Massacres and Miracles

I really don’t have much to say.

I am heartbroken. Deeply, painfully heartbroken. For the families whose lives were shattered in a single moment. For the children who will never have a chance to grow up. For the elderly who should have been allowed to live out their final years in peace. For the young and the old, the men and the women, murdered in cold blood while attending a Jewish celebration centered on light, continuity, and hope.

There is something especially cruel about that. About Jews gathering to celebrate survival, identity, and resilience, only to be met with bullets. About a people whose history is defined by persecution being attacked again while doing something as ordinary and human as coming together as a community.

I am heartbroken for those who lost parents, siblings, spouses, and friends. For the people whose lives will forever be divided into before and after. For the empty seats at Shabbat tables. For the phone calls that will never come. For the birthdays and weddings and holidays that will now carry absence instead of joy.

I am heartbroken for the survivors, who will carry this trauma for the rest of their lives. Long after the media moves on. Long after politicians stop issuing statements. Trauma like that does not fade. It lingers in the body, in sleep, in memory, in the constant scanning of the world for danger. That is now part of their reality.

And I am heartbroken for the Australian Jewish community, which has now lost whatever fragile sense of safety it still had. This attack came after years of smaller attacks, escalating threats, firebombed synagogues, crowds chanting to gas the Jews, open calls for intifada in Western streets, and a government that responded with indifference and delay. This was not unforeseeable. It was tolerated until it became undeniable.

And I am furious.

I am furious watching political leaders who did nothing while Jewish institutions were attacked now release meaningless platitudes about condemning hatred and spreading light. Words that cost nothing and arrive only after Jewish blood has already been spilled.

I am furious watching figures who spent years legitimizing hatred toward Jews suddenly posture as opponents of hate. Posting bland statements about tolerance while refusing to acknowledge the role they played in creating an atmosphere where Jews are demonized, isolated, and dehumanized. They cannot acknowledge it because to do so would require confronting the consequences of their own actions.

They would have to admit that Israel is not an abstraction or a political inconvenience, but a necessity. That Jews need a sovereign state capable of defending Jewish lives because history has made it abundantly clear that no one else will reliably do so. They cannot accept that truth because it exposes the moral emptiness of their worldview.

What truly terrifies them is the knowledge that their words do not push Jews away from Israel. They push Jews toward it. Every chant, every excuse, every rationalization makes the case for Jewish self determination more compelling. And that terrifies them more than anything.

Most of all, I am angry because this feels so familiar.

It feels like a pattern we have lived through before. As though every time a Jewish holiday arrives, we brace ourselves. As though celebration is never allowed to exist without mourning trailing close behind. It feels like we are being dragged backward into a chapter of history we were meant to study, not relive.

An era of massacres and miracles. Of darkness and survival. I grew up learning these stories. Pogroms, expulsions, blood libels, ghettos. I never wanted to experience these patterns in real time. I never wanted to feel my body react the way generations before me did. And yet here we are.

The physical sensation is unmistakable. The pit in your stomach. The tightness in your chest. The dread as you scroll and realize how bad it is. As names and faces and videos emerge and the scale of the tragedy becomes clear.

I recently saw a Jewish comedian mocking American Jews who say “this is the worst it’s ever been.” And on an intellectual level, I agree. Jewish history contains horrors far beyond what we are living through now. But it's unquestionable that we are moving closer to those realities, not farther away.

Attacks on Jews are increasing, not decreasing. Jew-hatred is being normalized, rationalized, and intellectualized in ways that should alarm anyone paying attention. And most Jews feel it. That sense that something ominous is building. Not only because of violence itself, but because of the reaction to it.

Because of the apathy. The minimization. The silence. The way Jewish suffering is treated as inconvenient or politically awkward. It feels like nobody actually cares. And the moment Jews try to articulate that, we are accused of demanding special treatment, of centering ourselves, of exploiting tragedy.

There is no winning with people who hate Jews. There never has been. It is not about behavior or policy or morality. It is about identity. If you are Jewish, your actions will be interpreted through a lens of suspicion and hostility. If you defend yourself, you are accused of aggression. If you remain silent, your silence is taken as guilt. The outcome is completely predetermined.

This will not end on its own.

Hatred does not burn itself out. Propaganda does not dismantle itself. The vast ideological machines that normalize Jew-hatred and excuse violence must be confronted directly. And Western societies must finally reckon with immigration policies that import mass antisemitism while refusing to address it out of fear, cowardice, or political convenience.

And for those in the West who think this has nothing to do with them, it does. What you are watching is not an isolated act of hatred but the consequence of years of indulgence toward ideologies that glorify violence, and treat civilian life as expendable. When open calls for bloodshed are excused as “context,” when mobs chanting for death are waved away as political expression, when authorities choose appeasement over enforcement, the lesson learned is simple. It works. The target may change, but the method will not. Societies that cannot defend their most basic norms, safety, rule of law, moral clarity, will eventually discover that the fire they refused to confront will not stay contained. And if this fight is not fought now, many in the West are going to wish they had an Israel to turn to.

I spend hours every day fighting this on my small Twitter account. Most days I am exhausted. Some days it feels futile. The scale is overwhelming, the lies are endless, and the indifference is crushing.

And yet I cannot stop.

G-d promised that there would always be those who seek to tear us down and destroy us. That truth has been borne out across millennia.

But G-d also commanded us to choose life. To defend ourselves and to act. Jewish survival has never been passive. It has always been a choice, made again and again under impossible circumstances.

So that is what I will continue to do.

To speak. To document. To fight lies with truth. To refuse to internalize shame that does not belong to us. To insist that Jewish life has value, whether or not the world feels comfortable acknowledging it.

May the light of Chanukah shine through this darkness. May the memories of the kedoshim who were murdered al kiddush Hashem be a blessing. And may Moshiach come speedily in our days. 💔