‘Until complete victory’
As we get ready to vote in these fateful elections, I have been thinking about this slogan that I have heard so much from our government over the past three years and that I still see on bumper stickers around the neighborhood. Winning. What does winning mean?
As a baseball coach, I never won a championship. Twelve years. Never tasted the champagne (I don’t think they do that in Little League). But when I look back, I know that I won. And the kids I coached won. Big time. How? Why? Because I defined winning based on a different metric.
How many of my kids enjoyed playing and continued to year after year after year. That was the metric. And now, as these young men are in their mid to late 20s, many continue to play in the older leagues and several are even fully ensconced as coaches training the next generation of Ra’anana ballplayers – that is victory. Great fun had, and essential lessons and values learned from a sport in which if you fail seven times out of 10 you are a hall-of-famer.
In all levels of sport, and life, winning is about fulfillment as an individual and as a group. It is not the immediate thrill of victory, but a long-term deeply felt satisfaction that comes from having done something the right way and shared that journey with people you respect and even love.
We Israelis have been sold false promises about winning after October 7. Like false prophets, our leadership has sold us on this or that picture of victory – images of enemies destroyed (though not really). After three years of war, we the people ask ourselves, as we vote, what does winning over Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran truly look like? What can truly be accomplished and what cannot? And how? No easy answers. Perhaps most importantly, what metric can we use honestly to define victory in a way that will honor the tremendous sacrifices that our sons and daughters have made?
Perhaps the key metric is our own confidence. We need to win it back. We are well on the way to doing that, thanks largely to the heroism of our people on that day and since. But faced with continued false promises and empty slogans we are divided at home and isolated internationally and that is impeding our recovery. It is hard to see how we restore our self-confidence as a society and state if we cannot independently examine and learn from the failures that led up to that day. With true confidence in ourselves and our mission, we can be more openly self-critical – which is essential to progress – and even take risks outside the battlefield to bring a better future with our enemies.
Sign me up for that kind of winning. The winning that comes from the deeply examined life, the winning that comes from long term confidence in the process and the path taken, as opposed to this or that short-term image of victory on the battlefield.
Without daring to minimize the tragedies, I always cringe when people talk about the 7th in terms of the Holocaust. The state failed that day, but it did not disappear. We are not going away. And we need not vote in this election based on fear mongering.
I will be voting for new leadership that is keenly aware of our enemies’ plans to destroy us and yet can lead with the confidence that we will prevail, and as such can honestly examine and address our own failures and improve upon them.
