Last night I attended a Pasadena city hall meeting for a vote on a ceasefire resolution for the Israel-Hamas war. (If you look at the photo attached to the article, I am the person standing in the back in a red shirt and orange scarf.) Unfortunately, the ceasefire call passed in the form of a declaration as opposed to a resolution and the language included a mention that the hostages needed to be released. I guess, considering all things, it could have been worse. What truly struck me was how outnumbered we in the pro-Israel camp were, easily 10-1. I have never felt less sure that we can beat these people.
I will give credit to the pro-Palestinian activists. For the
most part, they were remarkably well-disciplined. There were exceptions such as the woman giving pro-Israel speakers the middle finger.
Also, someone went over to me and whispered in my
ear: “We are all Hamas.” That being said, clearly, the organizers of the pro-Palestinian group
made an effort to make sure that their supporters kept to the rules and did not
boo their opponents. In the video, you can even see someone holding up a text
on their phone telling people not to boo. I actually thanked one of their organizers
for getting his people to quiet down. I even shook his hand. His response was: “I
assume you support genocide.” This organizer might be an SOB, but at least he is a polite SOB.
Unfortunately, our opponents are not fools. They understand
that, while anger is useful for whipping up people who are already on your side,
it turns off precisely the sorts of average people that you need to convince. As
Adam Smith argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, anger is the emotion that
other people have the hardest time empathizing with. The pro-Palestinian speakers offered a tone of moral authority without coming across simply
as angry or hateful. Having cute kids coming out to speak certainly did not
hurt. (Yes, I assume that the kids were coached and rehearsed their statements. That being said, I have spent enough time in education to appreciate what it takes to get a kid to
stand before a crowd and speak clearly.) The biggest ace cards that the
pro-Palestinians were able to employ were the large numbers of Jews who went up
to the microphone and said things like: “as a Jew who is descended from
Holocaust survivors, I denounce the genocide being carried out by the apartheid
Zionist state.” Obviously, it is hard to accuse the pro-Palestinians of hating
Jews when so many of them are Jewish.
Seeing how badly one-sided the meeting was becoming, I put
my name down to speak and was given a minute to address the council. Here is
what I said:
It seems clear that, when talking about a ceasefire, quite a
few people here mean that Hamas should get the chance to pull another October 7th.
(This got a response from the pro-Palestinians and they were called to order by
the council chair.) This Sunday is the Jewish holiday of Purim when we
celebrate being saved from the genocidal plot of Haman. I have a message for all
the ideological descendants of Haman out there, particularly the Jewish ones. I
admit that I am afraid of you. But I also know that, one day, my descendants
will laugh at you. Perhaps, we will make cookies shaped like your ears, fill
them with jelly, and eat them. The cookies and not your ears.
My basic idea was to make it clear where the moral high
ground lies Our opponents are not human rights activists trying to prevent a
genocide. On the contrary, their goal is to carry out one themselves. That
being said, I did not want to come across as angry. Showing that you have a
sense of humor can be an effective tool to humanize yourself in the eyes of
your opponents. In contrast to anger, the desire to find humor even in
difficult circumstances is something that people easily empathize with. Finally,
and I guess this is Chabad having a positive influence on me, I wanted to reach out
even to Jews who are so estranged from their Judaism as to willingly collaborate
with people plotting to carry out another Holocaust. Perhaps, those who did not
get my joke about hamantaschen will be intrigued enough to ask someone for an
explanation. They might even come to realize that Judaism is far richer than simply spouting leftism and calling it tikkun olam. For example, Judaism has you teach your children to make a blessing on hamantaschen and share some with your neighbors.
There is the old joke that the essence of Jewish holidays can be summarized as they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat. Purim takes this a step further. Haman tried to kill us, he failed and we will remember his efforts not as tragedy but as farce. More than killing Haman, we get our revenge on him, Mel Brooks style, by making him ridiculous. We dress up like him, get so drunk that we confuse him with Mordechai, and, yes, we eat cookies shaped like his ears.