Let me begin by telling you two things that do not belong together.
A family kitchen.
And a hand grenade.
Not three weeks ago, my wife and I were given a private tour of Kibbutz B’eri. I use the phrase given a tour in a darkly sardonic way. What we were shown were the remains of homes where, in some instances, entire families—including young children—were murdered, and where people were kidnapped. All of this on October 7, 2023.
In one of those homes, we stood in a kitchen.
Except for the fact that the refrigerator, the table, the stove—everything—was badly burned; except for the fact that there was a gaping hole in the floor; except for the fact that members of a family had been killed there, it looked very much like a normal kitchen.
This is how I speak when emotion overwhelms me. I invert things. I describe them indirectly, hoping the truth will reveal itself by contrast. Of course there was nothing normal about the kitchen. That is precisely the point.
Our guide was a long-standing member of the kibbutz. On October 7, he witnessed the massacre firsthand—the sounds, the sights, and I can only imagine, the smells. He spoke only Hebrew. For obvious reasons, he no longer lives there. Not merely because his home, like so many others, was uninhabitable, but because—here I am only assuming—the trauma itself has made the place impossible to inhabit, even as it remains impossible to leave behind.
Standing in that kitchen, I asked what now seems like a foolish question, though at the time it felt reasonable.
“How did the fire start?” I asked. “What kind of weapon was used?”
“A hand grenade,” he said. “You see the hole in the floor? That’s where it landed. A soldier used his body to try to save others.”
And that image stayed with me.
A hand grenade.
Something we’ve all seen in movies. Something abstracted by distance and fiction. One grenade. Just one. Enough to kill many people. Enough to turn a kitchen—a place meant for soup, for bread, for children wandering in barefoot, laughing—into a hellscape.
Not a single act. A single day. A mass spree of killing. Each one a pogrom complete in itself. Each home its own horrific Kishinev. Its own terrible Białystok. Its own bloody Iași.
Today, all but one of the hostages have been returned. We now await the arrival of the last one. For burial. I do not say this lightly. It is nothing short of a miraculous occurrence. Not because it ended the war—it did not. Not because it defeated Hamas. Not because it healed the rupture that was torn into the fabric of Jewish life, or into the lives of those among the nations still bound to a timeless moral code—one not named progressivism. It did none of those things. But because in a world that has grown increasingly casual about Jewish death, Jewish lives were restored.
Hamas remains in power. Its aims intact. Its hatred undiminished. The central objective of the war—the removal of Hamas—has not been achieved. And the return of the hostages did not soften the posture of the world toward Jewish suffering. If anything, it clarified something far more unsettling.
We know that within days of the massacre, marches against Israel took place the world over, posters of kidnapped civilians were torn down in cities across the world. I walked the streets of New York looking for someone in the act. Hoping, to my own surprise, to find them. Hoping to interrupt, to confront, to name what was happening in real time.
We believed, perhaps naively, that visibility would summon conscience. That if the world could only see, it would care.
It has seen.
And it does not.
There was an expectation—quiet, unspoken, deeply human—that Jewish suffering, made undeniable, would matter.
A grenade in the kitchen teaches a simpler lesson. Reality does not negotiate with our hopes. It does not care how clearly we explain ourselves. It only reveals what is.
One, a space meant for nourishment.
The other, an object meant for death.
The task before us is not to plead for the world to tell the difference.
It is to remember that we already know.
On 14 December 2025, an Islamic State (ISIS) inspired terrorist attack occurred at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia during a Chanukah celebration. Fifteen were murdered, including a 10 year-old girl.
There comes a moment when a people must stop asking whether it is understood and begin asking whether it is standing upright.
For generations, Jews have hoped—prayerfully, desperately—that explanation would lead to acceptance. That if we could only translate ourselves into the moral language of the age, we would be spared. That if we demonstrated our suffering clearly enough, compassion would follow. The posters were not wrong. They were human. Necessary. A cry for the restoration of sanity. They were an attempt to say: Look at us. Look at what has been done to us. But they revealed something troubling beneath their decency—a hope that Jewish suffering would be persuasive. That visibility would confer legitimacy. That victimhood would be enough.
It has never been enough.
History has never rewarded Jews for pleading. We reward ourselves, and we do so by our successes.
Hatred against us does not arise from misunderstanding. It does not dissipate when corrected. It predates the ideologies that now carry it, and it survives every effort to dress it in new moral clothing. It is as comfortable on the far left as it is on the far right. It requires no single doctrine—only a Jew stooping to ask permission to exist.
To be a Jew is not to kowtow to the latest intellectual fashion. It is not to adjust one’s posture in anticipation of approval. To be a Jew is to carry a set of obligations older than any modern political arrangement, and deeper than any passing moral trend.
We are told that to be a “light unto the nations” is to make ourselves palatable. The opposite is true. Light does not flatter darkness. It illuminates. It stands where it stands. It eradicates darkness.
Jewish dignity has never been rooted in power for its own sake, nor in conquest, nor in moral exhibitionism. It has been rooted in particularity. In continuity. In the refusal to disappear. In the insistence on living Jewishly—openly, visibly, unapologetically—even when doing so incurs cost.
Heroism, for Jews, has rarely been loud. It has been stubborn. It has been generational. It has been the courage to remain who we are when the world demands something else.
It is time to stop asking whether the world cares about Jewish suffering. That question has been asked often enough. And answered.
The task now is older, harder, and far more dignified:
to live as Jews not seeking permission,
not auditioning for sympathy,
but offering the world what it cannot now—and could never—generate on its own:
a moral seriousness anchored in eternity.
Miracles call for gratitude.
Dignity calls for resolve.
Both are required.
And unlike the space meant for nourishment and the object meant for death, these two go hand in hand.
Peter Himmelman
