My new article on Linkedin “A Nature Made Hiatus”

A new year is a great time for reflection. These days, as a new year begins according to the Hebrew calendar, I think we should reflect on what Covid-19 has meant for us as a society. Where were we going? Right up to the outbreak, the international tensions were rising to such levels that everyone tacitly agreed that a huge war was going to break out. America vs. China, Russia vs. America, North Korea vs. America, Pakistan vs. India (both nuclear powers), regional and global conflicts were threatening to erupt the world over. The virus forced it all to stop. It gave us a hiatus, a chance to reroute.

The pandemic, unprecedented fires, insane hurricane season, street and domestic violence, racial and social tensions, and all the other blows that have landed on us this year indicate that we are facing a systemic shift. But they have saved us from ourselves.

The coronavirus showed us also how quickly nature recovers if we only leave it alone. For a few weeks, we witnessed a recovery of wildlife that we’ve never seen before and didn’t think was possible. But as soon as the closures were eased, we resumed our gluttony, as if saying “Nature can wait.”

The pandemic, unprecedented fires, insane hurricane season, street and domestic violence, racial and social tensions, and all the other blows that have landed on us this year indicate that we are facing a systemic shift. But they have saved us from ourselves. Whatever harms the disasters have caused, they are far less than what we would have, and will cause ourselves with our total alienation and abusive attitude toward nature and toward people. We were on the brink, and nature pulled us back from the edge.

I hope it does not let us go there again, and I hope we will finally understand that we have to stop and think about our lives. Nature has stopped our rat-race, but we have to ask why. If we do that, then we can build a great life together. If we don’t then either nature will continue to restrain us through increasingly painful blows, or we will destroy ourselves and much of the planet along with us.

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Medium published my new article “Blazes of Hate Are Hotter than Fire”

Somehow, the blazes on the West Coast, which have by now spread across the western half of the US from Montana to Texas, seem to have toned down the heated election bickering, the hopeless battle against Covid-19, and even the tragedy that this hurricane season is unleashing in the states along the Gulf of Mexico. But unless we realize that the blazes, the storms, the virus, the racial tensions, and the violence on America’s streets and in American homes come from the same source, things will only get worse, as hard as it may be to imagine.

The hatred in the hearts of too many Americans today is hotter than the blazes that are burning down the country’s most beautiful sceneries. It is setting off storms, setting the streets on fire, and pitting people against each other. Until the fire in the hearts of Americans is put out, the country will continue to fall apart.

A viewer on my Facebook page asked with resentment, “Do you pray for her (America)? Do you pray for your neighbors?” She resented what sounded like admonition and felt as though I didn’t care. I understand why she would feel that way, but the truth is quite the opposite. Since 2002, I have taken at least four long tours from coast to coast elaborating on the future that I saw for America in general, and for American Jews in particular. During all of them, my warnings were met with mockery and condescension. It didn’t stop me from trying over and over. And when I wouldn’t tour, I would write or talk about it — on my own social media pages and on every outlet that would publish my cautions. I am still doing it. Are these the actions of someone who doesn’t care? Would someone who didn’t care go out of his way, invest money, and face derision and accusations that he is unrealistic?

Even now that my warnings are coming true, some Americans choose to focus on the tone of my words rather than on their own actions. Instead of seeing that I am saying now what I have been saying for the past two decades, and that my only aim is to warn them and suggest what I believe will help them, they pick at my choice of words. It would be much more helpful to them if they looked into their own hearts and examined how they feel about each other, since this is the heart of the problem.

This is the truth. I could choose to sweet talk my readers and be a popular person, but that would not be an act of love; it would be fawning in order to win fame or money. Worse yet, it would not give my English speaking readers anything valuable to help them with the mounting crises. My gift was then what it is now: the truth. If you’ve got a blister, burst it while it’s small. It always hurts the least.
So now you know I do pray for America, and my prayer is always the same: that Americans will know the truth and have the strength and courage to act accordingly.

The hatred in the hearts of too many Americans today is hotter than the blazes that are burning down the country’s most beautiful sceneries. It is setting off storms, setting the streets on fire, and pitting people against each other. Until the fire in the hearts of Americans is put out, the country will continue to fall apart.

In the squabbles and arguments over who is right, everybody’s wrong. The only right answer is that quarrels are made in order to rise above them and make peace. Differences are made in order to help us grow up and see more views. As long as we do not understand that we cannot win the social war unless both sides unite above their hatred, and that hatred itself is the only real enemy, the troubles will keep coming faster and more intense.

This is true for America as it is true for everywhere else. But right now, America is burning, drowning, dying by gunfire, and filling its hospitals with Covid patients. And since Americans are aching, my heart goes out to them. I pray for them and wish them the best: to see the truth and to have the courage to unite above hatred.
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Medium published my new article “Individual and Collective in Repentance”

“‘How will the Jews atone for their sins?’ wondered King David. To which the Creator replied: ‘When suffering will befall the Jews because of their sins, they should gather before me in complete unity. Together they shall confess their sins and recite the order of the Selichot, and I will answer their prayers.’”(Mishna) This exemplifies the very essence of the Israeli nation which requires us to adopt a collective approach vis-a-vis everything, for the good and for the bad.

This shattering of our peoplehood is what we should ask forgiveness for, for ignoring the growing gaps between us, for forgetting what is expected of us as a people, and for our actual behavior that is out of sync with mutual guarantee.

The Selichot (forgiveness), communal prayers said during the High Holiday season, represent a special time of introspection and repentance. But what should we be asking forgiveness for? This special period delivers the realization that, collectively, we have been heading more toward separation than toward connection with others in our lives, and this is the sin for which we need to ask pardon.

This has important implications for the Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. All our introspection — all we wish to reflect upon, examine, clarify, admit to, confess, seek pardon for — must also be carried out jointly and in full consideration of each and every member of the nation.

However, since we have been raised separately, we have been trained and encouraged to manage ourselves as individuals. As a consequence, we have grown distant from our communal beginnings and lost awareness of ourselves as a people. In other words, we have retreated from behaving as a society inspired, organized, and operated according to mutual guarantee.

The sensation that we are like the organs of a single body — the consciousness where each individual is not evaluated separately, but rather as an integral part of a healthy and fully functional whole — has degenerated. It behooves us to gradually awaken from this delusion of division and realize that we are being looked upon by others as a people, not as a collection of faction groups or separate individuals.

This shattering of our peoplehood is what we should ask forgiveness for, for ignoring the growing gaps between us, for forgetting what is expected of us as a people, and for our actual behavior that is out of sync with mutual guarantee.

There is no reason to be angry and reproach each other; there is no reason for arguing and using harsh words. Generally, such words achieve little, and often have the opposite effect. Take, for example, educating children. We raise our voices and command them to “be good, give in and share,” but our words seem to fall on deaf ears. Before they will comply, they need to recognize in us something that comes from deeper within. Remember your parents. Don’t you mainly remember their actions rather than their words? Because children observe everything and have a keen ability to recognize what comes from the real place of the heart, they learn best from personal examples; we are just the same.

We must take the opportunity the High Holidays provide in order to rediscover the ties of loving connection between us. We lack only the awareness of our division to be able to cry out and ask for the strength to unite, for the force of love and correction. Our ultimate goal is to internalize the notion that we are parts of one single body functioning in mutual guarantee and love.

The love that we are talking about is internal, deep, and hidden. It does not burst out in front of everyone as it is seen in films or theatre, where it is selfish love anyway. So it is difficult and complicated to demonstrate what it is like when all are connected and feeling as one.

After we come to this profound awareness of the state we should be in and realize that we have not even come close to exerting enough efforts in that direction, then we are ready to repent and to plead for help. When together we come to such a heartfelt demand for healing and unity between us, we are ready with a prayer that will certainly be fulfilled.
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My new article on Linkedin “In Need of a New Navigation System”

The world is changing so fast that we can’t keep track. We used to study about globalization at school or university, but never felt it as a real issue in our lives. Now it’s enough to look outside the window in Western Europe and see the pale blue sky, turned grayish by the smoke from the fires in America’s West Coast, to understand that we really are in one boat. We’re navigating the world as if we live in a three-dimensional world, but we don’t; we’re living in a sphere, and every point in that sphere touches every other point. Anything we do, say, or even think touches everyone else in the world. It’s a scary thought, but nonetheless true. I agree with former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who recently connected the world’s problems to “a lack of global partnership,” but I think it’s deeper than partnership; our survival has become connected.

We can change the face of the Earth and the fate of humanity in a matter of months; it’s just a matter of switching from a negative attitude to a positive attitude toward others. If we exercise this, we’ll live in heaven on Earth. If we don’t, we won’t need to die to go to Hell; it’ll come up to us.

In fact, the first lesson that the coronavirus taught us was that we’ve shifted to a new dimension of existence, a spherical one, where every single element impacts every other element. Many people used the phrase, “An infection anywhere is an infection everywhere,” to describe our mutual accountability with regard to the coronavirus, but this is just as true with regard to everything else.

Therefore, even though we do not like each other, and in many cases wish each other the worst, we cannot afford to maintain this attitude; it will hurt us very directly and very personally. We have become responsible for one another in the full sense of the word. We should care about the fires and hurricanes in the US as though they are happening in our own town; we should care about the millions of people dying from Covid as though they were our own family, and we should care about the millions of people around the world who do not have sufficient food and water, shelter, or even sanitation. We should care about all the people who are suffering because they today are we tomorrow, as simple and as literal as that.

And it’s not as if there’s nothing we can do. There is plenty of food and water for everyone; there is much we can do to curb Covid and even cure it, and there is much we can do to help Earth balance her climate. But in the current dog-eat-dog attitude, we’re not going to do anything and we will all drown in Earth’s sinking boat.

So the first thing we need to do is change how we relate to one another. If we change the social atmosphere, it’ll suddenly feel very natural to help one another. When that happens, the vast resources we have stored for our own needs, and in order to deny them of others, will quickly find their way to where they are most needed. We can change the face of the Earth and the fate of humanity in a matter of months; it’s just a matter of switching from a negative attitude to a positive attitude toward others. If we exercise this, we’ll live in heaven on Earth. If we don’t, we won’t need to die to go to Hell; it’ll come up to us.

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Medium published my new article “A Shana Tovah Depends on Us”

We are on the threshold of a complete revolution — a substantial change in our attitude toward ourselves, society, humanity, and all of nature. Rosh Hashanah, in Hebrew meaning the “head” or “beginning” of “the year,” arrives at a special time, one like never before, in the midst of a global pandemic. We are aware of the far-reaching impact of the virus, but we need to ask ourselves for what purpose did it arrive? The answer to this question is the key to a good new year, a Shana Tovah 5781.

The coronavirus era is reshaping our lives, literally by force. It is moving us toward a higher and more advanced world in which all the parts are bound together. The fact that the world looks exactly the opposite now — filled with ego games, violence, corruption, struggles and riots — is all part of the development process.

The coronavirus is showing us just how our individualistic, self-serving behavior is leading us to destruction and pain. By looking ourselves square-in-the-eyes in the mirror, with complete honesty, we will want to reform and correct our nature into one that only wants mutual cooperation and unity.

The increasing challenges and predicaments we are experiencing awaken worldwide introspection in order to realize that the current path humanity treads is not leading us to a good place. This recognition alone is already a very important step in our development. The coronavirus has turned out to be a force that is awakening humanity to undertake a complete revision of its state.

Our current understanding of what is happening boils down to awareness that we are being beaten by this virus. But our discernments do not dig deeper than that. We have no idea what the blows are directing us toward, where they are coming from, and more importantly, for what purpose. We are as helpless and disoriented as a newborn baby who feels pain and will not stop crying, without any understanding of the reason for the situation.

Thus, our most important challenge is to discover the reason for the coronavirus, not in the biological sense, but in the essential sense, from its very origin. Social distancing, masks, crowd prevention, a global race for a vaccine, experimental treatments — all are measures looking to alleviate the problem of Covid-19. Nevertheless, none will be able to constitute a comprehensive solution to the coronavirus phenomenon.

Nature, just like a loving parent, always works for the good of all of creation together. The blows, pressures, and anguish, as painful as they feel to each individual, do not come to harm us, but to bring us to balance with nature, and by that, to a better life. Their purpose is to sharpen our awareness of our priorities in life, of what really matters: our harmonious relations with each other and with nature.

The pandemic is aimed at teaching us how to approach our surrounding environment properly, in an integrated and complementary way, with the desire to do good to others and to our environment. Nature is global, integral, and unified. Thus, the trend of evolutionary development is to cause us to identify ourselves with those same qualities, despite the fact that we were created different and distant from each other.

The coronavirus era is reshaping our lives, literally by force. It is moving us toward a higher and more advanced world in which all the parts are bound together. The fact that the world looks exactly the opposite now — filled with ego games, violence, corruption, struggles and riots — is all part of the development process. If at the beginning of the pandemic we still saw manifestations of solidarity and mutual help, today everyone’s patience has run out.

Moreover, the illusion that we treat each other well has been shattered, and it has become clear that it is human nature to look out for only oneself.

The helplessness we are feeling will lead us to search for guidance from our sages who, throughout thousands of years, created a unifying method for this special time to usher humanity to a new horizon. This timeless method develops in a person the vision and feeling that we are all within one system. Once this notion is firmly instilled in us, it becomes natural to treat others as we would like to be treated until we become “as one man in one heart.”

And when we are finally harmoniously connected, we will feel how the one power in nature that rules everything in reality does only good to us.

So what should we wish ourselves for the new year? First, to recognize our egoistic human nature as a self-destructive force that separates us. Second, that we will desire to change direction and connect for the good of all. By this, we will activate the force in nature that radiates a healthy and peaceful world. Our intention and will to build a deep connection between our hearts will heal the coronavirus at its root and will ensure that next year will be the sweetest we have ever experienced, a true Shana Tovah.

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Medium published my new article “.So Long Teddy Bear — Time to Grow Up If We Want Covid Out”

As I said from the beginning of the outbreak, the coronavirus is not another virus and Covid-19 is not another pandemic. It’s a game-changer, a transformer that will turn our lives upside down and inside out. When it’s done, we will be different people, and until it’s done, it won’t go away.

Whatever picture governments and the media are painting, the truth is that we are in the midst of an economic, social, and political meltdown. The very basis of our way of life, where we are forced to compete with one another for resources and funds, and over social status and respect, where we cannot trust anyone because the success of one necessarily means the failure of another, that basis of our previous lives is finally dissolving.

When we transform our approach from selfish to selfless, we will collaborate even better, and everyone will truly benefit from our common products. There will be abundance for everyone.

Just as melting snow creates a lot of mud, but underneath it the grass is growing and buds are shooting up from the frozen earth, so our lives are shedding their former, frozen facade, and a new one, vibrant and joyful, is budding. But until it sprouts, we’re going to have to do some wading in the mud.

In the meantime, there are several things we can do to expedite the budding of our new and better life.

1. We have been hanging on to our old lives as if we’re adolescents gripping to a shabby, frayed teddy bear that we have loved since childhood. We cannot see that Mother Nature is offering us a plethora of new and exciting games to play, suitable for our age and understanding. We’re so hung up on the past that we cannot release our grip on it and grab the wealth that future is offering us.

However, it will happen nonetheless. We will have to give up our old way of life since we are changing whether we like it or not. Even if businesses are reopened without any limitations, buyers won’t come as they did before and businesses will collapse in droves. If we transition to the new era mindfully, we will be able to provide everyone with income and occupations. If we do not, we will still do it, eventually, but after a parade of disasters. The catastrophes we are seeing now all across America are just a prelude to a cacophony of colliding and contemporaneous adversities.

2. We have to understand that essentially, we’re not going through an economic crisis. Seeing it this way is the narrow worldview of financiers who make their living by exploiting people and seizing financial opportunities. But in truth, we are going through a social transformation, a transition from a selfish to a selfless attitude toward life.

We may think that living selflessly gives you less material abundance, but this is absolutely wrong. When a society lives selflessly, its residents all guarantee the well-being of each and every member of the community. This means that they never have to worry about food, shelter, education, healthcare, energy, and after school activities. Instead of individuals caring for themselves, the community cares for them. People, in return, do the same for others, but their minds and hearts are carefree.

As a result of the transformation in society, our whole concept of the economy will change. Since the economy reflects the relations in society, when members in the society collaborate, the economy becomes collaborative, too. Also, this process does not unfold in any compulsory manner, but simply because it’s in everyone’s best interest.

Consider this: We already live in a collaborative society. Nothing we produce is made 100% locally, and without collaboration from countless other manufacturers in numerous countries, we wouldn’t be able to produce anything. So the problem is not that we don’t collaborate, but that we collaborate against our will and attempt to extort, manipulate, and cheat on each other in the process. When we transform our approach from selfish to selfless, we will collaborate even better, and everyone will truly benefit from our common products. There will be abundance for everyone.

3. The third, and most important requirement for expediting the transition from the old world to the new is mutual support. We have to help each other see where we are going, that we are heading toward a beautiful life. People will not be able to let go of their teddy bears and embrace the new and easy living until they see others do the same. So think about it, talk about it, and excite others about the new life ahead because as soon as we agree to the transition we are going through, the budding shoots will burst through the snow and a new spring will begin.
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Medium published my new article “Repenting Last Year’s Sins Does Not Permit Their Repetition in the Next”

In the weeks leading up to Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), and especially on that holiest day of the year, many Jews repent last year’s sins. We ask God to forgive our sins against Him, and mainly against each other, and plead with Him to erase our “indictment.” We confess our sins before Him, and in return, expect Him to forgive us.

Every occasion on the Hebrew calendar symbolizes a stage in our transformation from selfishness to selflessness. This is the meaning of Tikkun — that we become good people, who want to do good to one another and strive to love our neighbors as ourselves.

At the end of the fast, we sing with joy that our sins have been forgiven and God has forgiven our sins. And what do we do immediately afterwards? We begin to fill up next year’s sheet. This is a complete misunderstanding of the whole idea of Selichot — the request for the Creator’s forgiveness.

Every occasion on the Hebrew calendar symbolizes a stage in our transformation from selfishness to selflessness. This is the meaning of Tikkun — that we become good people, who want to do good to one another and strive to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Selichot is not permission to sin next year; it is a pledge to refrain from sin, a request of God to change our evil, selfish inclination into a good, giving inclination. If we resume our mistreatment of each other as soon as Yom Kippur is over, it’s as if we tried to cheat God. It doesn’t work.

We Jews have the obligation to correct ourselves and be a role model nation, “a light unto nations.” This is why all our holidays are about transformation from egoism to altruism. As long as we avoid it, we are pariahs in the eyes of the world, a pestilence the world wants to clean up and clear out. We ask why there is antisemitism and why Jews have suffered at the hands of the nations throughout the generations, but we ourselves are causing them to hate us through our abominable relation to our brethren.

Every non-Jew, and especially antisemites, examines closely how we treat each other. Even Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that Jews unite only when a “common booty” entices them to cooperate, but otherwise, they are mean to one another. If we want atonement for our sins, we need to look at our past only in order to learn from it how to treat each other better, and ask God to give us the strength to keep our promise to Him, but mainly to each other.
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Medium published my new article “Influencers and Generation Z”

It used to be authors, thinkers, philosophers, and highly educated people who inspired us. Now, vloggers, reality show stars, sparsely dressed Instagram models, and YouTube celebs are people’s role models. We rarely read anymore. People become influencers according to the number of subscribers and followers they have on social media, and they don’t garner them with words, but with pictures that are usually provocative, evocative, and exude an air of entitlement.

We should look at the role models of today’s young not with disapproval, but with alarm that we have let them come to such emptiness, that we have not given them goals that would make them truly happy. We should look at them and change ourselves, so they will change as well.

Yet, for all the shallowness of Generation Z, it is not necessarily bad that people have stopped reading because there is a good reason for it: They are far less naïve than we were. They don’t believe in people’s good will; they want clear-cut answers, and they are very sober about the life ahead of them. They are disillusioned, and this is good. They will take what helps them and reject what doesn’t, and it is up to us, who built the world they now live in, to provide them with helpful answers and solutions.

Young people today have little respect for academic titles, politicians, or powerful and super wealthy individuals. For the most part, they have no aspiration to be like any of them. They want to have fun today and they don’t believe that titles or social status make one happy. They are right, and they are clever.

However, they are also depressed because they see no future. If all there is to look for is some fun today, then why not get high on something and forget about tomorrow? But when they come down, they come down to hopelessness.

Although they suffer, this pain produces questions, real and deep questions about the meaning of life. Perhaps the best testimony of the intensity of this question is the increase in suicidal tendencies among young people. According to an essay published in Business Insider, “Suicide is Gen Z’s second-leading cause of death, and it’s a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age.”

It is our job, the millennials and Gen Xs, to provide them with answers. We are the ones who must introduce to them the benefits of human connection, the confidence and security that we can find only among people that we trust. We are the ones who must show them, through our own example, that it’s more rewarding to raise our eyes from the cell phone screen and look at each other.

We, their parents, must demonstrate how communicating and conversing about social unity creates a strong and solid community where socializing is fun. We are the ones who must realize that the tensions we are feeling today, the hatred between rivaling camps, and the anger we are venting freely do not contribute anything positive to us or to our children. On the contrary, they are destroying our society, and without a strong society, we and our children have no future, not even on the physical level.

So we should look at the role models of today’s young not with disapproval, but with alarm that we have let them come to such emptiness, that we have not given them goals that would make them truly happy. We should look at them and change ourselves, so they will change as well.

We should teach them that a person who disagrees with me is not my enemy, but an inseparable part of the fabric of society, and that only disagreements help me understand my own ideas and feelings. We should lead by example, and show that only when we embrace the different and cherish our diversity do we build a united society that is a thrill to live in and a solid basis for the future.

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Medium published my new article “Survival of the Fittest Is a Lie We Tell Ourselves”

With each passing day, we have to realize that despite the growing tensions, we hate the wrong enemy. We think the enemy is that man who supports the other party, or that woman who belongs to the other race, or that person who is more privileged in some way, who is richer, smarter, prettier, luckier, or any other “er” that I would like to be or have.

There will be no winners in this war because it isn’t the right war. The right war is against our own egos, and we can defeat them only if we fight it specifically alongside those who are unlike us, whom we dislike, and of whom we disapprove, since this is the only alliance that our egos will never support.

But none of them are my real enemies. There have always been people who were more successful than we in some way, and there always will be such people. But they didn’t use to make us feel bad, and they didn’t use to make us feel that we want them out of our lives, and if possible, out of existence. They have always been here, but we were different. We were less self-entitled, less absorbed with ourselves, or simply, less selfish. Yes, our own egoism is our enemy.

We can’t control it; it’s growing from within us and is so much a part of who we are that we don’t even feel that it is the problem. But if we don’t learn how to work with our ego, it’ll lead us into civil war because we won’t be able to tolerate anyone’s existence but our own and those who think like us and look like us.

There will be no winners in this war because it isn’t the right war. The right war is against our own egos, and we can defeat them only if we fight it specifically alongside those who are unlike us, whom we dislike, and of whom we disapprove, since this is the only alliance that our egos will never support.

But it has to be a common decision, taken by the whole society on all its factions, or it is bound to fail. And should you ask what will motivate people to cooperate with those they hate, or even relate to them positively? The answer is that we have run out of options. If we don’t do it, we will all fall. We’ve come to a state where we are totally dependent on each other, and we are dependent the most on those we most dislike.

Actually, not only we, but all of reality consists of opposites that complement one another. They do not like each other, but are completely dependent on each other and their own existence guarantees and sustains the existence of their opposite or “rival.”

Think of “night” without “day,” “winter” without “summer,” “dry” without “wet.” Or when it comes to people, think of Black without White, Republican without Democrat, Liberal without Conservative. Can you imagine a coin that has only one side? This is how dependent we are on one another.

We think that when Darwin discovered the principle of “Survival of the Fittest,” he meant that only the meanest and most belligerent survive. This is a complete misinterpretation of his words that our pugnacious egos impose on us. A recent book by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods titled Survival of the Friendliest writes that “to Darwin and modern biologists, “survival of the fittest” refers to something very specific — the ability to survive and leave behind viable offspring. It is not meant to go beyond that.” Moreover, they add that “Darwin was constantly impressed with the kindness and cooperation he observed in nature,” and quote his book Descent of Man, which states, “Those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”

We are headed in the opposite direction. We are breaking our social fabric, tearing apart our communities, and dismantling the country. In such circumstances, we ourselves will not survive. And the only culprit is the human ego. We are now at a point where either we unite against it and help each other overcome it by encouraging each other to connect, and by trying to unite with those unlike us, or the ego will win and we will all lose everything.
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Medium published my new article “If Peace with the UAE and Bahrain Is Good, Where Are the Trumpet Sounds?”

Less than a month after the normalization agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain has also joined the peace train. I am all for it; peace and normalization are always better than war and animosity. But to be honest, I don’t see that the rest of the world is so excited about it, and I think this shows how isolated we are in the world. Despite the fact that Israel has established connections with countries who were previously enemies, no one is cheering, no one is sounding the festive trumpets. For all our efforts to be accepted, Israel, and Jews (though they may not recognize it), are excluded from the family of nations.

Wherever Israel appears, it is unlike any other country, and so it is with regard to Jewish presence anywhere. It is time we asked ourselves why this is so; it is time we understood that the way the world relates to us depends on us and not on them.

Wherever Israel appears, it is unlike any other country, and so it is with regard to Jewish presence anywhere. It is time we asked ourselves why this is so; it is time we understood that the way the world relates to us depends on us and not on them. The nations will welcome us when we bring to the world something that not we, but they consider worthwhile. Until then, whatever we offer them — advanced technology, developed agriculture, innovations in medicine, and brilliant novelists, actors, and filmmakers — the world will only hate us more. We will not receive an ounce of gratitude until we bring them what they really want from us. They do not express it, but we must figure it out and do it nonetheless.

But that something is plain to see: In a broken world, splintered by hatred, we — Jews and the State of Israel — have to bring correction to the world, Tikkun Olam, through unity. The world will accept nothing less from us.

We hate the idea, but we are not like everyone else. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who isn’t Jewish and they will tell you that they feel that there is something special about Jews. Some hate us, some like us, but most everyone senses that we are different, and they’re right. No other country or person has to justify their existence, but we Jews do, as a nation, as a country, and as individuals. We should recognize it, since otherwise the nations will tell us this the way the Nazis told this to us eighty years ago.

No nation attracts more attention than the Jews, since no other nation is expected to set an example to the whole world. We are judged by a different standard because we are expected to be more virtuous than everyone else, more loving, caring for each other, and with more mutual responsibility toward each other than all other nations.

For saying this, some Jews have accused me of being antisemitic. But denial gets us nowhere. Instead, we must roll up our sleeves and get to work, because the whole world is waiting, and it is becoming increasingly impatient.

The demands of the nations from the Jewish people are not some fabrications of sick minds; our own sages told us throughout the ages that we must be a role model nation, “a light unto nations.” Rav Kook, the leader of religious Zionism before the establishment of the State of Israel, articulated this message poetically and succinctly in his book, Orot HaKodesh: “Since we were ruined by unfounded hatred, and the world was ruined with us, we will be rebuilt by unfounded love, and the world will be rebuilt with us.”

As just said, we need to unite not for our own sake, but to set an example to the world. In the days before the ruin of the Second Temple, there was a period when we were so united that people from the nations flocked to Jerusalem to see the miracle. The book Sifrey Devarim details how gentiles would “go up to Jerusalem and see Israel … and say, ‘It is becoming to cling only to this nation.’”

Similarly, The Book of Zohar (Aharei Mot) wrote about our hatred for each other and the importance of our unity for the rest of the world:

“‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also sit together.’ These are the friends as they sit together and are not separated from each other. At first, they seem like people at war, wishing to kill one another … then they return to being in brotherly love. …And you, the friends who are here, as you were in fondness and love before, henceforth you will also not part from one another … and by your merit, there will be peace in the world.”

The book Kol Mevaser also stresses the importance of unity for the people of Israel: “This is the mutual guarantee on which Moses worked so hard before his death, to unite the children of Israel. All of Israel are responsible for one another, meaning that when all are together, they see only good.”

Therefore, we need to realize that we will have no peace or peace of mind until we make peace among ourselves. Until we rise above our deep-seated hatred for each other and unite in order to serve as an example to the world, the nations will treat us as pariahs.
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