Why this feels different from the inside |
Lately, I’ve found myself in conversations that feel strangely misaligned.
People I know, people I respect, people I interact with regularly—we look at the same place, the same events, and seem to be seeing entirely different things. In some of these conversations, Israel is described in terms that suggest scale and power far beyond anything I recognize. In others, it is spoken about as though it is firmly secure, even unthreatened.
The descriptions sometimes feel so detached from what I know that it’s hard to tell whether we’re disagreeing—or simply not talking about the same thing.
Not because I think people are acting in bad faith, but because the starting assumptions feel so different that we end up talking past each other.
I’ve been trying to understand that gap.
Continuity and fragility
Part of the answer, I think, begins with something easy to overlook.
The Jewish people are small. But more than that, they are old—not in the sense of tradition alone, but in continuity. A people that has carried its identity across centuries, across continents, across repeated upheavals.
That continuity can create an assumption from the outside: that it will simply continue. That it always has, and therefore always will.
But that doesn’t hold from the inside.
Continuity, for a people like this, is not automatic. It has been interrupted before—reduced, nearly broken.
And if something has nearly ended once, the possibility that it could end again never disappears.
If we step back and look at scale, the picture becomes........