It’s pretty bad out there - The Jewish Standard

It would be so wonderful to be able to write about unicorns and puppies.

It’s glorious autumn outside; the unseasonable warmth allows us to be out more and glory in it.

That’s real — but it’s hardly the point. What is the point is that the world at large, and our part of it in particular, seems to be going through paroxysms of fear, rage, and horror.

To some extent, we know — and we know particularly as Jews, heirs to millennia of history — that history cycles. We’ve been living through unprecedentedly good times. It’s human to hope they continue, but it might be Jewish to know that they won’t — and that eventually they’ll be back. (Yes, we might all be dead by then, it might be generations from now, but it did take the Israelites 400 years in Egypt and another 40 wandering in the desert, so whatever…)

We Boomers and even Gen Xers grew up believing that history generally moved in one direction. Upward. That had been our experience. After World War II and the Holocaust, progress meant that things just were getting better. Yes, bad things happened — Korea, Vietnam, assassinations, segregation, September 11 — because progress wasn’t ever going to be one straight line, but still, as Martin Luther King Jr. told us, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

But does it?

The results of last week’s election show us to be a nation not only divided but at each other’s throats. That’s true not only in general but in the Jewish world too. Trump voters cannot understand why his detractors don’t understand that the father and grandfather of Jews cannot be an antisemite, that his love for Israel is true, and that as a businessman he will help the economy. Harris voters cannot understand why his supporters don’t fear the hatred, cruelty, and full-on insanity that is about to be unleashed, why his soon-to-be-vaporized legal problems aren’t red flags, and his convictions aren’t disqualifying. (And then there are his likely appointments; it’s less pleasant to think about unicorns and puppies when thinking about puppies makes you think about Kristi Noem, his DHS choice.)

And then there’s the Jewish part.

The concerted, brutal attacks on Israelis in Amsterdam are disgusting and horrifying. Although there are some vitally important differences between what happened there now and during World War II — there is an Israel, and it can and did get the Jews out of there, and while the police might not have been as vigilant as they could have been, officially the Netherlands is on the side of the Israelis and the Jews, not the thugs. But such attacks happening in the city where Anne Frank hid until she was captured, imprisoned, and died — and one of the attacks happening at the house where she hid — is the most repellent of ironies.

And now it’s happening here.

Not with the brutality of Amsterdam. It’s comparatively tamer here.

But look at the photographs from the protest in Bergenfield on Sunday. Look at the faces of the anti-Israel demonstrators. Look, particularly, at the expression — a smirk? a snarl? — on the face of the woman brandishing a picture of Hitler.

There are qustion about that protest. Where did the protesters come from? Not from Bergenfield. Who got Neturei Karta there, and why? What else could the police have done? Can we ever live together in peace again?

One thing that seems clear from all of this is that we in the Jewish community cannot afford to hate each other. Much as we might detest each other’s choices, we cannot detest each other. We’ve got the whole world ready to do that for us.

—JP

Opinion

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