The Jews Did Nothing Wrong

A letter to the G-d who took us out of Egypt

“For it is for Your sake that we are killed all the time; we are regarded as sheep for the slaughter. Arise! Why do You sleep, my Lord? Wake up! Do not abandon [us] forever!”

Psalm 44:23-24

Dear G-d,

We have wandered for 2000 years and not seen your Temple. We have been without a David and without a Solomon, without a banner and without an army. We have offered children like Abraham and watered continents with our blood. We have been a disgrace and a shameful word, a curse in the mouth of the world. We have been feared and “othered” to the greatest extent possible, and no amount of refinement or civilization has saved us from it. Within living memory, we were all but utterly destroyed. We did not deserve the holocaust; the holocaust is beyond deserving. Nothing we could have done could possibly have deserved it, and nothing can or has justified your lack of intervention.

Your people are now broken and orphaned. Our continuity is largely lost, our communities still reeling, beating a retreat from the gaping nihilistic void at the heart of the 20th century. The righteous and the saintly in their millions sanctified your name. There is no “birth pang,” no occlusion of your kindness, that ever has an excuse to occur again. We have paid your price unpayable.

“Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land.” Fair enough. But now, there are no sins and no sinners. You apparently expect to lift us up, to return us to your service, by breaking us more. It started with the Temple. “They’re not holy enough, so I will remove the place where they can remember me.” It continues through the innumerable rabbis, leaders, saints, geniuses and mothers and children who were taken from us in Auschwitz. Is this meant to teach us something? Is there meant to be some nice “lesson” in orphaning a generation? Were those orphans, having seen the twisted face of wickedness and cruelty beyond bearing, meant to raise “normal” children when, by all rights, no serious task beyond recuperation should ever have been demanded of them? Were the children of survivors themselves meant to raise normal children? There are still not as many Jews alive today as there were before the Holocaust. Those who remain are still trying to set straight the crooked timbers of their souls. Your educational methods are bunk.

There are no sins and no sinners, G-d. You have no right to expect anything. No one has to do anything anymore. Your holocaust and subsequent descents have created a generation where the most insular Haredi is a tinok shenishba. No one is culpable because no one has a chance in this world to get the slightest grasp on holiness before receiving a slap in the face of some kind. I have seen what you offer to Jews today. Your education is traumatic, your salesmen rude, your philosophy "not necessarily," your hierarchies motivated, your perspective limited, your love invisible, your demands many against the shadow of the smokestacks and the gas chambers. This is the world you have built and in which you have asked us to serve you.

And indeed, “All this has come upon us, yet we have not forgotten You, nor have we been false to Your covenant.” Many of us, in our madness, did not forsake the Jewish path after the holocaust. We have done our part and more. We are here, we are engaged, we are learning your Torah and doing your Mitzvos. We are imperfect, yes. Your attorneys with beards and rabbinical hats say it’s because we’re still so foul and estranged from your path. But on the whole, the Jewish heart isn’t buying it. The fact is, Creator—we have gone above and beyond expectations. We are the humblers of Moses, the embers rescued from the conflagration. No Jew goes to hell anymore; gehinnom has been mothballed and gathering dust for decades. You have no claim. Everyone is exonerated. There are only righteous Jews in this generation. When anyone does anything, you should be grateful.

It is this generation who built a state in Israel, with your blessing. We had to use the nation-state concept developed by our abusers and build it with the orphans and refugees you left us. (Oh, don’t think that the non-Ashkenazi Jews far from the holocaust were spared, by the way. On the contrary, in this story, their uprooting, the breaking of their civilization is even more recent, recompense for their long and storied (and, we won’t forget, G-d, often violent) humiliation.)

What do you expect of us, oh G-d? What did we do to deserve this Black Shabbat, this Simchat Torah Massacre, this October 7th?

What did the boy who lost both his parents to the demons do? Why did he request the soldiers to retrieve Tefillin from the embattled kibbutz for him to wrap at his coming Bar Mitzvah? What did the G-d of the Tefillin do for him? This is Torah, and this is its reward? A child who could never be blamed for never fulfilling your commands in his whole life is thinking as he buries his parents about your Tefillin. What more can you possibly demand of our broken people? Why do you not care about your own Tefillin?

Again, there are no sins and no sinners, G-d. Some want to blame Oct. 7 on Israel’s security apparatus. Some want to blame its politicians. Some want to blame its policies. Some want to blame Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Some want to blame Jewish division and Jewish sin. They all want to blame Jews, themselves or others, because they are somehow still on your side, G-d. It is surely us in some way.

But if we are imperfect, if we, despite trying to come together for mutual defense, prosperity, and the freedom to be Jewish, fail, that is not our failure. Our imperfections are not our own. The state is built by your orphans. Its view of the world is founded on multi-generational trauma. If its citizens are insecure, it’s because they have suffered abuse after abuse. If they lack courage, it is because they have seen the sallow faces of the gulag, the fearful faces in the smugglers’ cargo holds, and the hollow faces of the DP camps. If they cling to their comforts, whether the liberal ideology of the West or the insular Torah ideology of the shtetl, it is because they have known your “discomfort.”

For a blameless, abnormal, broken, and orphaned nation, G-d, we have done well. We have remained Jewish. Remained committed. Tried to do right by everyone else and right by ourselves. The dirty little secret about who is to blame for October 7th is that it’s not a Jew. And it’s certainly not our enemies, the wolves from whom our Shepherd is meant to protect us.

This is all your fault, G-d.

We are sinless and blameless.

We, every day, go beyond for you what any sane person would give. We have proven our commitment and our love in the face of truly unspeakable evil and pain. We have done our part.

It is time for your part, G-d. It’s enough. It’s enough pretending that the next Jewish imperfection repaired, the next mistake overcome, the next security apparatus established is going to fix everything. We are not the problem, and we are not the solution. This is your broken world. This is your orphaned people. This is your mess. These are your blameless and saintly sacrifices. This is on you.

You put us in this exile. You can take us out.

The Jews are not to blame. The army is not to blame. The left is not to blame. The right is not to blame. The Haredim are not to blame. The settler youth are not to blame. The secular Jews are not to blame. The Mossad is not to blame. Even Bibi Netanyahu is not to blame, not really. These Jews are your broken shards; the splinters left over from your aggression. Their mistakes are not their own. Their shortcomings are not their fault.

That they have built anything at all and still wish it to be called Jewish is a miracle beyond imagining. It is our miracle. The Jewish people are making miracles for you, G-d. Where are your miracles? Not after-the-fact ones, “rays of light in these dark times.” The big ones. The ones where you fix this world. Where an October 7th cannot possibly ever happen again. Where you dry the ocean of Jewish tears. Where we can never again make the mistake of the abused spouse and think that any of this is our fault.

Enough is enough, G-d. You are to blame.

If you are there and have any self-respect, it is time to end this bitter, stupid, interminable game. History is in quadruple overtime, and monsters are mauling the cheerleaders. It’s enough. Fulfill the old promises and prophecies. Redeem us from this exile.

Yours, still,

Tzvi