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October 13, 2023

Let me tell you about the Jews of today. It’s taken thousands of years, but we are no longer a meek and timid people who will obediently board a train, be separated from our loved ones, and walk into a gas chamber believing we’ll have a nice shower after our arduous journey. It is precisely these tragic events in our collective Jewish past that inform the present and somehow will inform our future.

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The catastrophe that unfolded this past weekend in Israel was surreal for all decent humans with a pulse—excluding pro-Palestinian groups celebrating in Gaza, London, Sydney, and New York, as well as low-IQ individuals with undeserved diplomas and a platform for ignorance like Sonny Hostin of The View.

As Sukkot came to an end, Jews around the world looked forward to celebrating Simchat Torah, where the entire Torah is raised up and completely unrolled so that the Creation in Genesis connects to the final chapter of Deuteronomy when Moses takes his final breaths while looking out over the land of Israel, contemplating the future of his people. No rabbi ever told me this, but it seems clear that our unknowable future hearkens back to our lived past, as well as to the time before man walked this Earth. And that past is also connected to a future we don’t yet know.

Linking the hope and optimism of a future to the toils and even the infamies of the past is a theme that repeats in Judaism. It’s even reflected in how we name our children—after the dead to commemorate their memory and life, keeping them alive in our hearts and minds and for our futures through our children.

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Seeing the images this weekend. Hearing the stories. Suddenly, the future hangs in a delicate balance between survival or death with a shocking throwback to the horrors of the Holocaust. Yes, in a matter of hours, Hamas and the Gazans unearthed the unthinkable inhumanities of the Nazis and even, I’d say, tried to give the Nazis a run for their money.

I imagined the young people enjoying the music festival. They must have watched parachuters descend from the skies with curiosity, thinking at first it was a stunt for the show or military exercises, then they were most certainly overcome with shock, then disbelief, then abject terror as evil touched down, poured out of vans, and began to shoot indiscriminately.

They ran. They hid. They didn’t have guns or any other means to fight back. They were literally sitting ducks, and the enemy relished that expectation. Hear me on this. The enemy, Hamas, the Gazan people, the Iranians, and their supporters on the streets and in our universities, relished slaughtering young people listening to music.

We saw the horrifying and unforgivable. Babies in cages. Cages! For animals! Most certainly awaiting death. At a time in my life, when I didn’t think my heart could break anymore, the little bits I have left broke into ever smaller pieces. For most, the Holocaust is a collection of stories in history books or passed down from older generations. This is in real-time.

They took glee in their murderous acts (a sure sign of madness, as we have witnessed countless professors, protesters, students, and political commentators openly celebrate the carnage, the kidnappings, the rapes, the beheadings). The Nazis took similar pride in the horror they unleashed on Europe’s Jews, keeping detailed records of every capture, every internment, every murder, every sick experiment, and every act of torture. Today’s Gazan-Hamas Nazis recorded everything and posted it all online for the world to see, then paraded dead bodies and rape victims still bleeding from the violence throughout the streets of Gaza with cheers from the crowds—all out of a twisted Nazi-like sense of pride.

Well, pride cometh before the fall.