Morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between.
Fresh coffee. Black.
2025.
Here we are. Still. What changes we want will not happen. What changes we started will not hold. What changes we’ll see will not be good even if some may look good. It’s coming and there’s no stopping it now. Yet it must be stopped, somehow.
I am so glad the algorithm sent so many of Jewish Threads beautiful Hanukkah menorahs during the last eight days. Their light will shine in the days ahead as a reminder to us all that it can, even through the darkest of nights. It wasn’t random. They showed up on my timeline because I pay attention to the Jewish voices among us and listen to them. I would like to think also because I lend my voice to their cause, little voice it may be. I will not be silent.
I have been wanting to watch Schindler’s List again for a while now and yesterday I noticed it is back on Netflix. So I watched it once more. It’s not the kind of movie you watch again and again, rather one that needs to be revisited from time to time. It’s a dark poem, an ode to the suffering of the Jewish people, driven by artistic license and painted with broad and thin strokes of black and white in a landscape of grays.
Amon Goeth was much worse than that and Oskar Schindler was not as good as that. A lot more Jews were killed by the former in much more horrible ways and the latter was not as involved in the making of the List as it seems, yet Jews were murdered and Jews were saved and the truth emerges through the black and white images in stark contrasts of gray. For me, it is not until color floods the screen at the end that the truth hits deep.
The little girl in the red coat who carries in her the souls of six million slain is replaced by the bright colors of life made possible by those who survived the horror. And everything becomes real without poetic license. The Warsaw ghetto, the children, the war effort, the monsters… The Holocaust. The worn out steps that need to be used again and again so we remember those who stepped on them. Those who made it out alive and those who perished as they climbed them.
Perhaps the incredible scene of the Soviet officer on horseback telling the Schindlerjuden gathered in Czechoslovakia there was no path for them either East or West becomes the more accurate representation of the post war reality for the millions of Jews who survived the Holocaust. The only true path to freedom was the one leading to Israel, as many of them would soon find out. Zionism was the answer. I believe it was then as it is now.
We find ourselves in a time when Israel is once again becoming the answer it turned out to be after the war was over in Europe. Once again it is its very existence that provides hope and keeps the light alive in the darkness. Zionism was always the answer. Israel lives so the Jewish people may live, no matter where they are. The fact so many think about making Aliyah today is a sign of the times we live in.
From Ireland to Canada, from Germany to Australia, and here, in the United States, Jews are planning for the eventual move to Israel if all else fails. Their lives are being upended much faster than gentile eyes can perceive and so are our own, those of us who are not Jewish, in ways even harder to comprehend but in an inexorably painful reality we won’t escape for long.
The writing remains on the wall for all to see. Most of us, including a few Jews themselves, don’t want to believe in it. “It can’t be that bad” or “they would never do that” return as dreadful echoes from Krakow. Looking away is making a comeback too. Everything old is new again. The brown shirts are replaced by keffiyehs but the hate is just the same. The tragedy is today some place on those brown shirts the hope they will crush the keffiyeh masked hatred.
They probably will, too. And ourselves along with it. Be very careful what you wish for. Already the reach of measures supposed to counter the existing antisemitism from Islamic fundamentalists are proving to be far more than that. They are telling us who they are. Believe them. They will crush every stepping stone we place for them in our foolishness and no matter what we believe in we will be crushed unless we accept them and that’s not even a way out.
Acceptance and obedience mean nothing to those who are consumed by hatred. They will only despise you more for it and will crush you in the end. Another incredible metaphor from Schindler’s List is the water hosing of the rail cars filled with Jews, allowed as it looked like a cruel joke: giving them hope when hope was already lost. The cruelty has always been the point and it will remain so. Accept it at your own peril.
I know we will soon face many terrible things in our lives but I can not and will not stop talking about one we face already and is becoming a breeding ground for a lot of others: antisemitism. I use it as my compass to guide me through the myriad of hatred ahead and identify those who are enablers of it, regardless of who they seem to be or how “nice” they look. It cuts both ways into the motives of some who are seemingly “on the right side”. Beware.
I will not be silent. I will keep the candles lit during this Hanukkah burning inside me, and thank you to those who courageously posted them on their threads. You are not alone. I just wish more would not only see them but know what they mean and what pain lies in each of them, behind the beauty of the smiles they bring and in every hopeful wish they represent. May they light our way in the dark days ahead.
Shabbat shalom.
Am Israel Chai 🟦
