Meteors streak through the night sky, lighting up for a brief second before vanishing into nothing. They burn because the Earth protects itself. Our planet’s atmosphere—thin but powerful—defends it from destruction. The meteors disintegrate, and the world goes on unharmed.

The Moon has no such shield. Every rock, every speck of space dust that comes its way slams straight into its surface. That’s why it’s pockmarked with craters—permanent scars of endless bombardment. Without protection, the Moon endures the full force of the universe’s hostility.

So it is with the Jewish people.

Across centuries, Jews have existed as the exposed body in a world of friction and fire. Without a “cultural atmosphere” to cushion them, they’ve absorbed the hits directly—pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, boycotts, and genocides. The Jewish story is a catalogue of collisions that the rest of humanity barely felt.

Christians and Muslims, by contrast, have lived for centuries within the thick atmosphere of dominance. Their societies, their empires, their majority status wrapped them in protection and privilege. When hatred sparks, their vast numbers and institutions disperse the heat before it burns. They are Earth-like—shielded by mass and power.

The Jew, wherever he resides as a minority, has always been lunar—alone in orbit, lacking an atmospheric buffer. Every ideological meteor, every political upheaval, every cultural storm leaves its mark. From England in 1290 to Spain in 1492, from Kishinev in 1903 to Pittsburgh in 2018, the craters accumulate.

If Christianity and Islam represent the Earth—secure, dominant, cushioned by atmosphere—Judaism remains the Moon, enduring open space without defense, absorbing the hits and still shining back upon the world.

In that celestial backdrop, we are now in a major meteor shower. We look up at them pounding the Moon and lighting the Earthly skies. We see the Moon amassing more scars and pray the projectiles will be small enough to incinerate before hitting Earth.

Jews had learned to survive without a shielding atmosphere for two thousand years. And then, in 1948, it got one, in the very place where the Jewish forefathers lived. Now, when the meteor showers of Jew-hatred arrive, those in Israel feel the impacts when the projectiles are large, while their diaspora brothers on the Moon get pummeled by lighter fare.

The Earth and Moon Jews have been barraged these last two years. They are scarred but eternal, waiting for the wave of debris to pass by as quickly as possible.