Asarah b'Teves 5785: What If We Believed the Antisemites? (a Teshuvah Thought-Experiment)

Asarah b'Teves might be over, but the tzarah is ongoing. These thoughts were inspired by an article I read on Asarah b'Teves this year. You'll see why I'm keeping this behind a paywall.

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Photo of one of the January 2025 Southern California Wildfires destroying the Los Angeles area.

Asarah b'Teves 5785: What If We Believed the Antisemites? (a Teshuvah Thought-Experiment)

Blaming Israel for the Fires in LA

I’m willing to bet that we’ve all seen a lot more antisemitism in the news since October 7th, 2023, much of it disguised as anti-Israel sentiment. (No, they’re not inherently synonymous, though they often are.) But this past Asarah b’Teves, I came across an accusation more ridiculous than any other in recent memory: that Israel is responsible for the January 2025 wildfires in Southern California. A Times of Israel article titled US anti-Israel activists blame Jewish state for Los Angeles wildfire crisis reports:

Code Pink, a far-left activist group, said on Instagram, “When US taxes go to burning people alive in Gaza, we can’t be surprised when those fires come home” …

The New York branch of the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, in an Instagram post about the fires, said, “Instead of putting resources toward making our country livable, our government is putting billions toward Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Fatima Mohammed, a leader of New York’s hardline anti-Israel group Within Our Lifetime, posted an image of the fires and said, “The flames of Gaza will not stop there.”

“Dropping hundreds of thousands of bombs on Gaza, turning it into a blazing inferno, has consequences,” she said.

The article also quotes New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, who remarked:

“The nature of Antisemitism is to scapegoat the Jewish People and the Jewish State for everything wrong in the world — no matter how tenuous the causal connection … The modus operandi of Antisemitism is slanderous scapegoating: when in doubt, blame the Jews.”

Add this to the long list of blood libels, well poisonings, blame for economic depressions, and countless other antisemitic conspiracy theories that attribute all the world’s ills to Jewish machinations.

When I read this article, my first thought was, “What a delusional accusation!” But then I thought of two counterpoints: a mishnah in Pirkei Avos and a recurring theme in Yechezkel.