A 24/7 Jewish existence requires mezuman/cash on hand; financial security is foundational for our physical sustenance and all creative possibilities that spring from it. We don’t live on bread alone (Deuteronomy 8:3), but we can’t do without it. So we put money in the bank. Money we save or invest protects us against the wolf at the door.

Cheshbon, Hebrew for “account,” stemming from the verb chashav / to think, has ethical connotations - bound up with Jewish religious thought and spiritual practice - as well as monetary ones. This blog often focuses on issues of moral accountability, what our Rabbis refer to as cheshbon nefesh / soul reckoning. The subject is especially pertinent to these weeks leading up to Aseret Yemey Teshuvah / The Ten Days of Repentance from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur.

Just as, for humans, a physical life absent spiritual purpose is hollow, spirituality detached from practical material concerns is feeble; the two must go together: Im eyn kemach, eyn torah; im eyn torah, eyn kemach / “If there’s no flour (for bread), there’s no Torah; if there’s no Torah, there’s no flour” (Pirkey Avot 3:17). The word torah points, along with other words sharing its root, to further implications of the physical-moral dynamic.

It plays out in several Biblical usages derived from three letters, yod - resh - hey, which form the verb yarah, meaning “to shoot/throw/cast.” In eretz yisrael, the moreh / early rain1, lasting through autumn, shoots down to fructify land that, over the course of a dry, rainless summer, was parched and thirsting for revitalization. Moreh also means “teacher.”

A literal meaning of torah is “direction.” A good teacher directs, guides, students thirsty for knowledge, showering them with divine wisdom. The term also has martial connotations: lirot means “to shoot an arrow” (Psalm 11:3); morim or yorim (1 Chronicles 10:3; I Samuel 31:3) are “archers.”

The soldierly sense carries over into modern Hebrew; Israeli news reports mention yeri tilim / firing of missiles, an all too familiar experience in the ongoing war against Iran and its local proxies. Torah arises from the need to address real-world security concerns.

The image of raindrops pelting the ground, their furious energy coming at trees and creatures and human habitations like a relentless shower of arrows or bullets, brings to mind another modern Hebrew term, gashmiyut/worldiness, deriving from geshem/rain.

Our earthly, material survival - like that of plants and animals with whom we share Earth’s blessed bounty - depends on access to water. The land of Israel is water-scarce; to flourish, it “drinks water from rain of the heavens” (Deuteronomy 11:11).

The wolf at your door is not only your hungry stomach but also your hostile neighbor; we need money for food to feed our bodies and for weaponry to withstand well-equipped enemies. Torah’s language interlinks desire for earthly abundance and exigencies of armed combat; a further Hebraic correspondence underscores this connection: milchamah/war comes from the same root as lechem/bread.

Letters lamed - chet - mem form the verb lacham, meaning both “to fight” and “to eat.” The world we live in is conflictive; to be physically nourished, you’d better have a defense strategy and a deep reservoir of funds to pay for it. Be militarily prepared! Torah consciousness reflects worldly realism.

I think of Torah as Jewish martial art. Here, some irony crops up.

Many (not all) Haredim - ultra-Orthodox Jews - in Israel are militantly, sometimes violently, pushing back against growing impatience (reverberating in voices across the political spectrum) with their refusal to serve in the nation’s army. A particularly, infuriatingly specious argument they use to justify evading military service is the claim of being, in their privileged role as Torah scholars, the Jewish people’s sole true guardians and defenders.

Recently, to encourage that outrageous Haredi draft-dodging scheme, the Knesset’s unscrupulous ruling coalition pushed through “a quasi-constitutional law declaring Torah study a foundational value” of the nation2.

This theocratic gambit banks on a nonsensical, factitiously arrogant assumption Haredi leaders and their followers make: They equate poring over Talmud text with defending their fellow citizens. Posing as Israel’s true defenders, they disparage its actual defenders.

Such fantastically dogmatic sophistry, unhinged from an honest assessment of what’s required for Jewish survival, further risks destabilizing the country’s democracy already imperiled through growing political corruption and spreading unchecked hooliganism. What do I mean by calling Torah am yisrael’s martial art?

The question brings us back to cheshbon in its various - financial, moral, spiritual - senses.

When I look at my assets and calculate what I should spend with what my budget allows, I am factoring in - accounting for - material requirements of survival. A person living in the everyday and striving to live a decent, spiritually fulfilling life must do this; it is holy work.

As a Jewish people, likewise, we must apply a methodology and strategy for collective self-defense. We need sufficient weapons manufacture and budget to procure them. We’re accountable to one another and must pool resources for the sake of mutual security.

There’s a rabid wolf at our door. Not having ways, and for those ways, resources we can afford, to guard against the wolf - of hunger and of violence - is morally irresponsible, spiritually feckless. There can be no cheshbon nefesh without cheshbon bank. It’s Torah.

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Abbas is trying to steer between his Ra’am party’s newfound commitment (in an appeal to Jewish voters) to Israel’s Jewish democratic character and his Israeli Arab constituents’ affirmation (in keeping with their religious-cultural identity and sympathies) of the Palestinian national cause. This attempt at conciliation backfired on him with many Jews in Israel, who’re in no mood to entertain the concept of Palestinian statehood.

Not only right-wing firebrands here, but soberminded centrists likewise understand the danger Palestinianism objectively poses to our safety. For Jews to survive, they must be aware, 24/7, of their surroundings. This requires realistic assessment of neighbors’ intentions and motives. The “reality” Abbas upholds is (notwithstanding his likely good intentions) lethal fiction: a murderous fantasy. We’d be naive to take it for fact or truth.

Modern nationalism has its fabulists but also its truth-tellers. Those who offer candor about nation-building’s challenges sometimes present it as make-believe - offering incisive, mature reflection in the guise of a fairy tale for children. An example is Carlo Collodi (1826-1890), author of The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet2.

It’s a satiric parable reflecting Collodi’s involvement with and thinking about Italy’s struggles during its emergence, in the 19th century, as an autonomous and unified nation-state.

Pinocchio is a wooden puppet who, in order to become a real, flesh-and-blood human, must learn to be honest. His misfortunes and foibles symbolically reflect those of Italy’s formative period - when activists (including Collodi) there were trying to overcome social divisions that hampered unification and thus to establish common ground for a shared national vision.

Over and over, Pinocchio gets in trouble because he refuses to take responsibility for his actions and squanders good opportunities with impulsive, reckless abandon, choosing instead to fall under the influence of unscrupulous, cunning and ruthless rogues who gladly take advantage of his naivety and insensibility.

He allows himself to serve as their puppet. In sabotaging his own prospects, he also creates problems for others.

He murders the cricket who was warning him about self-destructive consequences to which his foolish behavior would surely lead (chapter 4). He torments, physically abuses, his creator, the well-meaning woodcarver Geppeto; the public watching Pinocchio’s maliciously offensive antics concludes Geppeto is to blame for them and - its sympathy completely misplaced - has a soldier drag the poor man to prison (chapter 3).

This scenario should strike a familiar chord with anyone listening in on the piteous Palestinian soap opera! Palestinians who clamor for “liberation” are like unreformed Pinocchio: They, same as he, refuse to take responsibility for their actions, pretending to lack agency while wreaking havoc right and left.

Jerry Seinfeld responded, when a pro-Palestinian (i.e., antizionist) activist asked him to shout out “Free Palestine,” by trenchantly noting: “It doesn’t exist3.”

He’s right: For all the hypocritical hoopla surrounding it, Palestine - a wooden construction, the puppet of interests (notably: jihadists, pseudo-progressives, NGOs, and governments) who exploit Palestinians’ grievances to Palestinians’ detriment - does not exist.

Could it?

That depends on whether the Palestinian body politic decides to follow Pinocchio’s lead.

He ultimately gets the message and grows up, learning how to admit and atone for his mistakes. A benevolent fairy tells him he “cannot grow.” “Why?” Pinocchio wants to know. She explains: “Because puppets never grow. They are born puppets…and die puppets.” “Oh,” he protests, “I am sick of being a puppet!” (chapter 25) He takes a long time to stop being one.

Palestinian politics so far is sunk in quicksand: a study in disunity, dishonesty, malice and violence. Israeli nationalism, by contrast, took a constructive course; proof residing in the Jewish State’s vigorous democracy, cultural blossoming, prosperous economy, and powerful military. These successes have been hampered, as all nation-building scenarios are, by serious flaws and mistakes.

Israelis are struggling with the question of how to sustain national unity in the face of both internal conflicts and external threats; Palestinians are unified only on wanting to destroy Israel. Rage, anger driven by unremitting hatred of Jews as supposed colonialist usurpers, is the driving force of Palestinianism. That’s a lie since am yisrael is indigenous to the Holy Land.

Pinocchio’s nose grows when he lies; his dishonesty sparks bodily reaction. So too for Palestinians as a body politic. In Hebrew, a word for “anger” is af, which in Biblical Hebrew also means “face” and “nose.”

The Torah uses flaring nostrils to signify how God’s retributive “anger will burn” (see, e.g., Exodus 22:23) against agents of indecency and untruthfulness. Researchers coined the phrase “Pinocchio Effect” to describe volatile facial - including nasal - thermal changes that are telltale signs of lying4.

Palestinian culture’s antagonistic and self-defeating dishonesty displays the Pinocchio Effect on a pervasive societal scale. Time is running out for “Palestine,” but like Pinocchio it might still have a chance to learn its lesson and become real.

(https://loc.getarchive.net/media/pinocchio-the-adventures-of-a-little-wooden-boy-a649cb)

I was thinking about possible symbolic ramifications of all this. Pondering further, I offer a figurative flight of fancy…

Our journey took us through the Athens airport. We flew Bluebird Airways, a Greek-owned company, for that first leg of our trip from Israel; our connecting flight, with Delta under Air France auspices, went directly from Athens to Boston.

Athens, Greece - the fountainhead of Hellenism. Jewish life sifted through a Hellenistic filter (a space of dominant Greco-Roman influence with Christian and Muslim amplifications) for over two millenia.

Identifying with that civilization’s values, relying on its support, proved for Jews as much a bane as a boon, and Israel is wisely looking for better friends elsewhere. A parting of ways with Western civilization could be on the horizon.

Support for the Jewish people is weakening, if not crumbling, in the political and cultural life of the West. With surging antisemitism and antizionism, the rate of hate crimes against us is accelerating; defamation of the State of Israel has become de rigueur, a calling card flattering insecurities of a restive public drawn like moths to flaming populist demagogues.

Tuesday’s U.S. primary elections result from the state of Michigan, where one Senate candidate played on antizionist sentiment to defeat his Israel-affirming opponent, is illustrative. It shows an appetite, in the electorate, for simplistic policy prescriptions that depend on scapegoating of the Jewish State and its advocates. Reverberations of the trend are leading to violence against Jews: verbal threats and physical assaults.

This disturbance has further shaken and divided Diaspora and especially American Jewry, some of which is starting to question its general identification - since the New Deal era - with liberalism and progressivism embodied in the Democratic party. For Jews used to assuming they had unwavering allies and support among purportedly open-minded, justice-seeking social activists in the Land of the Free and the Brave, the shock of seeing themselves othered, ghosted, negated and vilified is beginning to sink in.

The bluebird symbolizes “a period of time characterized by sunny, cloudless weather1.” “The bluebird of happiness” is an image peoples across the world recognize and cherish2. Jews in the West did enjoy halcyon days for a time, especially in the United States during the post-World War II “Golden Age of American Jews3,” which came to an abrupt and horrifying halt on October 7, 2023.

Our Bluebird Airways flight from Tel Aviv to Athens symbolizes, for me, the historical movement - a reverse motion screening of Jewish destiny - that drew us away from our homeland into exile. The imperial army that literally dragged Jews in chains to Rome was an agency of Hellenistic design.

Jews got used to living in exile and found ways to validate, enjoy and even glorify it. Our pursuit of happiness led us to mimic our Christian (and to a lesser extent Muslim) neighbors in embracing Greco-Roman ideals.

Even before the 70 CE destruction of Jerusalem and subsequent galut/exile, Pharisaic leaders were dabbling in Greek philosophy; after, during the Christian and Muslim Middle Ages (whose religious cultures internalized and were beholden to Hellenistic values), some of our most prominent Rabbis - the towering multifaceted polymath Maimonides being the most obvious example - did in-depth explorations and examinations of, and found Jewishly “acceptable” applications for, ideas and methodologies drawn from Hellenism.

Earlier, while Jewish religion’s Jesus-oriented (ultimately, Christian) sister rival was quickly forming, Jewish scholarship led to Philo of Alexandria, an Egyptian Jew with a Greek name; he didn’t just dabble in Greek philosophy: he owned it.

Under its sway, he became the effective godfather of Jewish philosophy from ancient to modern times. And his ideas influenced formation of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian theologies - which are not only largely compatible with but intellectually dependent upon Greek ideas. Jewish people have for ages been circling around in a Greco-Roman orbit.

Jews with Ashkenazic roots (i.e., those who lived in northern Europe, eastern Europe excluding the Balkans, and western Europe excluding Iberia) became so acclimated to it that they gradually came to assume it was their natural habit. Yeridah/descent, a going down, opposite of aliyah/ascent or going up to the land of Israel, had turned into a default condition, one of spiritual depression and moral subservience.

It marked Jewish life for two thousand years. Internalizing the foreign code and being able to spout its dogmas mechanically became a badge of honor for Jews enduring the humiliation and degradation of Diaspora existence in Christian Europe.

(The Greek people I met on the plane and at the Athens airport were helpful and sweet. I want to go back to visit Greece; I can learn from them but do not identify with them.)

I see symbolic content also in the names of the airlines, Delta and Air France, that brought us from Athens to Boston. Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, is cognate with dalet, Hebrew’s fourth letter.

Number 4 bears several Jewish connotations. Kabbalists speak of 4 worlds: physical, emotional, conceptual and spiritual. I maintain that such compartmentalization of our lives is a sign of Jewry’s disunity: a disintegrated Jewish consciousness consonant with the exilic condition. Athens to Boston, Europe to America, represents futher societal rupture that Ashkenazic Jews, already split in their apprehension of what being Jewish means, endured in transitioning from Old World to New.

Jews moving into modernity were subject to divergent impulses, conflicting motivations, and contending persuasions. The bond of shared aspiration - to find our way home to eretz yisrael - that had held us together as a people was splintering.

Air France sponsorship of our Delta flight represents (in my figurative model) conditions or constraints upon Jews’ modern experience - first in Europe, then in America - of conditional acceptance and eventual betrayal.

France is where Jews were forced to choose between holding onto their ancient status as members of the Jewish nation and renouncing Jewish nationhood in favor of no longer being segregated and persecuted but Jewish in religion only and otherwise accepted as individual French citizens. They chose the latter option.

Offered as a solution to Jewish diaspora malaise, this was effectively a divide-and-conquer tactic. It led, by way of the Dreyfus Affair, to the Final Solution.

Witnessing Jew-hatred that erupted during the trial of (falsely accused and then convicted of treason) French Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Theodor Herzl anticipated cataclysm and spearheaded the Zionist project of reuniting an increasingly divided and disheartened people.

Turnaround, knitting the Jewish soulscape back together, would mean: physically reclaiming the Jewish homeland and participating bodily, 24/7, in its building up; boosting downtrodden Jews’ flagging emotions; translating Jewish religious concepts into secular form; and reanimating our national spirit.

For Israel’s Sephardic and Mizrachi majority, Diaspora existence turned out to be a non-option; upon Israel’s founding, their parents and grandparents were forced to flee their homes in the Muslim world. Most American Jews - mainly descendants of Jews who escaped pogroms, poverty, and genocide from eastern Europe, but including Holocaust survivors and others from western Europe as well - still think of the U.S. as home.

I think they are ambivalent, uncertain about what comes next. They sense trouble but don’t know what to do, where to turn. They’re up in the air - like the plane Martha and I were passengers on. For us, though, that Delta / Air France nonstop flight from Europe to America was not a one-way trip.

Seeing a gathering storm of antisemitism, Herzl worried about the dismal prospects for Jews in modern Europe. In the form of antizionism, the danger has migrated to America. Realistic alarm spurred him to pave the way for Diaspora Jews’ - including Martha’s and my! - rejoining am yisrael in eretz yisrael.

The airport from which we departed and to which we’ll return was named after Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. He wanted to achieve for Jews a “normal” state. Israel’s circumstances are far from normal, but to be Jewish is normal in Israel and nowhere else.

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Attempts by militant ultra-Orthodox Jews to impose - through legislation and intimidation - their will on Israel’s secular majority have met with resistance. People showed up at the café in solidarity with the owner and support of his refusal to be bullied into submission by religious extremists.

The largest segment - around 45% - of Israel’s Jewish population identifies as chiloni/secular. (That’s roughly the same percentage as of world Jewry, which is also predominantly secular, that lives in Israel.) A majority of Israelis in general favor religion-state separation2.

I cherish shabbat menuchah / Shabbat serenity and do not go to stores and restaurants on the Jewish day of rest. My habit is to stay close to home, read, study, relax, take a walk, take a nap, take it easy. And I don’t judge what others do with their Shabbat time.

How does rioting against folks who choose to dine out or buy a cup of coffee on Shabbat contribute to the tranquility and dignity befitting this divinely blessed weekly holiday? Even though starting an engine means lighting a fire, which is one of the 39 forms of physical labor that, our Rabbis said, the Torah forbids on Shabbat, if you want to get in your car and drive for a weekend visit with family and friends, swimming at the beach, or picnicking in a public park, why not? I likewise want Israel to provide more public transportation on Shabbat for anyone who needs it.

In conversation with an Orthodox friend, the subject of religious observance - specifically, obedience to the mitzvot/commandments - came up. He defines it, per his family background, Jewish education and moral convictions, in halachic terms. I suggested to him that, while this is a valid way of understanding what being commanded as a Jew means, there are other ways.

They don’t meet his definition but are meaningful and important nonetheless.

I was describing to him a bar/bat mitzvah gathering Martha and I attended last Thursday evening on a kibbutz where cousins of mine live. Daughters from that family counted among 14 kibbutz members’ children whose coming of age was occasion for celebration by the kibbutz community as a whole.

It was an entirely secular event; there was no religious content in any conventional manner: no Torah recitation, no devar torah (commentary on the weekly Torah portion), no liturgy from the siddur/prayerbook. But I found the experience powerful, inspiring, spiritually uplifting.

And fascinating.

What came across most strongly to me was a feeling of communal connection: a sense of tribal bonding and social affirmation. After a lovely informal dinner party held on the kibbutz grounds, as twilight descended the large crowd migrated to an open area where chairs were placed opposite an outdoor theater.

Along with an elaborately staged dramatic performance - a skit comprising song, dance and accompanying video (projected on a giant screen), in which all of the beney/benot mitzvah (that’s the plural of “bar/bat mitzvah”) participated - were robust physical feats. At the start, as names of the 14 were announced one by one, each flew down on a zip line, then jumped through a hoop of fire; they later performed challenging gymnastic exercises on ropes high in the air.

Emblazoned in fire, displays of Hebrew phrases honoring the kibbutz and these young honorees lit up and shone through the darkness.

My Hebrew still a work in progress, I didn’t follow the plot line clearly, but I picked up a tone of serious reflection on challenges kids face growing up with their peers in a country at war and their need to prioritize cooperation over self-centeredness.

This festive moment was a rite of passage, a ritual of initiation: an opening, a welcoming into a more adult world. It was, in its own fashion, about recognizing one’s place as a bat/bar mitzvah: a responsible citizen of am yisrael.

I told my Orthodox friend about this. He listened respectfully to my description and understood my point. As the people of Israel, as Jews, we are fishers in yam talmud / an endless sea of learning. To draw in all the wisdom we can, we need to cast a wide net, one that embraces diverse approaches - whether secular, religious, or some hybrid of the two - to thinking and living as shomrey mitzvot / souls who guard and carry out the mitzvot.

Living constructively, in a genuinely collaborative spirit, every day as a Jew among Jews does require forbearance and compassion, a willingness to refrain from condemning our neighbor whose customs and practices differ from our own. A commitment to support and uplift one another.

An eager willingness to listen and learn - and a desire to celebrate together.

(IDF soldier and Haredi community member dancing at a staging area near the border of Gaza, Nov. 28, 2023 outside Sderot, Israel / Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images /

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When I got there, the first thing the friendly manager - repeating what his associate had told me on the phone the day before - said no such brand was in stock; definitely not there.

I named my approximate shoe size (I had done my homework and translated my U.S. shoe size into the Israeli one), showed him a picture I had taken of the shoe that interested me, and (as per the earlier phone advice) offered to locate it in the catalog. Instead of bringing me the catalog, he looked carefully at the picture, hemmed and hawed a bit, did some brief research, told me he might have available something similar in a slightly smaller size, and went to look for it.

He found it; I tried it on. It wasn’t a perfect fit but might work. While I was telling the manager this, he went back into the stock room and - eureka! - brought out a pair of the same brand in the size I had named. This shoe fit perfectly. I bought two pairs.

Israeli social interactions often follow this scenario.

You ask for help; the first thing people do is say they can’t help you. You repeat your request; your persistence starts to pay off. Unresponsiveness gives way to investigation, negation to validation, frustration to hopefulness. The attitude shifts from “there’s nothing I can do for you” to “let me take a look and see what I might be able to do” to “maybe this can help?” Movement by fits and starts from the impossible to the viable. I experience that pattern in my dealings with stores, banks, hospitals, and government here.

Informally coming up with solutions to seemingly intractable problems seems to be the Israeli way.

I think it’s rooted (history echoing myth) in an ancient and modern Jewish inclination: At the sea’s edge, Pharaoh’s army rushing toward you, you predict doom - when all of a sudden the waters part and you escape on dry land. In 1948 and 1967, you’re outnumbered and outgunned by enemies preparing to wipe you out - you defeat them.

Refusing to take “no” for an answer - not letting the presumed likelihood of failure stop us from succeeding, not caving to expected defeat - is integral to our character. Which reminds me of an old (admittedly, chauvinistic) American Jewish joke…

When informed that a flood will inundate the world in exactly seven days, people congregate in their places of worship. A Catholic priest tells his flock to confess their sins and prepare to meet their Maker. A Protestant minister tells his parishioners that divine judgment is upon them so they should sear their souls and throw themselves on God’s mercy in hope of being spared an afterlife of hellfire. A rabbi informs his congregation that they have exactly seven days to learn how to live underwater.

Word is that Israel is doomed. Antizionists have been mouthing this mantra for decades, but Israeli analysts and pundits - pointing to political corruption, military debacles, and surging emigration, all these things seen as indicative of a nation on the path to disintegration - are now expressing the same concern. At the same time, Israeli optimists - I unapologetically among them - push back loudly.

There are around 16 million Jews in the world today, this number lower than the roughly 16.6 million Jews who were alive in 1939, on the eve of the Shoah1. We’re always underwater, and yet we keep breathing, learning how to thrive under precarious circumstances.

Maybe, just maybe, a reason for Jews’ persistent survival in the face of horrible odds is our refusal to take “no” for an answer, our willingness to persist until we find what we were looking for - the solution to our problem, the missing link, the shoe that fits - and instinctively knew was there all along.

If we truly are am olam / an eternal people, a big part of what makes us so is our determination to find that pair of shoes, put them on our feet, and walk upon the pathways of life.

You might not notice someone pulling ahead of you even if you adjust these mirrors, attach a convex blind-spot mirror, have an electronic sensor detection system, and/or coordinate side-view with rear-view mirror use.

The car coming from your right or left will remain visible for awhile, then disappear for a moment and reappear as it goes past.

I’ve had close calls when I didn’t pay attention carefully enough: Glancing at the side-view mirror, seeing no one in my way, I began turning into the next lane, almost crashed into a passing car, and had to swerve back into my own lane. My mother once advised that to be extra-vigilant I should rapidly (so as to not neglect focusing upon what’s in front of me) look over my shoulder before turning into a lane.

Instead of relying solely on artificial optical mechanisms when changing lanes, we should honor the testimony of our own eyes: see for ourselves.

Everyone is going at different speeds, with more or less horsepower, in vehicles of assorted sizes and curb weights. Their safety ratings vary. Awareness of or obliviousness to a rapidly accelerating automobile’s approach - the hazard close at hand - could mean the difference between life and death.

Every road we travel on has its perils. The road Jews are on is unsafe; societal traffic conditions are frightening. A terror machine (antizionism) is gaining on us and edging alongside as we steer our course down the freeway. Not seeing what’s coming could put you at risk.

People with strong ideological drive come suddenly, seemingly out from nowhere to your right and left. Heedless of your position, they power on forward. If you don’t watch where they’re coming from and what they’re doing, a smashup will ensue. Your survival requires heightened vigilance. Remember, your blind spot is a danger zone.

There’s danger on the right. Right now, danger on the left - the fast lane - warrants greater concern.

Some left-wing opinion drivers - moving through that liminal space where antizionist impulses are emergent although hard to discern, concealed or fuzzily wrapped in tropes of “constructive criticism” - mean well and wouldn’t deliberately sideswipe you. Others, arrogant scofflaws and aggressive bullies, like to intimidate - these latter, the unabashed antizionists, het up with political road rage, flooring the pedal in their armored Humvees, pose an obvious threat.

Yet, if you’re a Jew who leans toward the left while ignoring your blind spot, you’re on a potential collision course not only with overt Jew-haters who wrap their ill will in rhetoric of “resistance” and “liberation” but with nice individuals whose political sympathies and affinities you think you share: those “reasonable” progressives with whom you’re a fellow traveler.

They too, cruising at moderate pace in their Volvos, could roll over you in your Peel P50 microcar and squash you like a bug1. Look over your shoulder; pay attention.

History teaches that what’s “behind” us is not only in the past but also a present pitfall to anticipate and avoid.

A telltale marker of Jewish life especially in the Diaspora is constant anxiety over what “they” think - “they” being the surrounding non-Jewish majority. Looking back through the side-view mirror to assess the sincerity of neighbors’ neighborliness, Diaspora Jews often allay their anxiety with wishful thinking.

They don’t notice anything to worry about - they see no potential collision. The blind spot.

One of the hardest conversations I’ve had in recent years - especially after the horrors of October 7 and the never-ending war with Iran (I agree with most Israelis that Trump’s ceasefire deal won’t change this bellicose status quo2) - has been with well-meaning persons, Jewish as well as Christian, whose criticism of Israeli policies and actions bleeds into rationalization for and reinforcement of antizionist gaslighting.

I want to think of them as friends, but, amid public furor over and growing rancor toward Israel, there’s a blurry line between knowing whom to embrace as friends and whom to hold at arm’s length. The side-view mirror’s blind spot poses a hindrance for us in distinguishing merely good intentions from real supportiveness.

The ghosting of Jewish liberals, their increasing exclusion from communal spaces purportedly dedicated to engagement, their growing invisibility within the American movement for social justice (which Jews played a key role in founding!) - these are signs warning us to be cautious about turning into that left-hand lane.

Don’t just check the side-view mirror; it doesn’t factor in the blind spot. Follow my mother’s advice: look over your shoulder.

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Israel upholds comprehensive civil rights for LGBTQ+ people, including allowing same-sex couples to serve as surrogate parents1 and recognizing same-sex marriages performed abroad - although, regrettably, not yet authorizing them to take place in Israel2.

A Pride festival is scheduled for July 25 in Lebanon, where discrimination against LGBTQ+ people remains widespread but attitudes are softening and tolerance increasing.

No other Arab or Muslim-majority country holds public LGBTQ+ events, and in most of those countries, to varying degrees, violence against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender individuals and formal criminalization of their sexual relations are pervasive. Among Palestinians, the subject of gay rights is taboo and LGBTQ+ persons’ lives are at risk.

The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) booted Israel’s affiliated organization in 20243, affirming ILGA’s “unequivocal solidarity for the Palestinian people4.”

Ironic, some?

More self-contradiction, antizionist LGBTQ+ folks, for you to chew on: Iran’s government, which treats same-sex relations as a capital offense5 but, same as you do, claims to champion Palestinians, launched ballistic missiles against us last night. In the safe room here in Zikhron Yaakov, I heard the boom of those rockets.

School is now called off, public activities restricted. If Israel’s Pride Month events are likewise dropped, Iran can take the credit.

So enough with the double standards, moral inversion, and gaslighting!

LGBTQ+ rights proponents who dismiss (as “pink-washing”) the observation that Israel is the only country in region to unequivocally embrace human rights for that group should get over themselves, get real, and abandon their self-righteous, preposterous attempt to justify a viewpoint based on twisted logic - an outlook without a shred of moral credibility.

They’ll have to reckon with their suicidal hypocrisy for demonizing - and blacklisting supporters of - Israel (which endorses lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people’s rights) while siding with Israel’s enemies (who threaten, traumatize and kill those same people).

Many LGBTQ+ community members still stand with Israel, yet the trend among activists is increasingly, decidedly and loudly antizionist. Negation of Israel is becoming a litmus test for admission to gay advocacy circles and organizations6.

“Queers for Palestine”? Really?

A majority of Israelis - 74% according to a recent poll - favor “full legal equality” for LGBTQ+ folks, 64% understanding this to specifically include civil marriage7.

The sizable minority opposed reflects a bias consonant with deeply ingrained traditional religious convictions as well as the authoritarian grip Israel’s Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) political parties have upon law relating to the Jewish life cycle.

That bias could explain why, unlike in the U.S. and some other countries, in Israel same-sex marriage ceremonies are still not legal (although - to reiterate - Israel does recognize same-sex couples whose marriages were formalized elsewhere).

Holy Scripture has nothing to say about lesbian relationships, but it strictly forbids gay ones (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13). Anything hinting of transgender identity is proscribed (Deuteronomy 22:5). Rabbinic law, losing no time to endorse the Torah’s ban on sex between men, widened the circle of carnal no-nos by eventually getting around to discouraging sex between women (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yevamot 76a, Shabbat 65a).

And yet, most Israelis disagree.

The survey’s data breakdown of respondents’ solid backing for “full equality” tracks their religious (or non-religious) affinities: secular/89%; 75%/traditional; 53%/religious; 25%/ultra-Orthodox. This poll finds over half of Israel’s religious Jewish population ready to license behavior our religion has historically outlawed!

The fact that Israel is so open to LGBTQ+ culture dispels the cartoonish image of this society as a potential or emergent fascist theocracy ruled by intolerant religious zealots who have free rein to carry out their fanatical agenda8.

On the contrary, Israelis’ receptiveness to Pride culture shows respect for diverse sexual orientations in an open society. As better understanding of human nature and needs arises, Jewish life evolves.

Having been physically intimate with women and men, I guess I belong (more or less?) in the LGBTQ+ fold. My sympathies are with those who diverge from “strai(gh)t” and narrow conformism.

I know I’m not alone in opposing mindless lockstep antizionist sentiment that - contrary to the openminded, widely embracing spirit of gay liberation - is threatening to engulf the field of LGBTQ+ rights advocacy.

I know there are plenty of other queers for Israel. Resist. Speak up. Speak out.

(LGBTQ+ flag streaming from the wall of Zamarin, a cultural center in Zikhron Yaakov Culture Center, June 2026)

In the middle of the night, their haunting howls would rise up from an area of dense vegetation down below, just a stone’s throw from us, and reach across the darkness through our bedroom window as we slept. Instead of finding the chorus of yaps and yowls irritating, we felt it a blessing and thought ourselves privileged recipients of a gift from nature and God.

Occasionally, an agonized shriek would rise up; we speculated it was from a cat who’d met a grim fate after having strayed into the enclosure where jackals lay in wait for prey.

We’re wondering if they’ve left the neighborhood. I’m worried some municipal agency saw fit to clear them out or kill them off. Did the war, with its sirens and missiles, scare the creatures away? (My cursory research hasn’t yielded confirmation of these suspicions or, for that matter, any information on the subject.)

The jackal - referred to as shu’al (the term also, and nowadays only, meaning “fox”) or tan - carries symbolic resonance in Judaism. Biblical references connote desolation and abandonment: “Like shu’alim among ruins have your prophets been, Israel!” (Ezekiel 13:4); “I have made his mountains a wasteland, his inheritance a wilderness for tanot” (Malachi 1:3).

Warning of Jerusalem’s razing as punishment for the Jewish people’s idolatrous, corrupt ways, God threatens: “I will turn Yerushalayim to rubble, a lair of tanim” (Jeremiah 9:10). Their presence reminds us of our past national humiliation and history of exile.

Yet there’s another way to think about the jackal. While walking on Har haTzofim / Mount Scopus and looking down on the Temple’s ruins, Rabbi Akiva (1st-2nd centuries CE) and three rabbinic friends of his spy shu’alim emerging from a pile of debris that had been the Holy of Holies. The other sages cry, but Akiva laughs.

“What are you laughing about?” they ask. He responds, “What are you crying about?”

Akiva comforts them by reminding them of two prophecies, the second following from and predicated upon the first. The first predicted the Jewish kingdom’s destruction (thus, the land reduced to uncultivated turf where creatures run wild). The second foresaw restoration of Jewish life in rebuilt Jerusalem. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Makkot 24a:33; 24b:2-4)

The appearance of shu’alim in the Holy Temple’s wreckage serves, Akiva explains, as harbinger of our people’s eventual redemption.

I too looked down from Har haTzofim upon the Temple site in the Old City. This was in 1990 during a period of study as I was preparing for the rabbinate. My family and I were high up on a tower at Hebrew University. It was during the first intifada. We heard shouts and the noise of violent clashes.

These days, in the precinct of Kotel haMa’aravi / the Western Wall, Jewish extremists are verbally abusing and physically attacking others Jews - women and men who want to pray together on an egalitarian, gender-inclusive basis. Conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and among Jews aside, I see the jackal as a sign of hope.

I’m not referring to the sighting, on Tisha be’Av / 9 Av in July of 2023, of a shu’al (in this case fox rather than jackal) near the Temple Mount2, a circumstance that aroused messianic speculation among religious zealots craving any hint of a Time of Redemption close at hand.

Nor do I mean Franz Kafka’s depiction, in his strange, perverse tale “Jackals and Arabs,” of jackals’ ritual purity obsession based, paradoxically, on instinctive craving for carrion. These jackals beg a traveler “from the north” to please liberate them by murdering their oppressive Arab masters, whose custom of killing animals for food the jackals find repugnant3.

In my book redemption has nothing to do with the Messianic concept of a savior figure who violently routs our enemies and restores our fortunes. For me, jackals betoken redemption just by being part of the physical landscape of eretz yisrael.

From there, they enter Israel’s imaginative landscape. I find redemptive potential in how the jackal weaves into threads of song, such as from this line of the serene Israeli classic “Erev Ba / Evening is Coming”: “…vecharchek ba’emek ha’afel melaveh hatan et bo haleyl / and far away in the dark valley, the jackal accompanies the coming of night….4”

Jackals, your haunting nocturnal wail was a sweet sound that wove in and out of my dreams and comforted, reassured me as I lay wrapped in a blanket of darkness. Aroused and half-waking, I listened to your baying call, which helped me remember that I am where I belong. And back to sleep…

Where are the jackals? I want them back!

(https://pixabay.com/images/download/ornaw-animal-7870531_1920.jpg)

This post begins on a confessional note…

During my ornery adolescence and early adulthood, I was down with taking snarky potshots at favorite targets in the grown-up world. I’d sneer contemptuously at middle-of-the-road politicians who were doing their level best to juggle balancing public budgets, responding to working-class constituents’ bread-and-butter needs, and ameliorating unfair social conditions that plagued vulnerable minorities.

My impatience with the status quo would lead to flights of manic overreach as I lambasted those decent, well-meaning public servants (and other adult figures), accusing them of malice, cruelty and - worst of all - boringness. They were fascist pigs, bourgeois thieves, global despoilers. Their least offenses exhibited unscrupulousness, criminality, malevolence.

My two older brothers (to this day far more rational than I) had to put up with my mishegas/nonsense and were generally affectionate and forbearing even as they felt obligated to point out what they knew was the chatter of an immature person who had no idea what he was talking about. They were indulgent of and occasionally amused by the whimsical knack I had for constructing a moral universe out of thin air, but they didn’t always suffer such obstreperously grandiose bluster lightly.

So at times they’d let me in on the fact that I was wildly ridiculous, my flights of self-righteous bombast insufferable. My father, a political scientist and classic Virgo, logical, methodical and patient, took these outbursts of juvenile invective in stride. His go-to response, blunt and sardonic, was: “When will you stop beating your wife?”

And left it at that.

The question was a mirror image of my own mentally untethered diatribes: a way of showing me how stupid my rhetoric was. It was the 1970s and 1980s, an age of political violence; America was living in the wake of assassinations; a shadow of violence hung over the nation as threats against and attacks on elected officials and people running for office continued.

My irresponsible prattling back then didn’t harm anybody. As we grow older and our circle of real-world influence widens, though, the fallout - for good or ill - of what we say and how we talk becomes more and more pronounced. We adults had better watch, be careful with, our words.

My grown-up self is not more circumspect, but I’ve learned, I hope, to rein in some of the potentially destructive presumptuousness that once made me lash out recklessly with slanderous allegations about human beings whose integrity I had no right to impugn.

The Torah states: “Do not go about as a talebearer among your people. Do not stand on the blood of your fellow. I am YHVH” (Leviticus 19:16). The three sentences work together to make a specific point: Gossip - unsubstantiated rumors, slanderous insinuations, libelous propaganda - can have deadly consequences, for which the perpetrator must answer to God.

To Bernie Sanders, who is spreading the lie that Israel is guilty of genocide, I ask: “Bernie, when will you stop beating your wife?”

To Nicholas Kristof, who spread the rumor that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians, I ask: “Nicholas, when will you stop beating your wife?”

What if the charges are true?

During the Middle Ages, word was that Jews killed Christian children and baked their blood into matzah. What if it’s true?

In modern times, belief in a conspiracy of Jewish bankers imposing a stranglehold on the world economy and Jewish oligarchs pulling the strings of entire governments was (and still remains) widespread. What if it’s true?

The same sloppy thinking goes on nowadays in the addled brains of liberal-minded folks who, with virtuous intentions and very often Jewish sympathies (or who even are Jewish themselves), lend false credence to scurrilous accusations about Israel’s domination of America and to demonization of Israel as an illegitimate white European racist settler-colonialist ethnostate.

During the recent festival of Shavuot, which commemorates zeman matan torateynu / the Time of the Giving of our Torah at Mount Sinai, Jews in synagogue heard recited aseret hadibrot / The Ten Commandments, among them: “You shall not bear false witness against your fellow” (Exodus 20:13). Same as the law forbidding talebearing, this one warns us against making unsubstantiated claims of guilt.

Spousal abuse is real, women bearing the brunt of it. Laws against wife-beating must be vigilantly enforced. At the same time, unjustly leveling that or any criminal charge interferes with prosecution of those who are criminally liable.

Scapegoating Israel, or Jewish people, by falsely accusing us of crimes against humanity distracts the world from paying attention to real sources of violence and injustice.

(The Martyrdom of Saint Simon of Trent from Schedel Weltchronik [Schedel’s World History], Plate 23 from Woodcuts from Books of the 15th Century / Date:1493, portfolio assembled 1929 / Artist: Michel Wolgemut [German, 1434/37–1519] and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff [German, c. 1460–1494] / printed and published by Anton Koberger [German, c. 1440/45–1513] / original text by Hartmann Schedel [German, 1440–1514] / portfolio text by Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber [German, 1855–1932] /

https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/ec4dfd48-eb66-a646-87ad-e40b7691cf5c/full/1686,/0/default.jpg /

The Jewish community was accused of ritually murdering this boy and using his blood in making matzah. See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/blood-libel)

That situation about sums up where liberal-leaning Jews and friends are in their fast-fading romance with Progressivism. It has cast us aside in favor of antizionists. If we think that becoming antizionist ourselves will make progressives reconsider and could win back their affection, we’re kidding ourselves, and yet many Jews and their friends are trying to do just that.

Although antizionism is sweeping gullible souls - adolescents and grownups with an adolescent mentality - off their feet in universities and town councils throughout the West, here in Zikhron Yaakov I detect that folks couldn’t care less about having been spurned so rudely. Israel’s political culture was originally progressive - political leadership Labor Zionist, with ties to democratic socialists, and left-wing nostalgia still lingering - but has long since moved on.1

The subject of antizionism is barely a blip on Israelis’ emotional radar screen. We’re not trying - as jilted lovers sometimes do - to get back into Progressivism’s graces by imitating the rival who supplanted us.

I am looking out my window at the flag of Israel, which we fastened to the railing of our mirpeset/balcony, waving nobly in the breeze. They’re visible everyone one goes. Walking along the sidewalks, I’ve noticed protest signs on walls and fences, but their messages, too, are patriotic.

The criticism, different from what one sees on banners hoisted aloft in marches in London and New York, reflects objection not to Israel’s existence but to policies and practices viewed - from assorted partisan and non-partisan perspectives - as endangering it.

Conversations with friends and neighbors inevitably circle back to the question of how to improve the country, not how to deep-six it. When discussing what approach to take toward Palestinians, even Israeli left-wingers who entertain the “one-state solution” notion honestly concede that it’s a pipe-dream. Pretty much everybody assumes Israel as a Jewish state is here to stay.

The question is, what kind of Jewish state should it be: democratic, theocratic, authoritarian? Grappling with that problem is where disagreement heats up, often boiling into acrimony.

Unlike Jews in cities throughout Western Europe and, increasingly, the U.S., Jews in Israel do not nervously tuck their stars of David under their shirts or remove kippot and other Jewishly identified clothing that could make us hate crime targets. Synagogues are not barricaded or equipped with armed guards. There’s no reason to worry that looking Jewish could mark you for harassment or worse.

Guards stationed at supermarket and school entrances monitor the potential terrorism threat (a throwback precaution to when waves of intifada traumatized the Israeli public some decades ago), but these days such security protocol is casual, seemingly perfunctory.

Because Israel has never not been at war with at least some of its neighbors, the present being no exception, many citizens also take a kacha-kacha/so-so attitude toward missile and drone attacks. During the latest round of hostilities, we sheltered in the safe room together with other apartment-dwellers on our landing, exchanged greetings and chatted, musing on the absurdity of what was going on, wondering when things would calm down.

In the north they haven’t. There’s anger aplenty especially among those who’ve been harmed there and elsewhere from attacks by Iran and Hezbollah. Once again, the indignation stems not from a wish, which Israel’s enemies fanatically embrace, to erase it from the map but from loyal citizens’ frustration with Israel’s government at not safeguarding them as it should.2

Protest is based on an assumption not of hostility against but of devotion to medinat yisrael.

Criticism informed by knowledge based on one’s lived experience with conflict is valid; armchair lectures of rebuke broadcast from halfway across the world, at a safe distance from the arena of conflict, are not. (One reason I decided to make aliyah was that I realized I could not in good faith judge how Israel should respond to difficult options with which it is faced in military, political and cultural terms unless I had skin in the game.)

Antizionist orthodoxy now dominates progressive politics in places far from where the Jewish people’s collective existence is on the line. Diaspora Jews who think humoring that unconscionable derangement will induce their ex to reconsider and come back to them are fooling themselves.

Jews and their friends should instead categorically reject antizionism and all the excuses individuals who’re prey to the antizionist disinformation campaign make for it. One modest step is to sign this declaration that Dr. Naya Lekht authored: https://www.stopaz.org/declaration .

And share it with others. Also, listen to an illuminating podcast she did with Steven Shalowitz on IsraelCast at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovxx4aHcJO0 .

The late great Jewish songwriting team Neil Sedaka (a proud supporter of Israel!) and Howard Greenfield wrote the classic hit “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” A teenage boy begs his girlfriend not to end their romance. Pleading wistfully, futilely, he reminds her of all the good times they had together. Jews and progressives had their good times, but the relationship soured as progressives broke up with us and took up with antizionists.

We should accept that fact - stop pretending we can fix a broken relationship - and move on.

(“Faithful to the Scroll [Declaration] of Independence”)

The left-wingers, moreover, cite Israel’s alleged violation of Palestinians’ human and political rights and argue that this contravenes principles of Constitutional democracy - with its promise of justice and rule of law - essential to the American way of life.

I did not hear from them the same objection about military cooperation with NATO-member Hungary when it was led by a self-described “illiberal” prime minister, Orbán. Nor did they suggest booting NATO-member Turkey, whose authoritarian-leaning president, Erdoğan, supports the terrorist group Hamas.

Where were the Democrats’ and Socialists’ indignant protests calling to expel those oppressive regimes from a security alliance based on the assumption of common interests?

Here the double standard, which ambushes Jews over and over again, is efficiently operative.

Compounding this hypocrisy is a profession of belief (again, one that many liberals share with many conservatives) in values of Western civilization based on a “Judaeo-Christian” ethic. It’s dishonest to say we share the same values and then turn around and say your interests are different from mine.

They surrender to the double standard through Hip Gnosis.

“Hip” means “woke”: in tune with today’s politically correct cultural vibe. “Gnosis,” of ancient provenance, refers to divine “knowledge”: a state of deep spiritual awareness that supersedes conventional religious understanding; thus, whose veracity is unimpeachable.

Adepts of Gnosis, “gnostics,” are God’s elect. Hip Gnostics (who come in “secular” as well as “religious” flavors) know for certain that they and they alone have a total monopoly on and direct phone line to The Truth.

The inventive chants that antizionist hip gnostics repeat over and over again - “From the River to the Sea,” “Globalize the Intifada,” “Settler Colonialism,” “Resistance by Any Means Necessary,” “Free Palestine,” “All Zionists Are Terrorists,” “Israel Israel You Can’t Hide, We Charge You with Genocide” - have a mesmeric effect.

It’s like a grotesque parody of what occurs in psychotherapeutic settings where, put into a trance-like state and freed of inhibition, the patient is liberated from rational constraints and beholden only to dictates of emotion. This is a fluid, volatile environment in which the venting of resentment untethered to realism or rationality is encouraged.

It’s a place where, letting words mean whatever one likes, one can practice self-contradiction with impunity, and where there’s no basis on which to decide who is responsible to whom or accountable for what.

As Adam Louis-Klein of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) points out in his articles at the MAAZ website (https://www.movementagainstantizionism.org/) and on Facebook and Substack, Jew-hatred is a murder game with moving goalposts. Political Whac-A-Mole. Speaking of evasive creatures, another pops into my mind: the chameleon.

I am not anti-chameleon. But like Jew-hatred, chameleons thrive on imprecision: manipulating false perceptions to take advantage, massaging ambiguity into an adaptive strategy.

Chameleons’ survival secret is an ability to change color; Jew-hatred’s survival secret is its inveterate, masterful, endlessly versatile hypocrisy. “Hypocrisy” in Hebrew is tzeviyut, related to the verb, litzbo’a: “to color/paint/dye.” Chameleons and Jew-haters change color to blend into their habitat - chameleons to become invisible, Jew-haters to appear innocuous. Chameleons and Jew-haters camouflage their intentions behind whatever hue places them in an attractive or convenient light.

An example of Jew-hatred’s chameleon-like elasticity: “The head of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism office…said that City Hall will not replace a widely used antisemitism definition that Mamdani scrapped on his first day in office.”1

A hip gnostic through and through, Mamdani repackages dogmatic hatred as redemptive wokeness. He was definite about rejecting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, which “equates some forms of anti-Israel rhetoric with discrimination against Jews.” To accept that fair definition, he, a militant antizionist, would have to acknowledge Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.

What definition did New York City’s Mayoral Office to Combat Anti-Semitism propose to replace the rejected one?

None at all.

The head of that office stated with subjectivistic suavity, “We don’t believe there needs to be a codified definition. The policy of this administration is we will continue to not have any codified definition of any form of hate.” To honor context, she added, “Bias and hate, it’s really sticky and extremely serious stuff, and it’s case by case.”

The most she could offer as a way to avoid defining antisemitism while pretending to oppose antisemitism was to call it “prejudice, violence and discrimination against Jews because they are Jewish.” In light of that example of tautological word salad, I recall yet another antizionist chant.

I heard it repeatedly blasted through a bullhorn by a pro-Palestine activist (who was later invited to speak, as a representative of Islam, at a local church) on a Vermont town’s main intersection during the heat of the Gaza war: “Zionists aren’t real Jews.”

Antizionists - at whose behest America is seriously considering hanging Israel out to dry - refuse to define “antisemitism,” but they have no problem defining what is legitimate or not legitimate for Jews to believe, do, and be. Instead of acknowledging our right to decide those things for ourselves.

This is what comes of hip gnosis.

(https://pixabay.com/photos/chameleon-panther-chameleon-384957/)

That morning, I was greeted by a friendly hijab-clad medical technician. Not surprising since Israel’s Arab population, predominantly Muslim, figures prominently in the medical field.1 At her request, I presented my plastic medical card, and she arranged the equipment for my test.

I mentioned my weak spot: Being scared of the pain and blood, I’d have to look away. She smiled and then, very gently and proficiently, pricked me with a needle (I felt a slight twinge but managed not to faint), took my blood, and applied a bandage to the tiny wound. The procedure was over in no time, leaving just a small red bruise, which would gradually fade. I was grateful for the young woman’s kindness and professionalism.

By contrast, Israel’s Arab neighbors have been at war with us for well over a century. Some eventually opted for peace; the majority remain hostile. On October 7, 2023 people across the Muslim world - Palestinians foremost - jubilantly celebrated the mass slaughter of Israeli Jews. Most of Israel’s Arab citizens did not share in that jubilation.2 Shedding Jewish-Israeli blood is a watchword of Hamas, Hezbollah and their sponsor, Iran’s totalitarian-terrorist Islamist regime.

The doctor will call me next week to go over the test results and discuss any possible abnormalities. Testing the Jewish people’s will, enemies are always looking for our weak spots, our vulnerabilities. Zionist thinkers, pronouncing a gloomy prognosis for survival in diaspora (i.e., diagnosing the Jewish people’s exilic condition as terminal), met the test with the bold vision of an at last “normal” Jewish existence in our own sovereign, independent state.

Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, perhaps put the point best in a quip brimming with ironic Jewish wit: “We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew.”3 For Jews, normal is messy.

More seriously, his comment reflects confidence in Israel as a robust social organism capable, through its own immune system, of keeping antigens - those corrupting influences that inevitably show up - from weakening and damaging the body politic. For social as well as political bodies, the ability to survive independently - without being hooked up to a machine; untrammeled by attachments and constraints of artificial life support - is a key measure of health.

Debate over whether Israeli politics, culture and values are healthy rages on, and that’s a good thing! This clash of opinions is itself normal, a sign of public health. In a well-functioning nation people face their differences of opinion openly.

Social malaise, by contrast, is marked by refusal to make room for disagreement. Repression of controversial views and stagnation in communal discourse follow with toxic consequences.

Israel is the rare democracy in this region. We have a free press, energetic political debate, explosive cultural creativity and diversity, and guaranteed human rights and religious freedoms. However, wrongful limitations - indeed, restrictions - on those civic blessings (not to mention violations of them) do exist.

Democratic commitments outlined in Israel’s Megilat Ha’atzma’ut / Declaration (literally, “Scroll”) of Independence are under assault through religious, political, legal, and military agencies representing some of the nation’s contending interests. We bicker over who’s to blame for, and reasons behind, the attack on democracy in Israel - indeed, on how to define or what constitutes the democracy that is so threatened. A specter of sinat chinam / baseless hatred looms.

It’s a potential tripwire for violence in which Jews could end up spilling each other’s blood. We’d better proceed very carefully, watching our steps, watching our words, taking care to love our Israeli neighbor as ourselves.

Love our Jewish Israeli neighbor only? What about the hijab-clad technician who took my blood?

Jewish citizens, let this sink in: You have in your midst Arab citizens, Muslims, who work to safeguard your health.

I’m writing this post on Israel’s Yom Hazikaron / Memorial Day - when we remember heroic acts: blood shed, lives lost to keep this nation vital and strong; and lives of Israelis who fell victim to terrorist bloodlust. Tonight begins Yom Ha’atzma’ut / Independence Day - when the heartbeat of Israel pulses with joyful pride in our 78 years of success as a nation.

Not all taking of blood is about death at an enemy’s hand; blood needs to be taken to assess one’s physical fitness. Not all Israelis are Jews; our national well-being depends upon cooperation among and respect for all our citizens. To sustain its atzma’ut/independence, Israel should not be thin-skinned but should show moral backbone. We must have enough bitachon-atzmi/self-confidence, as a Jewish state, to embrace all its people, Jews and non-Jews alike.

Israeli society’s lifeblood is now being tested. We apply tools of medical science to test the body’s fitness. In the same way, we apply tools of social science to keep our body politic strong, uniting its diverse parts so that they can work together to keep us vigorous and vibrant as a free and independent state.

(the now healed contact point where a needle drew blood from my arm)

(the flag of Israel waving from our mirpeset/balcony today, Yom Hazikaron)