Dear Z,
I am writing to you today to express my gratitude. I will not use your name, because this is not really about your identity. It is about what you came to represent. You have been and continue to be a clear representative of the black fog that is consuming the left and right from the edges. I did not expect to thank you for this. But you have played a role in my evolution as a human being. As an atheist. As a Jew.
Your delusional rage, so righteously expressed, emerging from someone who had previously seemed well-grounded, shattered perceptions I would have deemed unassailable: The idea that morality could be absolute. The idea that civilization could evolve. The idea that Judaism is just a religion.
There is no sarcasm in my gratitude. Living under false perceptions is not something I will ever choose. Reality might suck, but delusion leaves one vulnerable to a kind of narrative-shear, where the fabric of your understanding can be violently rent by the force of truth bearing down on your fantasy. It is always better to know the truth. It is better to know you have cancer so that you can treat it, rather than to live as if you don’t as it kills you.
Here are some of the truths you, and the mob you embody, have helped me discover.
There may be something like absolute morality, but we are nowhere near orienting practical morality toward it.
I always believed that there is a Platonic ideal morality. Just as we can never actually see a perfect circle, yet can still recognize what prevents actual circles from being perfect, I believed we could also tell when something or someone was objectively immoral by comparing it to an ideal – which is to say an absolute – morality. In this way, I believed if we were being precisely and accurately honest, we could all agree when something is immoral. You have helped me see that this is not true. You have shown me in real time how morality is actually defined post hoc in order to justify a more basic instinct that may have been previously suppressed under a different moral framework. I see now that while the need to belong to the mob trumps any notion of an absolute morality, the need to feel moral must still be met. Therefore instinct precedes morality, and not the other way around, as I had believed. In other words, people will decide what they hate, and then assemble a moral framework that decrees that hate to be righteous.
Antisemitism sits squarely in the centre of this phenomenon. For reasons I can’t begin to claim to understand, Jew hatred appears to be one of the most durable cultural reflexes in human history. It is not biological, but it is culturally deep enough that, under the right conditions, it returns with astonishing speed. Since we can also be taught to suppress immoral instincts, there are times when Jew hatred is suppressed because it is deemed immoral. I thought that suppression was something else – I thought it was erasure. A progression toward a morality where hating Jews simply for being Jews was a relic of a less evolved humanity.
You have shown me how easy it is to transition from those times into the opposite. I have watched, through you, the mob simply reconstruct a morality that now requires that in order to be moral, you must dehumanize and then vilify Jews. All while you still claim not to be antisemitic, by redefining words like antisemitism, and even redefining the word Jew. It is fascinating to me that you don’t see the contradiction: I am not a Real Jew unless I agree with your vilification of Jews; and because I am not a Real Jew, hating me is, by your logic, not antisemitism. It is an interesting, and admittedly frightening, workaround: your new morality creates the loophole it needs to avoid looking like a betrayal of the one it replaced.
I thought humanity was on a progression toward absolute morality. I was incorrect. You helped me see that baser instincts are not erased by morality; they are temporarily suppressed by moral frameworks. Like dormant volcanoes, they remain quiet for a time, only to erupt when too much tension has built beneath the surface. When they erupt, new moral frameworks are constructed to make the eruption seem ethical. That is why you and so many like you seem to me to be behaving so poorly while believing yourselves righteous. I am still operating on the moral framework of my youth. You are not. And what is objectively most jarring is that you think you are, not noticing the diametric path you are now on.
Civilization does not evolve. It cycles.
History is not a story about the past. It’s a user’s manual for the future. The saying “history always repeats itself” tries to encapsulate that, but it’s not accurate enough. And for those of us lucky enough to be born at certain parts of the cycle, we can maybe be forgiven for thinking of history as something that happened before we evolved into something better. I certainly thought so. I was taught about pogroms. I was taught about Kristallnacht. I was taught about the Holocaust. I was taught “never forget.” But the lesson I did not take in was that these are not stories about terrible times we grew past. They are demonstrations of what humans can and will do. And they happen again and again and again. The point is not to learn from them because knowledge guarantees prevention. We are meant to learn from them so we can recognize the pattern when it returns, even if recognition does not grant us the power to stop it. I didn’t understand that.
If someone had told me when I was 12 that in my lifetime I would see people in Canada and the U.S. openly and publicly rejoice at the rape and murder of Jews in 2023, and be celebrated as righteous for rejoicing, I would have been certain they were wrong. If they had told me that the fringes of the political left and right would unite on any idea, let alone that Jews are the world’s most significant problem, I would have been certain they were insane. If they had said that people would blatantly and remorselessly rewrite history to the point of claiming that the Holocaust was fabricated, or that Jesus was Palestinian, I would have been certain that there was no way the society we live in would tolerate that level of absurdity. We had advanced past that, right? Past intolerance, past witch trials. Past pogroms.
Nope. You have taught me that we don’t get past anything. We just cycle.
Being an atheist Jew is not a contradiction.
This is the thing for which I am most warmly grateful to you. I am an atheist, but I did not grow up that way. It’s something I came to realize as I aged and studied and gave thought to things like God and religion. And I thought my atheism separated me from Judaism. That I had stepped away from my roots. Your behaviour has helped me see that my being an atheist does nothing whatsoever to alter my status as a Jew, or my belonging with Jews.
See, I was born to a Jewish mother. Therefore I am Jewish. That’s it. I can’t turn it off any more than you can turn off being born a person with brown hair. A brown-haired person who dyes their hair blond has not changed what grows from the root – they are just living in a way that the world can’t see that part of them … until the roots start to show. To be sure, some Jews dye their metaphorical hair so well and so often that nobody knows they are Jewish. In some cases, even they have forgotten. The hair-dyeing has become so much a part of their life that they have forgotten that it’s not something natural blondes have to do. But it doesn’t matter. If you are born Jewish then you are Jewish. You can opt in by converting, but you can’t opt out. History has shown us that even when some of us have believed we could opt out (or were forced to), we couldn’t. Judaism is immutable.
So how is it that you helped with this? When, after October 7, I found myself reflecting on, and sometimes explaining to you, Jewish ties to the land of Israel, I at first felt like I needed to qualify that I am not religious in any way, and am in fact an atheist, so as to distance myself from a religious viewpoint, as if that somehow coloured my perspective one way or another. Thanks to you, I was compelled to examine that deeply, and thus discover something profound. Jews are not bound together by a religion. Jews are a people. We don’t choose who is a Jew and who isn’t. We don’t proselytize, and we do not treat being (or not being) Jewish as a measure of human worth. Of course, there are religious Jews who follow their sect’s interpretation of the laws of the Torah – and there are many sects! But that’s only a subset of the Jewish people. A Jew can be religious, secular, atheist, observant, non-observant, culturally Jewish, historically Jewish, or some complicated mixture of all of these. None of that makes Jewishness less real. It makes it more obviously a peoplehood. Because it’s an immutable characteristic, you can layer whatever you like on top of it without changing it.
Because of you, dear Z, I feel secure again owning my Judaism, and no longer struggle with any inherent contradiction in the fact that I am also an atheist. I love my people. I love being with them. I love the traditions, the history, the unrelenting emphasis on learning and questioning and challenging and then learning more. I love our ties to Israel. I love Israel.
This has been your gift to me, even though you didn’t think you were giving me one.
Z, I am sincerely thankful. Your real-time metamorphosis, likely driven by the hope that somehow I would be shamed, remorseful, or even outraged, has instead brought me to a place of greater peace and acceptance. You did not shame me. You clarified me. You helped me understand that civilization is thinner than I believed, and that Jewishness cannot be explained simply as religion. I can see now that the world is not as I thought, and that is sad.
But continuing to believe otherwise would be sadder.
Sincerely yours,
Rich
Experience Has Made Me Rich 