Horrors and miracles - The Jewish Standard

We are now a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

A century ago, in 1925, the world already had been through the Great War — later demoted to World War I, because in 1925 no one could have imagined the Holocaust, the bomb, or the other horrors of World War II. (This is not to understate the horrors of World War I; trench warfare sounds like a dress rehearsal for what was to come.)

The world also had been through the influenza epidemic that killed about 50 million people, disproportionately many of them young, until it eventually withered away, unable to find enough victims. (Estimates say that about 16 million people died as a result of World War I; that’s a horrifying number, although far smaller than the number dead by disease.)

Much horror lay ahead in that century, as well as some miracles. The state of Israel was born, and so were computers, at least as we know them today — the abacus is far older — and toward the very end of the century, the internet and what we called the World Wide Web.

Our century began with the terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in an attack that was unimaginable until it happened; we lived then in a state of innocence that it’s hard to imagine now. Wars against Islamists, fought with hideous brutality, kept going, even as they moved from country to country, and eventually out of the headlines. In this country, polarization became worse and worse; years ago, political scientists predicted that the way primary elections unfold, with the candidate farthest to the fringe most likely to win, eventually would lead to trouble. They were right. It did.

We lived through the pandemic; that is, if you’re reading this, you did. More than 1,200,000 Americans did not; around the world, an estimated 7 million people died of covid.

More than 1,200 Israelis, visitors to Israel, and workers in Israel were slaughtered by barbarians — a true description of Hamas — on October 7; about 250 were taken hostage, some of them have been slaughtered, some died of starvation and deprivation, and some are still alive but are languishing unrescued in Gaza. Almost 2,000 Israelis have been killed fighting in Gaza or in Israel’s north, and many thousands of Palestinians also have died. Despite what we’re sometimes told, the war shows no sign of ending, although eventually it must end.

We also have seen miracles, albeit with unexpected consequences. The increasing miniaturization of powerful computers have led to the power of social media, among other things; it also allows us to pull up facts to put in, say, editorials, without having to go to a library or an archive or do anything more than google.

There are some people still alive now who were born in 1925, or even earlier, but it is fair to say that none of that rapidly dwindling group remembers life a century ago.

There is some irony to President Jimmy Carter dying this week; he turned 100 on October 1. His legacy in the Jewish world is complicated — he brokered the Camp David Accords in 1978, he called Israel an apartheid state in 2006, he apologized for that in 2009. His interaction with Israeli leaders was far too complex to be described here, but it is fair to say that despite having been born in a town unlikely to have been home to many Jews, at a time when the Jews in the Deep South did not flourish — Leo Frank was lynched in Georgia, Jimmy Carter’s home state, just nine years before the future president was born — Mr. Carter spent a great deal of his time with Jews or thinking about them.

We cannot imagine with any accuracy what the next quarter of a century will bring. The world is changing so quickly, and we appear to be living at a time of major shifts, that any kind of certainty would be ridiculous.

But we can and do hope that somehow the good — the improvements in medicine, in technology, in our understanding of the world around us — will overcome the hatreds that live in dark, dank places.

We know that life generally isn’t binary, but still, we hope and pray that good will prevail.

—JP

Opinion

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