When someone throws a fit at me in line at Rami Levy, I smile and know there will never be a second Holocaust.
Call it arsim, call it Israeli chutzpah, but when I see scenes like these I feel calm. It’s part of the package deal of the new Jew.
Try to imagine the antisemites-on-duty coming today to the average Israeli and trying to load him and his family onto a sealed train headed for some camp. Oh boy, would they get it. Chest bared, decibels rising — “What did you say? Put your own mother on there, you son of a gun” — and boom, the little antisemite gets a kick in the tuches and is shoved onto the train himself. For dessert they let out a whistle the whole street can hear, and a few street kids come over and rock the train car, just to wind him up. This is Canaan, habibi, not Switzerland — don’t mess with us.
Because it is not only our strength that will prevent a second Holocaust. It is the total transformation the Jewish soul has undergone.
The prophet Ezekiel indeed promised that when we returned from exile we would receive a new heart: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.” And the Sages, in tractate Sotah, promised in turn that in this generation “chutzpah will abound” (chutzpa yisga). And they were literally one hundred percent right.
80 years, and the heart has changed. A different generation was born here. We are brash and prickly. Fearless. For better and for worse. Yes, yes — also loving and soft and shy and all that, but the temperament of the Canaanite sun has definitely done its work. The eyes are no longer hesitant; they blaze with fire. Sometimes too brash, as I said. But I’ll take the whole package as it is, thorns included.
Jacob no longer needs to scheme. Just before entering the Land he wrestles with Esau’s angel, and rightfully wins the new name Israel. A name of striving with God. Of war. Of healthy chutzpah. And whoever messes with his family from here on out will land himself in a world of trouble. Just ask Shechem son of Hamor.
God forbid, I am not saying they went like sheep to the slaughter. The opposite. They gave their lives to stay with their families until the very last moments (see the article I wrote about the terrible error in the phrase “like sheep to the slaughter”). But still — there is no denying that the Jewish soul has undergone a fundamental change over the last eighty years.
There are countless messages and studies and lessons from the Holocaust. But the central lesson, after 80 years, simply flows in our DNA without our even noticing. Not just the strength of planes and tanks and ships, but a healthy, brash strength of spirit. I am a proud ars.
And that central lesson of the Holocaust was written 57 years ago by the fighter Ofer Feniger of blessed memory, a son of Givat Haim who fell in the paratroopers’ battle for Ammunition Hill. After learning about the horrors of the Holocaust, he wrote this to his girlfriend:
“I feel that out of all the horror and helplessness, an immense strength rises and grows within me to be strong — strong to the point of tears, strong and sharp as a knife, quiet and terrible. That is what I want to be! I want to know that hollow eyes will never again stare out from behind electrified fences! They will not stare like that only if I am strong. If we are all strong! Strong and proud Jews!
When I see a fearful Jew, a picture or a word that recalls all this, I regret every moment I wasted in the army and did not use to become better, more dangerous.”
(Ofer Feniger, 1963)
