No other people in human history has known anything like the repeated disasters that the Jewish people has known. All through our long history, we have known time and time again cataclysmic events that destroyed whole Jewish worlds.
It is not, therefore, surprising that a sense of impending disaster comes as second nature to the Jews. To anyone who cares for the Jews and has seen the pattern of destruction so repeated in our history, there cannot but be a constant sense of impending danger, a constant alertness to the question of where the next great danger may be coming from.
And with love and concern comes the idea of playing the role of warning and warding off the danger.
This warning to ward off the danger is also very deep and fundamental in Jewish history. It is in Tanach (the Bible). There are repeated warnings always of the disaster that awaits us if we turn away from the ways of God. Seeing disaster as a real possibility, and thus as a goad to encourage changing our own actions, is a primal Jewish mode of perception.
Warning and warding off the danger is thus, not surprisingly, even today one central theme in the political journalism of Israel. Whether from the Right or from the Left, apocalyptic scenarios tend to abound, and every small event is taken as portent of some looming great change for the worse.
This, however, does not mean that those who do warn and do fear are necessarily wrong. Israel today is, after all, the one nation whose destruction is openly called for by its neighbors. It is the most hated and stigmatized nation, the one treated most unjustly in international forums. Its enemies come from extreme Left and extreme Right. Moreover, the dangers to Israel in political and military terms are constant and greater than to any other country.
Along with this, the Jewish people seems to be undergoing a self-imposed disaster of assimilation in which it is shrinking in numbers and potential power. Thus, with all the tendency to understand the 'foreseeing disaster' as a historical reflex, which exaggerates present dangers, there is the wonder whether this might not be exaggeration at all.
Doomsday scenarios abound in our political writing. One such scenario is that of Israeli retreat before Arab terrorist violence and an increasing withering away of the Jewish state. A disengagement and large withdrawal from Judea and Samaria are seen by many as the cause of real demoralization and weakening of Israel. The horrible forecast is of our contracting into the sea.
Another doomsday scenario relates to the Iranian nuclear capability, and the possibility that it will be used against the Tel Aviv area. And that the Iranians or some other anti- Jewish force can, G-d forbid, with nuclear weapons, put an end to the Jewish state.
Countless other scenarios abound, including those in which, for instance, an Islamicized Europe forces the US to abandon Israel. Or one in which Israel's own extreme leftist Jews combine with the Arabs within to destroy the Jewish state, as it were, peacefully.
In other words, pointing out our historical habit for seeing impending disaster everywhere as a way of somehow seeing it as 'exaggerated', and in this way calming our own fears, may simply be yet another illusion. The fact is that despite all the great triumphs of Israel in its wars, there are a whole host of very real dangers. And disaster is again a real possibility.
Now, all of this comes despite the call for and the feeling of a different tone and stage in Jewish history. After the founding of the state of Israel, and then after the Six Day War, there were feelings within the Jewish people that the time of this kind of total threat had passed. There was, for many, an emotional respite, a feeling of assurance that now a new stage of history had been entered.
But the fact is - however ironic, however unjust, however terrible - the Jewish people, the state of Israel are today hated and resented as no other people and no other state. The kinds of propaganda present throughout the Islamic world, in their monstrous hatred and absurd ignorance of historical fact, are life-threatening to Israel. The vicious Palestinian indoctrination of schoolchildren is a particularly worrisome form of this kind of evil.
So, the sad conclusion is not that we should or shouldn't dismiss our own 'exaggerated sensitivity' and 'warnings', but rather that we must have the knowledge and good judgment, along with the power to act, to distinguish the real threats from the non-real, and to properly concentrate our efforts at warding them off. This sense of 'impending disaster' is something we are forced to live with; a terrible burden and price that we must pay for being who we are, where we are. This is part of the price that we must pay for being part of the Jewish people and Jewish history, for striving to keep that people and history alive for future generations.
It is not, therefore, surprising that a sense of impending disaster comes as second nature to the Jews. To anyone who cares for the Jews and has seen the pattern of destruction so repeated in our history, there cannot but be a constant sense of impending danger, a constant alertness to the question of where the next great danger may be coming from.
And with love and concern comes the idea of playing the role of warning and warding off the danger.
This warning to ward off the danger is also very deep and fundamental in Jewish history. It is in Tanach (the Bible). There are repeated warnings always of the disaster that awaits us if we turn away from the ways of God. Seeing disaster as a real possibility, and thus as a goad to encourage changing our own actions, is a primal Jewish mode of perception.
Warning and warding off the danger is thus, not surprisingly, even today one central theme in the political journalism of Israel. Whether from the Right or from the Left, apocalyptic scenarios tend to abound, and every small event is taken as portent of some looming great change for the worse.
This, however, does not mean that those who do warn and do fear are necessarily wrong. Israel today is, after all, the one nation whose destruction is openly called for by its neighbors. It is the most hated and stigmatized nation, the one treated most unjustly in international forums. Its enemies come from extreme Left and extreme Right. Moreover, the dangers to Israel in political and military terms are constant and greater than to any other country.
Along with this, the Jewish people seems to be undergoing a self-imposed disaster of assimilation in which it is shrinking in numbers and potential power. Thus, with all the tendency to understand the 'foreseeing disaster' as a historical reflex, which exaggerates present dangers, there is the wonder whether this might not be exaggeration at all.
Doomsday scenarios abound in our political writing. One such scenario is that of Israeli retreat before Arab terrorist violence and an increasing withering away of the Jewish state. A disengagement and large withdrawal from Judea and Samaria are seen by many as the cause of real demoralization and weakening of Israel. The horrible forecast is of our contracting into the sea.
Another doomsday scenario relates to the Iranian nuclear capability, and the possibility that it will be used against the Tel Aviv area. And that the Iranians or some other anti- Jewish force can, G-d forbid, with nuclear weapons, put an end to the Jewish state.
Countless other scenarios abound, including those in which, for instance, an Islamicized Europe forces the US to abandon Israel. Or one in which Israel's own extreme leftist Jews combine with the Arabs within to destroy the Jewish state, as it were, peacefully.
In other words, pointing out our historical habit for seeing impending disaster everywhere as a way of somehow seeing it as 'exaggerated', and in this way calming our own fears, may simply be yet another illusion. The fact is that despite all the great triumphs of Israel in its wars, there are a whole host of very real dangers. And disaster is again a real possibility.
Now, all of this comes despite the call for and the feeling of a different tone and stage in Jewish history. After the founding of the state of Israel, and then after the Six Day War, there were feelings within the Jewish people that the time of this kind of total threat had passed. There was, for many, an emotional respite, a feeling of assurance that now a new stage of history had been entered.
But the fact is - however ironic, however unjust, however terrible - the Jewish people, the state of Israel are today hated and resented as no other people and no other state. The kinds of propaganda present throughout the Islamic world, in their monstrous hatred and absurd ignorance of historical fact, are life-threatening to Israel. The vicious Palestinian indoctrination of schoolchildren is a particularly worrisome form of this kind of evil.
So, the sad conclusion is not that we should or shouldn't dismiss our own 'exaggerated sensitivity' and 'warnings', but rather that we must have the knowledge and good judgment, along with the power to act, to distinguish the real threats from the non-real, and to properly concentrate our efforts at warding them off. This sense of 'impending disaster' is something we are forced to live with; a terrible burden and price that we must pay for being who we are, where we are. This is part of the price that we must pay for being part of the Jewish people and Jewish history, for striving to keep that people and history alive for future generations.