During a season of light, choosing solidarity over silence

This Hanukkah season has gotten off to a rough start. A celebration of resilience, renewal, and a miracle had a pall cast over it because of two antisemitic lunatics who opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Australia last weekend.

Fifteen people were killed by the father-son assailants, whose car contained explosives and ISIS flags. Police fatally shot the father. The son is in the hospital and is expected to face several terrorism charges. Among the victims were a 10-year-old, a retired cop, two rabbis, and a Holocaust survivor.

I have little to offer by way of commentary that hasn’t already been said. Such horrific events shock the conscience. It was an act of pure evil.

I am dispositionally conservative. I have long accepted that we are a fallen people and deeply fallible. But even someone whose expectations of his fellow man are low can be rattled by something as awful as what occurred in Australia or at the Nova Music Festival in 2023.

What happened last weekend is an unfortunate reminder that no law can cure the disease that infects human nature.

That’s not to say I don’t applaud lawmakers and leaders from both parties who have strived to root out the scourge of antisemitism in our state. Teaching Arizona schoolkids about the Holocaust isn’t too much to ask, nor is stopping the state from doing business with companies that participate in the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divest, and sanction) movement. I can’t muster much sympathy for anti-Israel protestors charged with trespassing for setting up an encampment at the ASU campus.

But hate can’t be legislated away, and there are some people who have been sucked into the internet cesspool of conspiracy, grievance, and resentment and can’t find their way out. After all, look at who commands the largest followings on social media. A huge segment of our society is marinating in this stuff. Some elected officials, all of whom should know better, have waded into the morass.

On the first night of Hanukkah at a celebration in downtown Phoenix, the security presence was stepped up. The presence of armed police at a gathering of the Jewish community should hardly be a surprise. Not after Poway or Pittsburgh or Toronto. (The fact that I can rattle those off without even googling them is a sad testimony of the frequency of such atrocities.)

Even Amsterdam, the city where visitors can step inside the home where Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding from Nazis for more than two years, saw anti-Jewish protests last Sunday, interrupting a Hanukkah concert.

I’ve had the fortune of visiting Israel on a handful of occasions. I’ve come away invigorated and inspired every time. As a person whose religious roots count more than one faith tradition, I can’t help but feel a little closer to the Jewish side of my family tree with each trip, nor can I look away when barbarism is visited upon the Jewish people. An attack half a world away is not an abstraction.

There’s nothing I can say to assuage the pain of Jews around the world, time and again the victims of senseless violence. All I can do is profess my solidarity with them and remind those around me that Israel is a light unto the world.

During this season of light, I hope you’ll resist the darkness and choose clarity over cynicism, truth over grievance, and solidarity over silence.

Danny Seiden is the president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

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