(London, Spring 2026)

In recent months, I have seen a sentiment expressed more than once.

A person writes that they are grateful their parents are no longer alive — spared, they say, from witnessing the rise in antisemitism now visible across London, the UK, and the wider world.

It is not an unfamiliar voice to me.  It is, in fact, a deeply personal one.  And yet, I find myself unable to recognise the gratitude being described.

I understand the fear.

We are living through a period in which Jewish life feels newly exposed. Incidents that once sat at the margins now appear with unsettling regularity. There is anger, unease, and a sense that something has shifted — perhaps irreversibly.

In such a moment, it is not surprising that people reach for ways to soften the impact.

To imagine that those we love have been spared the distress. To place a protective frame around their absence. To try, somehow, to make loss feel purposeful.

I understand the instinct.

But I cannot share the conclusion.

I have lost both of my parents.

I have many sentiments about that loss. Gratitude is not one of them.

If anything, what I feel most acutely — especially now — is the absence of their perspective.

The resilience they modelled. The steadiness they brought to moments of uncertainty. The capacity to sit with complexity without collapsing into it.

I would be grateful for that now.

I would be grateful for their voice at the table. Even if that voice expressed anger, frustration, or deep discomfort with the world as it is.

This was brought into sharper focus for me this past week, attending the funeral and shiva of a friend’s mother.

She had lived into her nineties. A full life, by any measure.

And yet, in a beautiful and honest eulogy, her daughter spoke not of closure, but of absence. Of the space that remains, regardless of the years given.

Ninety-six years did not diminish the loss. It clarified it.

There was no suggestion — explicit or implied — that her mother had been “spared” the difficulty of the world by dying.

Only that she was missed.

This is where I find myself thinking more deeply about gratitude.

Because gratitude is a central Jewish posture.

We mark it daily. We build it into our prayers. We articulate it in moments of joy, survival, and continuity.

And at this time of year, we move through a sequence of days that are saturated with it:

Yom HaShoah. Yom HaZikaron. Yom Ha’atzmaut.

These are not naïve expressions of thanks. They are grounded in cost.

In sacrifice. In endurance. In the decision to keep living, and to keep building, despite what has been lost.

But Jewish gratitude is not, as far as I understand it, a gratitude for absence.

We do not thank God that those we love are no longer here to feel pain.

We remember them. We name them. We say Yizkor. We hold their absence as presence.

We do not reframe their loss as a protective gift.

There is something else at stake here.

Because to say that we are grateful our parents are no longer alive in order to avoid witnessing the world as it is, suggests — perhaps unintentionally — that the appropriate response to difficulty is not to endure it, but to be spared it entirely.

That is not the inheritance I recognise.

The Torah does not frame life as something to be protected from discomfort. It frames it as something to be chosen — consciously, repeatedly, even in the face of challenge. “U’vacharta ba’chayim” — you shall choose life (Deuteronomy 30:19).

Not an easier life. Not a quieter one. A lived one.

Rabbi Hugo Gryn, reflecting on his experience in the camps as a child, tells of his father sharing a small piece of margarine rather than saving it for the next day. When he questioned the decision, his father responded that they did not know what tomorrow would bring — better to live today than to preserve something for a future that might not come.

It is an extraordinary moment of moral clarity.

Not denial of suffering. Not escape from reality.

But a refusal to define life by fear of what might happen next.

This is not an isolated instinct.

Across Jewish history, again and again, we see the same choice made — not to withdraw from life, but to inhabit it more deliberately, even in the harshest of circumstances.

Yosef, alone in Egypt, stripped of family and context, does not dissolve into his surroundings. He resists, he reframes, he remains rooted in who he is, even when everything external has been taken from him.

In later generations, Jews under unimaginable pressure have continued to light candles, to mark time, to hold on to practice in whatever form was possible. In the ghettos of Europe, Chanukah lights were kindled in secret — fragile and dangerous, but not abandoned.

And more recently, we have heard accounts of hostages taken on October 7th attempting, where they could, to maintain elements of Jewish life — keeping kosher as far as possible, marking festivals, holding on to identity not as abstraction, but as daily practice.

These are not acts of denial.

They are acts of definition.

They say: we do not wait for conditions to improve before we live as Jews.

We live as Jews, and in doing so, we shape the conditions.

We do not inherit a tradition of being spared. We inherit a tradition of showing up.

I would rather my parents were alive to see this moment.

I would rather they were here to react, to challenge, to offer their perspective — even if that perspective was uncomfortable or critical.

I would rather have the friction of their presence than the silence of their absence.

Gratitude, for me, sits elsewhere.

I am grateful for what they gave me.

For resilience in the face of adversity. For the capacity to engage, rather than withdraw. For the ability to hold complexity without needing to resolve it immediately.

I am grateful for conversation.

I am grateful for continuity.

I am grateful for life — even when that life includes discomfort, anger, or fear.

And perhaps that is the distinction.

Jewish gratitude is not about avoiding the world as it is.

It is about choosing life within it.

In a time when fear is real, and when the instinct to protect — ourselves, our children, our memories — is strong, it is worth asking what we are teaching through the language we use.

What does it mean to say that absence is preferable to presence?

What does it mean to suggest that those we love are better off not witnessing the world we inhabit?

I cannot find gratitude there.

And so, as we move through these days of memory, mourning, and independence — days that hold together grief and gratitude in equal measure — I find myself returning to something simpler.

Not a resolution. Not a judgement.

Just a quiet position:

I would rather have them here.

And I suspect, deeply, that they would rather be here too.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)