The Blogs: How Not to Crumble before Giants

Recently, many Jews have found themselves asking a question that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few years ago:

How safe is Jewish life in America?

The question surfaces everywhere. Around Shabbos tables. In WhatsApp groups. In conversations after shul. Increasingly, it has found its way into Jewish publications as well. Respected rabbis, prominent philanthropists, and thoughtful laypeople have begun wondering aloud whether the remarkable chapter of American Jewish life is approaching its end. Every great diaspora, they remind us, eventually came to an end. Why should ours be any different? The writing is on the wall. The only uncertainty, they suggest, is how long we have left before we, too, must leave for Israel, not as an ideal, but as a matter of physical survival.

It is not difficult to understand why this question has taken hold.

The past few years have shaken many of us. Anti-Jewish violence, campus unrest, and the relentless stream of images and headlines on our phones have left Jews feeling something that, until recently, many of us scarcely imagined we would feel in America: vulnerable.

The fear is not irrational. But precisely because it carries such profound implications, I would suggest that before allowing it to shape the conclusions we draw, and the decisions we make, we ought first to ask what fear itself does to the human mind.

Fear is rarely content to remain merely an emotion. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, it begins to reshape the way we interpret everything around us. It no longer tells us merely what is dangerous. It begins to tell us what is true.

Once that happens, something subtle begins to occur. We stop seeing isolated events as isolated events. They become evidence that everything around us has already changed. One frightening fact begins to crowd out a hundred quieter blessings until the world itself appears transformed.

Fear narrows our vision. Standing in the middle of a forest, all we can see are the trees. Only by stepping back does the forest itself come into view.

Measured across almost every meaningful indicator, American Jewry, and especially the Orthodox community, continues to flourish in ways unmatched in Jewish history. Our communities continue to grow. Schools, yeshivos, and shuls continue to expand. Jewish philanthropy has reached extraordinary levels. Observant Jews participate openly at every level of American civic and economic life. Whatever challenges confront us, this is not a picture that resembles the final years of medieval Spain or nineteenth-century Russia.

And yet, for many of us, that no longer feels like the defining reality of Jewish life.

None of this minimizes the dangers before us. A synagogue shooting is horrifying, but it is not a state-sponsored pogrom. Hostile demonstrations on college campuses deserve serious attention, but they are not Kristallnacht.

The question is not whether these events matter. They do. The question is whether they have gradually become the story through which every other fact is interpreted.

Whether fear has taught us to see only the trees until we have forgotten there is still a forest. Whether the remarkable flourishing of Jewish life has quietly disappeared behind the latest headline, the newest outrage, the next reason to be afraid.

The Torah, I believe, has something profound to say about this. Not about fear itself, but about what happens when fear quietly assumes the authority to interpret reality.

We are in the midst of the Three Weeks, the season when Jewish memory turns to destruction. We mourn the loss of the Temple, of Jewish sovereignty, and of Jerusalem itself.

Yet the Three Weeks do not only ask what was destroyed. They ask how destruction begins.

And the answer is startling: long before the walls of Jerusalem fell, something had already fallen in Jewish eyes. The story of these weeks is not, at its root, a story about what happened to the Jewish people. It is a story about how they came to see the world.

That story begins long before the Temple. Our Sages trace the roots of Tisha B’Av back to an earlier night, the night the Meraglim, the scouts sent to survey the Promised Land, returned. It was there, they tell us, that the Ninth of Av first became a night of tears, planting the seeds of every national calamity that followed.

At first glance, the connection is puzzling. The spies were not wrong about the facts. The cities really were fortified. The inhabitants really were formidable. The Torah itself gives us no reason to doubt their report.

Their failure lay somewhere else. The spies did not merely report what they saw. They taught the nation how to read reality, and once they had taught them how to read it, reality itself changed.

They spoke of impenetrable cities “fortified to the heavens.” They spoke of fearsome giants beside whom they felt like grasshoppers. Even the enormous fruit they carried home, which could have testified to the goodness of the land, became further evidence of the terrifying strength of those who lived there. Every fact now seemed to point in the same direction because fear had already written the story.

The people responded as frightened people almost always do. They wept through the night.

Yet, what followed is where the tragedy really begins. The sin was not the fear itself.

It was what the fear became.

Fear, under the circumstances, was understandable. The walls were real. The enemies were real. But the fear grew larger than its cause, outsized and panicked, until it overwhelmed their capacity to think clearly.

In the span of a single night, a generation that had witnessed the Exodus, crossed the sea, eaten manna from heaven, and stood at Sinai came to an astonishing conclusion.

They said:

“Because the Lord hated us, He brought us out of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us.” (Devarim 1:27)

Those words should stop us in our tracks.

God hates us. Worse still, His whole purpose from the very beginning was to destroy us.

And yet they said this on a morning when the manna had fallen like every other morning, beneath the same clouds of glory that had shielded them since Egypt. Nothing in their lives had actually changed.

The only thing that had changed was how they understood Him.

Once fear became the lens through which they interpreted reality, every act of love was reimagined as part of a deception. Redemption became a trap. Providence became abandonment. The God who had sustained them from Egypt to Sinai was no longer seen as their Redeemer but as their destroyer.

They had turned a loving God into a monster.

III

Here, our Sages tell us, Tisha B’Av truly begins.

The people wept through the night, and the Gemara records God’s response:

“You cried a crying of nothing (בכיה של חנם); I will establish for you a crying for generations.” (Ta’anis 29a)

The phrase is striking because it seems so obviously untrue. A crying for nothing? The walls were not imaginary. The giants were not imaginary. The people’s fear may have overwhelmed them, but it was hardly born from nothing.

So what is the “nothing” to which the Sages are referring?

The “nothing” was not the danger before them. It was everything they imagined the danger meant.

Because nothing in the world around them had actually changed. The only change came from within. The walls were still walls, and the giants were still giants. But so too the manna still fell each morning. The clouds of glory still surrounded them. The promises made to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov remained as certain as ever. Every evidence of God’s love still stood before them.

The only thing that had changed was the story they told themselves.

From fortified cities they imagined inevitable defeat. From a lifetime of unmistakable Divine love they imagined a God who hated them.

That world existed nowhere but in their frightened imagination.

That is what the Sages mean by בכיה של חנם. Not tears without a cause, but tears over a world that did not actually exist.

Fear had not merely magnified reality. It had replaced it.

And once that meaning of חנם comes into focus, another phrase, one so familiar that we rarely stop to examine it, begins to look entirely different.

שנאת חנם.

The Talmud famously asks why the Second Temple was destroyed. That generation, it says, was occupied with Torah, mitzvos, and acts of kindness. Unlike the First Temple, whose destruction followed idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed, the Second fell because of שנאת חנם.

We translate that phrase as “baseless hatred.” But that translation has become so familiar that we rarely notice how little it explains. How could an ethical failure, not even one the Torah explicitly lists among its prohibitions, outweigh the three gravest sins combined?

The answer lies in a word we have already encountered.

חנם.

Read in light of בכיה של חנם, cries for nothing, שנאת חנם is not simply hatred without a reason. It is hatred built upon a reality that doesn’t exist.

Once fear teaches us to misread God, it becomes almost inevitable that we begin misreading one another as well.

It is seeing another person through the stories we have written about him, through motives we have assigned to him, through grievances that grow larger each time we replay them in our minds. Like the spies before us, we begin with something real, a slight, a disagreement, an offense, but suspicion quietly recruits every new fact into the same story until the person standing before us gradually disappears beneath the version we have constructed.

The very same distortion that transformed a loving God into an enemy now transforms a neighbor into one.

Crying for nothing and hating for nothing are not two unrelated failures that happen to share a word. They are the same act of imagination directed toward different objects.

In one case, toward Heaven. In the other, toward another human being.

The tragedy of the spies, then, is not only Israel’s story.

It is the oldest human story.

We know this way of seeing far better than we realize, because it is as old as childhood itself.

It is the child’s mind.

It is the monsters beneath the bed and the shadows on the bedroom wall that would not let us sleep. It is the quiet childhood fear that perhaps our parents do not really love us after all, that we are alone in a world far larger than we can understand.

Children do not merely experience fear.

They inhabit it.

A coat hanging in the corner becomes a stranger. A creaking staircase becomes an intruder. The shadow itself is real. The story built upon it is not.

We smile at those fears because they seem so distant. Yet adulthood brings no shortage of new shadows. They simply become more sophisticated. We begin to fear that history is repeating itself, that it bends toward catastrophe, and that the people around us have a hidden motive waiting to reveal itself.

The monsters leave the bedroom and quietly enter the mind.

Fear itself is not the failure. The question is what we do next.

Do we take our fears in hand and examine them honestly, remaining committed to emes, to reality as it actually is, with its dangers and its blessings held together?

Or do we hand fear the authority to decide what everything means?

That is precisely what ten of the spies did. Two refused.

Yehoshua and Kalev saw the same cities and the same giants. They carried the same fruit back to the camp. Their courage did not come from possessing different information. It came from seeing the same information from a higher vantage point.

Perhaps that is why Kalev could still declare, “The land is very, very good.”

The landscape never changed. Only the story they told about it.

That brings us back to where we began.

Over the past year, many voices have warned that American Jewry is approaching its end. The conclusion is presented as almost self-evident: sooner or later, Jews will have to leave, not because they long for Zion, but because there will simply be nowhere else to live.

I understand the fears that give this narrative its force. Some are rooted in genuine dangers. The spies, too, saw genuine dangers. But the Torah’s concern was never whether there were giants. It was whether the giants would become the story through which every other truth was understood.

Ironically, our generation risks committing the same error in reverse.

The first generation stood at the border of the Land of Israel and became convinced that entering it meant certain destruction. Their fear transformed fortified cities into proof that God’s promises could not be trusted, and a lifetime of Divine care into evidence that He had brought them into the wilderness because He hated them.

We stand in almost the opposite place. We have built schools, yeshivos, shuls, neighborhoods, and families on a scale no previous diaspora ever knew. We have experienced a degree of religious freedom, civic participation, and material blessing that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined. None of this guarantees that America will always remain this way. No society comes with such guarantees.

Yet fear quietly rearranges the meaning of the evidence before our eyes. Instead of decades of freedom, opportunity, and blessing, we begin to suspect camouflage. Beneath it, we are told, lies another Spain. Another Germany. Another exile simply waiting for history to resume its familiar course.

The spies feared entering the Land because they no longer trusted the world God had promised them. We fear remaining outside the Land because we begin to lose trust in the world God has actually given us. The distortion is the same. Only the direction has changed.

This is not an argument against aliyah. The return of the Jewish people to our homeland is among the greatest blessings of our age, and for many Jews it is the right and holy path. It is an argument against allowing fear to become theology, against looking at a life overflowing with God’s kindness and allowing the trees to obscure the forest.

Every generation stands before the same choice. Not whether danger exists. But whether we allow danger to color what every other truth means.

That, perhaps, is the enduring question of Tisha B’Av. Not simply what destroyed the Temple, but how a frightened heart can slowly destroy the world it sees.

But Tisha B’Av, like every fall and failure in Torah, carries within it the possibility of repair.

If בכיה של חנם and שנאת חנם are both failures of sight, then their repair must be a recovery of sight. It comes through the reverse posture of the heart:

אהבת חנם.

We usually translate אהבת חנם as “unconditional love.” But read in light of everything we have uncovered, it is something even more fundamental. אהבת חנם is the decision to meet another human being before fear has had the chance to invent him. It is the recovery of our ability to see another person as he truly is.

It is, in the deepest sense, the refusal to do to another person what the spies did to God: to turn someone worthy of trust into the monster our fears have imagined.

Pirkei Avos teaches that any love dependent upon something disappears when that thing disappears. Only a love dependent upon nothing endures.

Read in light of Tisha B’Av, those words become almost a commentary on everything we have uncovered. Fear is forever gathering evidence to justify its suspicions. Love begins differently. It extends generosity before suspicion, trust before accusation. It is love given freely, בחנם.

The recovery of such vision rests upon the deepest truth the Torah teaches about every human being: before he is anything else, he is צלם אלקים, an image of God. To see another person first as צלם אלקים is already to begin seeing him as God sees him rather than as our fears do.

Consider what that image is an image of.

God created the universe for nothing. Not because He needed anything, and not because there was anyone to repay Him. Creation itself is the original free gift: existence bestowed upon creatures who could never have earned it, because before the gift they did not yet exist.

To be created in that image is to carry within ourselves that same Divine capacity. To give before calculating, to extend goodness before demanding proof, to love before requiring another to deserve it.

This is harder than it sounds. To love because of shared tribe and tongue, shared history or shared culture is natural enough. That love asks little of us. The Torah asks something greater: to look first for the image of God in the person before us, even before we have decided what we think of him.

VII

The only cure for שנאת חנם is אהבת חנם.

It does not merely replace hatred with affection. It replaces the imagined person with the real one. It replaces the false image fear had created with the image of God that was there all along.

עין טובה is the name tradition has for this recovered way of seeing.

Yet אהבת חנם asks something even deeper.

Fear always begins with the same question:

Am I safe?

From that question follows every other anxious calculation. Can I trust you? Are you a threat? Must I protect myself? Fear, by its very nature, places the self at the center of the story.

אהבת חנם begins somewhere entirely different.

Whose safety has God entrusted to me?

Or, more simply:

How can I become a source of safety for someone else?

Throughout the wilderness, God did not merely assure Israel that they were safe. He became their refuge. He fed them with manna, sheltered them beneath the Clouds of Glory, guided them by day and by night, and remained faithful even when they doubted Him. The God whom the spies imagined to be their destroyer had, in truth, never ceased becoming their protector.

To be created in His image is to carry that same vocation into the world.

Not to seek safety. To become it.

God’s goodness becomes visible in the world through people who refuse to let fear have the final word — people who do not crumble before giants, least of all giants conjured by their own imagination.

In truth, every human being stands before a world larger than he can fully understand. We are all, in this sense, still children. We all know what it is to fear the shadows, to mistake uncertainty for catastrophe, and to wonder whether the world is less good than we hoped. The Torah does not ask us to deny those fears. It asks us first to see beyond them, and then to become for others what God has been for us: the steady presence in the room through whom fear begins to loosen its grip and trust begins to return.

This is the vocation hidden within the ideal of אהבת חנם.

Not merely to possess the truth, but to carry God’s light into places darkened by fear, to help others recover the goodness, the trust, and the reality that fear has hidden from them.

If that is true, then the question facing American Jewry today is not only whether America remains a safe place for Jews.

It is whether we ourselves will become the kind of Jews whose presence makes America a safer place for everyone else.

The Torah has never asked us merely to survive history. It has asked us to sanctify it: not merely to seek blessing, but to become a blessing.

Perhaps that is the deepest question of Tisha B’Av.

Every generation must decide whether fear will become the story by which it understands the world, or whether it will recover the courage to see reality as God has been showing it all along.

The spies saw giants and forgot the manna. They saw walls and forgot the covenant. They looked upon a world overflowing with God’s goodness and imagined a God who hated them.

The repair begins the moment we refuse to repeat their mistake: when we choose to see another human being before fear has rewritten him, and when we become, in the image of God, a source of steadiness, trust, and light for a world still searching through the shadows.

That is אהבת חנם.

And perhaps that is what it has always meant to be an אור לגויים: to help others see the world as God’s goodness has always made it.