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.
The explosion of antisemitism after October 7 bodes ill for everyone, not just the Jews. That’s because the fundamental Jewish values — biblical faith; a reverence for tradition; the preservation of the family; national solidarity; the protection of state borders; attachment to the land of one’s ancestors — are the basic values of Western civilisation. I’m reminded of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s chilling prophecy, in his 1846 book Two Ages, that the late-modern phenomenon of levelling — the ongoing destruction of the organic communities which have sustained human beings for millennia — is “a demon that no individual can control”. He predicted that levelling will be a global phenomenon, driven by an ideological abstraction so extreme as to be utterly devoid of ethical and political content. “Not even national individuality will be able to halt it,” he wrote, “for the abstraction of levelling is related to a higher negativity: pure humanity.” It is this utterly vacuous concept — pure humanity, without respect for actually existing individuals and the thick bonds of family, congregation, locality, and peoplehood of which their lives are woven — that animates the angry mobs of atomised Westerners whose call to “globalise the intifada” expresses their implicit desire to destroy civilisation as such.
That nihilistic desire springs, in large part, from a failure to transmit the precious wisdom of our ancestors “from generation to generation” (l’dor vador in Hebrew). The result has been widespread cultural forgetfulness concerning the conditions of a decent human life. But Western antisemitism seems to be rooted in another kind of forgetfulness as well, one bordering on the psychological category of repression. We human beings perversely find it difficult to forgive others for the wrongs we’ve done them. Instead of paying our moral debts, we prefer to let them slip from memory while fabricating justifications for doing so. For some Europeans, the guilt of the Holocaust is assuaged by associating Israelis with Nazis and accusing them of genocide.
The Islamist enemies of Israel are consumed with bitterness and envy. Their goal, a demonic inversion of good and evil, is purely negative. They remember — and in a perverse manner observe — the Jewish holy days. The unspeakable atrocities of October 7 occurred on Simchat Torah, the celebration of the completion of the annual liturgical cycle of public Torah readings. Hamas’s barbaric attack was explicitly directed against Judaism as well as Jews.
What Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and the other Islamist enemies of Israel have forgotten is that God chose the Jews to be a light unto the nations. Dispersed throughout the world, their light seems small and weak when times are good, but shines most brightly in the deepest darkness. The attacks of October 7 have stirred in the Jews — Hasidic and atheistic; Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic; Indian, Chinese, Australian, and American — what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory”. Today, in an existential crisis that may turn out to be the denouement of the central drama of Western civilisation, these unwilling protagonists — the whole people of Israel — are determined to defend themselves and the light they carry.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/