“The Jews are witnesses to God.” — Blaise Pascal

Here’s a staggering idea. At least it is to me.

The existence of the Jewish people may be among the strangest phenomena in human history.

One of my great fascinations has long been the movement of the Jewish people through time, their resilience, their strengths, their remarkable gifts, and the overwhelming challenges they have faced. My wife once joked that I’m the Jewish Spike Lee—his passion being the story of Black America, mine the story of the Jews.

October 7, 2023 amplified many things. Something profound happened that day, certainly for those directly touched by the horrors, for the Israelis who lost friends, relatives, and neighbors. But also, I think, for Jews everywhere and anyone still capable of recognizing what it means when such brutality erupts into the world.

A fissure opened. A wound in history that never quite heals began to bleed once more, as it seems to do every seventy or hundred years. History has a way of bringing us again and again to the same moral reckonings.

As for that tragic day, I am often asked, sometimes with what seems like genuine curiosity, whether I am dwelling on something that has already been spoken about ad nauseam. Or worse, whether my unflagging attention to the October 7 pogrom is merely an excuse used to condone genocide. This is not the place to rebut those accusations..

But the questions they raise lead me back to something that has long fascinated me.

How does one explain the Jewish story, the ancient one and the modern one?

Just under a century ago, six million Jews were murdered—six million minds, six million lives filled with love, creativity, faith, and strength extinguished. Entire branches of a civilization were cut off at the root. And with them disappeared the generations that would have followed.

Yet within less than eighty years, the remnants of that same shattered people built a tiny nation that is now arguably one of the most resourceful, resilient, and influential societies in the world. How?

And how is it that the seemingly miraculous nature of this occurrence has stirred such hatred? Not from everyone, of course, but from so many.

Sometimes that animus reveals itself in small but disturbing moments:

A truck laden with explosives was deliberately crashed through a protective barrier and into a synagogue serving as a pre-school in suburban Detroit during school hours. Only through quick action by brave security guards was a massacre prevented. Several Jewish institutions in Europe have also been targeted, including an explosion that damaged a Jewish school in Amsterdam amid a string of attacks on synagogues and Jewish sites. At the very same time, hundreds of ballistic missiles have been launched toward Israeli civilians by the Iranian regime and its proxies, the same regime that trained and funded Hamas’s pogrom, sending millions into shelters and turning entire cities into targets.

These are not isolated events.

It may help to look briefly at something from Jewish theology that sheds light on what we are seeing today, not only the resurgence of Jewish vitality but also the persistence of that deathless and despicable phenomenon: anti-Jewish hatred.

Rosh Hashanah is known as the Jewish New Year. It arrives in the month of Tishrei with the blasts of the shofar, apples dipped in honey, and prayers recalling God’s constant re-creation of the universe.

But strangely, even though Tishrei—the month in which Rosh Hashanah falls—is considered the “head of the year,” it is not the first month of the year in the Torah.

The first month is Nisan, the month in which Passover occurs.

Tishrei reflects the physical world: the seasons, the planting and harvesting of crops, the natural cycles upon which human life depends.

But Nisan, the month of Passover, commemorates something different. It marks the moment when history itself seemed to break free from those ordinary cycles. It signals the beginning of a reality not governed by the physical world.

With the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt, the most advanced civilization of its time—a place from which escape was impossible—something extraordinary entered human history. The usual mechanisms of the universe appeared to bend. The Exodus was not merely a political event or a migration of slaves. It represented a permanent cosmic shift.

From that moment on, a new possibility entered human history. Human beings, guided by moral law, could now participate in something that transcended the ordinary patterns of nature.

The idea is simple, but radical: the material world is not the final authority.

On its face, it makes little sense. We live in the world of nature, and for all practical purposes we are bound by its laws.

How else, though, does one explain certain things?

How does one explain the existence of the Jewish people, first rooted in the Land of Israel and later driven into exile for more than 2,700 years, yet still recognizable as a unified nation nearly four thousand years later?

More to the point, how does one explain the modern State of Israel?

Or the fact that the land, long written about as one that would bloom again only with the return of the Jewish people, has done exactly that —and in our time?

“Miracle” is a word many modern people are uncomfortable with. It sounds anachronistic. Unscientific. Something belonging to a more primitive age. I get that. I consider myself modern as well.

But how do we open the newspaper and account for what we see today?

A people nearly destroyed in living memory rebuilding itself with astonishing vitality. A small nation surrounded by enemies finding the will and the means to protect itself. And so many denying it the right to exist.

Perhaps that is why the story of the Jewish people so often appears improbable. Their history itself seems to behave like the story of Passover, continually leaping beyond what history normally permits.

And perhaps this also explains some of the complaint, the consternation, of those who throughout history have sought to destroy the Jews.

The continued existence of such a people can feel like a kind of living argument for something many would prefer not to acknowledge: the possibility of Divine providence, and the unsettling suggestion, drawn from the Torah itself, that such providence might somehow be bound up with the Jewish people.

The continued existence of such a people can feel like a kind of living argument for something many would prefer not to acknowledge: the possibility of Divine providence, and the unsettling suggestion, drawn from the Torah itself, that such providence might somehow be bound up with the Jewish people.

For those who find such an idea intolerable, it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. And sometimes the human response to that dissonance is not reflection, but the desire to eradicate the source of the discomfort.

The Russian Christian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev once reflected on this very phenomenon. Responding to those who attempted to apply a purely materialist interpretation of history to the Jews, he wrote as follows:

“Their destiny is absolutely exceptional… Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination.”

Others have expressed the same astonishment in different ways. Mark Twain famously asked:

“All things are mortal but the Jew… What is the secret of his immortality?”

My Hebrew name, my essential name, is Pesach. Passover.

It means to leap beyond. To transcend.

At the very least, it reminds me that what we call “reality” may not be the final authority we imagine it to be. History, it seems, has a way of reminding us of that.

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” — Niels Bohr

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