Acclaimed Israeli professor of history and best-selling author, Yuval Noah Harari, probably most famous for his book, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” suggested that history is the study of change, and that the real value of learning it is in liberating ourselves from the past. I must add that history is also the study of that which does not change. For example, in less than one month after we enter the Jewish New Year, 5786, we’ll begin reading the Torah again, on Simchat Torah, as our ancestors have, and their ancestors have, and on and on.
The Jewish people are a case study in what changes and what doesn’t change and how that has influenced our growth and global contributions.
Learning from the past serves in shaping a positive future; it guides us in better contributing to a more just and compassionate world.
We hold a moral obligation to remember historical events accurately, especially today as nefarious governments and groups use propaganda to take advantage of our information gaps to motivate us to do things that are not in our best interest. We need to resist caving to their influence so that we may preserve our advanced levels of freedom, in our wonderful but imperfect democracies – whether in the U.S., Israel or elsewhere.
There is an ideological battle being inflicted on us by authoritarian regimes. We should not underestimate the benefit of the study of genuine history, and we certainly should not underestimate the toxic influence of manufactured history. We have been seeing its searing effectiveness in massive campaigns against Israel, in the dawn of its struggle to rescue the remaining hostages abducted by Hamas. The Islamic terror group has committed themselves to destroying the Jewish people, and often at the expense of the Palestinian people who they, in part, govern. Hamas is just one terror group that makes up the Islamic Regime of Iran’s “Ring of Fire,” proxies who’ve brought misery to the people in the lands surrounding Israel.
The Palestinians need not be our enemy. Our people, the Jewish people, never wanted them to be. But Palestinians have succumbed to the propaganda that has said that we are their enemy, creating a spiral of violence in which their people attack, and our people defend. The terrorists who invaded Israel two years ago, triggering this horrific war, were raised on a stream of misinformation that misrepresented who we are, our history, and their history. Their teachers and school materials have been glorifying murder and distorting history for decades. Their government TV programs feature characters like an adaptation of Mickey Mouse, who’d repeatedly urge Palestinian children to aspire to murder Jews. And even outside of Oct. 7, but certainly on Oct. 7, thousands of Palestinians grew up to do just that. Such misinformation and toxicity has absolutely ruined their lives and has disrupted the lives of their targets, the Israelis, who really just yearned to live in peace with their neighbors.
But peace is not the goal of those who fund misinformation. For example, Qatar, notorious for migrant worker abuse and harboring terrorists, recently committed to giving $20 Million toward “Palestinian education,” on top of their previous contributions. Qatar has influence on the colleges in the United States that have received portions of their $6 Billion. They fuel the perception of fiction to be fact, which has given rise to division and hostility, not only in the Middle East, but here, in the United States.
We need to do our part by reacquainting ourselves and discussing with our children the history of Israel and Zionism so that we don’t succumb to propaganda that would manipulate our hearts while evading factual accuracy. History has too often hosted the union of Islamists, like Hamas, with those who do not share their values but only the goal to disrupt healthy development. We’ve seen this marriage destroy some freedoms in Iran that predated the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The marriage of Soviet era communism (and its remnants today) and Islamism have forced the Palestinians (certainly their leadership) in a cycle of violence with a sole goal of destroying the only democracy in the Middle East, one whose citizens so desperately want to live in peace with all her neighbors.
If this trend doesn’t change, the freest countries in the world will resemble those that are authoritarian, restrictive and abusive. As Yuval Noah Harari aptly articulated that the best reason to learn history is “not in order to predict the future but to free yourself from the past and imagine alternative destinies.”
The conclusion of the Torah is like a year in review, looking back at what worked for our people in the past year and what needs to be changed for the upcoming year. We could apply this lesson on a grander scale.
On these High Holy Days, may we internalize the importance of learning from the past, making amends where needed, and having personal and communal freedom to create new opportunities for positive growth. And may prosperity, peace, health, joy, and liberty lead us to experience ultimate blessings. Shanah Tovah, K’tivah v’Chatimah Tovah.
Rabbi Idan Irelander leads Congregation Ahavat Olam in North Andover.
