“I don’t believe it!” is a common reaction to something that seemed highly unlikely but actually is. When I used to travel a lot, I would see people do things at airports that I could never do, at least not in public, like really losing their cool at some airline employee or a fellow traveler. “Don’t they see what they look like to others?” I would wonder to myself. Apparently not.
Belief is an interesting thing. It can either be very limiting and confining, or it can be very liberating. Once upon a time, I did not believe Torah came from God and was an archaic set of principles. I assumed that I was the free one, being a secular Jew and unbridled by commandments. When I saw Orthodox Jews I thought to myself, “I can’t believe Jews still live like that!”
Then I later learned otherwise. Wondering if there was a deeper meaning for life than what secular society was offering me, I eventually discovered Torah. And though I had no intention whatsoever at first of living by it, just learning it, I came to realize, begrudgingly at first, that it was a package deal. If you want to learn Torah, you have to live Torah.
Once I did, I slowly realized that I had not been as smart as I thought I was, or had experienced enough to properly appreciate Torah. Now I can’t believe how I thought I was freer without it. The only thing freer pre-Torah, it turned out, was my yetzer hara, which excelled at materialistic pleasures and failed miserably at self-growth.
How blinding cognitive dissonance can be.
You know why the Holocaust happened? Yes, of course, because God said so. But He didn’t just come down and announce, “Sorry folks. I don’t like the way Jewish history is going, so I’m going to send the Nazis in to do a Holocaust!” It’s never so clear or so fast. It happens in stages and usually a result of our inexcusable blindnesses.
There were warning signs as early as the 1920s. Kristallnacht in 1938 was a blatant one, but by that time the Holocaust had officially started. It was already too late, but in the early 1930s, while Jews still made Shabbos and went to shul on a regular basis, there was still time. There were some who saw what was brewing in Germany and took it upon themselves to warn fellow Jews to leave. But they were not believed, and most were simply thrown out on their ears.
Can a Holocaust occur? We know it can. We’ve seen it happen. But until it did back in 1942, it never had before. Pogroms, yes. Cossacks, yes. Roman conquering of Jerusalem, yes. But never the systematic collection and murder of 6,000,000 Jews from across Europe. That had been beyond any experience we had ever known as a people (though it is described in the Torah twice), and therefore it defied our national imagination.
Part of the problem is that it is difficult to comprehend how people can do to you what you would NEVER do to them. Another part of the problem is that we like to hope that people can never do to us what we would never do to them. If I believe that, then I have to protect myself, and that means taking extreme measures like moving to some place safer at considerable cost and trouble. Those who did before the Holocaust tended to survive it.
We tend to trust too many of the wrong things. We tend to make too many of the wrong assumptions about people and ourselves. And we tend to forget the most important point of all: the unbelievable happens because God MAKES it happen. So much for human logic. So much for cognitive dissonance. It just seems too convenient and so safe—until it isn’t.
Which brings us to the situation today. The world has become obviously strange. For a while there, the strangeness was only apparent if you stumbled upon it or went looking for it. But it is out of the closet now in full view, and it is forcing the issue for many around the world.
We know there are very evil people in the world. We know there are wealthy and powerful people who have more control over our lives than we want them to have. We know, hopefully, that not everyone thinks the same way. We know there are world problems that are in need of solving, and we know that obvious solutions don’t exist or work that well.
We also know that society is made up of perpetrators and their victims. We’re aware that money is an incredibly huge motivating factor, and that some people will even kill for it. We know the people running our governments are both unqualified and unreliable, often the lesser of many evils, and often the worser of many evils.
We know there are real life conspiracies going on all around us. We’ve had hints to large ones that we have difficulty believing actually occurred because, well, because we have difficulty believing that they can occur. We HOPE they did not occur, and aren’t occurring, because that would mean…we don’t even want to consider what that would mean.
It’s weird. We’ll pay good money to watch a conspiracy movie and even believe it is possible to be true. We might even walk around paranoid for a few days after, confusing reality with the imaginary. But we fail to realize that the reason why we believed the movie is because so many things in it could easily be happening in real life!
You see, there is this line in the sand, and it varies from person to person. But wherever it is for an individual or society, everything on this side of the line is real to us, and everything on the other side of it is unreal to us. It doesn’t mean it isn’t actually real. It just means it isn’t real to US…even though so many times in life we have seen that the reality DOES exist on both sides of the line. The Holocaust should have taught us that.
Now for the punchline.
We’re already suspicious of the coronavirus, its origin and how it spread to the world. There is already controversy surrounding the people managing it, and heated debate about the approach for dealing with it. We can see with our two eyes incredible amounts of lying and corruption in government, and how manipulative the people with the money and political power are. And we know that godless people do godless things, usually in the name of some distorted idea of the greater good.
Will they knowingly con us?
They do it all the time.
Will they knowingly endanger us?
They do it all the time.
But can they knowingly murder us?
They have in the past when they believed it was for the “greater good.” Many have been quoted as stating that this IS the greater good.
Is this really so hard to believe? In the world today? If you stop thinking like yourself and instead look at the world as they might?
According to some scientists, trace elements have been found in the vaccines that could be used to explain why many people have suddenly died, or at least taken ill. I know of cases locally that could easily be used to implicate the vaccine. I know of cases where the person did not die from Covid, but it was recorded as a Covid death nonetheless. There are whistleblowers around the world whose credibility only gets called into question and smashed once they speak out against the practices of those in charge…people, I must emphasize, do not believe God oversees their work.
It makes me nervous. It makes me uptight. It makes me angry. And then I remember that God runs the world, even if people think and make it look otherwise. I recall that no one can harm me if God doesn’t allow it. But then I wonder, “What if God is allowing them to?”
Yes, evil has a half-life. Yes, good always triumphs in the end. Yes, Moshiach will come one day and right all the wrongs and that will be it forever for bad. In 1945 the Holocaust ended as did the Third Reich. But not before wiping out 6,000,000 Jews and killing a total of 72,000,000 people.
The problem is much bigger than I can get my head around, and it may run right over me, God forbid. Honestly, I don’t know even half the truth about what is really going on. I also have no idea where Divine Providence is taking us, though I have my suspicions which I will NOT share at this time. I don’t know who to believe and how much.
But, one thing is for sure. I will fight to not let cognitive dissonance blind me to what may be happening. I will try to fight back my biases in each direction so that I can maintain some kind of clarity. It’s not mainly a question of what to do. It is mostly a question of what does God WANT me to do.
Maybe it’s already too late. Moments before Kristallnacht began, Jews had no idea how far advanced the problem was. Seconds before planes flew into the Twin Towers, people were sipping delicious coffee and reading the morning news oblivious to what was about to happen 100 floors up.
It’s just plain dumb to think we know what the next moment will bring, especially when it history is already throwing us for a loop. But it is just plain dangerous to think any of us are smart enough to sit back and blindly trust the world of science and the governments that control it. Maybe even blind arrogance, and that gets God going more than anything else.
Maybe I’m wrong. I’d like to be wrong, really wrong. Maybe it’s just paranoia. I can be that at times, just like anyone else. But take a look at all the essays I have written over the course of 40 years, and the over 100 books I have published, thank God. I hate controversy, and try very hard to avoid it. But if I have legitimate sources to say something I believe has to be said, I will say it. If I think there is reason for concern, especially based upon past history, I will issue a warning.
I believe in conspiracies but not just for the sake of believing in conspiracies. To borrow Talmudic language, there has to be legs for the thing. I would like to mind my own business because that has always been safer, but something tells me to act otherwise.
Ironically, it doesn’t go back to when I first started learning Torah. It goes back to my first 12 years of life, because that is when we are molded as people for the rest of our lives. That is what will dictate how we perceive reality and information no matter how much we learn and think we know.
Give it some serious thought while you still can. We may be too late to change the direction of mankind, but there still may be time to change the mind of God regarding us and our loved ones.