It’s 6:30 AM and the alarm goes off. As you are prone to do, you hit the snooze button. At 6:35, the alarm sounds again. You are sleepy this morning, so you hit it again. Knowing it is as far as you can push it, you hit it one more time at 6:40. At 6:45, when the alarm sounds one more time, you finally jump out of bed, knowing that if you let it go any further, it will be too late.

That is how the attack against Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, needs to be understood. It is the equivalent of that last alarm in the morning. It is that final alarm before it is too late.

Any time there is a terrorist attack on innocent people, it pains me. Any time it is on my fellow Jews in particular, I take it personally. This time, however, still felt different. This time, more than any other time, it felt like evil took aim at all of us, and the victims just happened to live in Sydney. As I write this, there are 16 dead and over 40 injured, six of them critically. This attack should teach every Jew one critical lesson: we are all vulnerable.

Hanukkah celebrations are not pro-Israel rallies. They are not limited to the very observant. There is no exclusivity in the community when it comes to these events. Maybe most importantly, they come in all shapes and sizes and take place all over the world. An attack on any size group, in any location, and in any denomination of Judaism anywhere in the world on Hanukkah is the most blatant statement of Jew-hatred possible. It cannot be spun as an attack on Zionists, or the religious, or the wealthy or privileged. It is, simply put, an attack on any Jew the target can find. This is why it speaks to our vulnerability. More so than any attack on a large group of Jews that I can remember, this one felt like it could just as easily have been any one of us, and if we ignore that fact and do not do everything in our power to fight against this scourge of Jew-hatred, led by Muslim extremism, we will ultimately find ourselves in the kind of trouble we have not seen since 1945.

So, what do we do? If we look at things honestly, we will conclude that often, people who do what needs to be done do not know that what they are doing will work at the time they are acting. We all know what our capabilities are, and we can all do something—be it on the spiritual, financial, influential, or even the physically defensive front.

To the Jews who consciously turn away and disassociate themselves from the community, read your history. The only difference between you and the rest of us is that you will be in for a terrible shock when you find out that you were not smarter than the rest of us after all.

So, whatever it is you can do, realize that as a Jew—or any other decent human being who cares about the future of mankind—if your vulnerability does not motivate you to take some sort of action now, 6:46 is approaching, and then it will be too late.

Am Yisrael Chai

Never Again Is Now!

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