The View from the Desk vs. The View from the Front Line: A Response to Raphael Wahl
Mr. Raphael Wahl writes with a profound sadness from his desk in Europe, lamenting that he is “afraid of falling out of love with Israel” and claiming that the country is “spending Diaspora goodwill.” But the true sadness of his essay lies in the ultimate blind spot of his perspective. He presumes to speak for the entire Diaspora, treating a vast, diverse global community as if they all share his personal anxiety, and he looks at the sacred bond between Israel and the Jewish people through the cold lens of a corporate ledger, speaking of “spending, borrowing, and squandering” emotional capital.
But true love, heritage, and existential survival cannot be measured on a balance sheet. The covenantal bond between Jews is not a transaction, and you do not audit a traumatized brother. If we must talk about a historical ledger, let us be honest: for over seventy years, Israel has given the global Jew a gift of priceless value—a straight spine, a vibrant living culture, and a guaranteed sanctuary so that no Jew will ever again be a stateless refugee.
It is highly convenient for a writer in the West to blame the current Israeli cabinet for the alienation of young Diaspora Jews. But this is a psychological justification. The decades-long “hiving off” of young Western Jews from their own heritage is a crisis born of creeping cultural dilution in the West, not the Middle East. It is far easier for Diaspora observers to point a finger across the ocean and say, “Our children are leaving because of your behavior,” than to look in the mirror and admit a failure in building deep, unbreakable Jewish literacy at home. Israel is not the cause of Diaspora assimilation; it is merely being used as the scapegoat for it.
Wahl claims that Israel has lost its conscience, completely erasing the staggering reality of Israel’s moral restraint. While he sits at his desk typing out elegant critiques, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are actively working at destroying Israel. Yet, at the very moment Israel was coordinating massive pipelines of humanitarian aid into Gaza, its own sons, daughters, and grandparents were actively being held hostage in the dark tunnels beneath it. What other nation in human history has sustained the population of its enemy while its own citizens were being starved in captivity?
From a desk in Europe, the daily toll of survival is invisible. Wahl does not live the reality of an Israel where tens of thousands of citizens have been displaced from their homes in the North for months on end, living as refugees in their own land under a constant barrage of rockets. He does not see the exhausting reality of families fractured by endless rounds of conscription—where husbands and wives are called away to the front lines for half the year, leaving those at home to carry the weight of a nation under siege.
Our Sages spoke of the Ayah, a bird that stands in Babylon and uses its piercing, long-distance vision to spot a blemish hundreds of miles away in the Land of Israel. The bird is classified as unclean not because it lacks vision, but because it uses its distance exclusively to search for a carcass—ignoring the entire vibrant landscape just to focus on a flaw. It is a tragedy when a writer adopts the eye of the Ayah—looking from afar, fed by a diet of distant misinformation, choosing to zoom in exclusively on Israel’s fractures while remaining entirely silent on the moral failures of the very European societies sheltering him, whose governments passively validate Israel’s executioners.
We are entering the Three Weeks, a period where we mourn the destruction of the Temple—a catastrophe our Sages teach was caused not by our enemies from without, but by Sinat Chinam, the baseless hatred and division from within. For a son of the Diaspora to publish a public audit of his love while Israel is under siege does nothing but stoke those same ancient, divisive fires.
Israel has never lost its abilities, its legacy, or its love. To suggest otherwise is to completely misunderstand the beating heart of the Jewish state. At all times, Israel shows unconditional love to Jews everywhere, no matter where they are or what the cost may be. Even today, at this very moment, Israeli teams are operating in places like Venezuela to help save people and bring them to safety, notwithstanding the fact that there are no diplomatic relations.
So please, Mr. Wahl, do not judge those who love you so much, and do not disparage them. Do not let distance turn a living family into an abstract political debate.
Appreciate the profound, unbreakable love that you actually have.
Ultimately, when reading an article like this, Israel is left feeling like a spurned lover. Our love for Jews across the world still continues, fiercely and without reservation, but we are deeply sorry to hear that your personal love, Mr. Wahl, is so conditional, and so poorly understood. If Sinat Chinam was the cause of our historic ruin, the only cure is Ahavat Chinam—unconditional, boundless love. That is how a family survives.
With lots of love,
Rabbi Eliezer Simcha Weisz
