There is a lot to have an opinion about right now.

Trump. Gaza. Iran. Antisemitism. Netanyahu. The next Israeli election. The next American one. Whether everyone is making aliyah or threatening to leave Israel. Whether artificial intelligence is going to eliminate our jobs, save our jobs, destroy democracy or finally figure out how many r’s are in “strawberry.” There are wars happening, wars threatening to happen and wars being fought exclusively in comment sections by people who appear to have unlimited free time.

Then there are the High Holidays.

5786 was, to use the technical term, a brick to the face. I would like to tell you that I expect 5787 to be gentler. I do not.

What we can expect is that life will continue to happen underneath all of it.

The harder question is what kind of life.

There has always been more suffering in the world than any individual could absorb. What has changed is our proximity to it. For most of human history, the fact that something terrible was happening somewhere did not mean that footage of it could appear between a text from your mother and an advertisement for moisturizer. Today, distance no longer determines what enters our field of vision. A missile launched thousands of miles away can reach a phone before the sound of the explosion has finished traveling across the city where it landed.

That collapse of distance has produced an odd moral consequence. Once we can know about nearly everything, it becomes harder to explain why we do not know about something. Once we can respond to nearly everything, not responding begins to look like a response of its own.

This is how attention quietly becomes obligation.

For Jews, that transformation carries particular weight. Vigilance is not some neurosis invented by social media. Jewish history contains enough examples of threats being dismissed until they could no longer be dismissed to make “pay attention” feel less like anxiety than inherited common sense. October 7 did little to weaken the case. Neither has the resurgence of antisemitism in places where many Jews had been assured that antisemitism belonged safely to history.

The instinct to watch, then, is not irrational. The problem is what happens when an old instinct........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)