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Wishing a blessed Yom Kippur to all my Jewish friends and followers. Though I’m not Jewish, I’ve walked alongside the community for the past two years. Here’s what I’ve observed, and how it ties into atonement—meaning to make right—in the spirit of Yom Kippur.
It’s with a heavy heart over this morning’s news that I share this, but in truth, it sadly reinforces what I’ve come to learn. Over the past years, I’ve been forced to pry my eyes open to something I spent much of my life not seeing. Antisemitism. It is not hidden in some corner of the human heart, it is acted upon daily. If you ever enter Jewish spaces, the evidence of unsafety strikes you like a lightning bolt. The schools are wrapped in barbed wire, synagogues are iron clad, and Jewish events are fortified like compounds. There is no corner of the earth in which Jews get to experience the simple privilege that most in the west unconditionally enjoy: safety. Not in Europe, not in America, not even in Israel.
But it’s not for nothing that I didn’t see it. What makes this hatred so deadly is its cloak of invisibility. Two thousand years has given it time to perfect its disguise, each year becoming more professional, more concealed. Yet, in truth, its cloak is still as poorly made as it’s ever been. Today, just like two thousand years ago, they continue to kill Jews and once again lay the blame at their own feet. It isn’t because of Jews, and it never was. It is because they are the scapegoat upon which the world projects its own hatred.
Sometimes when I’m sitting alone on my balcony, I think of the hostages that remain underground. I feel so much pain and sorrow thinking of what it must be like to be without light, water, or touch, and starved of life itself, while the world keeps turning above them. While we laugh, go to work, debate, rest, play, and love, they suffer alone. They aren’t just forgotten, their experience is shrugged off as deserved, simply because of their identity.
Yet, this hatred is not meaningless. What I’ve come to see is that the Jewish people exist as a mirror. They reflect back to societies the sickness they cannot face within themselves. A healthy society treats everyone as equals, a sick one casts Jews as scapegoats for their projected ills. Every age reveals itself in how it treats them. It is only when a society learns that their concealed hatred is a reflection of the sickness that lives in their shadow that that society can begin to “make right.”
To atone is to admit what is broken. And Jews, by their very existence, force the world to see its brokenness. They are history’s mirror, held up to every empire, every nation, every generation. Until the world stops projecting its hatred and confronts its own reflection, nothing can be made right.
So on this day, I’d like to offer this to my Jewish friends and followers. You are not the hatred that the world projects onto you. You are the catalyst that awakens the world by reflecting back to it what it refuses to see it. In other words, you are healers. For every person that understands themselves or the world better because of what was done to you, another heart becomes healed. That isn’t a light role, but it is the role of the light.
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