Divergence

"Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress."

 -Isocrates

Our enemies aren’t burdened by conscience or freedom like we are, and so they use these exploitatively to divide us.

Rational good people can see a polarizing figure like Netanyahu differently. Can question his encroachment on the Supreme Court last summer, or how he allowed Oct 7 to happen in the first place. Question his handling/mishandling of the war so far and all the attempts at hostage rescue as too feeble. Alternatively, some might want to get behind him for now at this time of peril and put such questions aside until safety is well established. And others may fully align with his views having lost all hope of any two-state solution that the Palestinians and we would accept. None of these views are irrational or malevolent even if they are contradictory. It’s simply uncertainty. And uncertainty is something we humans are forever uneasy with, maybe especially so in the fog of war, when Israel itself is at existential risk. But to deny uncertainty here is foolish. Anyone pretending to know with certainty the way forward is only fooling themselves.

“Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”

-Voltaire

Civility of discourse allows discordant views to interact and from that dialectic might emerge a greater truth than would be possible if each remained within their own echo chamber. It’s our civility that creates the culture that allows this to happen. If we overly proselytize. If we demand others see things our way. If we assume everyone but us is naive, myopic or acting out of fear and ignorance. If we’re more concerned with being right than doing right, of winning an argument than winning the war. If we abandon each other at the first signs of discord… then we have done our enemy’s work for them. Then all is lost. We are lost. Left to wander in the wilderness. Perhaps for far more than forty years this time around.

What is Zion? It is many things. A hill, a city, a country, a kingdom. But at a transcendent level it is the very opposite of wandering the wilderness. But such a promised land is beyond the grasp of those that let their enemy’s spies, or worse yet the spies in their own mind, overtake all their senses and govern their conduct. How we treat each other matters. Even more than the truth itself, whenever what is true can only be beholden by the many united not the one divided.