Letter from the Editor
In my editorial for the last issue of this magazine, published shortly after the atrocities of October 7, I expressed my support for the Israeli survivors of those atrocities and my sympathy for the those Palestinians innocent of such behavior and victimized by the barbarians of Hamas, men more intent upon eliminating the state of Israel than serving the needs of the people they at one unfortunate point were elected to lead.
I did not expect any particular response and was not looking for one. Although I appreciated the expressions of gratitude that came from a few friends and colleagues, it seemed to me a given that one should oppose rape, murder, and kidnapping. I consequently was taken off guard by the brief storm of vitriol that came my way – one of the less graphic and accusatory messages was brief and to the point: “You filthy Jew!”…which I found a bit ironic, given that I indicated in the editorial that I had been baptized a Christian and confirmed in the Episcopalian church.
Far more concerning to me has been what I perceive to be an escalating tsunami of misplaced passion, erupting antisemitism and pure stupidity in America and the Western democracies. How in the space of only a few months has this tsunami gathered? Why has it gathered?
I have no enthusiasm for converting this healthcare magazine into a political screed or to waste pages chastising misguided college and medical students for their unfathomable behavior, and I will close my editorial simply with this quote from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West:
Human nature is full of riddles…One of these riddles is: how is it that those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly appear to lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery…societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into moral lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception.