Guest Post (Hillel Fuld): Finding The Positives In These Difficult Times

Hillel Fuld is the CMO of Zulastrategic advisor at various startups and startup incubators, startup mentor, and a tech blogger who contributes to sites such as The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Mashable,Gigaom, and others.

You can also read his personal blog at TechNmarketing or watch some of his lectures/interviews at Microsoft,TechCrunch Disrupt, and others on hisYouTube channel.

Fine. I’ll try!

Countless people have reached out to me and asked me for my take. Why? Not because they care what I think. Who am I?

They asked me because they know that with very few exceptions, I always try to find the positive side of current affairs.

And so anyone who has been in my immediate vicinity for the past week has witnessed me in a very conflicted state, a state of mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it’s happening again. Jews are being butchered. Really nothing else to add to what is happening. Jews are being butchered.

On the other hand, is there really no light at the end of this tunnel? Could that really be? No hope? Nothing to grasp onto? I don’t believe that to be the case. Now or ever. There is always hope. In fact, hope is what has gotten us through what were much more difficult times in our history.

So what positive can you and I possibly find here? How can we possibly smile?

I’ve literally spent a week thinking about this. Even when I was working or in a meeting or tweeting 30 times a minute trying to let the world know about what’s going on here, this is what was occupying my brain. “What positive can I find here?”

The answer came to me last night as I was driving home from Tel Aviv at 8:30 PM.

I was listening to the news about the measures Israel will be taking against our enemies to stop the terror. I was listening to the security analysts talk about what we SHOULD do. There were many differing opinions.

A complete closure and curfew on east Jerusalem and all the surrounding Arab villages, destruction of all terrorist homes, banning of Israeli citizenship from all terrorists and their families, placement of IDF soldiers in our city centers, and many more ideas.

Then it hit me. We are discussing how to defend ourselves. We are discussing how to fight back. Because how we defend ourselves, how we defend our people, and how we fight back is up to us!

It is difficult, near impossible to step back from our current reality and take a wider view of things. But contrary to what many people, even some smart leaders might have you believe, without looking at our roots, our history, our past, it is very difficult to build a future.

So yes, we need to take a wider perspective and realize that we are privileged to be able to fight back. The world was silent then and we were defenseless. The world was always silent and we were always defenseless.

Well now we are strong, we are the strongest. And now, all of sudden, the world wants a “Clarification of Israel’s force used to fight terrorism”.

Sorry UN and Kerry, you won’t get your clarification because we got ours 75 years ago and therefore you don’t deserve a clarification.

The only factor here in deciding how we will act is us. Our army, our strength, our morality, our culture, our mercy. You? You are irrelevant, always have been, and always will be. And in case we forget that for a split second, we know we can always count on you, the global community, to remind us of your hypocrisy and lack of care for Jewish lives.

So yes, folks, our ancestors would look at our situation and smile at how lucky we are to be home, to have the ability to defend our home, to voice our opinion, to HAVE an opinion, and to act on it as we see fit.

Are people dying? Are amazing, inspiring, righteous people dying in the streets of Jerusalem? Yes they are. Will taking a broader perspective of things bring them back or make it easier to say goodbye to them? No it won’t.

There is one thing I heard from my father many times that helps me in times like this.

Every life that is taken is an entire world and as a nation, it rips out heart out. That IS the difference between us and them but what he pointed out so accurately is that there has never been a 67 year period since the destruction of the temple in which so few Jews have been killed. Wrap your head around that.

There was always something. The Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust, always throughout our history, we were murdered and with all the pain and sorrow in every single life, never has it been this good.

This country, our home, protects us as a people. We can’t see that now but in the grand scheme of things, we’ve never had it better.

Please remember that at all times and realize that this country is here to protect us as a nation, and we, only we, can decide how to protect it from our enemies and the world. It is ours, we are the decision makers here and we call the shots. And for that, I am thankful.

You should be too.

I keep hearing people say “We will get through this.”

We won’t only get through this. We are stronger than ever and we will beat this savage terror the only way we know how, with strength, conviction, morality, integrity, and truth.

Sorry to get all theological on you but we need to be like Rabbi Akiva who always saw the positive side of everything. What is happening to us in this country right now was all but predicted in our scripture. You know what else was predicted? How we will win and be redeemed as a nation!

Sounds too religious for you to believe? Then don’t. Just examine our history as a nation for the past two thousand years and you will see the light at the end of the tunnel shining bright into your eyes.

idf soldiers western wall

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