I thought America was different. I think most of us did.
I grew up with a mother who emigrated from Uzbekistan to live in the USA. My mother had lived through Communism and its chokehold on the USSR. Israel is what enabled her family to leave- getting them out. But she told me stories of growing up surrounded by virulently antisemitic Muslims who wanted her and all Jews dead.
I thought she exaggerated. I thought she was wrong.
So it was I who was surprised by October 7. I who was surprised by Jew-hunting mobs in Dagestan, searching airplanes for Israelis to kill. I who was surprised when my Serbian Uber driver told me that while he did not agree with the Jew-hunt the Muslims in Dagestan went on, he "understood their actions."
I was surprised because America was the land of promise. The melting pot, where we could all live together. All thrive.
But my mother was not surprised. She was not surprised when her cousins, who had also emigrated from Uzbekistan in hopes of a better life, were murdered at Ofakim by the same Jew-haters they had sought to flee. She was not surprised by the mobs in America chanting "From the River to the Sea." She was sad, but not surprised.
An illiberal idea has taken hold of America. An idea that, as the journalist Haviv Rettig Gur puts it, upholds "moral cartoons." In this cartoon, we shrink people and their experiences down to cartoons and caricatures. We look at oppressors and oppressed, sadists and their victims. We don't look at morality or justice- we search only for the weaker party. Then we support them. This makes the people doing this, largely people who live in America or the West, and through that fact alone, experience unbelievable privilege, feel good.
And we are not a melting pot anymore. We have a surfeit of allegiances and identities, and we brandish them in an effort to seize sorrow. It is not a society that promotes agency and achievement- it is a society that is sick, and gluts itself on self pity.
So I have looked for allies in our sick society. And I am disgusted by what I see.
Our leaders are either crass, boorish brutes or panderers with little backbone. I have no interest in either. And increasingly, they are becoming less relevant to me.
The message that is clear to me is that none of these people *are* relevant. There is God. There is only God. He is the only one calling the shots. He is the only one who will determine whether I live or die. He is the one who will determine whether and when we rescue the hostages. The most effective thing I can do is pray. Humans are disappointing. God is not.
Of course, we must take action. We must talk to, plead with elected officials. Advocate for our positions. Try to effect change through natural means. But it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that natural means will not be how we win.
Israel has already received the world's hatred, recrimination and rancor for its response to an event no other country would let stand. Hundreds of people, including a TODDLER and an INFANT, remain prisoners in Gaza. Eventually, Israel will be abandoned by its allies. But none of this matters.
As David said when he fought Goliath, "You come at me with a sword, a spear and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, who you have taunted. This day God will deliver you into my hand, and I will kill you, and remove your head from your body, and I will feed your corpse to the carrion birds and the wild beasts, that the whole earth may know that there is a God in Israel.”
And there is a God. And He is stronger than the hatred of evil men, the arming of violent rapists, and the calumny of a world gone mad. I don't trust in men. I don't trust in nations. I don't even trust in my country. I trust in God, only God, and I will live to see my trust rewarded.
Thank you for this!
More of this!!