Our Future-Bound Arrows

Children of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

Last night, I went to a meeting of Jewish parents in the Portland area who are concerned about the explosion of anti-Semitism in our children’s schools. I was thrilled to see that the big meeting room was packed. I feel confident saying that hundreds were there.

It was a long meeting. Parents were first invited to talk about any anti-Semitism their kids have experienced at school. This was the most excruciating portion of the evening. Many, many parents spoke with wrenching emotion and even tears about absolutely vile things their kids have endured, the indifference some have encountered from their school’s administration, and the helplessness they feel.

One man said he called in to discuss his child’s issues, a meeting was arranged, the principal nodded a lot, said very little, and offered some vague assurances. His story concluded with this chilling statement: “Nothing changed, and that was the last call from me they ever took.”

When it was my turn to speak, I touched on a few different things.

I opened by saying that I’d begun paying close attention to the response of PAT (Portland Association of Teachers) to the war near the beginning of this year. I attended a meeting that included union leader Angela Bonilla and a group of concerned Jewish teachers in early February. Back then, while PAT’s sympathy very clearly lay with the Palestinians over Israel, they were still making an effort to issue politically careful statements. It upset many of us that they were calling for a ceasefire so prematurely, at a time when no other nation attacked in the same way would ever be expected to stand down. But at least the statements they were signing included sentences like:

We, members of the American labor movement, mourn the loss of life in Israel and Palestine. We express our solidarity with all workers and our common desire for peace in Palestine and Israel, and we call on President Joe Biden and Congress to push for an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege of Gaza.

And among their demands, they included:

The Israeli hostages taken by Hamas must be immediately released. Both Hamas and Israel must adhere to standards of international law and Geneva Convention rules of warfare concerning the welfare and security of civilians.

Whereas by their meeting last week, they had entirely dropped all pretense at even-handedness or lack of extreme malice toward the Jewish nation. They were distributing the material I shared in a very recent newsletter, which was explicitly violent, eliminationist and Hamas-supporting in nature.

Watching the rhetoric morph, step by step, into outright support for the murder of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish homeland has been chilling, frightening and infuriating.

But I also told a story that unfolded at my own children’s high school, one that involved my son. He was having lunch with his friends not long ago when the subject of the conflict came up. One of them said to him: “I’ve been dreading having this conversation with you.”

“Why?” my son asked.

“Because I just don’t understand how you can support this genocide.”

“First of all,” my son, who is a high school sophomore, told his friend, “it’s not a genocide. The word genocide has an actual defintion, and there’s no interpretation of it that can be applied to what Israel is doing.”

The friend went on to ask how he could support an apartheid state.

And because my children and I have discussions on this topic every single day, and they read my substack whenever it comes out, and they have heard me talk about this over and over and over, they are well equipped to counter these lies. My son’s first move — which I’ve coached him to lead with — was to simply ask what his friend meant by apartheid. How, exactly, was Israel an apartheid state?

Shocker: the friend had no idea.

And so my son suggested he do some reading on the subject so that he could arrive at more informed opinions. He recommended this substack as a start, though I’m not sure whether he mentioned that he was related to its author.

But the friend’s response was astonishing to me, because it showed a maturity far beyond what I’d expect of a typical teenage boy. He did some reading, came back to my son not long afterward, and said (to my everlasting surprise — again, because it's more than I hoped for from a teen), “You know, I never heard a pro-Israel opinion before we talked the other day. I literally never heard a single person present the perspective from the other side. And I’m embarrassed to realize I’ve been a sheep. I don’t know enough on this topic to go around spouting off about it.”

I know this is a barely believable story, but it happened. Some high school kids really are precocious young adults who have never been exposed to the truth and can at least recognize that they’re out of their depth when that door is cracked open.

Then I went on to relate another hopeful story about my daughter.

My kids have been showing me the posts and memes their friends are putting up on social media since the war started. And as with the teacher’s union, the rhetoric has morphed from watermelon emojis and calls for a ceasefire to content like this:

I’ll just share the first 2 slides of the 8 in this post, the first because it’s relevant to the story involving my daughter:

And the second because it’s unbelievably vile, and it represents the ever-increasing violence of the rhetoric as well as anything could:

So a classmate of my daughter, who is not Palestinian at all, posted this content, and my daughter took the risk of entering an exclusively anti-Israel comment section to stand against it.

The most lengthy comment in the following screenshot is hers. She calls herself Spideychar because she’s a climber.

Of 225 comments, hers was the only one in defense of Israel. But surprisingly, and for whatever it’s worth, it was also the one that got the most “likes”.

Her classmate made a weak attempt to argue from her own nearly-nonexistent knowledge base, and the argument continued further over the course of the comment thread, but the other girl soon gave up and simply went silent, without deleting or blocking or severing the social media connection, which I also consider a win, if not as dramatic as the one involving my son.

Here’s the point, and it’s a plea I issued last night as well: we must teach our children their own history and insist that they remain informed about events unfolding now, so they can counter the hate and lies effectively in their social circles but even more importantly so they remain proud of the Jewish nation, proud of their own people, and confident that they can remain loyal to both with full integrity and moral conviction.

I’ll conclude with a passage I quoted in a very early newsletter, from the book My Promised Land by Ari Shavit, where he describes Israel’s many Holocaust survivors who went on to have children of their own:

The 30- and 40-year-old parents know they are the desert generation. Though they were saved from annihilation, they know that they will never reach a true haven. For them everything is temporary, fragile, and in doubt. For them life is waiting for the next catastrophe.

But their children are something else... their children are arrows shot to the future. For even though the bow was scorched and deformed in the great fire, it can still shoot a future-bound arrow.  

We, too, can still shoot future-bound arrows, by teaching our children well. One of the items on my very long self-imposed to-do list is to create a series of resources that will be accessible to tweens and teens, empowering them to move through the world with the confidence that comes from growing up in a strong and proud community and acquiring a working knowledge of this very complex topic.

Finally, I want to leave you with some truly uplifting news from my neck of the woods.

The first action item we decided on last night was to flood our Board of Education, our principals and our superintendents with emails against the trash propaganda that PAT is trying to ram into the Portland Public School curriculum.

And in just one day, real progress has been made!

Less than 24 hours later, PAT took down said teaching guides from their website. You can read all about that right here.

Fam, I promise you — to turn a college encampment chant on its head — I will not stop, I will not rest. I won’t stop fighting for you, for us, and most of all, for our kids. We all need to fight, like it’s 1933. Because for all intents and purposes, it is.

I’ll be back with you Friday. In the meantime, stay strong and stand fast. Chazak v’ematz.

Am Yisrael Chai.