I have an old Left-wing friend. He was born in England and studied at the elite Cambridge University. His career choice was journalism and public relations and he proved himself good at both. I’ve never actually met his wife but I understand that she is much more Left wing than her husband. I suspect the reason he has never introduced us is that I would simply be too much for her and may expose the traditional English façade and pretense of tolerance.
He made aliyah a long time ago and I try to meet him for a coffee and catch-up whenever I am in Jerusalem.
On one such occasion as we sat outside a restaurant in Rechavia enjoying our coffees, he told me a story about his family. He had an uncle who lived in Paris before the Second World War. This uncle was a communist and so when the Nazis invaded, he had two targets on his back, Jew and Red.
His fellow communists devised a plan to smuggle him to the South of France and from there he would be met by Spanish comrades. They would guide him across the Pyrenees mountains and into the relative safety of Spain.
After an arduous and dangerous two-week journey, the uncle and his French guides at last met their Spanish counterparts. He said, “Au revoir” to his French comrades and “Hola” to his Spanish ones. Somehow they had learned that their fellow communist was a Jew, so instead of taking him into Spain, took him in a circuitous route back to France and handed him over to the waiting Nazis who sent him to Auschwitz.
I listened to my friend’s story with total incredulity. I was not of course surprised by the perfidy of fellow Communists to one of their own, particularly as he was a Jew. I was surprised that such a betrayal had not set my friend in precisely the opposite political trajectory to the one that he and his uncle before him had taken.
That kind of treachery is one of the first themes the scroll of Eicha addresses when discussing Jerusalem, “All those who loved her have betrayed her and have become her enemies.”
And so today, the circle of Jewish history turns in a counter-clockwise direction. The Biden White House utters threats about “Red lines.” The UK’s Foreign Secretary speaks ominously about the UK “reassessing” its support for Israel if it attempts (as it must do) to finish Hamas off.
First comes betrayal and then outright opposition and enmity.
Perhaps his fate would have been different if only my friend’s French uncle had contemplated his country’s famous saying, “Plus ca change”; “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” And who knows, perhaps he did and wasn’t really surprised in the end when the trap was sprung. Maybe he just wanted to enjoy those two weeks where he could pretend that he was going to be saved and be free. Possibly he simply wanted a last “fling” where he could fool himself that the world wasn’t such a bad place after all.
It is; it is just very good at looking as though it isn’t.
That precise thought popped into my mind a few weeks ago as I stood in a place designed to make things appear totally different to how they actually are.
The location of this “land of illusion” was a state-of-the-art film studio in New Jersey.
A friend has come up with the idea of a Jewish version of the famous TED Talks. His is called “JED Talks” and he asked me to be its first speaker.
On the film stage, I faced five cameras that covered me from every angle. The walls and floor were painted green. It could not have been more than eighteen feet long and twelve feet deep. However, by the time the computer-generated imagery had finished “re-inventing” the green background, I was on a stage three times its size. The computer simply shrunk me to give the impression of a huge stage. It also filled the stage with props and drapes as the five cameras zoomed in and out or looked down at me from above. The addition of sounds of an audience applauding and laughing completed the illusion.
Unless you know what to look for and understand the sophistication of the deceptions computers can play on you, the finished stage is indistinguishable from the real thing.
I suspect we have been living in a “green screen” like deception for the last 76 years. Who can blame us? After the Holocaust, the Jewish people needed some R&R from, “Plus ca change.” Maybe just like that Jew approaching the Spanish frontier, deep down we knew we were kidding ourselves and if we looked carefully, the deception would collapse and reality would appear instead.
It has now. As Eicha says, all those who loved us have, or are in the process of, betraying us and becoming our enemies.
The only ones we can and should depend on, are ourselves or at least those of us who are still loyal to Am Yisrael (not you Jonathan Glazer) and of course Hashem Himself.
The very last words of the Talmud say, “Hashem can’t find any other container for the blessings He wants to send the Jewish people, except shalom.”
We broke that container in the months leading up to October 7. Hamas captives stated that the split in the Jewish people encouraged and emboldened their attack. At the moment of writing this piece, Yahya Sinwar is reported to have rejected a cease fire deal as he is encouraged by the split in Israel’s War cabinet, Netanyahu, Gallant and Gantz.
We can’t rely on anyone else; we never could. Whatever we can do to create shalom and unity within our people, is what we have to do.
Hashem says he wants to send us His blessings… all He needs is for us to create that container called shalom.
