Dear John

Dear John,

I didn’t think our friendship of forty years would end over current events. I saw no reason why it should end at all. I am dismayed by the 447 days since you last replied to me, since you blocked and canceled me. I am angry, and I am hurt. “It’s me, not you,” I heard you say in your parting email. “I am the coward; I am the one incapable of facing conflict,” and yet it is me left alone, reaching out, to no reply. It is me sharing wedding photos and a grandchild birth, and you – uninterested and incapable of sending a simple thumbs up. You left me, John, at a time when I could have used a non-Jewish friend.

It is a lot to endure, this war. Not that I am complaining. My family, thank God, is intact. Sons and sons-in-law in and out of green. We are in bomb shelters under ballistic missile fire, but mostly not. We are on hold in many areas yet plodding forward in most others. Too many funerals and Shiva visits. And through it all, I have my family, my community, my nation to wrestle with and rely upon. To thank and cry with. To celebrate Chanuka, Passover and Sukkot and Sukkot again, and Chanuka again. Everything is so palpable and raw. Prayers fraught with charge, almost too full to speak. Our ancestors were victorious at this time. A partial, incomplete, and fragile victory in those days at these times – here, not there. These are biblical times, and like I have done for forty years, I sought to process them through and with you, my non-Jewish sounding board. You have been present at each significant twist and turn in my winding path to religion and Israel. Letters from my first years in Yeshiva, bright-eyed and comic. Bringing home my fiancée for you to meet. One by one, my children, for you to know. We discussed everything from my first summer internship with you at the Toronto Western Hospital to watching our careers and businesses wind down in a syncopated rhythm. You knew me as a medical school-bound high schooler. And an under-employed educator searching for his next gig. You shared with me your boys, your loves, your struggles. Not long before this war, we sat past midnight in a Toronto city park, listening to your creations, celebrating your coming to be what you have always been, a musician, an artist, a songwriter.

I told you on October 9^th that this was a game-changer. That the world was irrevocably changed, and it seems our friendship is not meant to survive this new reality, or perhaps it is struggling to make the transition. And that scares me some. Because you are Canada. And while I feel safe in my country, with my people, my army, my leaders, I look with growing trepidation at the disfigured visage of my birth country. I am losing trust in the average person, the integrity, intuitions, and base morality of the average John. I always knew of evil. Holocaust-surviving grandparents and terror attacks made sure of that. I was born into martial law, declared by the first Prime Minister Trudeau. I understand how radicals and revolutionaries, at that time French separatist terrorists, fighting for their version of French self-determination untrammeled by English domination,  can take over and destroy what is good. But how does a good, kind, white Protestant, without a revolutionary bone in his body nor a single antisemitic streak, throw his Israeli friend off the bus? How does a multicultural friendship, nurtured in the healthy soil of Toronto the good, go sour so easily? I imagined I understood when my grandmother told of the rare Belgian in Nazi-occupied Brussels that would lend a hand. The police officer who saved my grandparent’s lives with fake papers. But why is it hard to find a friend in non-occupied Canada of 2024? What is this insidious, creeping antisemitism that sprouts from within, without a megalomaniacal fascist leader, without economic collapse, without the dark clouds of war? If antisemitism is scapegoating, then you are blaming me for what? What is the fake disease infecting the world for which self-reliant, willing to defend themselves, Israeli Jews are being blamed? What government censor made sure that your Greek Orthodox Church issued a mealy-mouthed, even-handed expression of remorse for the death on all sides of the Middle East conflict on Sunday, October 15th, 2023? Where is your outrage, your gumption, your ability to stand up and say something against moral equivocation to such a disgusting degree? I think I understand. You watch CNN, the CBC, and the BBC, and you, innocently believe it. It is hard to believe that most of the official organs of power, the legacy media, and the United Nations, all rife with antisemitism. Now I sound like the lunatic, conspiracy-minded Trumpist – everything you hate. But I beg you to believe me when I tell you that my lived experience is clearer, more grounded, and more connected to reality than the Screens you are watching. I am calling to you across a divide and think, quite literally, that our lives, that is, your life, and my life, depend on you waking up and shaking off this hangover.

I first sensed we were headed for trouble when you expressed your incomprehension and utter exasperation with people who refused the COVID-19 vaccine. I explained my own reluctance in an effort to get you to see another side. I related how those in my family who had flat out refused paid an exorbitant price in diverse, multicultural Canada that now had zero tolerance for people who thought other than the current medical Orthodoxy. Diversity is one thing, I learned. It refers to skin tone, sexual orientation, language, and the smells and tastes of different cuisines. It does not extend to thinking differently. It is a self-certain, predetermined aesthetic that knows what people should taste and smell like, how they should sound, and what they should say. It believes it can smell who is good and who is bad, sensing people’s real intentions behind their pretensions. Canada distrusts aggressive, successful, powerful white men. The very type of men you and I are not. This aesthetic bypasses logical categories. It prefers a soft-spoken, intellectual lightweight who feels appropriately guilty for the privilege of being born to Canadian royalty and pays his debt in cash to those who graced him with power. Justin Trudeau embodies the ethic of how Canada models the world. He trained and developed his moral intuitions in the same place I first learned about power and authority – as a high school teacher. He has never grown past the simple platitudes that are the cornerstone of a liberal, suburban public school education, nor has the rest of Canada. Be nice. Raise your hand before speaking. Practice safe sex. You can have anything you want: sex, drugs, and rock and roll, so long as you ask nicely. Be fair. Everyone wins, and no one needs to feel bad. And if there is violence, the excuse “he started it” is never true because it always takes two to tango.

And this is why I present such a problem to you, dear John. I ask you to pick a side when all you want is to be left alone. All Canada wants is to be nice to everyone and untangled in foreign involvements. Antisemitism today does not grow from scapegoating. It is much more insidious, attractive, and compelling. It persists in the belief that one can be neutral when it comes to the Jews. That one can rise above the petty fray that troubles the Middle East. It is a deeply Christian prejudice that that sort of tribalism belongs to the past, to primitive Muslims and Jews who have not yet learned that particular loves and particular lands are not worth fighting over. Canadians can afford that self-righteous illusion because no one has yet actually tried to assail their particular land. Or have conveniently forgotten the fierceness and violence they themselves, or perhaps their fathers, were capable of when threatened. Answer my letter, John. I didn’t start this war but I am going to finish it, for my sake and yours.