The Hope of Two Thousand Years

A conversation with a Jewish historian on optimism in a time of war

A letter from a man named David to the philosopher Ha’ari, the father of modern Jewish dialectical ontology, a.k.a. Kabbalah

Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our own land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

—The Hatikvah (The Hope), Israel’s national anthem.

Reuven Spero is a history teacher at Alexander Muss High School in Hod HaSharon, Israel. He writes a blog at The Times of Israel and describes himself as a refugee from Kentucky, where his family lived for 200 years. In my post, Bitter to the Burned Mouth, I wrote about acceptable loss and how we can know when Israel has gone too far. Reuven and I discussed the subject at length and he later wrote an essay, “The Abyss,” based on our exchange, which I offer below. It begins with Reuven responding to a line at the end of my essay, in which I wrote, “Every time you want to comment on the war in Gaza, before you do, fix the image of a suffering Gazan child in your mind, and let that be your emotional gut-check on your own opinion.”

David,

And also keep in one’s mind the images of beheaded Israeli babies, bodies burnt beyond recognition, women gang-raped, murdered and mutilated — and realize that Israel is fighting for them as well as for — not against — that suffering child in Gaza. It is easy to be seduced by power, by ideology, by the evil of one’s enemies. Not all Israeli or Israeli soldiers are immune to such seduction, but over time we do see that the Israeli army as an institution adopts policies to restrain the beast within, and the soldiers who lose themselves inside the abyss are rare. One policy aimed at restraining the beast is to make sure that Israeli soldiers get home to the civilizing influence of their families and communities, sometimes just for a day or a shabbat. While I always thought that the wrenching shift from war to warmth to war again might result in numerous AWOL soldiers, in fact it motivates while also renewing belief in things that are good and warm. I am wary of the trust in power that our army seems to embrace. I think the army and government has shown that we remain faithful to the values that make Israel a Jewish state, while our enemies have shown that our acquisition and use of power is unfortunate, but justified.

I study and teach history, and specifically Jewish history. I have read accounts of slaughters, from Crusade to Chmielnicki to Hevron. A good Enlightenment Jew, I believe in progress, both technological and human, yet I know that a mere dozen years before my birth, Jews were still being slaughtered in a way that reflected technological perfection, of a type. My shocking revelation on October 7 is how ideologically unprepared I was for the brutality, joyous brutality of the slaughter. And the joyous brutality of those of the enlightened West who supported the slaughter.

To put it in your paradigm: we are confronted with people who simply have no abyss. There is nothing inside of them that is reflected by a mirror of humanity. I’m not saying they are not human. What I am saying is that I am shocked at myself for thinking, for believing with no supporting evidence, that humans like this could not actually exist in our day. Can one say another human being is soulless without losing one’s own soul? I think the answer to that is yes — and I believe that is a foundational idea of the Jewish people.

The issue then becomes how one does battle against the soulless. The American government seems to believe that they should be rewarded with a state. Kick the problem down the hill for a few years until the next slaughter and reprisal, some more dead Jews at the hands of the soulless ones, and some of them and their children will die too.

The strategy of Hamas is called muqawamah. It means long-term, low-scale, asymmetric warfare aimed at the moral attrition of one’s enemy. It is the “M” of the acronym of the organization called Hamas. Every time an episode like this erupts, we deal with it, but the cost over time will eventually undermine our country. I don’t know if that could happen, nor do I know if our country could survive the kind of steps that would need to be taken to distance this threat from our borders, even if that led to a better life for both sides.

But we have to look and we have to see. We have to see, as you said, the cost of taking up arms to fight against this expression of inhumanity, a fight we neither asked for nor desire, but one from which we are adjured to press. We have to see that suffering Palestinian child and know she is suffering because her leaders see her more precious as dead rather than alive. And we can’t let that image stop us, weaken us, from fighting this war relentlessly, without quarter, because that is the only response I can reasonably take when I see the images of the butchered, maimed, slaughtered, and burnt of October 7. When I think of the hostages still held by the soulless.

It has nothing to do with the numbers. I don’t know why you left the path of talking about morality in our day and turned to numbers. We need clear moral sight much more than we need a scorecard. Proportionality says nothing about the rights and wrongs of a conflict, and we have to be clear-minded and (yes) responsible enough to be able to talk about rights and wrongs. Clear-minded and (yes) responsible enough to confront the relativism of the post-modernists and the false god of the victim narrative and the purportedly oppressed. If we can’t do that or are afraid to do that, we are lost.

Reuven,

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I agree with you that it is a moral issue and not a matter of numbers. But I chose to write about numbers because that is the most common criticism of Israel in this war, and it needs to be made clear that Israel is nowhere near exceeding any of the acceptable bounds we have repeatedly set in previous conflicts. And let’s not forget, this is all based on Hamas figures. If you have to bomb Dresden to defeat the Nazis, then you bomb Dresden. Another set of numbers that needs to made clear, as I discussed, is the level of support for Hamas among Gazans, which is far higher than the level of support Germans had for the Nazi Party. Imagine if up to 80% of Dresden civilians had known all about the death camps, thought they were a brilliant idea, and the moment Hitler was dead and the Nazis wiped away, imagine they would have been all too eager to elect the next Nazi Party. Would we not call them Nazis too? Would we consider such people innocent? You have people today who call Trump a Nazi for dog-whistling to fascists but they will not call Palestinian nationalists Nazis, even though this political movement literally sided with Germany during World War II, even though their leader Amin al-Husseini sent Jews to death camps and joked about it, even though they dance like rabid animals when Jews are slaughtered or raped, and even though they chant about finishing the Holocaust or tell us Hitler had a point. So I think 80, as in the 80% of Gazans who support Hamas, is one of the most important numbers in this war, because if you want to see the Holocaust completed, then you might be a noncombatant, but you are not innocent.

David,

I don’t disagree with you either on fact or on principle. You could have added as well that it is hard to accuse Israel of genocide when it provides 80% of Gaza’s electricity, a significant amount of its water, allows humanitarian aid into Gaza even including some supplies that undoubtedly help Hamas support its underground bases, and does not engage in large-scale indiscriminate massacres of the civilian population. I read an article in Mosaic today by Shany Mor that analyzes the hypocritical use of language and legality when talking of Israel that seems to have as its objective the overt identification of Israel with Nazi Germany. Modern replacement theology! This becomes all the more ludicrous in light of Sol Stern’s article in Quillette reviewing Jeff Herf’s research into the Nazi roots of Palestinian nationalism.

It’s just that…I don’t know, David. Is this all just preaching to the choir?

I don’t mean to sound hopeless. Part of my frustration has to do with the policies of the American government as articulated by Antony Blinken. Unable to garner any international cooperation for addressing the problem of Gaza and unable to come up with any creative ideas of their own, they choose the one path that will inevitably lead to disaster and pose a direct threat to Israel’s existence. Any time the Palestinians have been given complete control over territory, they use that territory to launch terror attacks on Israel. And then there is the underlying premise that if one gives legitimacy, money, responsibility, and power to people who have a history of radicalism and violence, that somehow this will make them responsible and moderate rather than give greater reach to their desire to destroy and conquer. As you say — 80%. Not hard to see where that leads.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

Reuven,

I know, I know, but look what happened with Germany. And Japan. Cultures can and have changed. People can change. The question is, what will be required of Palestinian culture to achieve such change? At the very least, I would say, is reeducation, which will probably have to begin by ripping the genocidal how-to garbage out of their UN textbooks. But truthfully, any real solution will probably look a lot like colonization. That’s a dirty word, but running their elections for a decade until democracy takes root and civil liberties allow the people to flourish would be good for everyone. You’d be forcing it on them, but polling tells us what they really want is genocide so your options are to allow the genocide, fight the forever war until a genocide accumulates, or force peace on them for the sake of your kids and theirs. They can thank you later. I would say let bygones be bygones and have your dictatorship if you want it, but your bygones are murdering Israeli children and Israelis are some of the best fighters in human history, so you can sow the wind if you want.