#NeverAgainIsNow

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One of the foundational practices of Life Coaching is helping our clients understand the distinction between being a victim and having a victim mindset.

So many of us navigate through life with a victim mindset, convinced that external circumstances control our fate instead of realizing our own power to shape it. When we embrace this mindset, we often find ourselves depleted of energy, creativity, and agency. We feel like a dinghy being tossed around in a turbulent ocean — dependent on the next wave to determine our direction.

Realizing that we are carrying this mindset is actually very good news because mindsets can be changed. The field of Professional Coaching exists and is thriving because of this truth.

Equally important is to know when we are actually a victim — someone who has been harmed, injured, or killed as a result of circumstances and actions of others.

Suppose I apply this clear distinction to this present moment. In that case, I am required to address the victimization of the Jewish people and the counterintuitive preference of many that Jews continue to operate from a victim mindset.

I don’t think there is a Jew alive in modern times who hasn’t wondered how they would have acted in 1943 when Jews were rounded up and murdered. We guess as to whether we would have put our heads down and walked into the gas chambers, tried to escape, or been like the freedom fighters in the Polish Ghetto. We wonder who, if any, of our gentile friends and neighbors would have helped us and who might have handed us over to the Nazis. We wonder what impossible choices we might have made if faced with life-and-death decisions that could only exist under such singularly horrific circumstances.

Today, a flare has been shot into the dark skies, and for a few short seconds, the whole sky has been lit, and we see where everyone stands.

Don’t try to unsee in yourself or others what you have seen in those few seconds.

This is a historical moment, and it deserves our full attention.

I’m bewildered by how so many people, including some Jews, want all of us to stay in the victim mindset. They believe that it’s better to continue to be victimized than to stand strong for our children, loved ones, and country.

They want us to wander from country to country and just deal with the cyclical but inevitable purging of the Jews from literally every country in the world except for the U.S. — for now.

If any country worldwide had a homicidal and genocidal cult residing on its borders, constantly breaching and engaging in acts of rape, murder, and hostage-taking against its citizens, the people of that country would be expected, no, required, to stand up and fight.

But Jews are clearly held to a different standard. We have to choose between being liked and staying alive.

Never again is now.

Never again will we be 1943 Jews.

Never again will we live with the victim mindset when we are actually victims.

We are 2023 Jews. We owe it to our children and their children to take a stand against evil, even if it’s a byproduct of ignorance.

We cannot afford to put our heads down and march forward in the direction “the world” seems to believe is where a “good Jew” should go.

We’ve been down that road before. It doesn’t end well.