Eric Hoffer
Eric Hoffer, an American social philosopher, author of the classic "The True Believer" and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, expressed Balaam's sentiments in a Los Angeles Times article decades ago.
"The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese, and no one says a word about refugees.
But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee called the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis."
"Other nations, when victorious on the battlefield, dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world."
"Other nations, when they are defeated, survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated, it would be destroyed. Had Hamas triumphed on October 7, they would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews."
"No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews, no one remonstrated with him. The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway."
"The Jews are alone in the world. Israel survives, it is solely because of Jewish efforts."
"Yet at this moment, Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened on October 7, had the Arabs and their Iranian backers won the war
Some years ago, in his Rosh Hashanah sermon at Temple Israel in Natick, Mass., best-selling author the late Rabbi Harold Kushner made this candid confession:
"This past year [of terrorism and anti-Semitism] has compelled me to come to conclusions I didn't want to come to. For all of my years as a rabbi, I have believed and I have taught that Jews were no different from other people, that Judaism was different from Christianity and Islam, but Jews had the same feelings, the same strengths, and weaknesses, the same fears, and dreams that Christians and Muslims have. I took issue with the Chabad rabbis who argued that Jewish souls are essentially different than gentile souls.
"I opposed and discouraged interfaith marriage, not because I believed that Jews were better than non-Jews but because a family with two religions was likely to raise children with no religion to avoid arguments."
"But this year has persuaded me that Jews are different. I find myself compelled to face the fact that the Jew plays the role for the world that the canary used to play for the coal miners. You've read about how the miners would take canaries with them into the mines because the canaries were extremely sensitive to dangerous gases. They responded to danger before the humans did. So if the miners saw the canaries get sick and pass out, they knew that the air was bad and they would escape as fast as they could.
Rabbi Harold Kushner
"That's what we Jews do for the world. We are the world's early warning system. Where there is evil, where there is hatred, it affects us first. If there is hatred anywhere in the world, it will find us. If there is evil somewhere in the world, we will become its target. People overflowing with hatred for whatever reason, including self-hatred, make us the objects of their hatred.
"This is the role we play in the world, not by choice but imposed on us by others, to be the miner's canary, to smoke out the bigots, the haters, the people who will be a menace to their communities if someone doesn't stop them, and we identify them early on by their hatred of us.
"Hitler attacked Jews before he attacked Western civilization, and that should have alerted the world to what kind of person he was, but the world misread the signal. Muslim fanatics practiced their terrorist skills on Israelis before turning those skills on the rest of the world, but the world never understood the warning.
"Our job is to live as Jews were summoned to live, because we can't escape the fate of being a Jew. Generations before us have tried and failed. We can claim the destiny of being a Jew, because when we do that, we discover how satisfying a truly human life can be."
He said this before October 7th, and the explosion of global Jewish hatred that followed. Imagine what he would say today!
How can any rational Jew explain the fact that in our elite universities, intelligent professors and students sided with Hamas against the Jewish people? Millions were murdered in countries around the world, from Syria to Darfur, from the Congo to Ethiopia, and yet we did not hear of one demonstration. Israel is trying to avoid another Holocaust, Heaven forbid, and it is demonized?
For me, this is the great proof that the Jewish people dwell alone at the epicenter of humanity, chosen by the Creator to be ambassadors of truth, morality, love, light, and hope. So, nobody can be indifferent to Jews. Either you admire them, or you loathe them.
But why are the Jews the canaries of the world? What exactly placed the Jewish people in this position?
The very existence of the Jewish people is suggestive of another dimension of reality. As long as the Jew is around, he is a witness that G-d is around. He is the witness, whether he knows it or not, whether he consciously testifies or refuses to testify.
"His very existence, his survival, his impact, testifies to G-d's existence. That he is here, that he is present, bears witness to G-d's presence in history. There lies the origin of the satanic idea of the Final Solution. If the witness were destroyed, G-d Himself would be dead."
Many of our beloved brothers and sisters, young and old, progressive and open-minded Jews, raised in the spirit of egalitarianism and equality, have for a long time attempted to suppress this historical truth.
Yet the virulent anti-Semitism resurrected during the past decades across the world and the irrational obsession to demonize Israel, especially in the last two years tens of thousands of rockets were sent into Israel with the attempt to murder as many Jews as possible; Hamas performed a mini-Holocaust, and yet Israel is blamed! is beginning to open many of our eyes.
If you open almost any news website in the world or watch any television news station internationally, you can hear the message articulated 3,300 years ago by a sophisticated and spiritual non-Jew: "It is a people that dwells alone, and is not reckoned among the nations."
This is not a curse. It is a privilege, and it is a reality. We are the Divine ambassadors of love, light, hope, and truth. If we wish to thrive, we must embrace this truth, acknowledged long ago by our fellow non-Jews. The world is embarrassed by Jews who are embarrassed by themselves; the world respects Jews who respect themselves. The world is ashamed of an Israel that is apologetic about its 4,000-year faith and tradition that the Holy Land is G-d's gift to the Jews.
Only when we acknowledge our "aloneness" will we become a true source of blessing to all of humanity.
Reprinted from the Parshat Balak 5758 email of the Chabad of Great Neck newsletter.
