Resilience Should Not Be Confused With Normalcy

There is a television commercial that seems to play every fifteen minutes on North American sports channels. A man bites into an Old El Paso taco. The crunch is so powerful that it creates a visible shock wave. Buildings shake. Windows rattle. Facades crumble. It is meant to be funny.

I have not found it funny.

For nearly three years, my family and I have been living in a country at war. During that time, two rockets landed roughly one hundred feet from my home. Debris from an Iranian missile landed on my next-door neighbor's back porch. Both of my sons have done about 500 days of reserve duty. Like many Israelis, I have become intimately familiar with the sound of sirens, the sprint to shelter, and the uneasy silence that follows an explosion. I have even mastered the art of discerning between the sound of an intercept and a ground impact. What advertisers imagine as comedy now resembles a memory. When the taco crunch sends shock waves through the neighborhood, my instinct is not to laugh. My instinct is to look for the nearest protected space.

The uncomfortable truth is that Israel has developed a national form of PTSD. October 7 changed us. We continue to function. We go to work. We send our children to school. We argue about politics. We complain about traffic. Israelis are remarkably resilient. But resilience should not be confused with normalcy. Something fundamental has changed in the national psyche. The Jewish communities of North America understand this. Everywhere I travel, people ask how we are doing. Synagogues recite special prayers on our behalf daily. Just this past week, I sat in a Canadian synagogue and listened as the rabbi struggled to maintain his composure while speaking about Israel. At one point, he openly wept. I was deeply moved.

Yet as I listened, another thought crept into my mind. I appreciate the prayers, but I am far from convinced that Israel is the only country that should be worried. I am writing these words from Montreal. Before leaving Israel, I received the standard security briefing. The instructions were blunt. Do not display obvious signs of being Israeli or Jewish. No kippah. No Hebrew in public places. Remove identifying stickers from luggage. Keep a low profile.

Think about that for a moment. I live in a country under constant threat from rockets and missiles. Yet when I travel to one of the world's great Western democracies, I am instructed to conceal my identity. Something is wrong with that picture.

The concerns are not theoretical. Since October 7, Montreal Jewish schools and synagogues have been repeatedly targeted. Incidents that would once have been unimaginable have become distressingly common. Last Friday night, a well-known kosher restaurant was consumed by a fire. Security cameras reportedly captured an individual pouring on the flames what appeared to be an accelerant. To an outside observer, the conclusion seems obvious. Occam’s Razor teaches that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And yet there appears to be an extraordinary reluctance to say what many people are thinking. Perhaps it was vandalism. Perhaps it was random. Perhaps it was something else entirely. In conversations in a synagogue the following day, I even heard suggestions that Jews themselves might somehow be responsible. I was stunned. When evidence points in one direction, inventing increasingly complicated alternatives does not demonstrate sophistication. It demonstrates denial.

Israelis know something about denial.

For years, many of us convinced ourselves that our enemies did not really mean what they said. We viewed explicit threats through the reassuring lens of our own assumptions. We told ourselves that economic incentives, international pressure, and common sense would prevail. October 7 shattered those illusions in a single day. The massacre forced us to recognize that reality does not conform to our preferences.

The lesson extends beyond Israel. Canada remains a free, prosperous, and welcoming country. The overwhelming majority of Canadians reject hatred. But societies rarely decline all at once. The warning signs emerge gradually. People normalize what would once have shocked them. Institutions become reluctant to acknowledge uncomfortable truths. Citizens convince themselves that obvious dangers are somehow temporary, isolated, or misunderstood.

I am grateful for the prayers offered on Israel's behalf. We certainly do need them. But as I walk through Old Montreal wearing a baseball cap, trying not to look Israeli, I cannot escape a troubling conclusion: perhaps the prayers should also be for Canada. Israel learned the cost of living in a dream world of its own making. The question facing Canadian Jews today is whether they are willing to wake up before reality does it for them.

Good things,

Ari Sacher