At midnight tonight it becomes official: A quarter century will have passed: 25 years of our lives, now water under the bridge, and unlikely to elicit admiration or pride.
There are positives, the amazing advances in technology, first and foremost: smart phones for example, and now AI. Technological breakthroughs inevitably evoke mixed reviews at first, but in the end, we rarely want to go back to what we had antecedently. Do we really miss the days when we needed to find a phone booth in an emergency? As for AI, think of what it promises for medical research alone. Remember the days when we discovered the genetic code and everyone worried about cloning for racial superiority? What we got instead is genetic mapping and new hope for curing cancer. The covid pandemic was a huge negative, but those covid vaccines that came about in record time? Another medical miracle and a big-time entry in the positive column.
I am not so buoyant about cryptocurrency, but I am not a fan of anything crypto (from the Greek kryptos) meaning “hidden.” Cryptocurrency enriches a few wealthy insiders and encourages other crypto pursuits like tax evasion and money laundering. “Don’t look at the bottle,” the Rabbis warned; “but at what is in it.” What happens, however, when you can’t do that, because the bottle is opaque? What goes for a bottle of wine goes also for the big stuff like international finance and governmental decision-making. I am for transparency, thank you.
The century had barely begun when the 9/11 trauma announced radical Islam’s appearance on the world stage. Then came ISIS, a worthless war against the Taliban, and Iranian fundamentalism exported across the Middle East. Horrific wars in Iraq and Syria sent refugees streaming into Europe and North America. In response, the world retreated into nationalist tribalism: right-wing parties brandishing the flag of ethnic solidarity at home and reviving ethnic distrust (if not downright hatred) for everyone else. The fullness of democracy is now under attack, even in Israel and America.
American leadership has turned its back on leading the planet toward anything positive: instead we seem intent on going it alone, with a dizzying set of punishing tariffs and threats to discourage historic alliances. In gross denial of science, we are actually hastening global warming. We have a Department of Health and Human Services that seeks to undermine both. The new class of burgeoning billionaire mega-rich are in league with a governing kleptocracy, at the expense of the ever more needy mega-poor.
The watchword of the last 25 years is “polarization.” Unable to govern, or even to trust one another, we are becoming the poster child for the state of nature that Thomas Hobbes thought civilization was supposed to rescue us from: a condition where life for the many is increasingly “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Jewish polarization pits an older generation that still proudly identifies as Zionists (regardless of how they view the war in Gaza) against a younger generation that finds the term revolting.
Most of all, war is back in style. A million displaced Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar since 2017; Buddhist persecution of ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka; the militant Islamist Boko Haram tormenting women in Nigeria; ethnic cleansing of black non-Arab populations in southern Sudan (over ten million people displaced so far). Above all, the cold war is back, Putinized this time round, and not so cold anymore, if you live in Ukraine. We are still reeling from the Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war — at a pause but maybe not an end. And let’s not forget the rise of anti-Semitism not just on the right but on the left, with outright murder of Jews from Pittsburgh and Washington to Sydney and Manchester.
Transparency in business requires financial auditors. So too, whole societies need moral auditors to pass judgement on their use of power: a role played mostly by journalists dedicated to the search for truth. The greatest loss in the last 25 years may be the demise of truth where anything good journalists discover can be blithely trashed as “fake news.”
My own moral bookkeeping, however, leads me to see myself as the character in Edvard Munch’s celebrative painting “The Scream,” standing on the bridge from one quarter century to another, and shocked at the nadir to which the world has sunk.
But maybe most quarter-century marks looked this bad at the time. What would I have said in 1925, with World War I in the recent rearview mirror? Or 1950, with the worldwide depression, World War II so recently ended, and concentration-camp victims still being counted? 1975 would have recalled the Korean War, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Vietnam debacle, and the cold-war arms race threatening the end of humanity itself.
2000, as I recall, looked better, with the fall of Communist Russia, the Stasi police state of East Germany, and the rest of the Soviet system. Perhaps 2025 looks especially bad because of all the squandered hope from what we thought the year 2000 heralded.
But if we got through the other stuff, I daresay we will get through this – a hope I draw from a story that I included in an earlier Letter. Rabbi Michael Robinson, of blessed memory, recalled falling on the pavement in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Me’ah Sh’arim. As he sat, recovering, on a nearby bench, a quintessentially dressed Hasidic rebbe (or maybe it was Elijah?) stopped to ask him what had happened.
“I fell,” Robinson said.
“No,” the rebbe responded. “You got up.”
I think the final take-away of the last 25 years is just that: not how far we have fallen, but how insistently we have gotten up.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 