I have a new kind of great replacement theory, which is as good as the other Great Replacement Theory is evil. This is a form of Great Replacement that Tucker Carlson would never promote. For one, it doesn’t spout antisemitism; for another, it relies on altruism.
There’s a sign permanently displayed near the dining hall of Camp Mystic in Texas, where everyone gathered for generations, summer after summer, until the camp was ravaged by floodwaters1 last year, resulting in the deaths of 25 campers, ages 7-10 and two counselors. The family that has run the camp all these years recently announced that they will not be reopening this summer, for the first time in decades.
The sign says, “Be ye kind. One to another.”
The sign is still there, and so should be the smiles of those precious children. Our task is to be their Great Replacement, making it our mission to replacing the priceless smiles of those innocent children by bringing smiles to children’s faces everywhere.
In my last posting, I wrote about my disabled brother Mark’s ability to bring out the best in every person he comes across, virtually without exception. I called him a “kindness magnet.”
There are people like that everywhere. One subscriber sent me a note highlighting a “Kindness Magnet” that she encountered.
…A few days ago a severely challenged woman in a motor-driven wheel chair was having a hard time getting up the little ramp our streetcars roll out to facilitate wheelchairs. I was not fast enough myself, but witnessed about 5 people all rushing to help her up and into the streetcar. And I witness every day how people of all ages and nationalities will offer their seats to elderly or anyone looking like they need to sit out the ride. It is heartwarming….
In the comments section, I’d love to hear your life-affirming stories of people who bring out the kindness in others. We certainly can use them!
Jewish sources are very clear about the need to steer the world toward kindness and love, and to judge others favorably, even when doing that seems counterintuitive. Counterintuitive, perhaps, but not counterproductive.
Because when our nation is being driven to cruelty, kindness becomes a form of rebellion. 2
Compassion is the Jewish way, even if, regretfully, not all Jews practice what their tradition preaches.3
The 19th century sage Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav wrote in his magnum opus, Likutei Moharan (282:1), “Know that it is necessary to judge each person favorably, and even someone who is completely evil, one needs to search for and to find in him some little bit of goodness.”4
The Hebrew expression for benefit of the doubt is Dan L’Chaf Zechut. (Here is a study packet I put together on this virtue).
So we need to seek goodness in others and ourselves. But how can that make a difference in fighting off the cruelty of the Trump era and replacing it with kindness?
It gets back to one of the prime reasons so many autocrats hate the Jews. It’s not because Jews are a malevolent force, but ironically because we are not. In the face of unmitigated oppression, brutality and falsehood, we assert that all are created in God’s image and deserve to live a life of dignity. We take pride - and take on the burden - of being the world’s conscience.
Granted, that sacred work has not been going too great for us lately, but it’s still our assignment; and it still pisses off Putin, makes Orban ornery and trips up Trump, who bemoaned that “Jews always flip”.
That goody-goodyness is what most angered Adolf too, even more than those illusions he had of Jews seeking world domination. He wrote in Mein Kampf:
Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision….I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading modifications of a falsehood called conscience and morality.
In a recent book about antisemitism, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Jew? and a film based on it, Tragic Awakening, Rabbi Ronald Shore claims that Hitler’s hatred for the Jews was actually based more on fear than hate. “He didn’t want to kill the Jews because they were bad; he wanted to kill them because they were good,” writes David Suissa in a Jewish Journal piece about Shore’s film.
Suissa, quoting the film, continues:
The Jews, with their ethics and life-driven ideals, represented a direct threat to Hitler’s Darwinian vision where the frail and the weak would be left behind. “Hitler believed that if the ideas of humanitarianism, love, equality, democracy were to succeed, that would be the end of humanity…The ideology of social Darwinism argued that civilized societies were harming humanity by helping the poor, the sick, and those who nature would have killed off.”
In Shore’s eye, the Jews were not a physical threat to Hitler but a moral threat. And that’s why, even when the war was lost in 1944, Hitler marshaled all of his remaining power toward annihilating the Jews.
When our nation is being driven to cruelty, kindness becomes a form of rebellion.
Authoritarian leaders always have a problem with moral codes that exist outside of their personal code of conduct and their whims. Jews stand for a law that promotes kindness and human dignity, and that’s why autocratic leaders from time immemorial have hated us.
I wrote this right after the election in 2024, and it bears repeating today:
The most Jewish way to act in the face of an administration that has openly pledged to be cruel is to stand up to the cruelty.
Not only have they pledged cruelty, they’ve made good on that promise. In a guest essay in the NYT, Easily the Worst President in U.S. History’, Thomas Edsall tries to quantify the damage Trump has done to the US and the world in just the first 15 months of his presidency. He writes:
A study published in The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, found that Trump administration cuts in U.S.A.I.D. funding “would result in approximately 1,776,539 all-age deaths and 689,900 deaths in children younger than 5 years” in 2025 alone. “Over the remainder of the period,” the study continues, “the complete defunding of U.S.A.I.D. would cause an estimated 2,450,000 all-age deaths annually, leading to a total of 14,051,750 excess all-age deaths and 4,537,157 excess under-5 deaths by 2030.”
And that’s just one small part of the cruelty inflicted, before we begin to discuss the damage caused by new environmental and health policies and food and childcare cutbacks. Oh yes, and ICE and war and corruption. And it all comes back to the basic cruelty and that “falsehood called conscience and morality.”
We, along with others who wish to join us, need to be the conscience of America. It’s why the haters hate us, so we might as well not shrink from the challenge. We need to be true to who we are. Not to “resist” or be “anti-Trump” or “anti” anything. We just need to be what we are meant to be. We need to be “pro” kindness.
Kindness is resistance.
Yes, Jews are the conscience of the world and that’s why bad people are sick and tired of us. That’s why they attack synagogues in Queens and Jewish ambulances in London. And by the way, even those Jews who have bought into the ethos of cruelty also hate us - “us” being those who stubbornly insist in seeing each person, no matter what their background, as being created in the Image of God (Tzelem Elohim).5
“God will be their comforter.”
In the midrash collection known as Leviticus Rabbah, there is a discussion about whether to shun or treat with compassion individuals who have become marginalized through no fault of their own - in other words, whether to follow the letter of the law, which in these cases is to shun them, or to show kindness. The example given is someone born out of wedlock, who in the Bible is supposed to be shunned for ten generations.
One rabbi looks at a verse written in the book of Ecclesiastes, which states, “behold the tears of…the oppressed, and they have no comforter.” He then states: “It is written: ‘and they have no comforter’ – and thus God declares: I must be their comforter.”
What a brilliant line. GOD will be their comforter! Comforter from what? According to this subversive rabbinic story, the oppression being discussed in the verse, is the law itself. The oppressors are those who cling to the letter of the law rather than to its spirit.
God is saying, that’s a dumb law!
This Midrash gets it. The ancient rabbis got it: Don’t use law to oppress! The law is supposed to make us a more caring society, not a more obedient one. Don’t fall into the knee-jerk response of following a practice that goes against your moral instincts, simply because it’s the way it’s always been done; it’s the stock answer, the command of someone you think is God…or because it is now government policy. “Remember,” the Midrash is telling us: God loves the outcasts! And not even the law itself is immutable.
The reality is this: All people deserve to be loved, all deserve kindness, because all are created in God’s image. And we’ll be the annoying bee in the autocrat’s bonnet.
If people are going to hate us for that, so be it. We can handle this.
Since it was Hitler’s struggle to release the world from the “burdens” of morality and restraint, all the more is it our crusade to reinforce those so-called burdens. It is our task to champion conscience and stand up to power. Our struggle – our Kampf, so to speak – is to subdue that inclination to follow the crowd and mindlessly obey the orders of impulse. Our cause is and must continue to be: to replace the autocrat’s cruelty with immeasurable kindness
So how can Jews get through these horrific times? The same way we’ve gotten through the last 4,000. By being the True Great Replacement, exchanging callousness for conscience.
We are God’s hands, in the form of the hands of those angelic Kindness Magnets of Camp Mystic. And we shall replace their goodness with our own.
Most likely fueled by climate change, the catastrophic 2025 Texas floods killed over 100.
See my prior Substack posting: We look strongest when supporting the weakest. Don’t bet on Trump saying that tonight. But will he use the R-word?
From the article: Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo said he felt “ashamed to be a Jew” after touring Palestinian communities in the West Bank that have come under repeated attack from Israeli settlers, warning that current Israeli policy there is “planting the seeds for the next October 7.”
He also wrote that we should seek the good in ourselves: (282:2) :
... So too a person needs to find (a point of goodness) also within himself... even when he begins to look into himself and he sees that there is within him no goodness at all, and he is full of sins... even so it is not permitted to despair because of this, rather he needs to search and to find within himself some small point of goodness... and even if he begins to look at this good thing and he finds that it is full of flaws... despite all of this, he can extract from it some point of goodness, and continue to search for and collect other points of goodness and by means of this they will be made into niggunim (”melodies”)... and then he will be able to pray and to sing and to give thanks to God...”
Tzelem Elohim - the creation of every human being in the image of God. ”And God created the human being in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them.” [Genesis]
“We are created in the image of God, if you will, and we are obliged to return the favor.” Rabbi Arthur Green
Erica Brown writes: Rabbi Art Green’s quote is taken from his book Seek My Face in an essay about God’s image. Looking back at his quote, we ask ourselves what it means to be created in God’s image. It is not only a description of our creative powers; it is also a statement of responsibility about the way that we treat others. Do we see God in them? Do we recognize that all people are created in this image, not just famous people or people who can serve us in some way? Rabbi Green continues and elaborates on this responsibility: “The inner drive to imitate the ever-giving source of life calls forth in us an unceasing flow of love, generosity of spirit, and full acceptance, both of ourselves and of all God’s creatures.” In the ideal sense, if we truly believe we are all created in God’s image we have to recognize everyone around us at all times.
See also my piece on Substack written right after October 7, 2023: Developing God’s Image
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