Paradox lost

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” – John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I

Israel has always been a nation that knew how to live inside a question.

Not the question of whether we should exist – that was the world’s question, hurled at us for generations. Ours was harder: how to exist. How to be both ancient and modern, both sovereign and self-aware, both proud and just. How to build power without worshiping it. How to root a Jewish state in moral memory while navigating the brutal demands of survival.

We never answered that question. We lived it. We argued it. We passed it down like a treasured family heirloom, a sacred tension that defined our politics, our faith, our art, our resilience.

We defended a homeland that sometimes defied us. A country where unity is always urgent but rarely achieved. Where the same streets that echo with prayers on Shabbat tremble with protests on Saturday night. Where faith can be both a source of strength and a tool of coercion. Where Arabs and Jews live side by side in quiet coexistence – until they don’t.

We used to know how to live in that contradiction: how to mourn and fight at once, how to sing “Hatikvah” with gratitude while wondering how hope survives so much fear. How to shelter both refugees and responsibility. We understood that complexity wasn’t weakness, it was character. The strength to hold two truths at once: that we were both a miracle and a reality, a refuge for the broken and a foundation for the builders, a home for both the healed and the still-hurting.

But that strength is slipping away.

In this moment of anguish and war, something deeper than security is at stake. We are not only losing lives, we are losing our paradox.

October 7 didn’t just break through the border – it broke through our belief that the past was safely behind us. The murders, the rapes, the kidnappings – they weren’t metaphors. They were atrocities. It was a return to the most primal nightmare: hunted again, burned again, abandoned again.

The pain was raw. The fear was real. The response, inevitable. But in the months that followed, the moral clarity that once anchored our self-defense began to drift. Certainty replaced conscience. Power no longer asked questions of itself. Grief was weaponized into policy. We told ourselves that nuance was a luxury we could no longer afford, that internal conflict must wait, that justice is for peacetime.

We stopped listening to the quiet voices beneath the piercing sirens. The unheard screams from beyond the border, beneath the rubble. We stopped asking whether survival alone is enough.

To raise these questions is not betrayal. It is fidelity to who we are and who we still claim to be. But increasingly, we treat such questions as threats. Critics are cast as traitors. Restraint is scorned as weakness. And justice, the very word, feels increasingly distant in our public life.

But this is not what it means to be strong. Our tradition never taught us to mistake power for righteousness. The Torah calls not for blind allegiance, but for moral accounting. Our prophets did not flatter kings, they held up mirrors.

We are the people of Abraham arguing with God, of rabbis disputing law across centuries, of generations who survived by doubting, refining, challenging. Our greatness has never been in our certainty – it has always been in our struggle. We are the people of the question mark, yet we are losing our voice to exclamation points.

That struggle must continue. Because Israel is not a myth or a martyr. It is a state, miraculous and flawed. A place where Jewish life breathes, sings, argues – and, when at its best, refuses to grow numb.

We must remain tethered. By memory: of ancestors who fled burning Europe and lived to see a Jewish flag rise in Jerusalem. By responsibility: because this story, this fragile, fractured, ferocious story, is not someone else’s to write. And by love: not blind, but blazing. Not uncritical, but unshakable.

Because even in its imperfection, Israel is still the beating heart of our people; still the place where our history lives out loud; still where, despite everything, a stubborn hope endures.

But hope must be tended – not with slogans, not with silence, but with truth. We must remember how to live in contradiction. For paradox is not weakness – it is the essence of who we are, the wisdom of survival, and the compass for redemption.

We will not return to paradise. But we can return to complexity.

And in that, perhaps, rediscover who we really are.