The Serpent’s Big Apple: The Art of Making the Unthinkable Obvious

Long before New York became the Big Apple, humanity learned its most enduring lesson about deception from a different fruit.

The story of the Garden of Eden presents us with a timeless lesson about the art of persuasion. Adam ate because his trusted partner handed it to him. Eve ate because the serpent was a master of psychological sleight-of-hand. He didn’t preach raw evil; he made it seem obvious that what she thought to be true was actually a lie. He rebranded the forbidden tree – the Etz Ha-Da’at Tov v’Ra, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – as a gateway to higher enlightenment, convincing her that everyone else was wrong. She ignored God’s instruction because she wanted to believe the smooth-talking narrative of the clever serpent.

The deep moral of Eden is that second-guessing foundational truths built on good faith, trust and understanding, simply because a clever voice makes the unthinkable look obvious, is the ultimate trap.

Fast forward to the Big Apple today, and we watch this ancient craft play out in real time on a global stage.

In a statement marking the anniversary of October 7, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered a masterclass in this modern serpentine rhetoric. After a brief nod to the 1,100 innocents slaughtered and 251 hostages dragged into Gaza, the statement pivoted sharply, accusing Israel of “ongoing genocide” and “apartheid.” With the clinical cadence of administrative authority, it performed the ultimate inversion: making it look obvious that a democracy fighting for its survival is the aggressor, while washing over the genocidal charter of the terrorists who started the war.

This blatant distortion of truth begs the question: Why do New Yorkers and other modern Westerners worldwide so eagerly embrace this falsehood? Why is the public appetite for such blatant inversion so voracious?

As the late British thinker and Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks observed when analyzing the mechanics of modern political hatred, such distortions succeed because they serve a deep psychological function rather than an intellectual one. As he famously noted, hatred and scapegoating are primarily about “the failure of groups to accept responsibility for their own failures,” (The Mutating Virus: Understanding Antisemitism) observing that it is “always easier to avoid real problems by blaming someone else.” (Holocaust Survivors Can Remember Without Hating)

In times of social anxiety, individuals instinctively crave a simple, binary framework where the world is neatly divided into absolute oppressors and absolute oppressed. By adopting a “clever voice” that rebrands complex geopolitical defense as systemic evil, people can feel morally superior, aligning themselves with a trendy, revolutionary posture. Just as Eve wanted to believe the serpent because the forbidden fruit promised secret wisdom and an easy escape from divine boundaries, modern Westerners are embracing anti-Israel falsehoods because it allows them to participate in a righteous collective grievance. It grants the psychological comfort of rebellion without the heavy burden of actual moral clarity.

For decades, the moral clarity surrounding Israel’s right to exist and defend itself was as plain as day. Yet today, that clarity is being systematically eroded by political actors who have perfected the art of making the untenable look self-evident.

Figures like Mamdani deliver falsehoods with such a polished, “truth-like” veneer that they make it seem obvious to an impressionable public that everyone who stood by Israel for generations was simply wrong. They package hostility as enlightened humanitarianism, employing persuasion to make an upside-down reality feel like common sense.

When a mayor of America’s largest city uses the solemn anniversary of a modern pogrom to legitimize this moral inversion, he isn’t just offering a controversial opinion – he is handing out the forbidden fruit. He is practicing the art of making the unthinkable look obvious, feeding an audience the illusion that turning your back on a tested, trustworthy alliance is a sign of moral evolution. In doing so –  in making good look like evil – he draws their attention away from the enormous local challenges confronting his city and America at large.

The true tragedy of Eden was that humanity chose to swallow the lie because the serpent made deception feel easier than holding the line. Today, as smooth-talking narratives wear institutional robes in New York and capitals across the West, people face the exact same choice. They can recognize the serpent’s art for what it is and reject the psychological temptation of convenient lies, or take another bite of the Big Apple’s bitterest illusion …and pretend they don’t know they are being seduced.