I came across this short essay on a Reddit thread I follow called /JewsofConscience. Most of the followers are Jews who are anti-genocide and therefore anti-Israel. Check out this related post about cults and dismantling the ideology of Zionism. (This “process” applies to all cults.) My italics to highlight some key phrases and sentences.

Shkoyach is a Yiddish term of appreciation, congratulations, and encouragement that roughly translates to “good job,” “well done,” or “thank you.”

MAA

Since the start of Israel’s genocide, I have lost many friends, alienated myself from certain circles, and I’ll never be able to view my nice little Orthodox Jewish neighborhood the same way ever again. I watched the kindest people who would give me the shirts off their backs ask me with puzzled looks on their faces why Israel shouldn’t simply kill everyone in Gaza, since they’re all collectively guilty. I have been forced to recognize that all these kind people would make amazing Nazi Party members. Plus, I used to really appreciate Israel. I spent nearly a year there after college, partaking in religious study at an Orthodox BT yeshiva, and it was such a rare and golden treasure to be able to assume the people on the street are just like you; to be able to go into any grocery store before a holiday and assume that everyone else there is shopping for the same meals and celebrations you are. I knew it undoubtedly had its problems, but I didn’t know enough to see how far on the wrong side of history it was then.

Watching the genocide in Gaza changed all of that; there was no way to deny everything I was seeing every day on my phone screen, no way to give the benefit of the doubt to the systematic rate of sniper bullets in the heads and hearts of children and toddlers, no way to explain away the targeting of doctors, nurses, journalists, and academics, and the crimes against humanity continue to pile up to this day.

The genocide in Gaza pitted my morals against the community I am supposed to be loyal to and forced me to make a real choice between the two, and I stood by my morals. It’s never a decision anyone likes to make, but here we are, and truly, it was a rare opportunity to learn a lot about oneself. Unfortunately, there are not many groups or ethnicities out there where I would have been forced into the same sort of choice. There are hypotheticals, of course, and everyone likes to imagine that they would have been the German who’s smart enough to resist Nazi propaganda, but rarely in life are we confronted head-on with such a situation. I explained it to my Yoruba/Nigerian friend by encouraging them to imagine if the war in Biafra started up again and the Nigerian government started systematically massacring the Igbo and that all her friends, family, and pastors said that that was a good thing. Even then, I don’t think it quite registered with her what I was asking. They always say that criticism starts at home, but I think there are a lot of people out there who don’t truly understand what that means.

So, at least I’ve learned a lot about myself, and I don’t think many people get to do that. Shkoyach.