On Mourning, Dancing, and the Jewish Refusal to Choose Between Them

Many have written about us. Twain. Churchill. Lincoln. Hitler. Each found us worth the words, which is itself remarkable. We are fifteen million people (sixteen at most), a rounding error in the arithmetic of civilizations. And yet we keep demanding to be noticed.

We are a people fractured in almost every conceivable direction. Language: English, Hebrew, Spanish, Amharic, Russian, French. Geography: North America, Israel, Europe, the rest of the world scattered like seeds from a burst pomegranate. Colour: white, brown, black and every shade between. Religiosity: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Masorti, Reconstructionist, cultural, atheist, and a hundred gradations within each. Politics, economics, sociology; I haven’t even started. Within each division, further subdivisions. The taxonomy of Jewish disagreement is essentially infinite.

To our enemies, historic and present, none of that matters. Not a single jot. We are simply Jews. Theirs is a terrible gift: the flattening of our complexity into a single target. Hitler did not ask whether you davened three times a day or hadn’t set foot in a shul in thirty years. To him, you were a Jew, and that was sufficient.

Here is what I have come to understand: to me, it doesn’t matter either. Not the divisions, not the denominations, not the geography. We are simply Jews. The enemy’s reductionism and my love arrive at the same word through very different doors.

By every logic available to us, we should not exist.

We are a people who have been ghettoised, tortured, expelled, and murdered across a span of history that begins long before the word “antisemitism” was coined to describe it. Since Solomon’s unified kingdom, brief, glorious, unrepeatable, we have been scattered; for most of that time we have been despised wherever we landed. In 1948, for the first time in roughly three thousand years, we were again a nation. That nation sits on a strip of land smaller than Lake Michigan, surrounded by neighbours whose hatred is not incidental but doctrinal, taught from the earliest age, sustained across generations with a fidelity we might almost admire if it were not directed at our children.

We number fifteen million. They number hundreds of millions, possibly billions. The arithmetic of survival says we should have disappeared long ago.

We are defiantly, stubbornly, inexplicably alive.

We came to Israel for the first time in 2007, on what I can only describe as a whim. We had a comfortable life in Britain. We had no particular reason to come. And what struck us, standing in this improbable country, surrounded by people who did not want it to exist, sustained by a Jewish people who could barely agree on what to call themselves, was not its fragility. It was its vitality.

We suffer from massive assimilation. Massive antisemitism. Massive anti-Zionism: a distinction that often feels like mere pedantry when the target remains exactly the same. And an internal discourse so venomous at times, so full of unadulterated contempt between brothers and sisters, that the wonder is not that we argue. The wonder is that the tent holds at all. I am not above this. I have my own sharp opinions and I hold them without apology.

Even today, as we observe Yom HaZikaron and move, with that specifically Jewish abruptness, into Yom Ha’atzmaut, we are divided. Some celebrate. Some do not care. Some actively discourage any form of celebration. We cannot even agree on whether to be happy that we have a state.

It is the most Jewish thing imaginable.

And then I think of the IDF.

I have not been a soldier. My son has served in special forces, and I will carry that in my chest for the rest of my life. The army is one of the very few places, alongside Ben Gurion Airport, perhaps, where I see every shade, shape, type, and colour of Jew come together under white and blue, dressed in green, and give everything they have: teenagers, young adults, reservists with families and mortgages and children of their own.

They are not unified by agreement. They do not all share the same theology or politics or even the same language at home. They are unified by something older and stranger than any of those things: the willingness to stand between the Jewish people and its destruction.

I can look at that and feel melancholy for what it costs. I can also look at it and feel a pride so fierce it is almost indistinguishable from grief. Both are true. Both are permitted. That is precisely the point.

This is the secret of Yom HaZikaron flowing directly into Yom Ha’atzmaut.

Other nations separate their grief from their celebration. They put them in different months, different ceremonies, different emotional registers. We refuse. We sit with the dead in the morning and we dance at night. We do not resolve the tension between mourning and joy. We institutionalize it. We say: this is what it means to be a Jewish state in the world as it actually is, not the world as we wish it were. Sadness and pride do not cancel each other. They have always co-existed, and the pretence that one must wait for the other is a luxury we have never been able to afford.

This is the pattern of our entire history. Not resolution. Not synthesis. Defiant coexistence. The darkness and the light, insisting on occupying the same space simultaneously, refusing to take turns.

Mark Twain, near the end of his famous reflection on the Jewish people, poses a question he does not answer: how have they survived, generation after generation, while the empires that oppressed them have turned to dust?

I will stop just short of answering. What I know is this: it is not by our own design. It is not by the brilliance of our leadership; our leaders have ranged from the inspired to the catastrophic, as in all nations. It is not by our unity, because we have rarely had it. By our own steam, we should have unravelled centuries ago.

There are two possibilities. The first is extraordinary, sustained, improbable luck; that somehow, time after time, across Babylon and Rome and the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Pale of Settlement and the Holocaust and October 7th, fortune has tilted just enough in our direction to prevent the final catastrophe. The second is a higher authority. One who maintains the coherence of a people who resist unification, who sustains the existence of a people much of the world would prefer not to exist.

As a religious person, as someone who has chosen to build his life in the Jewish state, as a father whose son wore that green uniform, I know which answer I hold.

To that answer: todah, Hashem. Thank you.

Some of us will spend our lives trying to break this people apart. Some will spend theirs building bridges across the chasms. Our enemies will do both as well, for their own reasons. And for all of history behind us, and for the probable history ahead of us, we will remain, as long as we continue to do our part of keeping the flame burning.

We were never meant to be large. We have always shied away from missionary expansion, from the hunger for converts that drove other faiths to reshape continents. And yet the world is largely monotheistic because of us. We give to civilization disproportionately (in medicine, in science, in commerce, in philosophy, in the arts) at a rate that makes no demographic sense whatsoever. And we are hated, or envied, or both, by a portion of the world that seems incapable of deciding which.

That, too, seems to be our fate: to keep giving, to keep influencing, to keep carrying G-d’s word into the world, and to keep resisting the forces that would prefer we stopped.

We have never been stronger. We have never been more vibrant. We have never punched harder above our weight in the world as a force for good, as a functioning democracy in an impossible neighbourhood, as a people who refuse, defiantly and without apology, to disappear.

We have also never been as hated, vilified, and falsely condemned as a genocidal nation as we are right now, in this moment, more than at any time in living memory.

The sadness and the pride, the memorial and the independence, the darkness and the light; they sit side by side, as they always have, as they apparently always will. Both are true. Both are permitted.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)