Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them
Dr. ViktorFrankl
My son and youngest child, Aviv, is preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and doing it nontraditionally. He’s a competitive dancer and doesn’t have time, nor the desire, to go to Hebrew school. He wants to do it on his terms. So what are his terms?
- He’s learning the Jewish prayers.
- He’s reading “Man’s Search For Meaning,” the holocaust accounts of Dr. Viktor Frankl.
- He’s watching every video he can get his hands on about Israel (he’s already watched every one of these and knows more than most college professors on the topic – not saying much, I know).
- He wants to do it quietly, with no party, in Israel on Masada, where the Jews made their last stand.
- He’s made a list of 13 fears, one for every year of his life, and together, we’re facing them and working through them – his idea, and a bold one at that.
So, we were driving to school, listening to the news (he’s an all-things-Israel-news-junkie), and the report of the Pogrom in Dagestan – a bloodthirsty mob of Jew haters who wanted to kill Jews, came on.
“Turn it off,” I insisted.
“No,” he said in a surprisingly stern tone.
“Yes,” I snapped back, reaching for the dial at which point he grabbed my hand.
“Abba,” he said with conviction. “This is one of my fears.”
And just like that, I got it. I knew exactly what he was saying, what he was doing, and why he was doing it. I choked back the tears. I watched this kid who has deeply internalized what is going on in Israel as he lived there not that long ago, in that very moment, step into his power.
He is terrified of Hamas.
He was in tears listening to the horror stories of boys his age being dragged away into Gaza, probably never to be seen again.
He isn’t some macho tough guy. The kid is Billy Elliot, an Enneagram 4 (the empath), and he gets mad at me when I kill spiders.
And yet, at this moment, I saw the truth – Hamas failed. We won. Period.
No, we haven’t got our babies back from Gaza.
No, we haven’t rooted out and eradicated all of Hamas yet, but we will.
No, we can not get all of those innocent men, women, and children who were murdered back.
No, we can not stop these terrorists from using their babies as human shields and all of the bloodshed of Palestinians, the blood of which is on Hamas’s hands.
And yet, one young man a world away from the fighting, a boy who hates bloodshed and is afraid of what is going on, did not surrender to his fear. He is not running from his fears. Sure, he’s still afraid – we all are – and yet, he reminds us of what Dr. Viktor Frankl meant when he said, “make your defiant stand.”
“Man is not fully conditioned and determined,” writes Frankl, “but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them.”
Aviv reminds us of what we must do to say Never Again, to mean Never Again, and to live Never Again…
We must not run.
We can not hide.
We should not live in fear; that’s what Hamas, their supporters, and all of the haters want.
Terrorists don’t just live to cause terror but to stifle the rest of us through that terror.
No, we don’t always control what they do or how they do – and certainly will never understand why they do it.
However, that doesn’t mean we don’t have control. We do. We always do control, but one thing – how we choose to respond.
There are a thousand ways we can and must fight Hamas, terrorists, and haters wherever they rear their ugly heads. However, as Aviv reminded me, maybe it starts right here, right now, with whatever fear we face. Maybe the best way to fight them is to simply face our fears, whatever those fears may be, as an act of courage as we make our defiant stand.
If we do, regardless of our age, gender, or religion, we’ll embody those timeless words that most Jewish boys and girls merely mutter but which every one of us, in our way, on our terms, must embody…
Today, I will courageously face my fears.
Today, I will make my defiant stand.
Today, I will defeat Hamas and all Jew-haters, racists, and bigots everywhere.
Today, I become a woman.
Today, I become a man.
