I did not graduate from Harvard, thus my erudition, or lack thereof, may not impress you. Like many of you, I cannot understand how the world can be turned so upside down. How can so many people not understand that what happened on Oct. 7, was indefensible? Can a global society tolerate and even justify such barbarism? We have learned to tolerate slavery, indiscriminate lynching, rape, torture, concentration camps, medical experiments on unwilling children, death camps, pogroms, carpet bombings, the use of nuclear weapons when a country feels it is necessary, massacres, rockets of death, assorted missiles and a political ideology and a religious zealotry that chooses death over life. We have seen how courts that were designed to uphold the law twisted into a rejection of justice. One can readily understand that the world is reaching a precipice.
If good people are not able to stop the destruction of values, property and the questionable actions of people who guard us, inform us and protect us, then what kind of future can we expect? If Jews need to justify their existence time and time again, if Jews cannot be appreciated for all the good they have given to mankind, and if the world is not comfortable enough to allow the existence of one small Jewish country, then what is there to say about the role of education in promoting truth, justice and tolerance? If the finest schools of learning in America have prostituted themselves to money rather than intelligence, what chance does mankind have?
We are at a point where any one of a number of countries possessing a nuclear bomb could rationalize the use of a nuclear weapon. It has been done before … twice. The rationale for using the atomic bomb was that it could end the war and save lives. The policy of the U.S. after Pearl Harbor was “unconditional surrender” no matter how long the war would last.
Can we afford the luxury of permitting the uneducated, the religious zealot or the autocrat a free ticket to disaster? What motivated the United States to develop an atomic bomb was the fear that Hitler would get it first and use it. Can we trust the world to Russia’s Putin, North Korea’s Kim or the mullahs of Iran? For the Jews, it was and it still is the faith in Hashem.
