We Don’t Need to Imagine the Fall of Rome

When the present feels unbearably loud, it’s worth pausing to ask what, if anything, history can really teach us. Even when we strip away the noise and the quarrels, history remains a reluctant teacher, insisting only that we cannot draw direct lines from past to present, and that everything, from institutions and empires to our own certainties, eventually passes. Such knowledge, however, doesn’t grant power; it only humbles us before the unruly variety of human experience. History, after all, rarely produces true prophets: few have foreseen the real turning points, and fewer still have known how to act upon them.

And yet, amid the turbulence of the past two years, it seems that history is once again on the move. Technological revolutions, wars, and social tensions – all are nourishing a new soil in which ideas that once seemed impossible are now shaping political reality.

For Jews, an eternal and vulnerable people, such moments are particularly dramatic. On the darker side, one need only recall a man named Adolf Hitler, who loved to preach radical ideas. Before the First World War, he was often dismissed as a crank. But after the war, those same words began to draw crowds. The rest is known.

Yet such transformations can also be viewed in a more hopeful light. The collapse of Jewish life in Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century erased a way of life that had lasted for centuries—but at that very moment, thousands of Jews packed their suitcases and sailed for America. From that migration arose a new Jewish-American culture–liberal, vibrant, and creative–that produced a modern Jewish golden age. Meanwhile, others returned to the Land of Israel, giving birth to a Hebrew, sovereign, dynamic culture–alive in the deepest existential sense.

In other words, change carries both danger and opportunity. What does that mean for the transformations we’re witnessing today? The truth is–not much. Mainly because it’s still unclear what this change even is. Are we witnessing the collapse of capitalism? Globalization? Multiculturalism? Democracy? Liberalism? These concepts may overlap, but each points toward a different future–and to a different kind of Jewish and Israeli existence.

In this general twilight, where the future feels open in the most anxious sense of the word, it’s hard to offer confident advice. Still, one cautious rule might apply: those who cling to the altars of the old world will struggle to survive; those who can improvise and adapt, while holding fast to their principles, may, perhaps, not only endure but even thrive.

The perhaps here matters. Change itself is not a goal, and adaptation is not a virtue if it leads to the worship of golden calves–falsehood and deceit disguised as progress.

Yet knowing when change becomes corruption is never simple; we recognize it only after the fact. Living through transformation, it feels like background noise—until, one day, we realize the world has shifted beneath our feet. But when that realization comes, it is rarely gentle. It carries the weight of all that has been lost before. For Jews, however, that awareness runs especially profound: they do not need to imagine the fall of Rome–they have Auschwitz.