Sunday, Sept. 17, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Happy New Year, 5,784.
Jews around the world celebrated Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, this past Friday night. Ten days of observance will end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, during which the Jewish world will ask God for forgiveness with the prayer to be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year.
And there you have it. The people of the Book, the light unto the nations and the givers of the law, will have managed and prayed their way through yet another year.
Jews have been at this a long time. Hence the 5,784 years. And normally, each year of our existence has been one of some sadness, some tragedy and a whole lot of hope that tomorrow will be better.
How else does an entire group of people manage to survive second-class citizenship and bondage by dictators throughout history, beatings and pogroms at the hands of authoritarian rulers, and the greatest of evils, the Holocaust, at the hands of Adolf Hitler — all while a willfully ignorant world stood by.
This is the time where I would be taking an undue amount of pride in the accomplishments of Israel — the Jewish state born from the ashes of World War II — while I would encourage all people of goodwill to look to the future with Israel and the determination of the Jewish people as its guide.
But, for the first time in my life I am struggling to do that very thing.
For how — I ask myself — can I hold Israel up as a shining example of democratic self-determination for the rest of the world to emulate when that lone democratic state in the Middle East may be just a few weeks or months away from succumbing to an authoritarian government all its own?
Israel is not alone. As much as I and others would like to point to her as an exception to the people’s passive acceptance of authoritarian rule around the world, the fact remains that she is just like everybody else. Divided, afraid, thrashing about for answers to unanswerable questions, and along the way giving democracy the boot in favor of a kick in the rear to all that has been built on the promise of peace and prosperity.
There is a reason the United States and Israel have been such close friends and allies. We have shared the same values, the same hopes and dreams, and the same aspirations for our children and theirs.
But, even here in our country, we are witnessing an unraveling of the democratic norms, the institutions that made us the envy of the 20th-century world and the leader of what should be a 21st-century world full of peace and promise.
While one megalomaniacal U.S. senator is single-handedly jeopardizing the command and control of America’s armed forces — with the connivance and condonation of his GOP colleagues who could put an end to his craziness but refuse to do so — the much crazier leaders of Russia and North Korea have met and promised to fulfill each other’s darkest dreams of genocidal world domination.
When Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, a man of character and imbued with the spirit of an American patriot, calls it quits because he is no longer a principled conservative among many but a lone voice in a wilderness populated by lesser beings, where is the outcry? Where is the once-proud Republican Party — the party of Lincoln and Reagan — when it is time to quash those who would divide and conquer this democracy from within?
And when a man who has amassed the power of the gods through his control over Twitter and the unwitting sheep who inhabit its spaces uses that power to embolden antisemites and other haters who want to harm people, especially Jews, where is Israel to stand up against the haters and those who give them the oxygen they need to spew their fire and venom?
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is meeting with Elon Musk as we speak. Is he there to enforce the ADL’s position that Musk is complicit in worldwide antisemitism? Or is he there to find common authoritarian cause with a man — as brilliant as he may be — who furthers hate and falters when it comes to stopping the hateful?
No, today, as we celebrate the 5,784th year of Jewish history , we cannot claim the high ground — moral or otherwise — when it comes to doing what is right. We cannot be the light unto the nations when it is darkness that envelopes our beautiful Jerusalem.
And we must not continue to allow that which is gripping the rest of the world to continue to take hold in the Land of Israel.
To all people of goodwill — fewer today than yesterday — Happy New Year. And may you each be inscribed in the Book of Life.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.
