Last Sunday, sixty thousand people filled Bathurst Street in Toronto — parents and students, Holocaust survivors in wheelchairs, clergy from communities not our own. The sound of Am Yisrael Chai rose over the city. I felt something I had not felt in a long time: we are not alone. We are many. We are powerful.

And then I opened Twitter.

Someone had responded to my post about the Walk for Israel with five words and a sneer: “This is a community that is afraid?!” Sixty thousand strong. Allies everywhere. Afraid? Please. Stop performing victimhood.

That commenter wasn’t just being dismissive. They were articulating one of the defining intellectual errors of our moment: the belief that power and vulnerability cannot coexist. That sixty thousand Jews marching in the streets proves the fear is manufactured. The Torah has a name for that error.

In Parashat Shelah Lekha, twelve spies return from Canaan — tribal princes, the best leaders Israel had, men who had witnessed the sea split. And yet they report: “vanehi v’eineinu k’hagavim” — “we were like grasshoppers in our own eyes — and so we were in their eyes” (Bamidbar 13:33). The Talmud in Sotah asks: how did they know what the Canaanites thought of them? They overheard the Canaanites say, ‘There are ants in the vineyards’ — took that........

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