Let me start by saying that I had a great childhood, b”H. I tended to be an upbeat person growing up, and though I did not have as much as others, I certainly could not complain given what I did have, b”H.
What I am saying is that I don’t have some kind of hidden agenda of doom and gloom. I certainly don’t want any. I like my life just the way it is, and war only interrupts and complicates it. It’s only when I recall how many Jews do not believe in God or follow Torah that I realize that, as good as my life may be for me, the world is far from what it needs to be.
Therefore, what I am about to say is out of necessity, not as much for me as for others who still look to the rest of the world for truth, justice, and the Godly way. It is for people who become disappointed by what their idols or heroes say or do to condemn Israel, or the Jewish people in general.
Do you know why so many Jews in the 1930s could not believe a Holocaust would happen to them? Because they could never perpetrate one against anyone else. They believed that just as they would try and stop one from happening to other people, other people would stop one from happening to them.
The Jews of that time could not believe or accept that friends, neighbors, and entire societies would abandon them in their greatest hour of need. As different as Jews may be from gentiles, they believed, or at least hoped, that they were similar enough to be able to count on them for their safety against anti-Semites and tyrants…against all historical precedent.
And here we go again. It is no surprise that Arabs support Hamas despite the terrible atrocities they carried out on Simchas Torah and after, because most Muslim Arabs hate Jews anyhow. It doesn’t make a difference that Israel has given them more than their own people ever did, who won’t even take them in. Jew hatred is as essential to their way of life as food is to their survival. So, no surprises there when they celebrate what Hamas did rather than condemn it.
But people get upset when non-Arabs sympathize more with Hamas than the Jews who suffered. They become incensed when Western world leaders and their idols and heroes stand up for the Palestinians and downplay what they either carried out against the Jewish people, or at least applauded it. They cannot believe how something so blatantly perverted can become the accepted way of thinking of so many influencers.
Why? Because they would never make that mistake about others. Because they still value truth as a virtue. Because they think justice should be the result of intellectual truths, not emotional shortcomings. They expect people to be educated, intelligent, and honest if they are going to comment on such a serous situation.
As a nation that has been hated and persecuted the most over history, the Jewish people are desperate for acceptance. So many in the secular world yearn for gentile friends among the family of nations. We will, and have, bent over backwards to gain the respect of the world and acceptance into their clubs, even though it has never ended well for us.
It doesn’t help that we are coming off decades of peaceful and successful lives. We have been deceived once again, as the Jews of the 1930s were, by how civil society seems to have become. We finally felt accepted and did not suspect that things could ever go back to the hated way they used to be
Maybe they wouldn’t if Divine Providence did not have a say in all of it. Maybe society would just keep getting better and more accepting if the Jewish people were not part of some greater master plan that includes exiles and redemptions. Maybe if God didn’t really care what we did with our lives, we would be free to just keep meshing with the world around us.
But what point is there in theorizing any of that if it could never be in the cards. History is about a lot more than just the Jewish people and their history, though both are an integral part of the master plan for Creation. Our approach to life over the last 70 years could never have been a permanent reality, because Creation would never have existed for it. It’s just never in the cards until Moshiach comes and this part of history is closed.
The truth is, none of what is happening today is a surprise to anyone who knows the deeper truth about the Jewish people and the ultimate purpose of Creation. You don’t even have to know it on the level of Kabbalah, though it certainly helps. You just need to know that the Jewish people are here to teach the world that God is One, and that everyone owes their loyalty to Him. Simple enough, no?
Apparently not, and that’s why gentiles, as the rabbis warned, naturally hate Jews. It’s why Jews constantly misunderstand and mis-manage that hatred, eventually at the cost of their own existence. It’s why so many of us fight to maintain status quos that were never meant to last forever, or even that long a time. We have tended to look at the means as the end, resulting instead in our own.
In other words, it is our very dependency on the non-Jewish world that leads to its unreliability. It is our hunger to be accepted as the rest that leads to our rejection. It is our fear of doing what we must for ourselves to preserve the Jewish people that ends up forcing us to do it. It is a catastrophic mistake to try and live in the Messianic Era before it comes.
The most important point is this. We have but one true and real friend at this stage of history, God. He didn’t let us down and then we turned against Him. First we forgot Him, and then He allowed what has happened to us. There is no one more reliable or loving of the Jewish people than Him.
And that’s where we’re going; that’s where we’re being led. As difficult as it may be to conceive so late in history, and so deep into the scientific approach to life, we’re being steered back to a much closer and supernatural relationship with God. And not just the Jewish people, but all of mankind, because that is the way it began.
History has dramatically changed many times in the past, but there was always enough of the old that remained to allow for some ongoing familiarity, and it will be no different this time. The difference will be the degree of change this time, because of what we will experience and come to know, and what God will give to us to make it happen.
Just because the world is stuck in the past doesn’t mean we have to be. On the contrary, we need to anticipate the change and start already by realizing that we will only be able to rely upon God going forward. Yes, yes, it’s always been the way, but somehow we got away with thinking that people came through for us. No more.