“When the Lord returned the exiles of Zion,
We were like those who dream”
— Psalm 126
(The Return of the Exiles of Zion, William Brassey Hole)
Waking from a dream can be disorienting.
It has been a week since the hostages came home, a week of strange emotions.
Elation for those who returned, anger for those who did not, fear for whatever is to come – those are but faint echoes of the pangs of the Jewish heart.
A heart filled with emotions like these sometimes wrests control away from the mind.
When working with young kids, they sometimes have “Big Emotions” – emotions they can neither handle nor understand, emotions bigger than their little bodies. And this has been a week of big emotions all around.
When a child has a big emotion, you put a hand on their shoulder and tell them to let it out. You take your time with them, and you make sure that they feel safe.
But the Jewish people will have no time to process these feelings.
Because, as much as this feels like waking from a dream, it’s not. As much as we might like to savor this brief moment of happiness, to bask in a moment of light amid years of darkness, we cannot.
When you awake from a dream, the world is still as it was before.
But our world is nothing like it was before.
These past two years have not been a dream; they’ve been more like a blackout bender – one where you awake to find yourself with a ringing headache and broken furniture.
Except we have been harrowingly sober this whole time.
This has been more like inviting a friend over, they get blackout drunk, invite all of their antisemitic friends, trash the place, break all the furniture, and then, in the morning, they wake up on top of their wreckage, yawn, and ask: “So what’s for breakfast?”
Whatever connection there was between the Jewish nation and the nations of the world has been severed, and it is hard to know if it will ever be repaired.
In the same week that our beloved friends were set free, Israeli fans were banned from a soccer match in the U.K.
Maccabi Tel Aviv was set to play Aston Villa in the Europa League Cup at Villa Park in the U.K., but, due to safety concerns, the city of Birmingham has decided to ban Maccabi fans from attending.
Allegedly, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government are ‘outraged’ by this. They say they are trying to reverse the decision.
But no one is stating the obvious: the city is probably right.
With everything going on in the U.K. right now, it realistically isn’t safe for Jews and Israelis to openly attend soccer matches in England.
A Jew or two could go to a game if he wore a cap over his kippah, but any open display of Jewishness is certainly out of the question.
It is yet another heartbreaking display of what has happened to England.
If you know anything about the English relationship with soccer and sporting culture in general, you understand how serious this is: the English are renowned for their love of soccer and sport.
Forget the obvious moral problems – think about the cultural implications.
Or focus on the fact that all of this is being done out of fear of their own neighbors, and no one is willing to say it.
Or consider what a slap in the face this is to British Jews after the Yom Kippur bombing.
Whatever part of this story outrages you most, that is just one splinter in the mountain of broken devastation that our drunken ‘friends’ left us with.
These drunken ‘friends,’ the nations of the world, have been drunk on their own self-righteousness for two years.
(The Absinthe Drinker, Edouard Manet, 1859)
As they drank deeper from the bowl of their own delusions, they grew bolder, less inhibited, and made decisions, life-changing, irrevocable decisions that will carry consequences for decades to come.
Decisions like rewarding barbarism with statehood and cheering on a flotilla of deluded adolescents as they carried out the barbarians’ will.
But as with all benders, there comes a time to sober up. That time came on October 8th, but the world kept drinking. And that time would come up a dozen more times before the hostages finally came home — but the belligerent world refused to stop, diving deeper into its own illusions.
Keir Starmer is waking to the realization that soccer matches will no longer be safe in England. Today, it’s for the Jews, so realistically no one cares, but it’s only a matter of time before the fear spreads.
Today, it is unsafe to be Jewish. Tomorrow, it will be unsafe to be gay.
Starmer seems to be sobering up to this reality, but you can see how desperately he is thinking about indulging in the simple bliss of blaming our country while ignoring his.
But there is no going back. The nations of the world have made their bed; now they have to lie in it.
After these past two years, with all the destruction wrought in the name of Palestine, there is simply no time to weep for the drunk who ruined his own life, especially when you know he is going back to the bottle.
Israel needs to be rebuilt, but there won’t be a dime in international aid.
Gaza needs to be salted, but there will be billions of dollars in loosely-supervised aid that will surely fund more terrorism.
At the end of this long and destructive bender, it appears that the nations of the world are still nowhere near sober.
They say that addicts must hit rock bottom before they change, and the nations clearly don’t think they’ve hit rock bottom.
Even after the “grooming-gang” scandal, no one spoke of sobering up.
As Jews, we do not have the luxury of inebriation. We’ve had to endure these past two years hauntingly sober, watching as the world partied on – celebrating a two-year Festival of Its Own Self-Righteousness.
The Jews will soon be expelled from Europe, either on paper or in practice, but the writing is on the wall. The Jews in the United States have it better, but only slightly. The fiction of the political parties is fading; the moderate center has evaporated. Neither side of the American political spectrum believes in non-violence, yet they both believe that the Jews are behind all the world’s evils.
This year we had one public firebombing and one public assassination (of Jews); how many will it be next year?
If we cannot admit that this is our current reality, we cannot begin to rebuild.
The old world is broken. It has been shattered to bits. Holding on to the idea that it is coming back will not serve you.
The only way forward is with truth. The hostages are home, but the war is not over – and the work has only just begun.
The good news is that we are in very capable hands: yours.
(The Creation of Adam, Michaelangelo, 1510)
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Spread Love, Spread Light,
Am Yisrael Chai
Great essay. There is no going back, our former friends are not magically trustworthy again, the orcs are emboldened.
Time for Jews to wake up.