“Whenever we cry, we are answered.” - Rashi
I haven’t been around much, I know. Some of you know that I’ve left Wall Street and moved into the Jewish sector. Currently, I’m serving as the interim Chief Marketing Officer at my local Jewish Federation, helping with their comms while their existing CMO is out on family leave.
It’s an honor, truly. The Jewish Federations do so much work on behalf of the Jewish people, and I can’t believe my luck that I’m able to contribute to that effort in my own small way.
But the job isn’t without its drawbacks.
Today—well. Today was one of those drawbacks.
Today was one of the worst days of my life.
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This afternoon, four coffins entered Israel.
Four adult-sized, locked coffins, carried by murderers, while jaunty pop music played over loudspeakers and families cheered and whistled. Four coffins stuffed with terrorist propaganda, then decorated with hateful slogans and labeled with the wrong names. Four coffins which the terrorists had locked, then literally threw away the key.
Four coffins—and only three hostages.
Shiri Bibas was not in one of the coffins. A mother torn from her babies, one last time.
A nation howls for her. For her children. For the peace activist accompanying them home. For the nameless woman in the fourth coffin, not a hostage, not Hamas—yet still a person, who was once someone’s daughter, too. We howl for them all.
Our howl is deep, familiar, primordial. It defies the politenesses of known language and even conscious thought. But we Jews know this sound all too well. We have howled this howl before, in every generation, stretching back for thousands of years. With ragged throats and broken hearts, still we carry on, hounded by Amaleks; they break us but never manage to silence us entirely; and still we howl, howl, howl the formless cries of grief.
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We are in the midst of the most terrifyingly comprehensive propaganda war that ever has been waged on the Jewish people (and, for that matter, on the United States).
With its anti-Jew propaganda, Hamas and its allies have won hearts and minds on a scale Goebbels would shiver to comprehend. Otherwise brilliant and ordinary people now have no trouble believing all manner of atrocities on the part of Israel and, increasingly, the Diaspora. After all, if they keep reading and hearing so many words about how terrible Jews are, then there must be some kernel of truth buried in all of it—I mean, both sides, amirite?
With so many academics, journalists, politicians, activists, doctors, and other authority figures caught up in the ecstatic thrill of Jew-hatred, the truth has never felt more precious and rare.
But some things are objectively true. Kidnapping babies and their mother; murdering them in captivity; holding their corpses for ransom; staging a victory celebration over their dead bodies; refusing to hand back a captive—these things are evil. This is true. No both sides or what-abouts or other justifications can change that fact.
We live in the time of monsters. That also is true. It is also true that it has always been the time of monsters. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, What happened once upon a time happens all the time.
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I heard some iteration of the following a lot over the past two days:
“There aren’t words.”
“No words.”
“What more is there to say?”
I understand this sentiment. Really, I do. But there are words. You just have to say them.
Just as God spoke Creation into being, so too do we speak reality into being with our own voices. We have a responsibility to use the power of our speech to create a kinder, better world; one that stands for good and condemns evil, that comforts and protects the suffering, that gives murderers no shelter.
You have to use your voice, because the only other option is silence.
Silence is more than an abnegation of duty; it is a denial of existence. Silence is a void, an emptiness, just as the universe was before God filled it with speech. When you choose to be silent, you choose to remove yourself from the narrative of the universe; you choose to pretend you do not exist and therefore share no burden of responsibility to the people still within the world you have abandoned.
But choosing silence is an act of creation, too: It creates a nothingness that metastasizes and swallows everything it touches. Friends, family, love, existence. Silence swallows life like a tomb.
Howl if you must. But don’t be silent.
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In the face of the truth of evil—in the face of silence—there are three words and three words alone that give me comfort: Am Yisrael Chai.
The people of Israel live.
That too is objectively true.
They may try to silence us, but they will fail. I know, because they have tried before and we’re still here. I know, because what happened once upon a time happens all the time.
So it will be again. Even if I have to speak it into being myself.
Am Yisrael Chai