Beyond Anger

By Abe Greenwald

Many Jewish friends contacted me yesterday to express their rage over the massacre of at least 16 people at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney and other anti-Semitic events over the weekend. Some spoke about their plans to buy guns, others talked about making aliyah, and others just wanted to vent. I too was heartsick, and I listened to them sympathetically. But I wasn’t quite where they were. 

I had been so enraged for so long over the explosion of Jew-hatred since October 7, 2023, that my anger eventually morphed into something else—probably out of an innate capacity for self-preservation. You can’t survive forever in a perpetual state of fury, especially when you wake up every day to a new anti-Jewish outrage. Somewhere along the way, my anger turned into resolve. 

So I’ve resolved to call out Jew-haters at first sight, live a more robustly Jewish life, identify proudly as a Jew, and profess my love of Israel and commitment to Zionism in any company and all circumstances, should the subject arise. I’m resolved to welcome but not rely on others who want to join the fight. I’m resolved to protect myself against anti-Semitic harm to the best of my abilities, and to the fact that I might, in the end, move to Israel. 

In some sense, I’ve taken that last step already. I don’t mean I’ve initiated the process of making aliyah; I haven’t. What I mean is that while I live in the United States and love it with my full American heart, I also exist ideationally in an inner Land of Israel. It’s a part of me that came into being only over the past two years, and it’s where I derive strength and hope. It’s where my anger was alchemized into resolve.

I’ve always been a passionate Zionist, but this was something new. 

From what I can tell, I’m not alone among American Jews (and some Gentiles) in discovering a new personal Zion inside themselves. It’s a condition we carriers seem to be able to spot in one another. 

We watched our beloved West collapse into moral cowardice and moral inversion, saw a self-sacralized media normalize blood libel, witnessed deadly attacks on innocent Jews, lived through the election of a left-wing anti-Semite in New York City, and finally observed the rise of rabid Jew-hatred on the right. And through it all, we were increasingly stunned by a Jewish state that successfully took on enemies a hell of a lot tougher than students in keffiyehs, that mobilized into a multifront war machine like the world has never known and tuned out the noise and hate to focus on the task of survival. Knowing that we had a connection to a land and a people giving their lives to secure civilization, while so many here at home had succumbed to the most unimpressive barbarians, does something to you. 

Mainly it imposes an obligation. I feel obliged to summon at least a portion of the strength that Israelis have shown over the past two years. Perhaps even more challenging, I’m obliged to share in some measure of their Herculean love of life. 

I don’t have a fraction of their courage and, in truth, I haven’t been called on to sacrifice a thing—unless you count my sense of comfort and security as a Jew in America. But since that was an illusion, or a vestigial sentiment from another age, I’m better off without it. 

We are obliged not to let the battle fall on Israelis alone. Whether that means legally obtaining a weapon or making aliyah and fighting alongside them or getting in the face of every Jew-hater you see, that’s up to you. But it means, above all, we must do more than get angry after each attack. It means being resolved to the unending fight that is Jewish survival. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.