An Open Letter to My Non-Jewish Neighbours

We’re tired of being told we’re “overreacting” when we recognize patterns in society that our grandparents died for ignoring.

Photo by David Holifield on Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a lawyer in Toronto.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Dear Neighbour,

I hope this letter finds you well, or, at least less bewildered than the rest of us. But Go Blue Jays Go, eh?

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while now, but every draft came out too angry, too tired, or too sad. So I waited until I could write something honest instead. Here goes.

You and I live in the same country, walk the same streets, pay the same taxes, and, at least in theory, share the same values. But lately, I’ve started to wonder if we’ve been watching the same world unfold. Because for me, as a Jewish Canadian and a Zionist (yes, there’s that Z-word), the last few years have felt like watching the ground shift beneath my feet.

There’s a book I keep thinking about, it’s called “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbour,” by Yossi Klein Halevi. He wrote it several years ago from his home in Jerusalem, trying to speak across the chasm of fear and mistrust that divides Israelis and Palestinians. He wrote it because he wanted to be understood, and because he believed that empathy, even unreciprocated, is a sacred act. As an aside, he wrote it in 2018, five years before those same neighbours rampaged across that border, killing and kidnapping his Israeli friends and family members. I don’t know if he’d write the same book today, but that’s another thought.

I suppose, though, I’m writing this letter for the same reason. Halevi wrote to his neighbour across a border; I’m writing to mine across a street. Because somehow, it feels like the emotional distance between us — the moral gap, the silence — is starting to feel just as wide.

Over the last few years, we’ve been surprised, disappointed, and, yes, scared. We’ve watched hostage posters bearing the faces of children torn down by people who looked way too comfortable doing it. We’ve seen terror groups romanticized, cheered for, and given the benefit of every doubt. We’ve seen rallies that promised “justice” but sounded an awful lot like vengeance. We’ve been graffitied, had our schools shot at, and been threatened with death. We’ve watched friends — good, liberal, educated friends — fall silent when it mattered most.

You may have noticed that those shouting the loudest for a ceasefire during the war have gone the quietest when the ceasefire actually began. It was the quiet of disappointment, of “Oh, Israel is making it out of this war in one piece … that’s … disappointing.” That silence, though, of our neighbours, of our friends, has been the loudest sound in my life for two years.

You might not know what it’s like to walk your kids to school and notice the graffiti that used to say “Free Palestine” now reads “Death to Zionists.” Or to check your synagogue’s WhatsApp group before Shabbat to make sure there haven’t been threats to the people or the building. Or to feel that quiet ache when your child hesitates before wearing her Star of David necklace to school.

This wasn’t supposed to be our Canada.

We believed in this country’s moral compass. We trusted its institutions. We assumed that when Jewish children were murdered in their homes, people would instinctively understand the difference between grief and glee. But that clarity never came. Instead, we were told to “understand both sides,” as if empathy were a finite resource that had to be rationed.

We’ve been left scratching our heads at the moral ambivalence that’s settled over polite society like fog. We’ve seen marches where people carried signs celebrating resistance that looked a lot like barbarism. And this was on October 8, 2023, while warm dead bodies still laid strewn on the Israeli countryside, well before any (fully justified) Israeli counterattack. We’ve seen journalists and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s entire organization dance linguistic gymnastics to avoid calling terror what it is. We’ve seen professors at the University of Toronto, McGill, Concordia, York University, and Toronto Metropolitan University sign letters defending the indefensible, and students cheer for the erasure of an entire people all while claiming to stand for justice.

We as a Jewish community believe in justice too. But just not at the cost of our humanity. Not while wearing blinders. Not in the absence of logic, or reason.

And yet, through all of this, we keep showing up.

We’ve marched, not to intimidate, but to remind the world that we’re still here. We’ve prayed, sung, and wept together, sometimes in fear but always in defiance. We’ve sent money, supplies, and solidarity halfway across the world to a country that most of us don’t just support, but love. We’ve taught our children that courage isn’t about shouting, but about standing tall, even when it feels like everyone’s looking at you sideways. We always wave our Israeli flags yes, but right alongside it we wave our Canadian flags too. We believe in this country, just like you, and are proud to live here. Those protesting against Israel are protesting against Canada too, in case you were wondering.

You might think Zionism is a political position. It isn’t. It’s a story, a family story. It’s the reason our grandparents had somewhere to run when the world shut its doors. It’s the belief that Jews deserve one small corner of this planet where they don’t have to ask permission to exist. Somehow, that belief has become controversial.

Zionism is not the belief in displacing others. It is not the belief in killing anyone. It is not an evil or morally reprehensible ideology. If you think that, you’ve been lied to. It is simply the belief that Jews deserve to be treated the same as everyone else. That’s it. We are not trying to do that at anyone’s expense. In fact, we just want to be left alone.

You probably don’t see yourself as someone who hates Jews. Most Canadians don’t. But antisemitism rarely looks like hate until it’s too late. It looks like moral equivalence. It looks like universities condemning “all violence” after a massacre. It looks like media outlets that can’t bring themselves to say “terrorist” when the victims are Jewish. It looks like silence or the polite shrug that says, “Well, it’s complicated,” as though ethics were a luxury we can’t afford anymore.

It’s that look we get when we show up to work with a Star of David or hostage tag around our neck, and you glance down at it, give us a funny look that says “Oh, you’re one of them,” and then retreat into the cubicle next door. Antisemitism is those same people who are more than happy to weigh in on the evil of kidnapped Nigerian girls, or the genocide in Darfur, but who suddenly can’t find their words to condemn Hamas’ vile actions against Israeli civilians.

Here’s the thing, though: It’s not that complicated.

For us, this hasn’t been a political crisis, but an identity crisis. Over the last two years, we’ve learned who our allies really are, and who only liked us when we were quiet. Or docile employees. Or happy employers. Or generous donors. Or quiet fellow citizens. We’ve discovered that the moral compass we assumed was universal doesn’t always point north. And we’ve realised that maybe the Jewish experience was never meant to be comfortable for too long.

Still, I want to believe that you and I share something deeper. That underneath the noise and the hashtags and the headlines, there’s a basic human instinct that still whispers, “This is wrong.” Because it is wrong to celebrate murder. It is wrong to erase history. It’s wrong to expect Jews to prove our humanity every time someone tries to destroy it.

We’re not looking for your pity. We want partnership. We want you to look at the same footage we saw, the same headlines, the same statistics, and admit that evil exists, and that it doesn’t always come wearing the labels we expect.

We are a small community. There are only about 17 or 18 million Jews in the entire world, and only about 400,000 of us live in Canada. Israel is a country the size of Vancouver Island. But of the 1,343 hate crimes reported in 2024 in Canada, 920 (68 percent) were against the Jewish community. This is just what was reported, and crimes against our community, our people, our institutions, continue to rise in number year over year. That’s insane.

I’m not asking you to agree with every Israeli policy. I don’t agree with every Israeli policy either, or Canadian for that matter. But I am asking you to remember that the moral test of a society isn’t how it treats its fashionable causes; it’s how it responds when decency becomes inconvenient. No one likes war, and no Jewish person rejoiced when the Israel-Hamas war began two years ago. We celebrated with literal tears of joy when it ended, and when our hostages were released. That’s all we ever wanted.

We’re tired of being told we’re “overreacting” when we recognize patterns in society that our grandparents died for ignoring. We’re tired of being the only minority whose safety is somehow negotiable. We’re tired of being told that being proud Jews is somehow controversial or inflammatory. We’re tired of being told that we have to fight to a truce, when we aren’t the ones who picked the fight in the first place.

So, neighbour, I’m asking for something small but meaningful. Don’t look away. Don’t make excuses. Don’t let moral clarity become another casualty of politics. Don’t assume the worst in me, and I won’t assume the worst in you. If you have questions about my religion, my beliefs, my heritage, my Zionism, my people, ask me. I’d love nothing more than to discuss with you over a coffee and cruller.

Yossi Klein Halevi wrote to his neighbour because he believed that if you truly listen to someone’s story, even your enemy becomes human. I don’t think you’re my enemy, but I’m writing to you because I still believe that if we can understand each other deep down, we might just find our way back to being the kind of country we thought we were.

Please share this with another Canadian who you think would benefit from reading.

Sincerely,
A Jewish Canadian

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