Israel at war: Why denial is totally unacceptable

It’s been over 500 days. Five hundred mornings of waking up to the same gnawing ache, the same headlines screaming war, loss, and uncertainty. Five hundred nights of wondering if the world still sees us, if it ever truly did. For Israel and Jews across the globe, this crisis—relentless, sprawling, and jagged-edged—has become a shadow we can’t outrun. Hamas rockets still scar the sky (or at least, they try to), hostages remain in Gaza’s tunnels, antisemitism surges like a tide swallowing Europe and America’s streets, and here we are, caught between survival and sanity.

And yet, there’s a voice—quiet, insistent, well-meaning—that whispers: Don’t dwell on it. Keep living. If we think too hard, we’ll go mad. I’ve heard it from friends, from family, from the stoic faces in Jerusalem cafés who sip their hafuch and shrug off the latest news. “What can we do?” they say. “We have jobs, kids, Shabbat dinners to plan. Life goes on.” They’re not wrong—life must go on. We’re Jews; resilience is our birthright. But here’s the thing: pretending everything is okay isn’t resilience. It’s denial. And denial has a price.

Imagine if, during the Holocaust, Jews in the free world—those who caught whispers of the camps, the gas chambers, the unthinkable—had said, “Oh, I can’t think about it. It’s too much. I’ll lose my mind.” Imagine if they’d turned away, brewed their coffee, and told themselves it was better to focus on the everyday. Some did, of course. Human nature bends toward survival, toward protecting the fragile shell of normalcy. But those who did look—who screamed, who fought, who smuggled reports out of hell—they changed the course of history. They saved lives. They bore witness when the world wanted to close its eyes.

I’m not saying we should weep in our beds, let despair swallow us whole, or surrender to the madness that 500 days of this nightmare could unleash. I'm not saying we should think about it 24/7 to the point that we need a cocktail of valium and cipralex. Because honestly, that wouldn't achieve anything good.

No, we’re stronger than that. But strength isn’t pretending the house isn’t burning while we sit inside it. Strength is facing the flames, naming them, and fighting them—even when our hands tremble and our hearts break.

Look at Israel today. Soldiers—barely out of high school—stand guard at borders that feel more like fault lines. Families in Sderot still flinch at every siren, their children growing up with bunkers as second homes. In the Diaspora, Jews walk past swastikas scrawled on synagogue walls, hear “Zionist” spat like a slur, and wonder if their neighbors secretly cheer when the news tallies our dead. Over 500 days of this, and it’s not “just politics” or “another conflict.” It’s a crisis of existence, a test of whether we’ll fade into silence or stand up and shout.

To those who say, “Don’t think about it,” I ask: What happens when we stop? When we let the exhaustion win, when we tune out the hostages’ families pleading for their loved ones, when we ignore the hate festering online and in the streets? Evil thrives in the gaps where we look away. It did in 1939. It does now. And if we don’t confront it—not with tears alone, but with action, with memory, with prayer, with psalms, with making meals for families of IDF reservists on the front, with learning Torah in the merit of those who fell, those brave, brave young men, with truth—we risk losing more than our minds. We risk losing ourselves. And I'm not even talking about those whose sons and husbands are on the frontlines.

The weight of 500 days presses down like a stone on the chest. But we’re not here to crumble. We’re here to feel it, to carry it, to turn it into something fierce and unbroken. Host a Shabbat dinner, yes. Kiss your kids goodnight. But don’t pretend it away. Don't think that if you just close your eyes tight enough, everything will return to October 6th, 2023. Don’t pretend the world isn’t watching, waiting for us to blink. Because if we do, who will tell our story? Who will fight for the next 500 days—and beyond?

We’re Jews. We’ve survived worse. But survival isn’t enough. We have to live with our eyes open, our voices raised, our hearts intact. Anything less is a betrayal—of the past, of the present, of the future we’re still here to build.