Canary in a coalmine

It seems with each passing day that humanity is plunging deeper into a state of hopelessness. What does that have to do with each of us, with the grouping called Jews, and with human survival? Is there a science that can explain the laws that govern our development as a society, as a species? Is it possible that science, religion and human history are not at odds with each other but are actually different points of view of the same thing? Different points of you?

We recently had the opportunity to meet with Seth Menachem. Seth is an actor, a writer, and now a psychotherapist. He strives to help his clients understand their history by discovering the ways in which they currently operate in the world. In our last article, we discussed the topic of Jewish Unity. We now continue the discussion, with a particular emphasis on his personal experiences, both good and bad, with left-wing politics.

TJF: Have you seen a change in the problems of your Jewish clients since October 7th, from personal to maybe something more existential?

SM: Initially it wasn’t existential, but they were generally managing a huge range of emotions where they felt overwhelmed by this feeling that the world hates them. Jews of this generation have never felt so physically, tangibly afraid. Not only due to what happened on October 7th in Israel, but the biggest shock for my clients in particular, American Jews, is that people who were their friends started to turn on them in social media, and viewed them through this oppressor/oppressed narrative. As you said, we keep spiraling, but no one is spiraling up.

TJF: How do we shift that? We are asking for your professional help. Can you use psychotherapy on us to do something to break that pattern? To actually do something to find our way out of this loop, despite being stiff-necked people who don’t listen to anyone and don’t learn from our mistakes?

SM: You’re asking Jews to do something while they’re in the middle of a tragedy, and that becomes impossible. While people are in the middle of a tragedy, they’re trying to survive, which makes it impossible for them to be able to have higher intellectual thoughts on how to manage a situation. It only becomes possible when you start to come out of the situation and feel safer.

There will always be racism, groups of people that hate us and others. We are talking about a particularly Jewish problem. Interestingly, Jews, this 0.2% in the world, have disproportionately dealt with more hate than most people. Due to our enduring legacy, we have become the canary in a coalmine to society’s collapses. We have also been the easy scapegoat for groups of people’s problems, even groups of people who have never met a Jew.

TJF: Canary in a coalmine, can you elaborate?

SM: My siblings and I are four New York and then Miami Jews raised with strong liberal values, and a mother who marched with Martin Luther King. We were raised in a similar way, which had us view the world through a similar lens. My sister, for example, moved from Miami to Marin, a place famous for its liberal values, a place that is wealthy but does not fixate on material things. She thought that it would give her kids a very unique experience in looking at the world. And ultimately, what happened is that the liberal values turned on themselves and she saw what can happen when the left goes too far. Her kids now are surrounded by antisemitism. They were silenced because they were boys in the classroom. Everything was viewed from an oppressed/oppressor narrative. You have four siblings in my family who are all very different, we are all spread out, and we are not necessarily very close. We don’t share political views or philosophies. Despite this, we have shared a similar narrative throughout the years. Even though we have all gone our own ways, we have all found that the left, in which we were so entrenched, has a serious issue. And that serious issue is that the woke D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) ideas that sound so good on the surface have actually created such a serious problem for Jews. And so we are the canary in the coal mine. Not just Jews, but right now we are seeing it affect Jews.

I’m probably not so different in terms of my political views than I ever was. It’s as if I was at a party, fell asleep, and I woke up in a different house. What happened to the Democratic Party? My views haven’t changed so much. I believe that people have a right to equality, I believe in helping other,s and I believe that as a rich nation we have a responsibility to help the poorest. That hasn’t changed. And yet, I actually left the Democratic Party for the first time after 49 years. I have found that within my own party there has been some very dangerous leftist Marxist ideology creep in, the canary in a coal mine idea. I started to see these things happen and wasn’t sure how to wrap my head around them because I both believe in helping others and I believe that gays should get married and trans people should have rights and that it’s important to understand our history and it’s important to understand what racism does in this country and how it has been problematic. And there were things that kept happening that did not feel right. I noticed that boys were being shut down. White males losing their voice. The ‘Me Too’ movement, which is very important, started silencing and dividing people rather than helping people get better, and helping to make things better.

Something is not working here. There’s a mess, and I couldn’t name it, and it wasn’t until the October 7th massacres that I was able to realize what was going on. When I saw the left at these pro Palestinian rallies screaming ‘Queers for Palestine’ or ‘Israel is a colonial state’, I realized what has been happening. You are watching people turn against Jews right now in society. We are seeing it everywhere. Israel had a horrible attack. There are civilian casualties, and it is horrible. Even though statistically, compared to other urban warfares, it is by far the best, there is no getting around it, war is bad. But they definitely had a right to fight this war. Seeing this turn towards antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine for me. The left turn against Jews is portending a problematic future for this country.

We have a problem with PR. What Jews have been doing wrong is not addressing it. We know that historically, antisemitism will always rear its ugly head. It has been problematic throughout history. You two have done a long study of Jewish history, and I am sure that you found a pattern, which is important in psychology. It’s the same story playing over and over, with different costumes. The pattern is that Jews are always made to be the scapegoat, and for some reason, they might last a generation or two in a culture, but then people turn on them.

TJF: We discovered that there is also something else that happened. Now, neither of us are “religious”, but we are both in love with God, which would take some time to explain. This concept that there is this force of love, and that everyone is part of one humanity, one family, and this pioneering concept of “love the other as yourself”. Now everyone has it, but it was a pioneered Jewish concept. If you trace through all the stories, it’s actually very spiritual. What happened was that through all those negative experiences, that point of loving the other as yourself got spread into all these cultures. This concept is everywhere now. There must be billions of Jews who don’t even know that they are Jews — the 10 tribes, intermarriage, and everything else. Everybody is Jewish, they just don’t know it. So through all these problems, something else that we discovered was that it’s not just two-dimensional. There is some core of development that has happened through it all. Abraham went down to Egypt and then came out, and then Moses came down to Egypt and came out. There is this whole concept of gaining more ‘coarseness’. It’s one thing to be holy on the top of a mountain. It’s another thing to be holy when you have riches to deal with, and you have women to deal with, and you have all these other things.

SM: Are you saying that other cultures have shifted because of it, or Jews?

TJF: Take South America. I was in Chile, you walk around and there’s a church with statues of Jesus everywhere. That’s a Jew hanging on the wall in some village in the middle of the Andes Mountains. This concept of a Jew made it to South America — not necessarily exactly the way that a Jew practices, but the concept. The whole giant continent knows about something that is connected to Jews, which it didn’t have before. You can go all around the world, and somehow through these alternating sequences of coming together followed by shatterings, this Jewish concept spread. It got diluted, but it spread.

SM: So that’s the positive. Antisemitism may be endemic and inevitable, but there is something good that comes out of the shattering.

TJF: Yes, but we can focus back even more on the solution. Antisemitism does not exist in a vacuum, meaning it is irrational. On the surface, you can’t explain it in the usual way — this happened, therefore this happened. In theory, on paper, everybody should love Jews. They’re great. They bring a lot of joy to everyone. They bring a lot of good ideas.

SM: Jews have been very good for society.

TJF: The King of Poland wanted to uplift his country. He imported Jews, and they went to work. Like enzymes that you add to a Petri dish. He started the whole process, brought the industry together, and then he tried to kick them out.

SM: The original ghetto, ghetto Nuovo in Italy, was created with the idea that we still need Jews, so we are going to let them come in during the day, and then go back. They didn’t hate us for being bad for society.

TJF: People understood the value of the Jews. Antisemites wrote about the value of Jews. What we are saying is that this ideal picture of the world that people are trying to get to — cultural evolution, social evolution, ideas that are extremely liberal sometimes — made us forget, or ignore, or try to hide the fact that yes, there is something that we as Jews need to do. And when we don’t do it, antisemitism comes and forces us back together. That’s what we’re saying. And that’s a very different premise than you typically hear, that you need to either live with it, or fight back. There’s nothing to fight back! We just have to turn inwards first and see what is happening.

SM: You’re not blaming Jews for the antisemitism. It is going to flare up regardless. Are you saying that there’s some shift that you can make in antisemitism by doing something different?

TJF: Exactly. You change your attitude and the world changes before your eyes. And I know it’s a difficult thing to swallow. And also, I’ll say one more thing. I know that it’s uncomfortable to speak about Jews as being somehow different, even though everyone clearly sees that everything in nature is unique and has its role and its place. I think it is easier to speak about that uniqueness in terms of ‘service to humanity’, not some sort of a superiority complex.

SM: That doesn’t bother me. Cultures have different things that are passed on. They create a certain uniqueness to them and Jews have their uniqueness as well. There is no shame in stating what Jews have become from thousands of years of passing on information. We want to better each generation and therefore as we have done so, we have created a certain type of person. I am struggling with what you are saying though, which is that if we can do something different within us, then they wouldn’t hate us so much. And I call bullshit.

TJF: So let’s say someone comes in for therapy. Are they really going to be able to change their mom? Are they going to be able to change their spouse? Who’s the only person they can change?

SM: That’s right. Okay. But, hold on, let me just make sure that we are saying the same thing. Because you are correct. You cannot change the other, the only thing that you can change is yourself. My issue is with the idea that if we change this thing within us, then the outside world will no longer hate us or be mean. No, if your mother is terrible, toxic, and narcissistic, and damaging, she still will be. You just learn boundaries on how to manage that. You learn better ways to deal with that person.

TJF: So you’re talking about managing a conflict. That’s important. And that’s what we are doing in Gaza, for example. Right now we have a conflict. We have to manage it and create boundaries.

SM: No, I’m talking about a society that will inevitably always be antisemitic. You have studied this deeply and have seen that throughout history, it inevitably flares up.

TJF. Correct, under certain conditions. Because the narcissistic mom is narcissistic as a result of how her parents raised her. We don’t expect that everything is going to change tomorrow. It will probably take three generations of education. Maybe less.

SM: You want to help heal society so it doesn’t get to that place, maybe. Rather than a narcissistic mom, we want to talk about a healthy mom or a healthy society that can get itself to an unhealthy place. It’s something that you can do to shift that. Is that right?

TJF: What we’re saying is, just like you said, that every culture is special, every culture has something to bring to the world. All these inventions, all these breakthrough scientific advances throughout the ages, it’s all great. What the world needs now is not that. The world doesn’t need another startup. The world needs an emotional startup. It needs a way to deal with conflict, to bring people together, because people have lost this ability. We kept growing and evolving, becoming heavier, growing our egos, and we got to such a place where it’s very hard for us to even make contact. The only people that still kept it and have a memory of that is the Jewish people. And what we are saying is that if we bring this to the world, the world will intuitively relax and calm down, because this is what they are subconsciously looking for. Everybody wants this, to find love, to find the connection. They don’t know how. Jews can show the way.

SM: What the world needs now is love, sweet love, you’re saying.

TJF: Exactly. Now more than ever.