It’s because
we have coped with crisis all our lives.
You have to understand that a Jewish live is about three thousand years.
We’ve had to
manage with being turfed out of our ancient land and made to suffer many times
by goyim in all their forms. Christians. Muslims. Even people who don’t exist
anymore. Babylonians. Mamelukes. Amalekites. Egyptians. Romans. Greeks.
Ottoman. Nazis. Soviets.
They blamed
us for their Black Death. They blamed us for their economic and political ruin.
They even blamed us when the Romans killed a Jew.
We cope.
They disappear.
Even when
driven out of our homeland and forced to live under the goyim we cope. Even
with the pogroms, the hate, the impositions, the inquisitions, the expulsions,
the massacres, the ghettos, the farhud, the holocausts, the death camps, the
gulags, we coped.
Crisis in our
more recent life means we have to leave our home and fight off whosoever wants
to kills us again.
So when the
hidden enemy came to strike us we were ordered to stay home. That for us is not
a crisis. We experienced that already back in the day when we were slaves in
Egypt as we were reminded ourselves during our Passover Seder service. We had
to stay home then. They died. We lived.
Today we
have to stay home. We sit, we eat, we watch television.
That is not
a crisis. That is a pleasure.
We mange
crisis well. What we also do well is worry. We worry how we will cope when we
are allowed out. Will we be able to live our lives to the level we had before?
That, for us, is a crisis. Why? Because we don’t want to go back to living the
way we had before. We want to do better. That’s what Jews do. Try to do better
than we were. But we will cope. We know we are going to start behind where we
were. But we know we will get back to where we were and then progress. That is
what we are good at.
The only
thing that troubles us is that it is going to take that bit longer to get back
to what we were doing.
As through
all our life we are not troubled by the goyim. Let them sort themselves out. If
they can’t cope with crisis they will have crisis until they sort themselves out.
It is those
among us that trouble us. That is because there are some of us who get in the
way of our crisis management. They cope by ignoring the danger. That’s not
coping. That’s extending our crisis.
Who are
these people who are so slow to cope with this crisis?
They are the
ones who enter our lives when we are born, marry, and die.
They emerge
from their warren to snip our penis when we are born, marry us when we are in
love, and bury us when we die.
Apart from
that, we don’t see the black-suited army until they interfere in the way we eat
or want to behave on Shabbat. Their shadow rules our life until we have to
fight then they disappear, until we die while coping with an external crisis.
They do what they do and disappear into their shtetls.
They live a
life detached. To them, we are the goyim. Yet they are a part of us.
So it annoys
us that they are slow to join us in coping with this crisis. We see them
collectively and individually not coping the way they should and it troubles
us.
For people
with their noses in the book, they seem slow to learn. But learn they must if
we are to survive this crisis.
Maybe this
will bring them closer to our collective need to cope, not only with this
crisis but with others to come.
For that is
our fate. The collective Jewish fate of coping with crisis.
Barry
Shaw. Author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.’
No comments:
Post a comment