We Fell in Love with Antisemitism - Until October 7 Woke Us Up
Beyond the flag and the fortress: Why the Jewish people have finally outgrown the 'reactive' identity of the victim and discovered a spiritual sovereignty that no longer requires the world’s permission.
There is something inherently multi-dimensional about the phenomenon of antisemitism and its relationship to the Jewish soul. It is not merely a one-way street of hatred; it is a complex dialectic of construction, persecution, and defiance.
The Three Dimensions of the Jewish Self
On the first level, the Jew reacts in response to how the world perceives him. On the second, with the peak of persecution, when it reaches the fever pitch of slaughter, paradoxically it produces a deeper, more stubborn insistence on identity. But it is the third dimension that is most fascinating: the self-reflection that arises in the shadow of the hunter. It is all reactivity, all a lower Jewishness, that is only defined by its "opposition" to the external gaze. One which makes us look inword, yet somehow, we are daunted by its power to define us, and by our will to remain unique despite it's need to eradicate our abnormality and / or existence.
The Immunity of the Religious
One might argue that the only Jews truly immune to the "Antisemite’s Gaze" are the deeply religious. Why? Because they simply do not "count" the external world with the same weight as the secular. For the Haredi or the devoutly observant, the perception of the Goy (the stranger) cannot provide fuel for their intellectual or spiritual fire. Their world is self-contained, fueled by a conceptual framework that predates and outlasts any external critic.
For the secular Jew, however, the story is different. We must wonder if the secular Jew has "fallen in love," philosophically speaking, with the rest provided by the antisemitic idea.
Traditional Jewish dimensions, Halacha, Torah, the ancient rhythms of prayer, may feel insufficient or "unreal" to a modern secularist. In that vacuum, the antisemitic mirror provides a grotesque but solid reflection.
It offers a new dimension to identity: “I am a Jew because they hate me.”
There is a strange, quiet comfort in being defined by an enemy when you are struggling to define yourself.
Everything changed on October 7th. With the surge of religious return following that dark day, we saw a profound internalization of "Jewish Fate." We began to understand the supra-temporal and circular nature of antisemitism. We recognized not just its hypocrisy, but how it arrives exactly at the moment of Jewish self-identification.
We didn't fall in love with the decree of fate; we simply stopped taking it personally. We realized that if this hatred is a constant, our only choice is to refuse to give it the power to move us. We understood that much of our "Israeliness" is exactly this: the power to persist in spite of the spirit of hatred directed at us - Yes it made us look inword, but no - it stopped defining us.
By our very existence, we violate the fantasies of those who wish to consume us. We fulfill the prophecy of "In every generation they rise against us," but we no longer do so from a place of neediness. We do it from a place of spiritual autonomy. We have realized that while Israel may not protect us from every disaster, it gives us a place to look destruction in the eye.
We no longer harbor the banal secular fantasy that the State of Israel will simply "stop the hatred," nor do we believe that this hostility itself can manufacture a soul for us in the way the mythological "Sabra" was once envisioned.
We have suddenly matured.
We are now far too sophisticated and wise to allow ourselves to be trapped in that initial stage where the trigger of hatred defines our modern essence.
To remain there is to lose; if our identity is merely a reaction, we will never truly overcome the enemy, we will only ever be playing defense. Instead, a shift has occurred. While the "second stage", that deep, defiant insistence on our identity in the face of persecution, has certainly been activated, we are navigating it through the introspection of a "third stage." We have shed the mundane secular delusion that physical sovereignty alone is the spiritual solution to our existential struggle.
Facing the world’s animosity, we looked inward and realized a profound truth: from the very depths of our being, our eyes are turned upward.
This didn't happen because of who our haters are, but because of what their hatred inadvertently revealed to us about what and who we are. And that is not something national alone, but spiritual.