The best way to gain confidence in one’s future trajectory is to experience some success — however small

Photo: AP Newsroom

MY colleague Gedaliah Guttentag’s superb interview with Senator John Fetterman (D–PA) provides an excellent lead-in to one of this week’s topics: How consistently awful most of us are in predicting the future of others, not to mention ourselves. It is safe to say that no one who followed the 2022 senatorial campaign in Pennsylvania had Fetterman on their card as the most likely Democrat to demonstrate moral clarity with respect to Hamas’s actions on Simchas Torah and thereafter.

Until Simchas Torah, his principal issues had been two hardy perennials of the progressive left — legalization of marijuana and shorter sentences for criminals, even violent ones. Yet when he contemplated the reaction of the progressive left to massacre of Israeli Jews, he abandoned his progressive label before he abandoned his support for Israel.

Professor Eugene Kontorovich among others has pointed to the irony that Hamas’s assault on Simchas Torah was one of the most inhumane in recent history — murder, torture, assaults on women, burning victims to death, beheadings — and yet it was celebrated around the world that very day. And over time, Hamas became the object of international solicitude, while Israel was condemned for committing genocide by those who neither know what the term means nor have ever bestirred themselves over actual attempts to wipe out entire peoples in recent decades — e.g., Tutsis in Rwanda, black tribesmen in Darfur.

Fetterman, alone on his side of the aisle, has stood tall to remind the world again and again how the war started and of the Israeli hostages being held in inhuman conditions. But the key point here is: No one saw this coming. During his Senate campaign, Fetterman was still recovering from a serious stroke and could barely communicate at all or understand questions put to him.

IF FEW SAW Senator Fetterman as a passionate and resolute defender of Israel, I think it is safe to say few would have predicted that Candace Owens would turn out to be “a raging out-and-out anti-Semite,” in the words of Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute. When Owens first came to public notice, conservatives could not get enough of the young, articulate black woman, who took no guff, whether being questioned on TV or in Senate committee hearings. She was quick on her feet, and able to skillfully point out the implicit racist assumptions behind questions directed to her and how her actual words had been deliberately distorted.

But there is no distortion of her increasingly wild discussions of Jews. Perhaps she could be forgiven as merely ignorant for having thought that the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City (home to 20,000 of Jerusalem’s 300,000 Arabs) was the only place Muslims could live in Jerusalem, and comparing it to the Jim Crow South of her grandfather’s day. But her expressions of disbelief about the cruel experiments, thoroughly documented by eyewitness testimony, on twins conducted by Dr. Yosef Mengele — “bizarre propaganda” she called it — defies defense.

I CHOSE FETTERMAN AND OWENS as highly public examples of people who defied the expectations of others. But in truth, there are countless examples of our inability to predict others’ futures all around us. How many times have you heard a parent say of a flourishing adult child, “He/she caused me more grief than all the others combined.” And similarly, every educator who works with disaffected youth can point to numerous examples of those who at 18 rarely got out of bed in the morning, yet who are today shteiging in the Mir or are even maggidei shiur.

Perhaps the person we are most likely to misjudge is ourselves. One might think that most people are prone to overestimating their own talents. But my impression is that people are more given to underestimating their potential than the opposite. And we are particularly likely to fall into that trap during Elul, as we remember past resolutions that ended in failure.

The best way to gain confidence in one’s future trajectory is to experience some success — however small — upon which one can build. Let me offer one homely example.

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with an old law school friend, who at 78 is still engaged in daily manual labor. He described how he and his wife have been following a diet for several years involving two non-consecutive days a week of consuming no more than 500 calories. I know myself well enough to know that calorie counting or weighing food is not for me, but I thought I could tweak his diet regime.

And lo and behold, I recently managed to get under one of those numbers on the scale ending in zero, where I have not been in some years. No one has yet approached me to say, “You must have been a college tennis player,” but at least I’ve temporarily gotten my physician — a short, athletic guy, who delights in calling me obese, no matter how unjustly — off my back. When I told him I had lost a few pounds, he retorted, “Well, make sure you don’t find them again.”

But with that first taste of success — somewhat unexpected, I might add — I have actually set my sights on the next five-pound marker going down, and developed a good deal more self-consciousness about what I eat and when, in the hope of future success.

As I said, a homely and not very important example of the principle of small steps. But I’m sure each of us can think of other, more important areas in which it can be applied.

The Sounds of Silence

My friend Rabbi Menachem Nissel and I recently found ourselves together at a later Shacharis minyan than we might have wished for. But at least it gave us a chance to catch up afterward. He had just returned from speaking in South Africa, and was in a typically ebullient mood about the whirlwind tour that had him giving over 30 talks in eight days.

But it soon became clear that the highlight of his trip were the two days he spent in the bush with a former colonel in the South African army from whom he learned to appreciate how much one can learn from just listening and watching carefully — e.g., from the swish of an elephant’s trunk, the way it moves its ears and tail.

But in order to extract that information, one needs quiet. If there is a drumbeat of background noise, the signals cannot be picked up.

And that is what has happened to us. We can no longer listen because we are immediately caught up in background noise. Last Sunday, the Houthis launched a hypersonic ballistic missile that reached central Israel. Immediately, Israelis were caught up in discussions as to whether or not it had been hit by an Arrow missile or had disintegrated in mid-flight.

Those are important questions, and I hope that Israel’s military strategists are fully engaged in answering them. But there was one other central fact that received too little attention: A missile powerful enough to have killed hundreds if it had struck in Tel Aviv had, for whatever reason, inflicted no casualties in Israel. Hashem had protected us.

And over the preceding Shabbos, Hezbollah launched 60 or more rockets and drones at Tzfas. None were ballistic missiles, to be sure. But each had the power to kill or maim. And yet there was, as far as I know, no one injured by that barrage. That surely deserves a little more reflection on our part — something more than just flicking to the next item on the morning news.

In my research last week on Churchill’s rallying of the British people to fight the Nazis when all appeared lost, I came across a discussion of Hitler’s decision not to attack the 300,000-plus members of the British Expeditionary Force trapped on Dunkirk beach, with his superior tank corps that had just cut through French defenses. Had he done so, he would have effectively destroyed British ground forces, most of whom subsequently escaped across the channel to fight another day.

Hitler’s reluctance to attack made no sense to his generals, and indeed it has no rational explanation. But it changed the entire course of the war.

Similarly, at least one senior Syrian commander was executed by a firing squad for his hasty withdrawal in the face of numerically inferior Israeli forces on the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War.

Yet how little attention we pay to the Hashgachah pratis that has preserved us over two millennia of galus.

And speaking of deafness, the total inability to step back and focus on the larger picture and the messages that Hashem is sending us, can there be a more striking example than the fact that the Tel Aviv municipality is once again fighting tooth and nail to prevent any open-air davening on Yom Kippur for those with little background?

And those who rode their bicycles and even motorcycles last Yom Kippur through those attempting to pray, who threw siddurim on the ground, etc., are threatening to do so again. Did Hamas’s massacre of over a thousand Jews less than two weeks later on Simchas Torah, and the beginning of a protracted war to which there is no end in sight, completely fail to register?

Have we entirely lost the ability to listen because we have lost the capacity to turn down the decibels all round us?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1030. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)