Our Greatest Threat Isn’t Antisemitism
Vayishlach and Our Internal Crossroads
I have a group chat with Jewish friends that used to be a predictable nightmare. We fought about everything: Israeli politics, American politics, theological politics, even imaginary politics.
But lately? Bliss. Every headline about antisemitism—on campus, in the streets—we all agreed. I thought: Look at us. Healing.
And then last week someone mentioned Bibi and Haredi draft exemptions. Within seconds, the group reverted to its natural state: arguing, defensive, frustrated, exhausted.
It was still on my mind when I read this week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach. Here’s what struck me: Vayishlach is the closing chapter on Jacob’s external enemies.
After this, Genesis turns inward: Joseph and his brothers, jealousy, betrayal, the collapse of trust. The Torah devotes more time, more emotion, and more moral depth to the fractures within the family than to the enemies beyond it.
Genesis is warning us: We Jews are far more capable of destroying ourselves than our enemies are.
External threats are real. They demand response. But they’re not what will break us.
What breaks us is what we do to one another.
Vayishlach opens with Jacob preparing to confront his brother Esau, who is walking towards him with 400 armed men.
Earlier, Jacob had just finished confronting Laban—his uncle and father-in-law—who welcomed Jacob as long as he enriched him, turning hostile the moment Jacob succeeded on his own terms.
At the end of the parsha comes the tragedy of Dinah: Shechem, the local prince, rapes her — a devastating violation of her dignity and autonomy, and a sober reminder of the vulnerability faced by a minority family living among strangers.
Taken together, Esau, Laban, and Shechem become archetypes of the external threat that have shadowed Jewish history: Esau represents religious antisemitism (resentment of Jewish chosenness), Laban embodies resentment of Jewish success, and Shechem shows xenophobic violence against the vulnerable.
Then the story about external enemies ends. And the Torah pivots.
What follows—twice as long as all Jacob’s external battles combined—is the story of Joseph and his brothers.
This time, the danger is internal: jealousy, cruelty, the fracture of peoplehood. The brothers throw Joseph away, and lie to their father.
Joseph rises in Egypt, navigating assimilation and identity. When famine drives his brothers to him, they do not recognize him.
The reckoning is slow, painful, and deeply human, because the work of healing a family always is. It becomes the architecture of everything that follows: exile, slavery, redemption.
Genesis tells a hard truth: external threats demand vigilance, but they do not undo us. What undoes us is what we do to each other—the corruption we accept, the bonds we break, the brothers we betray.
Antisemitism is dangerous. Jewish self-destruction? That’s lethal.
Reading this, I kept thinking about Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal, who argues that Jews today—both in Israel and the Diaspora—are at a crossroads.
In the Diaspora, we face a triangle of external threats: the far-right’s nativist antisemitism, Islamist fundamentalism, and the radical left’s demonization of Zionism and Israel.
These forces, once distinct, now echo one another, forming a chorus of hostility that Jews have not faced in generations.
But Eyal points out that in Israel, the internal dangers may be even greater: fighting over Haredi draft exemptions during an existential war, corruption at the highest levels, a precarious economic future for Israel, too many resisting accountability for October 7.
I agree with much of this assessment. Even so, I don’t think the divide Eyal draws is as clean as Diaspora = external threat, Israel = internal threat.
Both communities face both internal and external threats. And both are existential.
In the Diaspora, beneath rising antisemitism is a deeper rupture: collapsing literacy, Jews who no longer know their own story, too many rejecting the idea of peoplehood.
In this Mamdani era, we are struggling to mark boundaries—what is inside the covenant, and what is outside. If we cannot explain why belonging matters, if we splinter over identity and meaning, external enemies will not need to destroy us. We will do it ourselves.
In Israel, the external enemies are real. But internal dysfunction is just as dangerous: mass exemptions during war, corruption, collapsing social trust.
And the truth is this: a nation can survive its enemies. No nation can survive the corrosion of its own moral foundations.
Jacob didn’t ignore his external enemies. But Genesis’ narrative arc embeds a warning: external threats, no matter how frightening, must not distract us from internal rot.
We can fight antisemitism with all our strength—and we must—but shared fear cannot be the only thing that unites us.
If external hatred becomes the one safe conversation that lets us avoid the painful work of examining our own fractures, we are repeating the mistake Jacob’s family made. The real danger will be inside the house.
One reason my friends’ WhatsApp chat keeps returning to antisemitism is because the internal questions are harder.
Antisemitism unites us because the threat is external, clear, shared. But Haredi exemptions? Boundaries? Peoplehood? Jewish literacy? These questions demand honesty. They require wrestling with what we owe one another and what it means to be part of a people.
The internal responsibilities look different depending on where we live.
For U.S. Zionist Jews, some of the work includes defining boundaries and holding them confidently—articulating the bonds of Jewish peoplehood, what binds us and what’s non-negotiable, while sustaining a broad tent that does not collapse under its own openness.
It also includes learning how to fight antisemitism without adopting a victim mentality and while still building coalitions with our neighbors.
For Israeli Jews, the work includes things like figuring out a healthy way of integrating Haredim into the economy and army service, reducing the polarization tearing the country apart, rooting out corruption even in wartime, and figuring out how to aspire for peace and normalization with Israel’s neighbors even as threats remain.
These are not distractions from the external battles. They are the foundations on which our collective future rests.
The internal work does not unite us the way fighting antisemitism does. But it is essential. A people that cannot define what holds it together, that tolerates corruption and fracture, cannot endure, no matter how fiercely it resists its enemies.
Genesis does not end in despair. Joseph weeps. The brothers return. The family begins to mend. Not perfectly, not without scars, but with the possibility of repair. This is the Jewish story. Not a story of perfection, but of the courage to rebuild what is broken.
We are at a crossroads. The external enemies are real and urgent. Yet only we can decide whether we will destroy ourselves or redeem ourselves.
Genesis teaches that the future of the Jewish people depends on this inner work. It determines whether we survive, whether we flourish, and whether we remain a people worthy of one another.
We cannot turn away from it any longer.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
Check out the first of a two-part Wondering Jews series about Hanukkah! 🕎
I got to interview my good friend Sarah Hurwitz — author of the fabulous Here All Along and As a Jew (both excellent Hanukkah presents 🎁📚) — to think through what Hanukkah means for us as American Jews today.
How much of the holiday’s history connects to the challenges we’re facing now?
What does “Hanukkah-style antisemitism” look like? 🔥
And what can we learn from ancient Jewish courage and clarity? 💪🕯️
Give it a listen or watch on youtube, and stay tuned for Part 2 with Dr. Tanya White! 🎧💬
Last year, for Vayishlach, I wrote about Jacob’s different strategies for confronting Jew-hatred and the moments that shape who we are as a people. Rereading it now… it holds up. Give it a look!
So powerful and true. Jacob’s wrestling may be with an outside force (Esau’s angel, or some being similar), but the episode seems the first time he finds inner strength or resolve. As a parent of smart, committed young Jews both anxious of rising Jew-hate, and frustrated with both Israeli malfeasance and inept American Jewish response to anti-Zionism etc., I sense they, and many of their peers, grasp the current Jewish moment requires a collective resolve (strength) capable of overcoming the injuries we’ve incurred (some self inflicted).
Thach you for your voice.
Another great post, Mijal. When we Jews allow non-Jews to define us, or we internalize what they think a "good Jew" should be - Judaism dies.