Descending

Jews call the act of moving to Israel from the diaspora aliyah. It literally means “ascending,” as in ascending a flight of stairs, or ascending to a higher spiritual realm. Conversely, we call the act of leaving Israel yeridah, or “descending,” because it connotes the opposite. This is my yeridah story.

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When people ask me why I left, the answer I give them depends on how well we know one another. To most, I say what I know they want to hear: I got tired of the terrorism, I got sick of the wars, I don’t know how I can raise my family in a place where we have to run to the bomb shelter in the middle of the night, we got a job opportunity that required us to move abroad, yada yada. These are all half-truths. I reserve the other half for my closest circle. The whole truth, as is usually the case, is unpleasant, as it requires some introspection to arrive at.

The whole truth is that I couldn’t stomach Israelis anymore.

On one of my last days as a resident of the country I called home for thirteen years, I got on a crowded bus during rush hour. Two wrinkled prunes wearing too much eye liner shoved their way onto the bus, each carrying a large suitcase. Contrary to what would be expected in a civilized country, neither one of them waited for passengers to exit the vehicle. I couldn’t hold back. Having already made up my mind that I’m leaving this shit hole, I blurted out: “Couldn’t you wait for people to get off first?”

The first prune immediately started flailing her hands in my face. “Who the hell do you think you are? You nobody! Who listens to you! You think you can give us orders? Well, I’ll tell you what to do, not the other way around, you nobody!” I smiled. The thought of all of this being over soon drowned out the hoarse cackling I’ve grown so accustomed to hearing all day, every day, around me. “Why do you all act like such fucking animals?” I wondered to myself before quickly letting it go.

Challas. Enough. I’ve had enough.

I explained once to a friend that when you first land in Israel, you are immediately greeted with a fresh sheet of 220-grit sandpaper to your face. At first it’s refreshing. Exfoliating, even. Ah, people here are real, you tell yourself. Direct. Straightforward. Honest. These are positive attributes, yes. After a while, when you’d really like for the sandpaper to stop rubbing your skin raw, well, no dice, achi. Israelis and olim alike delude themselves with all kinds of hypotheticals to obfuscate the truth that Israelis are, in actuality, extremely rude and ill-mannered. They will paper over this with proclamations like: Israelis are first to offer help in an emergency! Israelis will invite you over for Shabbat dinner five minutes after meeting you! Israelis are like cactus pears; prickly outside, soft, sweet inside! All of these stereotypes are, for the most part, accurate. But Israelis are, on average, also extremely short-tempered, chronically irritable, congenitally disagreeable, and narcissistic. Hell, one of the world’s foremost experts on narcissism, a rare self-diagnosed narcissist, is also Israeli.

A lot of the common character traits that prevail in Israeli society are, for obvious reasons, also prevalent in diaspora Jewish communities. Because Jewish culture developed as a minority culture that has been aggressively persecuted just about everywhere for the last twenty centuries, an enormous backlog of grievance has accumulated which Zionism, as a failed utopian ideology, has not succeeded to rectify. Grievance, it turns out, breeds a sense of entitlement, i.e., the sense that you have not been given what you are owed. This is perfectly understandable — take any identifiable group of people who have lived in disparate parts of the world, all of whom have been repeatedly dispossessed of their material wealth, personal agency, political representation, lives, or some combination of all four, and tell them, now it’s your time to take it back, and you’re going to get an intolerable group of raging narcissists. For the longest time, I didn’t want to write this essay, because one of the processes I fear most is the totalizing tendency of everything becoming psychologized¹, but when the model provides significant explanatory power when no other plausible explanation is readily available, it practically writes itself.

Now, any reasonably self-aware Jew is acutely cognizant of the potential damage, especially these days, that can be inflicted by lending credence to antisemitic stereotypes. That is not my goal, and if you came here to shout “Jew” in the comments, please resist the urge and kindly show yourself out. I already know we’re insufferable. I’m just trying to explain why.

There’s an old fable about a Hasidic rabbi who walked around the shtetl with two notes in his pockets. On the left, it was written: “The entire world was created just for me.” On the right, it was written: “I am nothing but an imperceptible speck of dust.” Jewish tradition, and Hasidic thought in particular, teaches that both of these things are simultaneously true. The mark of a wise man is knowing how to navigate through life between the two extremes of self-aggrandizement and humility. Jews are about 0.2% of the world’s population, yet our scriptures, teachings, and metaphysical orientation form the basis of the world’s two most popular religions², together comprising just over half of Earth’s living human population. It would be an understatement to say that Jews have historically been, and continue to be, disproportionately influential in world history. To deny this simple fact would be an act of unforgivable ignorance. You can think that the disproportionate influence of Jews and Jewish ideas is a good thing, or a bad thing, or choose not ascribe any moral judgment to that fact whatsoever, but to deny that it is true is simply incongruent with reality.

Israelis, to the extent that they think about the problem of outsized Jewish influence at all, have a very fraught relationship to their Jewishness. A lot of Israelis are completely apathetic to the question of Jewish history and how to interpret its significance to their own lives. In fact, a major tenet of secular Zionism was to build a nation like all the other nations, i.e., to drop the particularism thing altogether and assimilate into the universalist ethos dominant in Europe towards the end of the 19th century (spoiler: it didn’t work out). But among Israelis who understand that Israel is very emphatically not a nation like all the other nations, there is tremendous disagreement regarding how, or why, or to what extent things are or ought to be this way. This line of reasoning, however, generally produces more questions than it does answers, something any good Jewish question is likely to do. So we try not to think about it too much, and hope we can keep the resulting neurosis at bay. We are not always successful.

One consequence of this disproportionate Jewish influence problem is that non-Jews tend to notice, and on occasion, they tend to get a little worked up over it. Kevin MacDonald is one such gentile. MacDonald compiled an extensive study³ on Jews, Jewish culture, and Jewish ideas from the perspective of evolutionary biology. The first volume of the study was written with a genuinely benign approach, remaining dispassionate and scientific in tone. The second and third volumes, however, were written after MacDonald had personally come to the conclusion that the Jews, collectively, were up to something nefarious. In science, if you make up your mind about the outcome you want and then write a paper (or three-volume study) cherry-picking facts and statistics to support your conclusion, we call that motivated reasoning, and correctly recognize it as junk. MacDonald was eventually forced into retirement, but his works remain popular among people who very specifically do not like Jews, and are looking for any and every reason to support their claim that The Jews are up to No Good. I think it’s extremely unfortunate that works like those of MacDonald are not more broadly read and discussed, because his three-part volume is itself a case study in how antisemitism functions like an ideological parasite, gradually consuming its host and subverting rational thought in service to propagating itself to other potential victims. Plugging your ears does not prevent the brain worm of antisemitism from infecting others around you. There is no vaccine which guards against ideological parasites, though there are some good books⁴.

But anyway, back to Israel. Among the subset of the Israeli population that is aware of what is happening outside the narrow strip of land bounded by Menachem Begin St. and the Mediterranean Sea, there is a growing consensus that things are not going well, and that a lot of people who previously were vocal supporters of the cause of Jewish statehood are now either much quieter, or have abandoned it entirely. There are a number of potentially existential problems facing the long-term viability of the state that need to be dealt with at some point, and preferably sooner rather than later. Yes, while Israel is, at the time of writing, the only developed country with an above-replacement fertility rate, it does seem rather likely, if current trends continue, that those two metrics are inversely correlated⁵, and that you can’t sustain both simultaneously for very long. Personally, giving up potable tap water in exchange for staving off replacement migration is a trade-off I’m unwilling to make. And while I realize that it’s rather hypocritical of me to be complaining about brain drain while taking our top decile-earning high-tech jobs abroad, whatever ideological disposition that brought me to Israel has long since been etched away by the unpleasant reality of living, working, and fighting with Israelis, day after day, year after year. Like many Anglo immigrants, I deliberately chose not to isolate myself in an English-speaking bubble. In retrospect, I kind of wish I had.

While most Israelis are primarily concerned with day-to-day struggles, like making it home alive through HaShalom junction after work, there is a gnawing, nagging feeling in the back of every Israeli’s mind that, if properly articulated, would sound something like, what if it doesn’t work out? It’s a very primordial fear that gets triggered when one is in mortal danger without much in the way of a viable escape plan. Multiply that by two thousand years of exilic diaspora history, and you’ve landed upon a recipe for some serious epigenetic existential anxiety.

I had a conversation with a friend from Odessa recently in which I posed the hypothetical that the Russians manage to reclaim the city. What would meaningfully change, I wondered aloud? Some flags would be lowered and raised, some new passports would be printed, but there would be no mass population transfers, no concentration camps, no executions (except for the American collaborators, of course). Half of Odessa, or maybe even more than half, would be relieved that the war was over for them, and that they could finally travel to visit their sister who lives in Nizhny Novgorod without taking a 20-hour microbus detour through Minsk.

In contrast, if Haifa were to get commandeered by Hezbollah operatives, something that once seemed like a distinct possibility before Operation Pager, anyone who had the misfortune of watching the footage recorded and gleefully broadcast by Hamas militants on October 7th (or, G-d forbid, experiencing it firsthand) as they raped and pillaged their way through southern Israel could tell you that there is a difference in kind, not degree, between intra-civilizational conflicts on one hand, and civilization-barbarian conflicts on the other. Atrocities happen in all wars, but in the former, they are the exception to the rule; in the latter, they are the rule, not the exception. Israelis, being an island civilization bordered on all sides by either hostile barbarians or by sea, are understandably a bit edgy about it, which shapes the national culture in a profoundly unhealthy way.

But maybe Israel isn’t all that different from its neighbors, you might wonder to yourself. And you’d be quite right to do so in one very important regard. A major tenet of third-worldism, the default worldview that prevails throughout much of the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, is a devout commitment to zero-sum thinking. If someone is wealthier than you, or their business is more successful, or they are better looking, or they have a bigger house, or a nicer car, or their kids got better grades than yours, or they have improved their lives in any conceivable fashion whatsoever, it’s definitely because they stole it, or they cheated, or they lied, or they are a bad person who didn’t deserve it. Colloquially referred to as the crab-bucket mentality, anyone who has worked with impoverished populations will instantly recognize the stench of envy permeating these rancid cultures. More than colonialism, or unfortunate geography, unfavorable climate, or bad luck of the draw with domesticable wildlife (sorry Jared Diamond), or really any other external factor, zero-sum thinking is the primary reason why much of humanity continues to live in abject squalor while jabbing each other with pointy sticks over whose patch of dirt it is.

Israel, being a unique blend of first-world economy and third-world mentality, is not immune to this phenomenon. As in other Mediterranean cultures, a common refrain to the sharing of good news about a fortunate development is bli ayin hara. That a saying to ward off the evil eye, the anthropomorphized form of jealousy and resentment, is so ubiquitous in Israeli society is a testament to its backwardness. And lest you think that this is unique to the absolute majority of Israelis descended from Mizrahi or Sephardi population groups, my Yiddish-speaking cousins say it all the time, too. Challas, achi.

So while Israel faces some rather unique challenges, it is also rather like much of the rest of the world in that it is full of impolite, envious, incompetent, uneducated nincompoops. Unfortunately, like much of the rest of the developed world, the proportion of highly skilled, conscientious, low-time-preference Israelis is shrinking in relation to the former group, thereby shifting the general demographic trend closer towards its neighbors in all the worst ways. Maybe Herzl will finally get his “nation like all the other nations” wish after all. From now on, I will be wishing Israel the very best of luck from abroad instead of sticking around to find out first-hand.

1. Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

2. Let’s leave out the debate about whether Islam is a religion or a totalitarian military-political cult for now.

3. MacDonald, Kevin B. A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples.

4. Saad, Gad. The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense.

5. Gross, Judah Ari. “Half of the children in Israel are receiving a third-world education,” warns economist Dan Ben-David.