We’ve all experienced something like it. The doctor tells their patient, “If you don’t stop eating food like that, it will kill you!” Does the patient believe them? On some level, perhaps. Do they heed the doctor’s warning? Not even a little.
“Didn’t the doctor tell you to stop eating food like that?” a concerned relative may ask. “I feel fine,” the person answers…until the day they don’t. That’s when they have a heart attack and realize they had been kidding themselves all along, if they live long enough to acknowledge it.
Call it cognitive dissonance or whatever. Part of being human is an ability to ignore inconvenient and uncomfortable realities, as if doing so somehow makes them disappear. People do it all the time all over the place.
But they don’t disappear. On the contrary, they just get bigger and worse, and after time, overwhelming. That’s when a person finally says, “I should have dealt with that problem while it was easy to do so. Now it’s too late and I am its victim.”
That pretty much sums up Jewish history. Warning signs of growing anti-Semitism are largely ignored by the general populace while they are still mute enough. By the time they become big enough to be of serious concern, it is usually too late to do anything about them, and to avoid becoming a victim of it.
At what point does a person’s brain go “click,” and acknowledge that a theoretical problem has become a real one? At what point does the brain realize that hypothesis has morphed into reality? Clearly it depends upon the person, because people react to situations differently, some taking them more seriously than others.
For example, for some in Europe, Kristallnacht was enough of an indicator to tell Jews where European history was going, and they left. In 1938, it may have been difficult to imagine Nazi Germany taking over Europe and capturing, torturing, and killing every Jew they could, but they chose not to chance it and find out first-hand how they would do it.
To many, they were alarmists, panickers. As bad as the situation had become for Jews in Europe by that time, these people thought, it still was not yet bad enough to pick up and leave behind what was for many, generations of family life. This was especially so since many had no specific place to run to.
But they must have wondered at some point to themselves and to each other, “Are we the fools? Are we making the mistake by staying? Will we soon regret not having followed the early escapees?” By the early 1940s, everyone who remained behind knew the answers.
If movies existed that we could watch that portrayed how what happened in Europe in the 1930s is similar to what is happening around the world today, we’d have a greater sense of urgency. We’d have a glimpse into how life can be so good for a Jew one day, and so bad the next day.
We’d have a better understanding how all those things that make us feel secure in foreign lands today can crumble tomorrow and disappear in a moment. We would see that, just as we rely upon the civility of our host nations and their ability to defend our people, they did too. And we would know how that civility can go out the window and the will to defend the Jewish people can turn into a will to hurt them instead.
One the of the reasons why is because that is what God wants. Diaspora Jews right now, at least those who believe in Hashgochah Pratis, believe that God wants them to be safe, that He is prepared to protect them against the Jews haters. He will tell the President to send in the army to protect Jewish communities from evil.
What if He won’t? What if He doesn’t want Jews to be safe? What if God is the One sending in the anti-Semites because it is part of an End-of-Days scenario? What if God is saying, “This fourth and final exile has come to an end, and because you did not leave when you should have, so have you”?
Before you ask, “How could He?” He already has. “Before you say, “Why would He?” you have to recall that He has His reasons. Before you bank on Him saving you against your enemies, ask yourself, “Why am I more worth saving than all those righteous people who had more merit than I do?” Hope is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t already translate into redemption.
Unbelievably we are here again, and so fast too. Crossroads. A brutal surprise attack in Israel that should have spelled the end of Hamas is instead arousing world wide anti-Semitism. Latent anti-Semitism. It was always there, just hidden in the hearts of a world that was distracted by other, more trivial things. Turns out that Hamas’s Nazi-style attack was just to draw that dormant anti-Semitism to the surface once again.
We should have been prepared for it because that is Jewish history. We should have been aware of it because that is what the prophecies forewarned about. We should have anticipated it because mankind was falling back into the kind of approach to life that leads to it. Instead, we just hoped that the bad would remain at the fringes and never make any real headway into mainstream society.
Can you feel it? I can. There is something in the brain pushing hard to take that leap and realize that the current reality is the new one. I can also feel the resistance, the part of me that liked the previous period of history and wants to keep it alive as long as I can. It’s a virtual mental tug-of-war.
But I know which side is going to win, and it makes me very uneasy. Jewish history is about to have that heart attack, and though many will survive it, b”H, many may not. How’s that for alarmism and panic?