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What do you do when you don't know how to move forward? When you’re stuck between a place that no longer works for you and a vast sea of uncertain possibilities?

When the Jewish people left Egypt, they soon faced a terrifying sea that seemed impossible to cross. No one knew what to do until Nachshon ben Aminadav had the courage to jump into the water and walk until it almost covered his mouth. Only then did the sea split, and the Jewish people were able to continue their journey.

How did Nachshon keep moving forward with no guarantee he would make it through? What can you do when you face your own sea-crossing moment?

Here are six ways to move forward even when you’re afraid.

1. Make Your First Step Small

Fear grows when your first step is too big and intimidating. Break it down into one small, concrete task: one phone call, a short email, even one sentence. Make your goal movement, not completion.

Nachshon took one small step and then another until a path opened up before him.

2. Focus on What You Can Control

You may not be able to control the outcome, but you can show up. Separating your effort from the result makes starting easier and reduces the pressure.

When the Jewish people walked into the sea, they didn't know if they would make it across. They focused only on what they could do to move forward.

3. Expect Discomfort

Don't wait for fear to disappear before you begin. Assume it will stay with you and move forward anyway. You don't need to eliminate anxiety to take action.

Recall a time when you were anxious but pushed through anyway. Even after the sea split, walking between walls of water was frightening. They moved forward while still afraid.

4. Ask Yourself: What's the Cost of Not Doing This?

Consider what happens if you stay where you are. What will you regret? What opportunities will you miss?

When Nachshon stepped into the sea, he knew the cost of turning back was too high. An uncertain possibility of life beat the familiar imprisonment of the past.

5. Limit Your Overthinking

Give yourself five minutes to think, then act. Overthinking keeps you frozen. There will always be more options to ponder with every step forward.

When the Jewish people crossed the sea, they couldn't let their thoughts paralyze them. Once they decided to move forward, they didn't look back.

6. Anchor Your Action to Your Identity

Think about who you are and who you want to become. Try shifting from "I feel scared" to "I'm someone who shows up even when I'm uncomfortable." Your feelings are temporary, but your identity creates lifelong momentum.

When Nachshon led the way into the sea, he saw himself not just as an individual but as a leader paving the way for the Jewish nation. Walking through walls of water, the people didn't see themselves as alone but as part of something larger, carried forward to safety.

When the Jewish people left Egypt, they faced a seemingly insurmountable obstacle the moment they reached the sea. They could turn back toward slavery, stay frozen on the shore, or follow Nachshon into uncertain waters.

Each of us faces our own sea-splitting moments when we must move forward even when we are afraid. But if we know who we are, what we stand for, and who walks beside us, we too will reach the other shore, one step at a time.

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In the course of retelling the Passover story, the Haggadah quotes the passage from the first chapter of Exodus in which Pharaoh justified the unspeakable repression he intended to inflict on the Hebrews.

“Come, let us deal wisely with them,” he exhorted his nation. “Otherwise they may become so numerous that if there is a war they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the land.” Though the tyrant’s idea of dealing wisely with the Hebrews began with slave labor, it wasn’t long before he advanced to murder. “Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying: ‘Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile.’”

Pharaoh’s false accusation set the pattern for what became one of the history’s most durable antisemitic conspiracies. Down through the millennia Jews have been portrayed as a fifth column, malevolently disposed to betray the nations in which they live. Again and again, the libel resurfaces: When war comes, it will be the Jews who caused it, or who had the most to gain from its outcome, or who manipulated others into fighting and dying. The libel is as old as the pyramids — and as current as today’s news.

To be clear, this is not an essay about antisemites. It is addressed to good and reasonable people who would never knowingly endorse bigotry.

Michael Oren, the distinguished historian who was Israel’s ambassador to Washington during the Obama administration, observed recently that the war against Iran has revived “the slanderous claim, from right and left, that Jews have dragged America into a futile war.” The ideological range of those promoting that accusation spans the spectrum. Oren quotes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, podcaster Tucker Carlson, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and MAGA fanatic Candace Owens. He could have easily extended his list.

But it is only the most recent incarnation of Pharaoh's logic.

The modern template was forged in the early 19th century, when the Rothschild banking family was portrayed by French propagandists as profiting from Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo — proving Jews could engineer wars for their own benefit.

In a 1941 speech, American aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh recycled an ancient libel when he told an America First rally in Iowa that Jews were among the “most important groups” agitating for war.

Henry Ford blamed Jews for World War I and bought a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to publish vitriolic articles like "Jewish Dictatorship of the United States during War." A generation later, Charles Lindbergh revived Ford's smear. At a 1941 America First rally in Des Moines, he accused Jews of being "war agitators" who were "pressing this country toward war."

The calumny is indestructible. When President George H.W. Bush assembled a coalition to drive Iraq from Kuwait, former White House aide Patrick Buchanan railed that only two groups were "beating the drums for war in the Middle East" — the Israeli government and its "amen corner in the United States." The 9/11 attacks instantly spawned a false rumor that 4,000 Jews had been warned to stay home from the World Trade Center. That fueled lies, still circulating, that Zionists had orchestrated the attacks. And when Harvard's Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer indicted "the Israel lobby" for the decision to go to war in Iraq, the same ugly slur was cloaked in academic respectability.

So here’s a question for those whose outrage at the current war seems to orbit around Israel, Zionists, or Jewish influence: Shouldn’t this history give you pause?

I am not questioning your honesty. I am not calling you antisemitic. I am asking something more unsettling: Are you sure you're not falling into the same trap as all those well-meaning people in centuries past, who genuinely believed that wars were being waged to advance Jewish interests, never realizing that they were perpetuating a classic big lie?

My purpose isn't to convince you that your views about the present war are wrong. It is to remind you that Jews have been falsely blamed for the world's wars throughout history — and that there have always been decent people who were seduced into believing it, certain that where there is so much smoke, there must be fire.

Every Passover, Jews recount the story of Pharaoh's slander and what it led to — not only as ancient history, but as living warning. "In every generation," the Haggadah teaches, "they rise up against us." For millennia, the world's wars have been blamed on Jewish cunning and Jewish manipulation — the same "hateful old lie," as Oren calls it. When you find yourself reaching for an explanation that sounds remarkably like the one Pharaoh offered 34 centuries ago, are you sure you're making an argument grounded in truth? Or are you, just possibly, recycling the oldest lie in the world?

This op-ed originally appeared in the Boston Globe

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Every year at the Seder, we read about four sons. The Fourth Son is the one who does not know how to ask. He is the one sitting in our universities, our newsrooms, our communal institutions, and sometimes at our own Seder tables.

He is the one my non-Jewish friends ask me about: We expected hostility from the usual places. What we didn't expect was Jews making the case against their own people better than Israel's enemies ever could. Can you explain this?

Their confusion is not political; it’s moral. They struggle to understand how a people forged by persecution could so readily supply the language used to delegitimize their own survival. Jewish students organizing anti-Israel protests. Jewish academics signing letters accusing Israel of genocide. Jewish public figures condemning Jewish power more fiercely than Jewish enemies ever have.

This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is visible, documented, and growing. And it demands an honest explanation.

The Haggadah offers one.

Rudderless

The Fourth Son is traditionally understood as disengaged or uninformed. But in our generation, his condition looks different. He is not empty of Jewish identity. He has fragments of it. He knows he is Jewish. What he lacks is a rudder — an internal framework that allows him to think, question, and interpret the world through a Jewish lens.

#He feels Jewish but cannot articulate what that identity stands for. So when pressure comes — social, moral, institutional — he cannot resist it.

He has symbols without substance, memory without meaning, ethics without peoplehood. He feels Jewish but cannot articulate what that identity stands for, what it demands, or how it should shape his judgment when the pressure comes.

So when pressure comes — social, moral, institutional — he cannot resist it. The loudest voices, the strongest consensus, the greatest social rewards end up deciding for him. His Jewishness does not guide his judgment. The world around him reshapes it.

The Fourth Son is rudderless at sea; the strongest waves decide his direction.

After Oct 7

Since October 7, the pressure on Jewish identity has been unlike anything most living Jews have experienced. Jewish students have reported feeling compelled to publicly disavow Israel simply to maintain social standing. The price of Jewish particularity — of saying we have a right to exist and defend ourselves as a people — has risen sharply in elite cultural and academic spaces.

For Jews with a strong internal framework, this pressure is uncomfortable but navigable. They can criticize Israeli policy fiercely, hold genuine moral tensions, and still maintain clarity about what Jewish survival requires. Judaism has always welcomed fierce self-critique. The prophets rebuked Israel. The Talmud argues endlessly. Cheshbon hanefesh, honest moral accounting, is a core Jewish practice and strength.

But there is a crucial difference between these two statements:

"We need to do better."
versus
"We are the problem."

The first is moral responsibility, the second is something else. When Jews reserve their harshest judgment for other Jews, adopt the language of those who deny Jewish legitimacy, and treat solidarity with their own people as suspect, critique has crossed into something the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing identified nearly a century ago: Jewish self-hatred.

As A Jew

In the modern era, Jewish self-rejection has acquired a distinctive voice: "As a Jew…"

"As a Jew, I must condemn…" "Jewish ethics demand we oppose…" "I'm Jewish, and that's why I say Zionism is the problem."

Jewish identity is invoked not to express solidarity, but to legitimize distance from the Jewish people. Jewishness becomes a credential, a way of saying I am not one of those Jews. These statements, eagerly amplified by Israel's enemies, provide cover for accusations that would be recognized as antisemitic if they came from anyone else.

This is not, for the most part, driven by malice. Many of those who speak this way are sincere. They are compassionate people responding to genuine moral pain. But moral reasoning does not develop in a vacuum. When Jewish power is consistently framed as suspect, when Jewish self-defense is treated as uniquely requiring justification, opposition to Jewish sovereignty can begin to feel like ethical clarity rather than adaptation to a hostile moral framework.

What begins as ethical concern can harden, over time, into internalized condemnation not of specific policies or leaders, but of Jewish peoplehood itself.

Open the Door

The Haggadah's response to the Fourth Son is not argument or rebuke. It is an opening.

#What this moment asks of us is clarity — knowing who we are, where we come from, what we have carried for three thousand years, and what we are still here to do.

The Haggadah says, “You open for him.” You don't wait for curiosity to emerge. You don't win him back with polemics. You give him language, belonging, and a place inside the story, before the distance hardens into something more permanent.

What this moment asks of us is clarity — knowing who we are, where we come from, what we have carried for three thousand years, and what we are still here to do.

Jewish identity, held clearly and carried with confidence, is not a moral burden to be managed or explained away. It is a moral inheritance to be proud of.

The Fourth Son needs to digest that.

This Passover, open the door.

The ideas in this article are drawn from my forthcoming book, The Fourth Son: Jewish Identity, Self-Hatred, and the Courage to Stand Alone, scheduled for publication at the end of 2026.

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In 1492, a Benedictine abbot named Johannes Trithemius sat down to write a treatise defending the ancient art of manuscript copying against a dangerous new technology. He argued that hand-copied text on parchment would outlast printed text on paper by centuries. He made the case that the labor of copying Scripture was itself a form of prayer, a devotional act that no machine could replicate. He was, in the most literal sense, a gatekeeper making his last stand.

He had the treatise printed.

Because that was the only way anyone would read it.

This is the central irony of every wave of democratizing technology: the experts who argue most forcefully against the new tool are often already using it. And yet their concerns are not always wrong. They are just incomplete. The question is whether we have the honesty to hold both truths at once, and the courage to choose freedom over the familiar cage.

The Abbot and the Press

Trithemius was not a fool or a reactionary. He was the abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Sponheim, a serious scholar who expanded his abbey’s library from 40 books to over 2,000. He understood what the printing press could do. He used it constantly for his own work. Thirty printed editions of his writings appeared during the 15th century alone.

And yet in De Laude Scriptorum, written in 1492, he made a case that deserves to be read carefully rather than dismissed. He wrote: “The word written on parchment will last a thousand years. The printed word is on paper. How long will it last? The most you can expect a book of paper to survive is two hundred years.” ¹

He was not entirely wrong. Early printed books on paper were genuinely less durable than manuscript text on vellum. This was a real quality concern, not a projected one. Parchment manuscripts from the 8th century still exist today in near-perfect condition. Many early printed books did not survive two centuries.

But Trithemius was also defending something beyond durability. He was defending a way of life, a role, an identity built around being one of the few people in Europe who could produce a book. And when his own monks at Sponheim disagreed with him, when they found the task of endless copying “both irksome and pointless” and finally rebelled against his regime in 1505, forcing him to leave the monastery, what was lost was not the books. The books kept coming. What was lost was his position as the indispensable guardian of them.

The Volunteer Encyclopedia that Beat the Experts

In 2001, Jimmy Wales launched an online encyclopedia that anyone in the world could write and edit. No credentials required. No editorial board. No gatekeeping of any kind. The professional response was swift and confident: this was obviously inferior.

Encyclopedia Britannica had spent 250 years building a model around credentialed experts, rigorous editorial review, and institutional authority. The idea that anonymous volunteers writing for free could produce anything comparable was not a serious proposition.

In 2005, the journal Nature published a peer-reviewed study comparing Wikipedia’s accuracy on scientific topics directly against Britannica’s. The difference in error rates was not statistically significant.

The experts were right that some Wikipedia articles were poor. They were right that the model produced uneven quality, that anyone could write anything, that the floor had dropped dramatically. What they could not see was that the ceiling had not dropped with it. The tool gave access to thousands of people who happened to know things that no paid editorial team could have recruited. A retired volcanologist in New Zealand. A Talmud scholar in Brooklyn. A working cardiologist in Bangalore. The gate had kept them out not because their knowledge was insufficient but because the infrastructure of credentialed publishing had no way to reach them.

Wikipedia was not an isolated event. The pattern ran through photography a decade before Wikipedia. When smartphone computational photography arrived, and Sony and others built intelligent auto-modes that produced technically beautiful images without manual settings, professional photographers split into two camps. Some said the auto-mode image is flat, it has no intentionality, the craft is in the decisions the camera is now making for you. They were right about some images. Others said anyone who makes a stunning image made a stunning image, full stop. They were right about others. The tell, then as now, was when the critique stopped being about the specific photograph and started being about whether the photographer had suffered sufficiently to deserve it.

Paul Théberge documented the pattern in 1997, studying how digital music tools were reshaping not just who could make music but what making music meant. As one academic review summarized his central argument: “MIDI signifies a democratization of the musical marketplace, with technology as both a response to musician needs and a driving force that musicians must contend with.”²

The specific domain changes. The dynamic does not.

The technology does not just respond to what practitioners need. It reshapes what being a practitioner means. Every generation of tool-makers hands the next generation a question: now that access is no longer the barrier, what will you do with that?

Today: The Vibe Coder and the Copywriter

The pattern is running again, right now, in two places simultaneously.

Software engineers who spent years learning architecture, debugging, and systems design are watching non-engineers ship working products using Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot. There are solo founders today running products with tens of thousands of users, built over a weekend, with no engineering background, carrying real technical debt quietly underneath. The product works. The users love it. The architecture is a ticking clock. Both of those things are true simultaneously.

Copywriters who built careers on voice, strategy, and the craft of persuasion are watching AI produce serviceable copy in seconds. In both cases, the gatekeepers face the same two-part question Trithemius faced: is my objection about quality, or about identity?

This moment has a name. Call it Expertise Asymmetry Collapse: the point at which a new tool closes the gap between what an expert can produce and what a newcomer can produce so rapidly that the expert's identity cannot absorb the change at the same speed. The quality gap narrows. The identity gap does not. And in that space between them, the gate goes up.

Where the Experts are Right

On vibe coding: most AI-assisted products do carry real technical debt. Insecure architecture, no error handling, unmaintainable logic, hidden fragility at scale. These are not projected concerns. They are documented. A non-engineer who does not know what they do not know can ship a product that works until it very visibly does not.

The Wikipedia model produced millions of articles of genuine value and also millions of articles that should not exist. Both outcomes came from the same open gate.

On AI copywriting: most AI copy is generic. It lacks the specific voice, the earned insight, the emotional precision that converts at the margins. A prompt is not a brief. A generation is not a strategy. The craft carries real invisible knowledge that the tool does not yet fully replicate.

Both of these things are true. They deserve to be said plainly.

Protecting Identity, Not Craft

Here is where honesty gets harder.

When an engineer dismisses a working, user-loved product because the builder skipped the suffering, the objection is no longer about the code. When a copywriter rejects AI-assisted work that is genuinely sharp because the process offends them, the objection is no longer about the writing. The critique has shifted from “this is weak” to “you did not earn this.” And “you did not earn this” is not a quality metric. It is a gate.

Real quality loss: Democratization produces real mediocrity. New tools multiply the 90% alongside the 10%. Craft carries invisible knowledge that access alone cannot transfer.

Projected quality loss: When the critique shifts from the work to the path, it is no longer about quality. Effort justification is not a standard. The gate is protecting identity, not craft.

Trithemius used the press while arguing against it. The question is not whether his durability concern was real. It was. The question is whether he could tell the difference between defending parchment and defending his position as its guardian. The evidence suggests he could not. His monks could.

Emet - Truth

The Hebrew word emet, truth, is spelled aleph, mem, tav (א-מ-ת). The first letter of the alphabet, the middle letter, and the last. Complete truth - from start to finish. Not partial truth dressed as the whole.

Partial truth here looks like: “this tool produces mediocrity.” Complete truth looks like: “this tool produces mediocrity, and I am also protecting something beyond quality, and I have not been fully honest about which objection I am making at any given moment.”

Holding both is uncomfortable. It requires a specific kind of courage to say: yes, the quality concern is real, and also, some of my resistance is about what happens to my identity when the gate I guarded opens. Trithemius could not say that. His monks had to say it for him, with their feet, in 1505.

This is not a failure of character. It is a failure of honesty that can happen to anyone who has built their life around a scarce skill. The invitation is not to stop caring about quality. It is to tell the truth about which concern is which.

Expertise Asymmetry Collapse is not a threat to craft. It is a threat to the story you have been telling about yourself. Those are not the same thing. Emet requires knowing the difference.

Freedom and the Fleshpots of Egypt

The Israelites left Egypt and almost immediately began to grieve it.

“’We remember the fish we ate for free in Egypt,’ they said” (Numbers 11:5). They were standing on the other side of the sea, liberated, and they were mourning the food of their captivity. The prison had been terrible. The food had been familiar. And familiar, after long enough, feels like home.

The word for freedom in Hebrew is not chofesh, release from constraint. It is cherut, the freedom to act from your deepest values, from truth, rather than from your fear. The Exodus was not merely physical liberation. It was the shedding of a slave identity that had become comfortable. The hardest part was not the sea. The hardest part was the 40 years of learning to want something other than the familiar prison.

The expert who cannot release the gatekeeping role is in the same desert. Free to create, to teach, to build at a higher level than the tool can reach. And still grieving the hierarchy. Still mourning the Egypt where being one of the few people who could make a book, make a record, write a line of code, made you indispensable.

The breakthrough available to the expert is not to stop caring about quality. It is to stop confusing quality with scarcity. When Trithemius’s monks left the scriptorium, the Word did not become less sacred. It became available to more people. That is not a diminishment of the sacred. That is its purpose.

And the breakthrough available to the newcomer is symmetrical. Now that the tool gave you access, are you willing to develop the judgment that access alone cannot give you? Wikipedia's best articles were not written by the first person who had access. They were written and rewritten dozens of times by people who cared enough to go back. The tool gave access. The quality came from what people chose to do with that access once the gate was open. Those are not the same thing, and collapsing them is its own kind of dishonesty.

The tool lowered the floor. The craft raised the ceiling. Both are necessary. The question is whether you have the honesty to know which one you are working on at any given moment.

What Freedom Actually Requires

Teshuva is commonly translated as repentance, but the word means return. A turning back toward your truest self. Not self-punishment or erasure. Return.

The return available in this moment, for anyone who has built a career around a craft that is being democratized, is not to abandon the craft. It is to return to why you loved it in the first place. Was it the scarcity? Or was it the making? Was it the gate? Or was it what was on the other side?

If it was the making, the tool is good news. The floor just dropped. More people can begin. You can go further. You can teach. You can do the work that requires judgment the tool does not yet have, and you can do more of it, and faster, because the parts that were only ever about process are now handled.

If it was the gate, the grief is real. And the invitation of Passover is to grieve it, fully, and then walk through the sea anyway. Because on the other side is not the absence of craft. It is craft no longer defended by scarcity. Craft that stands on its own. Craft that earns its place not because it was hard to access but because it is genuinely worth accessing.

Trithemius was right that something was dying. The age of the pious monastic copyist was over. He could feel it. What he could not see, because grief does not allow you to see clearly, was what was being born. The Reformation. The Renaissance. The Scientific Revolution. Hundreds of millions of people who could read. Books in every language. Knowledge that had been locked in monastery libraries for a thousand years, free.

Every wave of democratization is a Passover moment. Something is dying. Something is being born. The question is whether you will let the grief become the destination, or whether you will tell the truth about what you are actually grieving, and walk through.

The gate was never the point. What you were guarding was.

Footnotes

• Johannes Trithemius, De Laude Scriptorum, 1492
  Source: historyofinformation.com
• Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine, Wesleyan University Press, 1997
  Source: weslpress.org

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0:00 Introduction — the claim everyone quotes
1:20 Absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence
3:10 Why Egyptian records would never mention the Exodus
5:00 Minimalists vs. maximalists — the archaeological debate explained
7:30 Tel Dan — one inscription that ended the "David was fiction" argument
10:15 The Edomite copper mines and the invisible civilisation
14:00 Semitic migrations into Egypt — confirmed by archaeology
16:30 Brick-making, straw quotas, and the Louvre papyrus
19:45 Joseph sold for 20 shekels — why that price is a tell
22:00 Tell el-Dab'a — 12 pillars, 12 tombs, and missing bones
25:30 The Sea of Reeds — what Yam Suph actually means, and the NASA model
29:00 The meaning of the Exodus beyond the archaeology

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00:00 – Welcome & Why Jews Are Obsessed With Egypt
01:20 – The Most Important Message of Passover: Unconditional Love
02:32 – If Pesach Is About Freedom, Why So Many Rules?
03:48 – Your Personal Egypt: Slavery in 2026
05:08 – Doubts at the Seder Table – Is That Okay?
06:09 – Chametz, Ego & the Difference Between Arrogance and Self-Worth
08:34 – The Plagues, Free Will, Pharaoh & Archaeological Evidence
21:09 – The Skulener Rebbe's Matzah: A True Story

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