Last week two ISIS gunmen opened fire on civilians on Bondi Beach as the Jewish community celebrated Chanukah. The terrorists killed a rabbi, a ten-year-old girl and more than a dozen others. Our collective and personal grief is real, overwhelming, and justified. And yet, amid this painfully familiar script – mourn, rally, stand together – I find myself haunted by something else beyond the physical violence: our continued hesitation to name what we are facing. Many of us, especially those of us entrenched in the liberal world, are still hesitant to say the word enemy.

Philosophically it makes sense not to fixate on our enemies.  Why give them airtime? Why let them shape us? Why focus on the perpetrators rather than the victims? But, in our effort not to obsess over enemies, we have drifted into something strange and even self-injurious: the pretense that enemies do not exist at all.

In this imagined universe, there are no enemies, only people with whom we have not had enough dialogue.  In........

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