Paying the price

Nobody gets out alive

The nature of life is that you must pay a price for anything worthwhile. The more it’s worth, the higher the price. Paradoxically, if you refuse to pay, you will ultimately pay more and get nothing in return. A woman who has children pays a price with the loss of her beauty and with the hard work of raising them. If she refrains, she will lose her beauty with time and have nothing to show for it but loneliness in her old age. We are all ultimately in this boat, on a personal and national level

I went to the funeral of a young man in Jerusalem this week. Sergeant Hillel Diener was 21 when he was killed in Gaza. He was married to the daughter of a friend of mine; I had been to one of their Sheva Brachot meals after the wedding. A religious man, Hillel had worked hard to join an infantry unit, and then to get to Gaza.

Thousands of us stood in the silent cold for two hours and listened as Hillel’s army teammates, brothers, sisters, parents and wife eulogized him. They talked about how much of a void he left in their lives. How he always had a smile, words of encouragement for everyone; how he’d taken initiative in learning Torah, in serving in the army, in getting his friends together for a barbecue. How he could never stand by and see others treated unfairly; how he’d step up and say something, even if it came at a personal cost.

Then we went home and they went to sit shiva, to accept the consolations of visitors and to start living their lives without their son, brother, teammate.

Eight hundred twenty two IDF soldiers have fallen in this war, and eight hundred and fifteen civilians. More will fall yet. Each one leaves a void in the hearts of dozens and hundreds of Jews.

Even one dead Jew is a huge price to pay, a light gone from the world. We choose to pay this price to live here as a free people which rules itself; to not be humiliated and exiled people, whose daily existence in exile is a desecration of God’s Holy Name. Here, non-Jews kill us to dispossess us from this Land, which they consider theirs. In exile, they killed us for the same reason. There, they had a point; what sense is there in dying for the right of Jews to live in Poland or Germany?

The right to walk one’s own land as a proud Jew, to live in one’s own home instead of a temporary hotel, to dwell among one’s own people and be ruled by them (albeit poorly)-that’s worth dying for and worth killing for.

The alternative to paying this price is living as an unwanted guest of other peoples in their lands. One day, they will decide, rightly or wrongly, that you are a problem. On that day, you will pay a price in blood and humiliation which will be higher than what it cost you to live in your own Land.

The week before, I read a series of articles on Substack by American Orthoprax Haredi Jews. People who lost faith and now live as outwardly religious Jews, but privately do not observe the commandments; who get together over a pepperoni pizza. Some have already left the community and stop in to visit old friends. They now see Judaism as a straightjacket, a rigid system of control encompassing all areas of one’s life, violating one’s rights and freedoms, and their own secret or open violation of its rules as a celebration of life. Free of its shackles, they can now go on a beautiful journey of fulfillment and self-discovery, seeing which customs they find cute and fulfilling and adopting them, like buying a comfortable pair of shoes.

I see this beautiful journey of freedom and self discovery from the other end; my ancestors engaged in it before my grandparents were born. My children are the only Jewish great grandchildren they will likely have. Given American demographic trends, their goyish descendants will likely be extinct within a couple of generations.

I grew up in a complete vacuum of connection to Judaism, in the burning trash pile that is American mainstream culture and schooling. The idea of an actual God who sets standards beyond that which is socially convenient or personally fulfilling was completely absent; life was something to be consumed and enjoyed, absent of any objective or larger meaning.

The Orthoprax are right. Judaism is, in fact, not a culture but a system of control. This system is what allows Jews to survive; without it, they go extinct. The path to that extinction often lies through complete personal degradation. It doesn't happen in the first generation but is left as a legacy for one's children and grandchildren.

Judaism is the price for existing as a Jew, whether in exile or here in Israel. It is also a high one; Judaism has standards for every area of your life, including your thoughts. The price one pays for inevitably failing to meet them is either guilt or shameful excuse-making. If you don’t pay this price, you will pay a higher one, that of dooming your children, of being a dead end, and of the knowledge that this is by choice. Instead of meeting the standards of the Torah, you will find yourself squeezed into the standards of the modern world, and ultimately you will be found wanting and condemned by those standards as they change arbitrarily.

It’s shameful to choose extinction in order to enjoy your pepperoni pizza in peace. It’s shameful to choose subjugation for the sake of your personal safety and emotional comfort. When you make a shameful choice, no matter how you justify it to yourself, you end up with a mouthful of ashes.