A Light (And a Fight) Unto The Nations

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

I thought I would write part III of the current week’s story about the bat mitzvah on the east coast. But I realized that it would be a spoiler of sorts for Friday’s Jews Of The Universe column. Dara Horn has insights that, I believe, should be considered in their own right before I apply them to my own personal context. So I will write part III of this ongoing saga after that.

Today I want to highlight all the reasons I’m (kayn ahora!) feeling optimistic right now on a few different fronts.

First and foremost, my gratitude mounts on an hourly basis for my worldwide Jewish family and all the ways we are bringing the most unbelievable set of strengths to this moment.

I have no words for the extraordinary fortitude, heart, stamina and brilliance of Israel right now. Words absolutely fail. What Israel is doing can barely be believed. It’s like our homeland rose out of the ashes of last fall and went into the stratosphere.

For months I heard that Hamas was the least of Israel’s enemies: the smallest, the least organized, the least capitalized. That it was impossible to defeat Hamas, because Hamas was an idea and you can’t kill an idea. That fighting Hezbollah would make our war with Hamas look like a walk in the park. That Iran was the terrifying head of the octopus, and all these ghastly militias were mere tentacles of the beast. That a war on so many fronts could spell the end for us.

Sometimes I sit here in my home, slack-jawed and shaking my head in disbelief, barely able to absorb the dazzling fact that Israel is taking all of them down at the same time in a surreal demonstration of strategic, technological and intelligence-driven dominance.

Israel is killing the Hezbollah leaders faster than the terrorist group can replace them. By now it’s understood that stepping up to lead Hezbollah is an unequivocal decision to commit suicide. Israel has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran is a naked emperor — that Israel can devastate it, and will if she has to, executing strikes of breathtaking precision at will.

I’ve begun to see this as a world war. I genuinely regard this multi-front battle as a fight for liberalism against religious extremism and despotism (even if there are, very deplorably, some figures within Netanyahu’s administration who are closer to the other side in terms of ruthless and violent zealotry than they are to the original and — I devoutly hope — enduring character of Israel).

And as staggering as the odds against the Jewish nation would seem, Israel may actually have a true shot at liberating Gaza from Hamas, the Iranian people from the Ayatollah’s regime, Lebanon from Hezbollah, Yemen from the Houthis, and the entire region from the iron claw of jihadist extremism. There is a very real chance that Israel can and will change the face and future of the entire Middle East for the better. What could be more in keeping with the role of a Light Unto The Nations than that? And it’s possible that we’re watching it happen in real time.

Sometimes I’m so proud of our people I can barely breathe.

And though I hardly dare say this, and maybe I shouldn’t, and I could most definitely be wrong, I am walking around with the belief that Harris & Walz will win this election next week.

Amid all the doomsday clamor, I have held fast for the past several years to the perspective of a wildly righteous American Jew named Simon Rosenberg, whom I have not yet known to be wrong about any of his predictions, most of which are very out of keeping with the general “wisdom”.

Put another way, as an adult who’s deep in middle age, I’m walking around immersed in my own private world of Simon Says.

Simon Says to do more and worry less.

Simon Says he would much rather be us than them.

Simon Says that MAGA is a stone cold political loser.

Simon Says we’re winning now, despite what Trump’s fake polls would have us believe.

Simon Says it will be very close, but we will win next month.

And as most of you are well aware, there is no way to overstate the existential necessity of winning this election.

Every time I post against Trump, I lose people here. So be it. I have never represented myself or this newsletter as anything other than anti-Trump. At its inception and at every step since, my goal here has been to build a home on the left side of the aisle for progressive and liberal Zionists. Because Zionism is the most progressive of values and every attempt to depict it as the opposite is a historical and current inversion of reality.

If you haven’t already read Monday’s gorgeous essay in JUDITH Magazine, my journal of Jewish letters, arts & culture, I would love to direct your attention to it: After the Death of My Father, I Now Carry His Dream of Freedom by Russian-born memoirist and poet Anya Gillinson. It tells the story of her refusenik father, his fearless defiance of the Soviet regime and his idealization of America. But it culminates in a tragic irony: when her father finally had the chance to visit the fabled city of his dreams, NYC, he was murdered within a week in a random robbery. And then finally it ends with a reaffirmation of her father’s faith in her adopted country, in spite of everything.

In the comment section beneath this heart-mangling piece, I wrote:

This wildly beautiful essay electrified me. My husband was like your father. Since childhood, he despised his native homeland of Russia and burned from the marrow of his bones to be an American.

To this end, he arranged to be an exchange student for a single semester as a freshman in college. There was a funereal silence in the car as his family brought him to the airport. It remained ever unspoken but fully understood by everyone in that car that he would never be back.

He did not see his parents again for 11 years.

Two months into his exchange student experience in upstate NY, the Russian economy collapsed and his parents could no longer afford his tuition. He would soon be broke and homeless. He was 17 and totally alone in a foreign country, with no contacts, no money, no livelihood, no friends or family, no English, no nothing.

Over the weeks and months and years ahead, he would sometimes go without a mouthful of food for 6 or 7 days on end but he never once considered going back.

On the other side of things now, he was able to bring his parents over. My father-in-law is a Ukrainian nationalist, and he too would rather die under a bridge in America than live in a palace in Putin's Russia.

I pray that in another week, we will vindicate the choices of brave men and women like them by keeping democracy and freedom alive here.

Everything I wrote was the literal truth. My husband starved for days on end during the roughest patches of his fight to stay here. The day he was granted citizenship was one of the very happiest of his life, on par with our wedding day and the birth of our children. And I have never seen anyone cherish the privilege of voting more than he does. This right accrued to him for the first time in 2012, and he knew his first ballot was coming to our mailbox, and yet — when that envelope arrived addressed to him — he simply could.

Not.

Believe it.

He opened it and stood staring at it, holding it with both hands and whispering: Oh my G-d. Oh my G-d.

Can you imagine how he felt when Trump won four years later? To know that as long and hard as he had fought to escape Putin, and how many thousands of literal and figurative miles he had come, the Russian regime was still managing to wreak havoc on his life, to warp and corrupt his promised land?

In the hours after Trump won the election, we lay awake all night, side by side, holding hands, staring into the dark, trying to process the terror and grief of it. In those hours, my husband spoke the words I could never have imagined coming from his mouth. This country is ruined, he said.

Even on this front, I feel that our people are fighting for the world. This past Saturday, per Fox News (which is ever so regrettably among the most reliable sources of reportage when it comes to the Middle Eastern theater of war), Israel knocked out several of Iran’s vaunted Russian-made S-300 missle defense systems, which leaves the country wide open to subsequent strikes and ramped-up direct attacks.

My husband and I were marveling at this today.

“Could this be the Jews’ revenge on Russia after all these centuries?” I cracked.

“This and Zelensky,” he said. “What a thorn in their ass that scrappy Jew continues to be. Can you believe the way, as small as he is, he just won’t go down?”

These wars are not unrelated, fam. They both represent tyranny and terror against self-sovereignty and democracy. And Jews are on the front lines on the right side of both. We have to do our part to support the effort. In this home stretch before the election, please vote for Harris & Walz and please bring your passion to bear within your own circles of influence.

I’ll be back with you Friday, bringing a Jews Of The Universe column featuring Dara Horn. I can’t wait to share with you all the gems of original and brilliant thought she shared with me.

Until then, I’m sending love and strength. Feel good about who and where we are. Chazak v’ematz.

Am Yisrael Chai.