The event: The massacre at the Har Nof synagogue, ISIS's horror videos
Date: 25th of Cheshvan, November 18th
The descriptions of the tortures of the Inquisition, the burning of the tortured in the auto-de-pe bonfires, the beheadings in the French Revolution, the slaughters in the Holocaust of European Jews - they always seemed distant to us, appearing in our imagination as a fast-paced film without sound, black and white, something dark whose songs remained somewhere in the barbaric regions of the backward African countries.
This year it came to us.
Colorful, produced with clear zoom-up cameras from a multitude of directions and vantage points. The horror and cruelty have been given a contemporary, modern life, here in the no longer one-sided room of the world, which we thought had become modern.
Here across the border, a two-three hour drive in a sputtering car, hundreds of thousands are being slaughtered in various ways and are being filmed, with no ability to deny or disavow.
Here within the border, within the city, within the neighborhood synagogue, we experienced with horror the slaughter of worshipers, we witnessed with horror the tefillin, tallit, siddur, and corpse.
The world has received a generous dose of enlightenment this year. Time and again the consequences of radical Islamic faith have been presented to it; time and again attempts have been made to dispel the cloud of fog in which the West has enveloped itself; image after image, video after video, horror after horror, and the West has refused to yield to the clarity.
It is not enough that the wing in the so-called progressive world did not go to open war, it is not enough that it refused to define who is human and who is not worthy of being human and being at all, it is not enough that it drafted a reasoned and meaningful letter of surrender against a central representative of this evil.
The picture of the slaughtered Jew in the synagogue on Har Nof, opposite the smiling picture of the signatories of the agreement with the Iranian devil, is the picture of the year, and perhaps the picture of the decade.
The inability to defend a moral position and set a clear, insurmountable boundary above any political interest, and to distinguish between good and evil, is a high point in the disintegration of the hollow and insecure West in the face of the power of Islamic decisiveness.
And this understanding that the world is once again "losing it...", and that it is possible to see everything, but literally everything, and to click one's tongue, and perhaps bomb here and there, and send the EU representative again to label settlement products, in the face of yet another news story about a flying barrel bomb in a market in Aleppo, this understanding has deeply penetrated this year.
And this is a mandatory understanding.
It obligates us as a people, obligates us as human beings, obligates us as God's people.
To continue to demand the distinction between good and evil, to maintain that basic human sensitivity to the distant and especially to the near, to distinguish between a person and a predatory animal, between friend and enemy, between religious morality and a monstrous religion.
And above all, it requires us to once again be that nation that knows how to clearly say the two words that justified so much blood this year: "Allahu Akbar" - but that is precisely why He is merciful to His creatures, merciful and compassionate. Truly.
• Michael Nachtiller is the director of Aguda Echat, and the CEO of Emunim.
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