What if?

It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback things and say how you would have done things differently after you see how others have made mistakes. But what about when you who direct that scrutiny at yourself? A rabbi once told me, “Regret is the evil inclination at work.” It makes sense. You can’t change the past and it will only drive you crazy if you constantly look back in life and wonder what would have been if you had made different decisions.

As I was sitting in safe rooms usually woken up between 2:00 and 4:30AM every night, and often during the day for close to two weeks, I began to wonder what if I had done things differently. I was obviously not in the right headspace to be as rational as when ballistic missiles fired from Iran were not constantly reigning over my head, but I would try and calm myself down and think of how things could be different in the future. Could I learn from this and make things better in the future?
I already felt horrible in that I had taken three comics to Israel to do our biannual Comedy For Koby tour and after only one show, the remaining five were cancelled, and it was unclear as to how they would be able to return home to the US as the airport was shut down. What if we had started just a week or two earlier? It’s hard to not play the “What if” game, but rationally I knew it was damaging and I was more focused on the immediate.

Not only was the charity we do the shows for, The Koby Mandell Foundation, going to lose tens of thousands of dollars, but the stress everyone endured was also awful. Couple that with not being able to get a single night of straight sleep and needless to say, it was difficult on everyone. Could I do anything to make things better for the comics? Now that we’re all back, they are all obviously all rational enough to know that I had nothing to do with when the attack on Iran began, but it still eats me up that I couldn’t really do anything to make things better while there. I’m hoping I never have to go through this again, and when I think about it, oddly enough this fight, along with Oct 7th might be a better ground for self reflection for everyone else, rather than all of us who went through it.

This fight with Iran was obviously different than October 7th, which I was also in Israel for. I seem to have knack for being in Israel during wars. It’s funny because it used to be a running gag that whenever I came to Israel with the comics it was always calm, and as soon as we’d leave Hamas would start firing rockets again. There were posts on my Facebook wall from friends saying they voted for me to make Aliya since it was always fine when I was there. I clearly broke that streak in a big way.

Ballistic missiles do more damage than the rockets fired from Hamas, but obviously the connection of both groups wanting to kill as many Jews as possible was the same. The “What if?” question kept at me. I then realized that it wasn’t really up to Israel to achieve some kind of long lasting peace in the Middle East, and it wasn’t even up to the Arabs and rest of the Muslim world. It was up to everyone else.
What if right after October 7th where citizens from thirteen other nations were kidnapped stood up loudly and said, “You do not get to kidnap and murder our citizens without repercussions!” What message would that have sent? What message would Iran have taken from it? Imagine it. Ireland and England send a group of soldiers symbolically on a flight together showing Islamic terrorists that they unite when they kidnap their sons and daughters. What message would that have sent to future generations of Protestants and Catholics? Kidnapped Irish citizen, eight year old Emily Hand, never got to see such a message because it was more important for both of those nations to judge Jews than go after their own.
What if Germany, France and Russia all sent a delegation of its militaries together, united in getting back their own citizens? What if Thailand, the Philippines and Sri Lanka released a message to the world calling for all Southeast Asian countries to back the rescue of its people taken? What if China and Nepal … yes China and Nepal came together just once and united in saying that kidnapping people, their own citizens, was wrong, and no matter what our differences can we come together in that?

All of these countries had people taken, not to also mention Tanzania so there’s your African representative as well. That unification would have been nice, but alas it didn’t happen. What happened was that Hamas knew the Jews would hit back, and as soon as they would, the world would turn on them faster than they could throw another hostage in a terror tunnel. Iran knew it too.

Iran knew that it is far more important for the world to dump on the Jews, than even to rescue their own people. It’s more important that the only Jewish state continue to be judged.

Look, I get it. If you’ve been picked on for 2000 years, going from victim to victor is going to take some getting used to, but the world is going to have to get over it. This obsession with holding Israel to a different standard than everyone else is dangerous not just for Israel, but for everyone else. It gets to the point where it becomes an obsession that takes over everything else. Look at Candace Owens. You could tell her that one plus one equals two was a Jewish concept and she’d haul off on how evil that is, and how Israel must be using that math equation for nefarious purposes.

Once you go down the path of “Blame Israel” which conveniently happens to be the Jewish State, it takes over everything. Everything. It’s why your life is unfulfilled, it’s why your child’s grades are bad, it’s why your job stinks, etc. It’s the reason for all negative things.

It won’t matter that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities help save the western world. The Jews did it, so it must be bad. It won’t matter that Tucker Carlson was calling for Iran’s regime to be wiped out just a few years ago. The Jews helped give its people a chance to do just that, so now it must be bad.

I’m hoping that in the future (and naively so) the world will one day take a split second and instead of knee jerk reacting to “Blame The Jews”, maybe take a second and ask, “What if we found a way to come together behind fighting something that threatens all of us?” I know it’s hard because you’d have to actually get behind a bunch of Jews, but maybe, just maybe, one day it might happen. I’m going to keep hoping it does and keep imagining… What if?