MUSINGS

A Gift for the Ages

Yitti Berkovic

Ezriel, my ten-year-old son, considers himself a crack journalist.

I mean, why not? He reads the World News section of The Circle as soon as the magazine is delivered, and he picks up snippets of adult conversations when he pretends he isn’t listening. In his estimation, he knows as much as any New York Times reporter (and, by that standard, who can say he’s wrong?).

Wide-eyed and innately curious, this guy keeps me on my toes. When we sit down to dinner or climb into the car, I ready myself for the onslaught of questions and requests for updates I know are incoming. “Ma, who is really winning in the Ukraine-Russia war?” “Ma, are Trump’s tariffs working?” “Ma, are people still putting up tents on college campuses?”

It’s impossible for me not to laugh as he peppers me with his adorably pressing questions. Blame it on nature or nurture, but I totally relate to his need to know. He reminds me so much of my ten-year-old self: inquisitive, thirsting for information, convinced he understands everything and completely unaware of his blind spots. 

Sometimes I know the answers to Ezriel’s questions (when he’s not looking, I read The Circle too!), and as I try to package my responses so they are appropriate for ten-year-old ears, I feel like a driver trying to navigate around massive potholes. The news headlines are pretty scary these days – they have been for a while – so it’s hard to keep Ezriel informed and in-the-know without giving him details that are likely to keep him up at night.

That’s why I felt a nervous queasiness when Ezriel started asking a lot of questions about the protests across the country – especially about those protests that were a little too close to home. 

Last week, we had a simchah about an hour away, so my husband and I were trying to figure out the best time to start the drive. Usually, when the whole gang gets into the car, I worry most about the screaming and yelling that happens when the kids fight over who gets to choose the next song. This time, though, my stomach was in knots about a different type of screaming: there was a major pro-Palestinian rally scheduled near our destination, so we needed to strategize how to circumvent a scene my kids (and I!) would likely find a little scary.

As we calculated the different ETAs, Ezriel was reading in the other room, so we wrongly assumed he was well out of earshot.

But with magical powers only crack reporters have, he overheard every word we were saying (even though he never seems to hear my thirteenth request for him to go take a shower!), and he was at my side in seconds, his cute face creased with obvious concern. 

“We’re passing a protest on our way?”

I shook my head reassuringly. “Tatty is working on finding a different route.”

His eyes darted nervously. “Why are they still protesting?”

I sighed. “That’s a really good question.”

“They’re in college. They’re supposed to be smart. Don’t they know what happened on October 7th?”

“They do.”

“So how can they not be on Israel’s team? It doesn’t make any sense.”

I chuckled wryly at his choice of words. Leave it to a ten-year-old boy to see everything in terms of teams.

But, in truth, I’m as stumped as he is. How can I explain to him what I find impossible to explain to myself? 

He’s right. It doesn’t make sense. Ivy Leagues accept between 3% and 4% of their applicants. These protestors are supposedly the best and the brightest America has to offer, and yet their sense of right and wrong is completely warped.

It’s cliched to say by now, but most of these kids couldn’t find Israel on a map. They can’t identify either the river or the sea about which they chant so loudly. With their progressive politics, they should be repulsed by Hamas’s brutal and backward ways, and they should instead be fighting for the one nation that has been marginalized for centuries. So why do they hate us so much? How can they know the truth of the atrocities done to our people and blame us? Persecute us?

Where is their moral clarity?

There is only one answer: they have none.

Because they don’t have the gift my ten-year-old son has been given. They don’t get to head off to yeshivah every day and learn morality from its very source: the Torah. 

In Pirkei Avos, we are reminded by Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya, “If there is no Torah, there is no ethics, and if there is no ethics, there is no Torah.”

Isn’t what we are seeing today on college campuses the greatest embodiment of this Mishnah?

Harvard’s school motto is “veritas,” which in Latin means truth. But without the Torah as their guide, truth is flexible. Truth is subjective. Truth is whichever way the wind is blowing. Truth somehow means that the depravity we saw on Simchas Torah this year was “good,” and the Israeli response to defeat brutal terrorists is “bad.”

But in a strange way, I’m actually comforted by the horror show that is unfolding on college campuses – supposed beacons of academic excellence, intellectual rigor, and morality (Ha!).

Because Ezriel is a lot like I was as a kid, and when I was only a little older than Ezriel, I was enamored with the Ivy Leagues. I dreamed of attending Barnard or Columbia and learning from some of the smartest people in the country. I thought earning a fancy-pants degree was one of the highest honors in the world. 

But the mask has been ripped off, and Ezriel won’t be fooled like I once was. 

Even my elementary school son can see that these Ivy Leaguers are not the smartest people in the country. These tenured professors – supposed philosophers and ethicists from the ivory tower – have ceded their principles to the mob, to the people pitching tents and screaming threats of violence into megaphones. The world around us seems to have lost its collective mind – its collective morality – and my ten-year-old knows it makes no sense, but the vaunted Harvard professors do not? 

It makes me want to scream – but in a good way!

I want to call out from my car window as I pass that ridiculous protest, “We know why you hate us – it’s because we Jews are the luckiest nation in the world!”

We have the Torah; we have the truth from the Source of all truth!

We don’t have to follow the way the wind is blowing. We don’t have to update our morality for the 21st century. We don’t have to make it up as we go along – and get it so patently, obviously wrong.

And especially this time of year, we know exactly why. 

“Hashem gave us a present” isn’t just a catchy little ditty we sing every Shavuos. It’s the foundation of who we are as a nation: we are blessed beyond measure to have Torah-true clarity that guides us through the ages. 

In the end, the protest was canceled due to poor weather conditions (apparently, it’s not worth braving the raindrops to protest a “genocide”), and there were only a few soggy protestors holding signs.

As we bumped our way through traffic, I caught sight of Ezriel’s face plastered up against the car window, shaking his head with derision. “It doesn’t make any sense, Ma.”

I offered a silent prayer: Please, Hashem, may he always clarity and sweetness in Your Torah, our gift from You for the ages.