Contextualization Is the Opposite of Surrender

As we make our way through the weeks between Pesach and Shavuot, we are bidden by Scripture to count each day separately. This mitzvah, called informally “counting the omer,” is not complicated or difficult: you simply say the blessing, then say out loud the day of the omer upon us, then wrap up with a brief prayer. In different years, of course, this custom has a different feel to it. But this year, as things have gone from bad to worse, as the situation on many college campuses has deteriorated to the point almost of no return, as the poisoned tree that is the international effort to delegitimize Israel has born more and more fruit on more and more different branches, as traditional allies have wavered or retreated entirely, and as many members of Congress (a minority, but a sizable one) hesitate to support the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act for a variety of reasons, some bizarrely exaggerated and others darkly ominous—in a year such as this, the practice of counting each day, of marking each day as it passes and turns into the next one, that practice feels ominous and darkly suggestive of worse things to come in a way that I cannot recall ever having felt in years gone by.

And then I came across a video by an Israeli sketch comedy time called Ha-y’hudim Ba’im, literally “The Jews are Coming.” Normally, it’s a very funny broadcast on Israeli television, something along the lines of Saturday Night Live in its heyday.  But this last video clip, released just a week or so ago, is not at all funny. But it is profound and it is, in its own dark way, encouraging.

The video presents a series of Jewish people from ancient to modern times. A woman speaks about her experiences in first-century C.E. Judea as the Romans razed Jerusalem and defeated the rebels who dared seek an independent Jewish state in Israel. A young man follows who speaks to us from eleventh century Cologne and describes his family’s experiences as the Crusaders invaded the city with the specific intent of murdering its Jewish population before setting off to “liberate” the Holy Land. We then shift forward a millennium and find ourselves in Kishenev in 1903 as a resident describes what he saw and what his family experienced during the pogrom I wrote about last fall (click here), an anti-Jewish riot that, in a world that had yet to experience the Shoah, was understood as an almost unimaginable act of violence directed against innocents, including children. And then we skip forward two decades and meet a young person speaking from Hebron in 1929, the year of the anti-Jewish riots there that took the lives of sixty-nine Jews, also including children.

From Hebron, we move back to Germany and meet an older man who lived through Kristallnacht in Berlin. He describes the riots, the destroyed Jewish shops and businesses, the arrests of innocent Jewish men, the intentional destruction of the local synagogues. And then we travel to the east and meet a younger man who speaks from Baghdad and describes the Farhud, the violent anti-Jewish riot that seized the city on the first two days of June in 1941, riots that included gang-rape, the destruction of synagogues and Jewish shops, the murder of more than 180 innocents, and the destruction of upwards of 900 Jewish homes.

And then we move forward to Gaza in 2023. A young woman from Kfar Aza who lived through October 7 faces the camera. Based on what we’ve already seen, we expect her to tell about her experiences, about what she saw, about whom she lost. But she skips that part. We know those stories, she seems to suppose. And instead she speaks about the future. About her intention to remain in place, to live in her home, to rebuild what the vandals destroyed. She speaks calmly, but with integrity and purpose. And then, almost as if to reward her for her courage, she is joined by the others, all of whom step out of history to join her on camera and to say, as one, that together they represent the worst of Jewish history, the low points, the disasters, the pogroms, the nightmares, the true horrors…but that they also represent the spirit of the Jewish people to face down its oppressors and enemies, and to refuse to do anything other than to resist the haters and the bigots and the barbarians, and to thrive.

There’s an interesting riddle embedded in the clip as well. The actors are all Israelis. The clip itself is in Hebrew with English subtitles. Except for the final woman who speaks from Kfar Aza, they are obviously depicting people who lived before the State of Israel existed, some of them long before. Even the woman who speaks first, the one who describes the Roman onslaught against Jerusalem in the first century, and the fellow who speaks from Hebron, even they didn’t live in an independent Jewish state! And the others obviously lived in different places, in Germany and Iraq and Moldova. So that’s fine: actors depict personalities from different centuries and different countries all the time. But then, at the end, when they all come together, they somehow turn into Israelis as they speak in fully unaccented Israeli Hebrew and pledge to rebuild, to thrive, to defend their country, and to prosper in their own land, in their homeland, in their native habitat.

And in that merging of past and present, of Jewish history and Israeli reality, of stories from distant centuries and contemporary reality, there is something truly uplifting and satisfying, even encouraging.

I’ve written almost weekly since last October about the situation in Israel. It has consumed us all, of course, and me no less than anyone else. As the situation in Gaza, on the diplomatic front, at the UN, in the halls of Congress, and on our nation’s college campuses has deteriorated, it’s been easy to lose hope and to feel dejected about the future. Yes, it could always be worse. But that’s the punchline to a famous joke, not a rational path into the future! And then I saw this clip and things fell back into place for me. Yes, we’ve dealt with terrible things in our past. Yes, October 7 was beyond horrific. Yes, it will take a long time for Israel to return to its pre-October 7 state, if it ever does. But contextualizing is neither denial nor retreat. And seeing these people on the clip I’ve been writing back stepping out of history to join that young woman from Kfar Aza to remind her that she is not alone, that the ghosts of the past are not only present but fully and really so as Israel—and Jewish people in all the lands of our dispersion—move forward into whatever comes next.

I intentionally didn’t give the link earlier on because I wanted to introduce it to you with my own words, but here’s it is: https://youtu.be/KjwrV0wG9E0?si=Zp2vl0HkWWQzNPCA. Take a look, let these people speak to you as they did to me, and together let us all find comfort in the thought that, since history is run-up and destiny is catch-up, it’s the present we need to negotiate together into the future. We have faced worse than Hamas and survived. And we will survive this as well.