A Year Between Illusions

We are living through a year that does not quite dare to name itself. It is called a ceasefire, a de-escalation, a transition, a negotiation phase. Yet none of these words truly holds. This year is not peace, and not war; not collapse, and not recovery. It is a year lived in parentheses – suspended between illusions carefully maintained and realities carefully postponed. The illusion is that the world is holding its breath in order to regain balance. The reality is that the breath itself has become uneven, shallow, and dangerously habitual.

In the Middle East, the word ceasefire circulates with a frequency that betrays its emptiness. Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq – each is officially “between rounds,” yet none has returned to a condition that could honestly be called peace. Israel lives in a state of permanent alert, its society stretched between mourning and mobilization, its borders provisional even when maps insist otherwise. Lebanon oscillates between economic collapse and military tension, its sovereignty hollowed out by paralysis and proxy logics. Syria remains fragmented into zones of influence, where silence does not mean safety. Iraq, formally stabilized, still trembles under militia power, regional rivalries, and the afterlife of war.

And yet, nearby, Jordan persists as a fragile counter-image. Not a triumph, not a model to export, but a reminder that peace is not an emotion. It is a discipline. It survives through restraint, continuity, and the acceptance of limits. Its existence sharpens the contrast: peace is possible, but it is neither automatic nor contagious.

Further north, the war between Ukraine and Russia has entered a different kind of suspension. There are no secure areas anymore, no rear zones untouched by missiles, drones, or exhaustion. Ukraine remains strong-minded not because it is unscathed, but because survival itself has become an act of moral will. Russia, by contrast, inhabits another in-between: violent abroad, absent at home. Its internal life is marked less by terror than by absenteeism – absence of accountability, of public deliberation, of genuine involvement. Corruption functions not only economically but morally, anesthetizing responsibility. War continues, but no one fully answers for it.

This condition is reinforced by the way violence itself has changed. War today is increasingly administered rather than confronted. Technology – drones, algorithmic targeting, remote surveillance – creates action without encounter, force without exposure, decision without a visible decider. Responsibility dissolves into systems and procedures. No one fully decides, yet destruction proceeds. Ceasefires become technical pauses rather than moral thresholds. Control replaces judgment – until judgment returns, amplified.

The same distance shapes humanitarian response. Compassion has not vanished; it has become fatigued and selective. Images circulate faster than mourning can mature. Some suffering remains visible; others dissolve into background noise. Aid language persists, commitment weakens. What emerges is not indifference, but a cruel hierarchy of attention – a humanitarian in-between where care is rationed, not denied.

Europe watches all this from its fractured interior, itself an unresolved project. There is a European identity, but it hesitates between culture, economy, politics, and memory. Under pressure from far-right movements, impoverishment, demographic anxiety, and cultural exhaustion, Europe oscillates between nostalgia and amnesia. One symptom is religious hollowing. Christmas survives, but often as consumption rather than incarnation. Ritual becomes event; celebration becomes distraction. When transmission fails, identity turns brittle — and extremisms grow not only from hatred, but from hunger for structure.

Beyond Europe, the in-between hardens. Africa remains split by poverty and layered post-colonialisms – old and new, Western and non-Western. Sudan bleeds in slow motion, again and again along the decades. Mali, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Congo oscillate between conflict and neglect. Asia mirrors this instability: India and Pakistan locked in inherited antagonisms, Afghanistan trapped in aftershock, Taiwan living under announced ambiguity. Everywhere, borders exist; certainty does not.

§ Words Without Weight: Identity, Memory, and the Hollowing of Meaning

Parallel to this erosion of responsibility runs a quieter but equally decisive collapse: the weakening of language itself. We continue to speak abundantly – of values, dialogue, ceasefires, international order, unity, remembrance. Yet words increasingly fail to bind those who pronounce them. They circulate without consequence, repeated until they lose their capacity to commit.

This semantic erosion explains much of our present paralysis. When language no longer carries obligation, societies drift between verbosity and brutality. Declarations replace decisions; commemorations replace conversions. We remember foundational texts, councils, and declarations – from Nostra Aetate to the early ecumenical councils – yet often in a self-referential, Westernized register that celebrates its own so-called “ecumenical” universality while quietly managing exclusion. Unity is affirmed, but plurality remains unresolved. Faith is defined, but its historical and cultural breadth is narrowed.

The same pattern appears in European identity. Europe exists, but without a shared grammar of continuity. Generations inherit systems without narratives, rights without transmission, freedoms without memory. In this vacuum, extremisms do not arise primarily from hatred but from hunger – a hunger for structure, for meaning, for boundaries that still signify. Religion, reduced to heritage or consumption, too often becomes spectacle. Christmas turns into exchange without incarnation, festivity without transcendence. Nativity does not allow versatility and is rooted in specific cities of the Land of Israel.

Belief itself has not disappeared, definitely not, but it has been displaced. It no longer points beyond history but absolutizes fragments within it – nation, trauma, identity, grievance. Moral intensity remains, but mercy evaporates. Justice is invoked without forgiveness; memory without redemption. In such conditions, conflicts cannot truly end. They can only be suspended, renamed, or postponed – endlessly in between.

Even the ecological crisis follows this pattern. Awareness is universal, conversion rare. Data accumulates; discipline does not. Catastrophe is acknowledged, yet sacrifice is deferred. Ecology becomes rhetoric rather than reordering, mirroring the same illusion: that recognition alone suffices.

Alongside political and military suspension runs a quieter collapse: the erosion of language itself. We continue to speak of values, dialogue, unity, ceasefires, international order – but words increasingly fail to bind those who pronounce them. They circulate without consequence. Declarations replace decisions; commemorations replace conversions. Even anniversaries meant to recall universality – the 60 years of Nostra Aetate, the 1700 years of the first ecumenical council or the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau (by whom?!) or the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki – are often remembered through selective lenses, privileging Greek-Latin or very local-restricted trajectories while marginalizing Slavic and other living Christian histories. Unity is affirmed; plurality remains managed.

Belief has not disappeared; transcendence has. Moral intensity remains, but mercy evaporates. In such a world, conflicts do not end — they pause, rename themselves, resume. Even ecology follows this pattern: catastrophe acknowledged but sacrifice deferred.

What has intensified beneath all these suspended conflicts is not only violence, but the weakening of restraint itself. Violence is no longer merely instrumental; it is increasingly expressive, irrational, and performative. The ancient intuition that man is a wolf to man no longer shocks – it is rehearsed, filmed, circulated, and justified. Cruelty returns not as excess, but as language. It explains, reassures, mobilizes.

This shift matters because it marks an anthropological fracture. When restraint collapses, norms do not erode gradually – they invert. What once required justification now claims moral urgency. What once provoked shame now produces applause, ignorance, disregard. War ceases to be a tragic necessity and becomes a proving ground for identity, virility, vengeance, or purity. In such conditions, ceasefires cannot heal, and memory cannot pacify, because violence has ceased to be a failure – it has become a claim.

What is lacking, then, is not knowledge, nor even values, but accounting. Not accounting as bookkeeping, but as the ancient act of standing before time and answering for what one has done with it. This demand does not belong to one calendar alone. It resonates across Jewish 5786 and Muslim 1447 alike – across traditions that know that time is not neutral, and that history is not an alibi.

To live between wars and ceasefires, between declarations and silences, is to risk confusing postponement with innocence. Yet, delay does not absolve. The year weighs. It asks what has been repaired, what has been avoided, what has been named and what has been concealed. Accountability is not moralism; it is realism. When power acts without answering, language without binding, violence without a subject who can truly say “I,” everything continues – and catastrophes become normal.

Against this drift, accountability remains the last interruption of illusion. It does not promise peace. It insists that even in unfinished wars, unfinished years, unfinished faiths, there is still a moment where one must say: this is what we have done, this is what we have allowed, this is what we refuse to normalize. Without that moment, history does not move forward. It merely accumulates wreckage. How shall we redeem the approaching clashes?

“Take only memories, leave only footprints” – they say in Barani Aboriginal Australian language. We also clutch to our footsteps and our memories a sheltered by some miracle as a tiny light that continues… continues.