What is the existential threat to the Jewish people?

 We were taught:

“Three signs mark this people: their capacity for mercy, for shame, and for kindness.”

• Yebamot 79a

“What is hateful to you; do not to another. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”

• Shabbat 31a

“You have been told, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you; only to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk in humility with your God”

• Micah 6:8

And we were taught the consequences of our failure:

“When you lift up your hands I will turn my eyes away from you. Though you pray at length I will not listen. Your hands are stained with crime; wash yourselves clean. Put your evil doings away from My sight.”

• Isaiah 1:15-16

If the beating heart of our identity devolves into stoking the memory of the fires of the Shoah, then we are worshipping Moloch. Centering Jewish victimhood to the exclusion of all else is a threat to our survival as a people.

If we worship the power of the IDF - its Merkava tanks, its intelligence services, its Jericho ballistic missiles - then that, too, is a threat to our survival as a people. Weapons are false idols;  they are sacrifices to Baal.

If we come to believe that our existence as a people requires the obliteration of our neighbors, then we have discarded what it means to be a Jew. We will have transformed ourselves into Laban the Aramean: a moral and physical threat to the legacy that 1500 generations of our grandparents and great-grandparents gifted us.