Wasting Courage… Providence remains
There are moments when one senses that something essential has thinned in the air, as though a subtle moral fabric has worn down and grown almost transparent. It is not an obvious collapse, not the spectacular breaking of institutions or the dramatic rise of persecution, but rather a slow and imperceptible weakening of presence.
In many domains – ecclesiastical life, academic institutions, civic structures, the everyday relations of people who once carried one another – I have begun to feel a peculiar and strangely uniform emptiness. It is the disappearance of moral courage, the shrinking of responsibility, the failure of human beings to stand upright in the face of difficulty. What marks this moment is not hostility but abandonment. And abandonment, unlike open hostility, leaves no scars that can be shown; it leaves a wasteland.
One can observe this in some parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, where authority increasingly appears as command without accompaniment, structure without responsibility, hierarchy without presence. Priests at times find themselves quietly discarded, left to form small islands of druzhba (дружба), friendship circles held together less by conviction than by mutual caution and the instinct to survive uncertainty. But this phenomenon is not uniquely Russian. Similar forms of self-protection and tribal retreat appear in other Churches, in Jewish communities, in universities where once-brilliant intellectual life has become cautious and procedural, and in civil institutions where the simplest decisions are avoided behind the language of technicality. It is a shared human reaction: when courage evaporates, people retreat into clusters of familiarity and fear.
Universities, which once cultivated free thought and courageous exploration, now shrink at the possibility of dissent. Professors speak through committees rather than from conscience; students learn to remain silent. Administrators prefer polished neutrality to meaningful engagement. In governments, ministries respond to ethical dilemmas with procedures instead of presence. Religious institutions echo this movement: sermons avoid difficult truths, pastoral care dissolves into administration, sacred language turns into formula. One begins to realize that something older and more universal is at work: a movement of wasting, a kind of moral erosion that gently hollows the world.
To describe this atmosphere, I often return to a German word I first heard in 1967: wegwerfen, “to throw away.” At the time, it referred to consumer culture, to the ease with which objects were discarded. But languages migrate from the material to the moral, and the gesture of throwing away objects has gradually become an anthropology.
A society that throws away things soon learns to throw away relationships; a civilization that wastes time begins to waste attention. A community that discards promises eventually discards people. English expresses the same paradox: waste means both abandonment and destruction. Hebrew speaks of זֶבֶל (zevel), refuse, the residue of a world that has lost its covenantal sense. Russian and other Slavic languages sharpen the intuition with мусор (musor) and the harsher мусора / мусорьё, terms in which garbage and degraded behavior mirror one another. They also add another word that is tragically timely: бред (bred) – delirium, a feverish, disordered confusion – and бредовый (bredovyi), describing not only nonsense but a kind of moral hallucination, a collective trance in which reality bends under the weight of illusion. Even the word урод (urod) – originally describing physical deformation – has come to denote the twisting of the human moral face.
Across these linguistic worlds, there is a single and persistent intuition: a civilization that wastes meaning eventually wastes courage. The symptoms appear everywhere: leaders hiding behind procedures, priests retreating into ritual without presence, teachers replacing pedagogy with metrics and abuses, parents hesitating to guide and playing “be my buds” with their children inside chopped recomposed families. Institutions choose evasion over responsibility. Societies stop imagining the future. The phenomenon becomes visible in demographic collapses. Birth – the willingness to bring life into the world – requires trust in continuity. When trust collapses, births decline.
Russia, with all its complexity, adds another layer to this landscape. It moves according to a different rhythm and a different instinct: warm yet distant, wild in its impulses and zealous for Christ, Allah, El Shaddai, appears to be irrational and passionate, yet also systematic, strict, and capable of long endurance. It carries within itself a strange unity of modesty and voluptuousness, tenderness and cruelty, restraint and excess. Its people often remain fiercely loyal to the nation, with a lust that the rulers will punish them. And It’s vast, almost metaphysical territories. This loyalty sometimes stretches beyond reason, becoming a kind of instinctive obedience to kulaks or boyards, to comrades or oligarchs – despots who have long known how to wield the knout, sometimes to the point of killing souls that preserve within themselves a servile blend of laziness, drunkenness, longing, and surrender.
This spirit rises like incense – at moments fragrant and holy, at moments thick and suffocating, capable of forming a strict and irremediable rigor. Time is different there; history breathes at another pace. And the inye (иные)—the others, the foreigners, the aliens – struggle to find their place within such immense human and geographical landscapes… before they are doomed to leave the immense homeland.
Only after understanding this anthropology of waste does the ecclesial and geopolitical confusion of our era become legible. Jerusalem – the city where geography and redemption meet, often in painful and conflicting ways – reflects these contradictions with clarity. Recently, the Patriarch of Moscow awarded the Patriarch of Jerusalem an “Order of Friendship.” The word friendship sounded curiously out of place against the broader backdrop of global religious ambitions. The Russians are not alone: many Churches, including certain American Evangelical circles shaped by political messianism and the Trump-era vision of Christianity as national identity, seek symbolic footholds in the Holy Land. Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelicals, and even factions within Jewish life quietly engage in their own forms of down-to-earth competition. Everyone claims to defend the sacred, yet all risks turning the Holy Places into theological trophies or geopolitical leverage.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the delicate balance of Jerusalem is preserved not only by the faithfulness of those who pray there but also by the unexpected joint vigilance of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Despite profound disagreements, both understand that no external religious empire – Russian, American, European or otherwise – can be allowed to destabilize the Status Quo. And within the Holy Places themselves, the real guardianship often rests with a handful of elderly monks, custodians, and clergy whose vocation is not political at all. Their steadfast presence is quiet, almost unnoticed, yet they can embody the antidote to waste.
The deeper crisis of our time, however, is the collapse of meaningful speech. It does not mean that people no longer speak. The world is full of noise. What has collapsed is davar – דבר, the word and lexicon that create relationship and truth. Leadership avoids responsibility with neutralized language: institutions speak in bureaucratic formulas, sermons become rhetorical gestures. Public discourses dissolve into slogans, and promises become instruments of distance rather than commitment. Christian tradition speaks of παρρησία (parresia) – fearless, truthful speech – as a sign of spiritual health. Paul, abandoned in a Roman prison, wrote with characteristic clarity: “All deserted me, yet the Lord stood with me and strengthened me.” (2 Timothy 4:16–17). Rabbinic tradition echoes this certainty in a parallel way:
אפילו אחד יושב ועוסק בתורה — שכינה עמו
Afilu echad yoshev ve-osek baTorah — Shekhinah imo
“Even when a single person sits and engages in Torah, the Divine Presence is with him.” (Pirkey Avot 3:6).
Across these two Pauline and Talmudic voices, a single truth emerges: the human circle may collapse, whilst the divine circle does not.
Jerusalem, in all its fractures, remains the teacher of this paradox. Empires have risen and fallen around its stones; Churches have fractured and recombined. Peoples have wandered, returned, and wandered away again, scattered. Still, its holiness persists not because of political guardianship but because of Presence – the quiet fidelity of those who refuse to waste the sacred.
And here one reaches the heart of the matter. Some claim that modernity or technology has misled humanity, that digital tools have deformed our interior life, or that God has vanished from the world. But there is no death of God. What dies repeatedly is humanity as usual: the humanity that prefers comfort to courage, routine to conscience, noise to truth. Beneath every such death, something older and more enduring continues to move – a Drang as we say in Yiddish and German, a pressure of Divine Providence, a hidden impulse that pushes life forward even through our failures.
This quiet Drang (דראנג) appears in unexpected gestures: the truthful word spoken when silence would be safer. The teacher who refuses to waste a student’s mind, or the priest who accompanies those abandoned by systems. The family who chooses life despite fear, and the custodian who keeps vigil in a forgotten chapel. Moreover, the community that refuses to dispose of one another. Courage returns this way – not as spectacle, but as fidelity.
The antidote to the age of waste begins where waste starts: with one truthful word, one responsibility embraced, one relationship restored, one act of presence renewed. Civilizations regenerate not through dominance but through conscience, not through conquest but through compassion, not through noise but through the quiet Providence that – even when humanity abandons itself – refuses to abandon the humane-gifted mankind.