Choosing To Trust Queen Esther In The Olam Hafuch
The path Jewish progressives walk is narrow and suspended over an ever-widening divide between their community and their politics. I don’t envy progressive Jews or really anyone Jewish located within the left umbrella, all the moreso for how eager many of our community is to let leave them behind to fall into the abyss due to the seeming embrace of anti-Israel social capital as the preferred currency of Democrats, especially as AIPAC involvement may have helped boost that antisemitic trajectory.
I have some complicated feelings on this, yet ultimately I can’t accept abandoning any of our people even for the dire crime of saying or even believing something self-destructive. We have to consider the possibility that as a people our agency is diminished and we’re all trying to navigate a spiritual exile that never ended for any of us.
Conparisons to Queen Esther might seem expedient, yet another understand is of looking to our heroes in a challenging time when none of our choices seem fully tov. Michigan’s Attorney General is currently being treated as a traitor to the people despite her overall loyalty to Judaism and the Jewish people as she discusses. I personally cannot believe that what she said is an argument to abandon Israel, even if it plainly sounds like it. What it is to me, is needing to give her as much credit as Yehoshua gave Gamliel even though logic rightly tells us that what she said is like saying left is right and right is left.
Notice also that Esther was not just brave, she was strategic. Like Esther, Dana Nessel is capable of building a political narrative to do more than walk on like a narrow bridge, something she has been carefully employing conditional language in order to do. I am not endorsing what she says by any means, yet it’s influencers like Hasan Piker that are the real Haman as Rahm Emanuel also refuses any denials of.
Israel actually helps prevent climate change from ruining the world, AI from causing all sorts of chaos, massive wealth inequality from destabilizing society, or nuclear technologies from ruining the world. No amount of scapegoating Israel could ever help with any of that. The opposite actually.
In Esther’s story, Ahasuerus comes to value the Jews even though his initial decree against the stands. Esther and Mordecai don’t achieve this directly or transparently, they achieve it by being smarter than Haman. I believe Jews are smarter than antisemites in general, which is part of why antisemites hate Jews since antisemitism is fueled by insecurity, inferiority, incompetence, and an incurable sense of injustice that always seeks to judge Jews for not saving humanity and the world.
Saving the world is not our job as a people, even if teaching other people to do so might be. And that’s why the USA and every other country should learn to love Israel as much as I know Dana Nessel does regardless of what it sounds like she’s saying. She persues justice and she’s the person who taught me that the law has value by giving us a recourse to make a more justice world. Maybe this is what we call Tikkun Olam, yet Tikkun is correcting and Olam is spiritual not just this world.
To truly do justice by Israel means correcting the spiritual disconnection that Americans, Canadians, Australians, British, Irish, French, Spanish, and countless other countries have from Israel. How many blog posts are there just on the Times of Israel site that detail what Israel has brought to the world that are the exact things the world needs for climate change? In Western Asia and North Africa, these are technologies that save lives and economies even in Israel’s wealthier neighbors.
And what country is more invested in not just AI, but the unfortunate need to mitigate AI harm from having constantly been under both AI-assisted cyberattacks and narrative warfare fueled by generative AI as well as telephony technologies like phone farming? Israel has expertise in all of these areas and is increasingly open to partnering with other countries who are very actively facing these threats.
You might not think of Israel as a leader in balancing wealth inequality. Yet Israel is not called the Startup Nation simply as a slogan, it has the expertise to help foster entreprenuership that isn’t constricted by typical tracks to innovation. And Jewish values identify justice with ensuring economic justice, not to spite anyone so much as ensure economic prosperity so that everyone can take part in society as the Torah’s mitzvot teaches us to do. And while Jewish philanthropy is often grounds for accusations of conspiracy, the reality is that the good those contributions do is often undervalued by the communities that benefit from them.
And Israel has more incentive than most countries to prevent nuclear harm. That’s why the Begin Doctrine exists and part of why Israel is cautious with nuclear technology. Israel has more to lose than most countries even from an accident in civilian nuclear technology, as Israel is a tiny country. While Israel is bigger than the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, it’s only by about an order of magnitude. Imagine the most populous tenth of New Jersey having to be evacuated indefinitely in a best case scenario. Regardless of whether the war with Iran is going well, avoiding nuclear harm remains an imperative and should for all countries.
Research seems to show antisemitism remains stronger on the right in America, especially with young people. It also seems to show that Israel and Palestine are not major issues for most Americans. Antisemitism is becoming more and more dangerous, the risk of Jewish communities facing armed violence grows, and so Jewish survival is not a theoretical bargaining chip nor should it ever be. We can accept that even in the worst situation, God will help our people and after thousands of years of the Galut we have Israel.
We are not going to return to exile just because BDS, the DSA, and various domestic terrorists of all political persuasions say so. Maybe things look bad right now, yet giving up is not something we’re allowed to do. Every Jew in Michigan knows that no matter who they’re voting for. Everyone who hates us should know that too. We do not control the world, yet it never works out well for those who want to remove the light of our people from it; it is not solely due to the actions of the Jewish people that those who would do us harm are defeated, more often it is that those who choose to stand against our people end up undoing themselves instead.
חזק ואמץ
