Eschatologist #2 - Are we Polish Jews in 1937 or East Germans in 1988?
If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:
We can’t talk about things ending without wandering into the domain of prediction. Even if we deem something “very unlikely”, we’re still making a prediction. We’re predicting that it’s possible, or perhaps more importantly, not impossible.
Eschatology encompasses a lot of things, but if we’re making it simple it’s just the study of how big, important things end. This immediately presents a difficulty—big, important things rarely end.
Things don’t get to be big and important if they’re ephemeral. But rare is not the same as never, and when big, important things do end, the impact, either for good or ill, is huge. As we’ve seen with the pandemic, these endings are difficult to prepare for. Though I know that the pandemic feels more like a big, important thing beginning. I think most of the difficulties arise from what it ended: normality.
Normality may not seem like much, but it’s one of the biggest and most important things of all. It would be nice if we could have had some warning, but the whole point is that predicting when big, important things are going to end is basically impossible.
How then should we prepare for these rare, impactful events? Should we just prepare for the worst? Is the lesson of the pandemic that we should all have a bunker with guns and canned goods? Or at least a six month supply of toilet paper? Perhaps. Certainly it is costly to prepare for the worst, but historically there are always situations where such preparation is more than worth it.
For example, imagine if you were a Jew in Poland in 1937. However inconvenient it might have been to take your family to America, it would have been far better than any outcome which involved staying in Poland. Yes, you may not have spoken the language. Yes, immigration might have been costly and difficult. Yes, you may have left friends and family and your home. But anything would have been better than what did happen.
Some people will argue that while all of this is obvious in hindsight, could you really expect the Polish Jews to foresee all that was coming in 1937? Well certainly some of the signs were there. Hitler had already been in power for four years. And if you had waited to be sure you would have waited too long. We can never be sure what the future holds. Our hypothetical Jew could have fled Poland in 1937 only to have Hitler assassinated in November of 1939 by Johann Georg Elser, setting history on an entirely different, and possibly better path.
In other words, it could have very easily ended up being a bad idea to make huge sacrifices in order to flee Poland. As an actual example of this, two brothers crafted a daring plan to rescue their remaining brother from East Berlin in May of 1989, risking possible death, when all they had to do was wait six months for the wall to come down.
In many respects this is the question we’re all faced with. Are we Polish Jews in 1937 or East Germans in 1988? Are the bad times about to end or are they just beginning? Will normality ever return? These are difficult questions, but their difficulty is precisely what makes them important.
After reading the title, I’m sure most of you are expecting an answer. Is 2021 more like 1937 or 1988? I don’t know. Nobody knows. But there are always signs. This newsletter is about identifying and interpreting those signs—of pointing out which way the wind is blowing.
So which way is the wind blowing? Well I’m forecasting a hurricane, but naming that hurricane will have to wait till next month.
If that sounds interesting…
Then check back in March—same time, same place. Or subscribe to the newsletter. There's a link at the top of the page.