Destroying the Jews, destroying the world
As a 32-year-old American Jew, it didn’t take long after Oct. 7 to realize that my entire life had been predicated on one fantastical belief: Antisemitism was, on the whole, eradicated from Western society.
Like many people, my first personal interaction with wildfire antisemitism was online. As my Instagram timeline became consumed with anti-Zionist rhetoric, my good friend from college reposted a video that shattered me. She shared a feature by a queer Jew expounding on all the reasons we Jews have been lied to by our own community. My friend, who is not Jewish, then wrote, “Jews who believe in Israel should take a hard look at themselves and get on the right side of history.”
I immediately ached for the days growing up as a Jewish kid during the turn of the 21st century.
This was a time when we learned about tikkun olam while trying to emulate Kobe Bryant on the basketball court. Where my non-Jewish classmates in Tampa, Fla., embraced my Judaism with curiosity and love, joining my family for Chanukah celebrations and becoming proud members of our school’s Jewish Awareness Club.
•No stranger called me sick for supporting a “genocidal, apartheid state.”
•No former crush marched down the street chanting threatening slogans manufactured by terrorist organizations.
•No friend brazenly and self-righteously claimed to understand my own history better than me.
This was also a time when Holocaust survivors shared the hell they somehow managed to survive, and non-Jews remembered that they, too, had fought an existential threat to everything they value.
Unfortunately, Jews don’t have the luxury of forgetting.
• • •
From slavery in Egypt to Oct. 7, millions of our ancestors have been humiliated, chased from their homes, tortured, raped and brutally murdered. And yet, we Jews survive. And not only survive — we thrive.
We dream, create, educate ourselves and have a knack for turning coal into the most sought-after diamonds on earth.
Men like Hungarian-American film-industry executive William Fox and the four Warner brothers built Hollywood. Ruth Bader Ginsberg advanced gender equality as the first Jewish U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Levi Strauss invented a jean company in 1853 that Beyoncé just wrote a banger about.
So if Jewish people provide so much good and progress in the world, why are we eternally demonized and persecuted?
In Mark Twain’s 1899 essay “Concerning the Jews,” he deduces that through centuries of economic exclusion, “the one tool which the law was not able to take from him [the Jew] — his brain — have made that tool singularly competent” and others were “unable to compete with the average Jew.”
David Wolpe, emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and a scholar on antisemitism, states that “Jews committed the unforgivable act of introducing conscience to the world. … For most of human history up to Sinai, what the gods cared about was how you treated them. … The Ten Commandments said G-d cares about how you treat each other. And that call to conscience means a call to sin and guilt.”
Or maybe the answer is analogous to Lord Voldemort’s contempt of Harry Potter. As Dumbledore explains to Harry, “If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. … It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good.”
• • •
Sometimes, amid the whiplash of antisemitism, we become disoriented to the fact that this hate is not about us. The Jewish people have been, and will always be, a mirror reflecting back the jealousy, self-loathing and bitterness in the souls of man.
Oct. 7 was my painful orientation to this Jewish legacy.
We are a nation destined to confront the worst of humanity, and in turn, understand the ultimate blessing of peace.
Is this what it means to be G-d’s “chosen people?” To receive the highest highs and lowest lows? To be the intergenerational model of joy and grief? To, as Wolpe noted, be the eternal conscience of human morality?
If there’s any proof of this, one must look to arguably the most evil human being in history: Adolf Hitler. An ounce of Jewish blood was a threat he could not tolerate. He said, “Conscience is a Jewish invention,” and he spent his life trying to destroy it by any means necessary.
So if consciousness is the liberator of the human mind and murdering the Jews is the annihilation of consciousness, then destroying the Jews is the intentional destruction of self-awareness. If the Jews are gone, the ability to know oneself is compromised.
Objective reality would be subject to endless manipulation, and the inversion of truth would be sacrosanct. Progress and freedom would cease to exist. Kindness and love would lose their meaning. Good would disappear, and the light that guides nations would be extinguished.
If you destroy the Jews, you destroy yourself. If you destroy the Jews, you destroy the world.
Daphna Shull is a writer, visual artist, musician and photographer who works as the creative producer for the-braid.org
