So, there’s this joke I saw on Substack not long ago where a priest, a mullah, and a rabbit walk into a bar and the bartender asks the rabbit what he wants. The rabbit shrugs and says, “Don’t know. I’m just here because of a typo.” (In case you’re wondering about the picture above, I asked AI for an image of a rabbi in a rabbit hole, and that’s what I got. It’s so weird and ridiculous that I had to use it.)

I liked the joke, and it struck a chord because I’ve been down a rabbit hole chasing the logic of Jewish leaders who have gone to war with Zohran Mamdani for calling what’s happening in Gaza a genocide, even though all but die-hard backers of Israel recognize it as genocide. Why, in their concerns about antisemitism and the safety of Jews, do they mark him, an exceptionally decent and courageous human being, as the enemy, and not the president and his enablers, many of whom are openly racist, fascistic, criminal, and not just antisemitic but pro-Nazi. A prominent rabbi who delivered a benediction at Trump’s inaugural, called Mamdani “discriminatory, divisive and dangerous,” said the mayoral election was “a battle for the soul of our nation,” and insisted that Trump-backed Cuomo, a corrupt political hack and sex offender, stood for “the values of America.” Did Jewish leaders rally around Hitler in the 1930s and badmouth Otto Wels, who was opposed to Nazism?

I’ve been crawling through the rabbit hole for some time, getting lost in the mazes of the burrow, traversing tunnels, sticking my head into various passages and chambers, trying to make sense of it. What is the reason for such passionate support of Israeli actions that have to be considered immoral if we accept that such a thing as morality exists? How could survivors of a genocide perpetrate a genocide on others and why did a nation put up with a leader who caused so much damage and destruction. That describes Netanyahu, who, instead of being held accountable for lack of preparedness for the horrific Hamas attack Oct. 7, 2023, has been allowed to oversee ever greater disasters. It is also true of our own dear leader. I wish I could say I found answers, but mostly I found more questions. Still, I came away with some ideas, not always coherent or clearly related to each other, but interconnected like the chambers of the burrow. Maybe you can figure out if and how they fit together.

“The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction,” according to Bertrand Russell (from the essay “On the Value of Scepticism” in The Will to Doubt). The passionate desire to defend what one wants to believe in even though it is contradicted by rationality and reality, is perhaps what drives the fury of the rabbis and magaworld. That idea explains why the condemnation of Mamdani is so intense, and the defense of a man unequivocally unfit for public office so impassioned. All the pretexts for supporting him—that he would bring the country together, fix the economy, help the working class, clean up the swamp, end foreign wars and interventions, and a lot of other nonsensical notions that were never valid—have proved completely false, and yet, none of his core support has eroded. He must be providing what many people want, although they might not admit or even know it.

In Crime and Punishment, after Raskolnikov commits a premeditated murder of an old pawnbroker, he slays her innocent sister. The first crime compels him to commit another. A heroin addiction may begin innocently with a prescribed painkiller. We have a tendency to get dragged down further into whatever hole we fall into (even a rabbit hole). It happens to individuals, but families, communities, societies, whole countries can get sucked down, too. In support of a cause, even a noble one, we may find ourselves doing things diametrically opposed to the values that drew us to it, and any improper action we take to further that cause makes it easier to take an even more odious action afterwards. We may start out championing a state founded as a refuge for victims or seeking a more populist, libertarian government and end up doing things so heinous that we’re left furiously trying to defend the indefensible.

If there’s one thing that just about everyone agrees on these days, it’s that the country is divided. Each side blames the other for the division, and in a way they’re both right, because the faction in power refuses to compromise and views any deviation from its own aims and policies as unacceptable, while the other faction, constituting a considerably larger portion of the population, refuses to accept such a state of affairs. Those of us in the majority may revile those on the other side for their obstinacy, irrationality, hypocrisy, and immorality, but even if one side can be called right and the other wrong, what is achieved? As Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” (The Gulag Archipelago).

If people can’t be categorically categorized as evil, what makes us do evil things? Humans are unfathomably complex, and the one certainty is that if a person acts in a particular way, there are forces driving him to do so. It’s easy to think “if I were Netanyahu or Trump, I wouldn’t have acted in that way,” but that statement is demonstrably false, because if I actually were Netanyahu or Trump, it’s exactly how I would have acted, because that’s how they did act. Are we to condemn other people for being who they are and not who we are? Well, we do, of course, and that’s part of the bind we’re in.

Hannah Arendt refused to label Eichmann a monster, although she readily agreed that he did monstrous things. Calling him a monster would have validated the Nazi’s project of exterminating Jews, who they saw as monsters. For her, he was just human. Arendt understood that evil resides in all of us and not in particular individuals. She was troubled by the attitude that evil could be eliminated by destroying people who committed evil deeds. Evil wasn’t destroyed when the Nazis were vanquished, and lo and behold, a nation risen from the ashes spewed out the chimneys of Auschwitz-Birkenau is committing similar evils. It may sound blasphemous to suggest that Israel is as bad as Germany in the previous century, but I’m looking at it the other way around, that Germany then was no worse than Israel now. Arendt said, “In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm,” (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil). Isn’t the same true of Israel today? Since I don’t view Israelis as evil monsters even if what they’re doing is terrible, I can no longer view Nazis that way either. Both are instances of humans committing atrocities, and that’s nothing new—human history is full of that.

Our history books are full of stories of conquest. In every age and every part of the world, one group of humans has tried to displace or exterminate another group. We’re not even the only animals or life forms who fight and kill one another, although we’re probably the only ones who moralize about it and label some some combatants good and others evil. But our technology has evolved far faster than our behavioral patterns, and we now have the capacity not only to destroy each other but the very earth we live on. Our only hope is to learn to curb our destructive instincts and live with each other. As long as we continue to talk of good guys and bad guys, we remain far from that goal.

I’m not certain what I learned from my excursion down the rabbit hole other than it’s complicated down there, but I appreciate your accompanying me on this difficult journey.

January, 2026