Relentlessness is not obsession. It is continuity — the refusal to let what was taken become legitimate through silence.

Survival Is Not Surrender

I did not learn relentlessness from rage. I learned it from tradition.

In my family, Judaism was not abstract theology or distant ritual. It was practical instruction about how to live when what is yours is taken, delayed, or denied. My father taught me that survival is not the same as surrender, and that silence is not the same as peace. You can adapt without conceding. You can build elsewhere without erasing the record of what was taken.

Judaism is often described as a religion of hope. That is true, but incomplete. It is also a civilization of law, claim, argument, and memory. We are a people who write things down. Who preserve contracts, names, genealogies, boundaries. Who argue over language and precedent and obligation. Who understand that power shifts, borders move, and rulers change — but claims must be kept alive if they are ever to matter again.

This is why Jews survived centuries of displacement without dissolving into amnesia. We did not confuse temporary possession with moral ownership. We did not mistake force for legitimacy. We kept the claim.

“Next year in Jerusalem” was not naïve optimism. It was record-keeping in liturgical form. A refusal to let a claim disappear simply because the moment could not yet honor it. It was a way of saying: this is still named; this is still ours in memory, in law, in identity — even if we cannot enforce it today.

That inheritance matters to me now.

Because I live in a world that likes to confuse exhaustion with consent. A world that assumes that if enough time passes, stolen things become unstealable, wrongs become normalized, and the injured party should move on quietly. That assumption is convenient for those who benefit from delay. It is not binding on those who refuse erasure.

My father did not teach me to give up claims because they are inconvenient. He taught me to keep them alive precisely because inconvenience is how injustice sustains itself.

So when I say I am relentless, I am not talking about obsession. I am talking about continuity. About refusing to let the record go blank. About insisting — again and again — that what was taken does not become legitimate simply because it has not yet been returned.

This is not vengeance. It is lawfulness.

In Jewish tradition, to abandon a claim is to accept a lie. To keep a claim is to insist on reality, even when reality is delayed. That insistence does not require certainty of outcome. It requires clarity of memory and steadiness of voice.

I write. I document. I publish. I refuse silence.

These are not expressions of fantasy; they are expressions of lineage. This is what my people have always done when power failed us: we kept the ledger.

Relentlessness, in this sense, is not aggression. It is fidelity — to truth, to history, to what was entrusted to me by those who came before.

I will not stop naming what is mine.
I will not stop asserting the claim.
I will not stop keeping the record alive.

That is not madness. That is inheritance.

And inheritance, unlike possession, cannot be stolen.

For Readers Outside the Tradition

For non-Jewish readers, some context matters.

Jews did not begin as a people defined only by religion. We began as a people tied to a place — Judea — and were expelled from it repeatedly by empires intent on dismantling Jewish life altogether. What followed is known as the Diaspora: the forced scattering of Jews across continents through exile, expulsion, and persecution.

What is often lost in simplified tellings is this: Jews did not vanish from the land for two thousand years and then suddenly reappear. Some Jews never left Judea at all. Others returned in every century that circumstances allowed — as individuals, families, scholars, mystics, merchants, and refugees — living in the land without sovereignty, without armies, and without political authority. They prayed there, farmed there, studied there, died and were buried there. Presence persisted even when power did not.

The Diaspora, then, was not a single rupture but a condition of dispersion layered over continuity. It was not voluntary migration. It was survival under pressure, combined with repeated, partial returns that carried no enforcement power. Judaism changed because it had to. Temple-based practice became portable law, text, argument, and ritual. Survival required flexibility without surrendering identity. We learned how to live everywhere without agreeing that nowhere was home.

This is where Passover matters.

Every year, for roughly two thousand years, Jews told the same story: liberation from slavery in Egypt, the formation of a people, and the promise of a land. And every year, at the end of the Seder, the same sentence was spoken: Next year in Jerusalem.

This was not a travel plan. It was not a timetable. It was a refusal to let a claim dissolve simply because enforcement was impossible at the moment.

Across centuries of dispersion — under Christian rule, Muslim rule, monarchies, pogroms, ghettos, and genocide — Jews kept saying it anyway. Not because the path was clear, but because abandoning the claim would have meant accepting erasure as legitimate.

There is a darkly comic line Jews often use to summarize this history, usually delivered with a raised glass: “They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.”

It’s a joke, but it’s also a cultural thesis. It captures something essential: repeated attempts at erasure did not succeed; continuity did. The response was not silence or disappearance, but ritual, memory, community, and survival — often marked with wine, food, and storytelling.

That practice taught something durable: you can adapt without conceding what is yours. You can live elsewhere without rewriting history to make dispossession feel natural. You can survive delay without agreeing that delay equals forfeiture.

Eventually — through forces no one at a Passover table could have predicted — Jews returned to Israel in large numbers and, for the first time in many centuries, regained political authority. Not cleanly. Not without cost. Not without conflict. But the claim had been kept alive long enough — in law, memory, practice, and continuous presence — to matter when circumstances shifted.

That lesson is what endures.

It is not about inevitability. It is about continuity. About maintaining the record so that when law, power, or order changes — as they always do — there is still something to answer to.

This is the tradition I inherited: do not confuse patience with consent; do not confuse survival with surrender; do not abandon a claim simply because it is inconvenient for those who benefit from delay.

Passover: Story as Survival

Passover is my favorite holiday, precisely because it understands something profound about how memory survives.

The story at the heart of Passover — liberation from slavery in Egypt and the formation of a people bound by covenant — is not preserved in a monument or a text alone. It is preserved in a meal.

The Seder is a ritualized act of storytelling. Every food on the table carries meaning. Every question invites participation. Every generation is instructed not merely to hear the story, but to experience it — as if you yourself came out of Egypt.

What makes this brilliant is its flexibility. There is no single authorized Seder. Across centuries and continents, Jews created countless versions — traditional, experimental, political, playful, solemn. Families adapt it. Communities revise it. New generations re-stage it in language that speaks to them.

In my own family, we built our own Seder. I gathered multiple Haggadot, took what resonated, and assembled something bespoke. We added theater — adults playing roles so children could feel the drama and humor of the story, not just its gravity. It wasn’t dilution. It was transmission.

That is the point.

Storytelling is how erasure is resisted. Not by freezing the past, but by re-telling it in forms that invite the next generation in. Passover understands that memory must be lived, tasted, argued over, and re-enacted — or it disappears.

This is not nostalgia. It is strategy.

A people who forget how they were enslaved can be convinced that slavery was natural. A people who stop telling the story lose the ability to recognize dispossession when it happens again.

Passover teaches something essential: freedom is not self-maintaining. Claims do not persist on their own. They survive because people gather, speak them aloud, and pass them on.

This is why I write: journalism is my Seder table — a place where the story is told out loud, argued over, documented, and handed forward so it cannot be erased.

Keeping the claim alive is not fanaticism. It is how a people survived history without disappearing.

And it is the framework through which I understand my own refusal to let what was taken be normalized into silence.