Now is the time to ask: Would you hide me?
After October 7th, a question ricocheted around the Jewish world:
“If the Nazis came again, would you hide me?”
It was meant to echo the 1940s in Germany: the righteous neighbor hiding the Jewish family in the attic, the ordinary person who risked everything to save a life. The implication was obvious. If you wouldn’t hide me, you failed a basic moral test.
Two years later, I think we can say it out loud: that was the wrong question.
Why? Because baked into it is a dangerous assumption, that someone else is obligated to risk their life for you. That your non-Jewish neighbor is morally required to sacrifice everything they have, children, spouse, home, or future, so that you might live.
It’s a beautiful fantasy. It is not based on reality.
In Ukraine in 1942, a young Jew had almost no way to defend himself. He could run, hide, beg, hope. He had no army, no Iron Dome, no diplomatic leverage, no air force, no special forces. He lived or died on the courage of strangers.
Today is not that world.
We have an army made up of our own children. We have power, responsibility, and agency. We are not history’s permanent house guests, hoping the landlord will take pity on us when the mob shows up.
To demand of your neighbor, in 2025, “Would you hide me?” is to cling to a psychology of helplessness. It is the wrong assignment of responsibility.
All of this comes to mind as the “International Community” once again dreams up a plan: Some kind of international force to “guarantee security” in Gaza and protect Israel.
Every country that signs up for this and every soldier who puts on that blue UN helmet, should be asked the real version of that old question:
Not “Do you support Israel’s right to exist?” or “Do you believe in a two-state solution?”
But this: If there is a Hamas cell preparing to fire on Israelis, and the only way to stop them is for you, personally, to intervene at great risk to your own life, will you do it?
If there is a tunnel you must enter, dark, booby-trapped, filled with armed men who dream of murder, and the only way to protect Israeli civilians is to send you down that tunnel, will you go?
We all know the answer.
Of course not.
Why would a 22-year-old soldier from Sweden or Egypt or Canada die for Jews in Sderot? He signed up for a peacekeeping mission, not a suicide mission. He was told this would be about “stabilization,” “monitoring,” “confidence-building measures”, the vocabulary of the diplomatic class. He did not sign up to confront the next Sinwar.
And if he didn’t agree to that, why are we pretending he did?
The problem isn’t just that such a force would be ineffective. It’s that the premise is rotten. It assumes someone else should take on the ultimate moral and physical burden for Jewish survival. It’s the old attic question dressed up in UN jargon.
There is only one group on earth that has accepted that burden. Only one group that wakes up every morning prepared, if necessary, to die for another Jew.
The Israel Defense Forces.
No one on earth is more motivated to succeed, because they are defending their own parents, spouses, and children.
No one on the planet dreams of protecting their Homeland and their family like the soldiers of the IDF.
And when they are allowed to do their job, they do it in a way that no imported “multinational force” ever can be expected to.
The Lubvitcher Rebbe would repeat over and over again how the Foundational Principle of Judaism is the protection of one’s life. And based on the Code of Jewish Law (Laws of Shabbat: 329), we don’t trust anyone except ourselves with that awesome responsibility. Who would?
So why, after everything we have seen, are we still fantasizing about outsourcing Jewish security? Why are we still acting as if the solution is another committee, another resolution, another battalion of soldiers whose only instinct will be self-preservation, not Jewish survival?
Is there a cost to letting “our boys” do the job? Of course. Every Israeli family knows that cost in their bones. But there is something even more suicidal than sending your children to fight.
It is building your future on the hope that your neighbor will hide you.