Jews have more to forget about than any people in history: captivities and resettlements, expulsions, confiscations, pogroms, and genocide. Yet for three millennia, they’ve displayed a miraculous capacity to overcome hardships and begin anew. Their irrepressible life-force has repeatedly helped them forget the immediate past and rebuild shattered lives.
But the rising waters of forgetfulness can be as perilous as those of memory. Israeli leaders and security officials forgot the measureless hatred and viciousness of those running Gaza and Lebanon. Diaspora Jews, at least in Anglophone nations, foolishly convinced themselves that antisemitism was a thing of the past. Both groups, exemplified in this respect by the young doves who celebrated “friends, love and infinite freedom” at the Supernova music festival where 364 people were murdered, let their wish to live in peace and security be father to the thought that their goal was virtually at hand.
In the United States, many Jews on the Left implicitly forgot their faith when they embraced identitarian progressivism. Since the days of the prophet Isaiah, Judaism has emphasised care for the poor, the oppressed, the widow and the orphan. To many Jews, explanatory frameworks such as critical race theory and intersectionality seemed to advance these noble aims. During Obama’s presidency, social justice activism began to invade American synagogue services. But when the people these Jews had mistaken for allies vigorously supported Hamas after October 7, it became impossible to ignore the fact that progressive ideology is fundamentally antisemitic.
How does it feel for Jews to realise that their supposed friends effectively wish them ill? More or less, I’d say, like the survivor Simon Srebnik felt when he returned to Chelmno decades after the Nazis exterminated 400,000 Jews in that Polish village. In a scene in the epic Holocaust documentary Shoah, Srebnik is surrounded by old men and women who remember him walking in chains as a teenager and are “very pleased” to see him again. They are standing outside a church where Jews were imprisoned before being gassed. A woman states that the doomed Jews “called on Jesus and Mary and God” for salvation; a man says that, when “the Jews condemned the innocent Christ to death”, they cried out “Let his blood fall on our heads and on our sons’ heads”. Srebnik smiles stiffly as they justify the persecution he suffered as a Jew even as they express affection for him.
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SubscribeAs a non-Jew I have yet to read an Islamist or Progressive argument that is as convincing as this article. The Jewish Tribe will win this war because their opponents don’t think of the future or the past but act on base motives and superstition.