In moments of meditation or when gifted with a flash from Above, we can glimpse the infinite, where all good things are present and harmony reigns. Most of our lives are dedicated to realizing that good for which we yearn, but we mostly find that it comes piecemeal. As we find that this is a dominating truth of life as we live it, we come to learn the value of correct priorities. We cannot raise the walls without first setting the foundation, nor place the cupola before the walls.
But lost in the politics has been the realization … that the ones who have set their sights on the Jews have their sights on them as well.
Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s Foreign Minister, showed a competent awareness of the value of prioritizing in his remarks quoted by Elliot Kaufman in the August 27th Wall Street Journal. Talking about losses in the propaganda war with Hamas, Sa’ar said, “We need to survive first. After that, there comes popularity and how much we are able to convince others around the world.”
Survival is the first of the rights listed in our Declaration; even liberty comes afterwards. Thus, we allow conscription to survive the danger to survival posed by those who seek us harm. Thus, we recognize a right to self-defense allowing citizens to employ even deadly force if necessary when faced with murderous intent. Thus, in Jewish law, clear threats to life require setting aside almost every legal restriction until life is secured. Thus, our Constitution allows even the most fundamental civil right, the writ of habeas corpus, to be suspended in time of an emergency threatening the life of the Republic.
Yet any student of history knows that tyrants love to declare emergencies, that many dangerous situations can be defused, that the human heart can be touched and changed. We know as well that realizing the good in human affairs requires the willingness to sacrifice for its sake. Is it not noble to give up even one’s life to attain peace and understanding? Our heritage sets before us many venerated examples of such sacrifice.
These last two paragraphs set out values that here, in our concrete and finite world, seem to be in mortal opposition. We can see the violent passion of some protestors for peace, whom we should assume at least the sake of a sound argument, are sincere in their protestations. We can sense the anger of those who believe with good reason (let us assume to escape following a trivial argument) that their lives are being discarded callously so that others can feel the glow of being thought peacemakers.
We should know by now that any argument can be gamed. The world as it is does not follow the ideological preferences of either the dove or the hawk, and any human ideology has its explanatory and practical limits, beyond which it is incompetent. And there is a lamentable history of ideologues of all sorts leaning deeply into their incompetence and causing harm, which is sometimes immense.
But at the heart of our civilization is a teaching of a Oneness that sets all apparent dualities in a redeeming context, resolving them as polarities that together express the whole. Darkness and light both are needed to make the first day; good and evil are both needed to give us the dignity of being moral agents, valued partners enlisted by the Creator to develop and preserve the beloved Creation. The ancient wisdom of Ecclesiastes put it so clearly that it even surfaced when I was a child on Top Forty radio — To everything there is season and a time to every purpose under heaven.
In a time of relentless confrontation, the ancient words seemed to many of my generation to say that only one of the polarities was being tried, “a time for war” and not “a time for peace.” The balance shifted.
But the questions Ecclesiastes encourages to raise require continuous raising. What was appropriate today may not be appropriate tomorrow. To fail to achieve a possible peace would be terrible; to fail to stop a preventable holocaust would be at the least equally terrible.
In the blessed security of a nation whose power and prosperity has been the only experience of many of its citizens, deadly danger seems exceedingly remote. Power exercised in a democratic nation follows the will of the people, and sometimes that will becomes flaccid from the easy and variegated pleasures of a prosperous and easy-going life. Politicians seeking power and lacking principle (what a grim and bothersome thing principle is!) capitalize on the popular mood and can continue to do so until the consequences become too uncontrolled.
Who needs sacrifice in fat times? But when hurt comes to the door, things change. The fat and powerful stand exposed. Think of Pelosi at her beauty salon, Newsom dining out during lockdown at the French Laundry, Boris Johnson and his pals partying. When people whose lives were shut down by the COVID policies of these politicians who were exposed as violating their own rules that had immiserated everyone else, there was hell to pay.
But Sa’ar is talking about something even more basic than the suspended liberties of 2020-2022. He is talking about survival itself.
That too has been a problem for politicians to defend. Years after Hitler had broken its treaty obligations and rebuilt Germany’s army, air force, and submarine fleet, years after he had started his concentration camps, had banished Jews from schools, professions, and civil rights, had started gassing the handicapped and mentally ill, had marched into the demilitarized Rhineland, and had seized Austria by threatening invasion, and when he was presently threatening Europe with war if his demands to seize territory from Czecho-slovakia were not met, Britain’s Neville Chamberlain justified his unwillingness to confront Hitler not only by expounding on the moral imperative of peace, but by making the case that the damage a weak peace would make was too distant for Britons to care about:
How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.
Yet at the same time, when war came, and it was Chamberlain who led Britain into war in September 1939, his earnest seeking of peace brought a distinct advantage that we don’t often hear mentioned today. Winston Churchill, at first isolated and scorned for his opposition to appeasement, was the one who pointed this out in Parliament the day war was declared:
In this solemn hour it is a consolation to recall and to dwell upon our repeated efforts for peace. All have been ill-starred, but all have been faithful and sincere. This is of the highest moral value — and not only moral value, but practical value — at the present time, because the wholehearted concurrence of scores of millions of men and women, whose co-operation is indispensable and whose comradeship and brotherhood are indispensable, is the only foundation upon which the trial and tribulation of modern war can be endured and surmounted. This moral conviction alone affords that ever-fresh resilience which renews the strength and energy of people in long, doubtful, and dark days.
The ability to see the value of the position he had so strongly opposed is a rare thing to see in politicians in any day. Usually, it is because the causes we embrace have been small causes, or smaller than they need to be. Churchill stood for the largest of causes, for civilization itself, and he succeeded in communicating that to the people who had to fight and win the war in the face of frightful, powerful evil. People on all sides saw that and their seeing it allowed him to effectively unite a nation and the world to the supreme cause.
In an era of increasing disunity, political fracturing has brought about unnecessary defeat. The authoritarians whom we fight, who seek to impose their ideologies at the point of a gun, see what they think is weakness in the way free nations hash issues through. It can become excruciatingly dissonant, like the last moments of a Bach fugue, just before all the clashing threads resolve into a triumphant tonic. But those who have little trust in harmony and see only force as regnant. Watching and hearing the fugue of our constitutional politics, the authoritarians see only chaos and hear only discord.
The question to us is: have we given up as well? Is that all we hear and see?
It is at that moment that we can turn to the score. We conservatives are the ones who know the ancient sources of our freedoms and our civilization. We do not worship mere newness but know that if we are to fully grasp the moment, we need all the gifts that have been garnered in the long march towards the light and have been given to us to use. We know the score; we know where this music is going and how it will come out. We know how to play it.
We cannot fail to be fully in the moment. But that moment for us is connected to what came before it and where it is going, and to lose that is to fail. And it is part of the drama to know that there are some things one must do even at the risk of it being impolitic, because of the responsibility of our knowledge and because of our trust that, given the time, we can win for them, those who disagree with us will see what we have done and we will march forward to triumph together. Thus, at a point of disagreement about priorities in war strategies amongst the Allies, Churchill telegraphed to his closest political associate: “It is no use planning for defeat in the field in order to give temporary political satisfaction.”
This is what Sa’ar was speaking of today. The flaccid Europeans and their fatuous friends in Canada have scraped together their ruling coalitions by making cheap peace with the Hamas vote, which has been enough to get them power. But lost in the politics has been the realization that was so slow in coming in the Thirties — that the ones who have set their sights on the Jews have their sights on them as well. The trimmers ruling the EU and Canada do not see the stark reality that is, now as in the Thirties, a choice between democracy and a cult of death.
Israel cannot afford the luxury of working this through slowly. That ran out on October 7, 2023. If it is a choice between survival and politics, they must choose survival.
That is a choice made not in defiance of civilizational norms, but in defense of them, giving the West a little more time to get the picture. Just so, Churchill and Britain bought America precious time to get ready for the war with the death cults of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan.
Let us see the large picture, hear the great music. It depends on us day by day to clarify the stakes, to make principled stands, to risk being misunderstood knowing that we will be thanked for it in the end. We will not look for cheap advantage in our own politics at the expense of our deepest principles and commitments.
We will carry on, and with God’s help, we will not fail.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
Group Allegiances Are Good. Just Not the Fake Ones of DEI.