Like any self-respecting middle-aged hypochondriac Jew, I spend a lot of time reading about illnesses. It’s very important for me to see all the strange diseases I need to worry about. 

But in my late-night roaming into the depths of WebMd, I’ve also started wondering what diseases we might have as a society and as a community. And, of course, professional deformation: what conditions afflict us as funders? 

Looking at the rarest diseases, I found two that we do have and one that we don’t have but should. 

The first disease we have is a very rare condition called the Anton-Babinsky syndrome. In this condition, the patients are sick or disabled but refuse to — or are unable to understand that they’re ill. When confronted with the obviousness of the illness, such as being asked why they are in a hospital, patients resort to colorful and extremely creative confabulations. In some cases, people who are blind maintain that they can see, and they’ll go on describing completely imaginary scenarios that they “see.” 

These people are not lying. They are absolutely convinced that they are healthy and may even become violent when confronted with the obvious fact that they are sick. 

We are a little like that. We refuse to see that many of our efforts as a community are not working. Yes, we always step up in times of crisis, but we delude ourselves regarding our obvious failure to address the issues that plague us. As a community, for example, we’ve never spent so much on fighting antisemitism, and we’ve never had so much antisemitism. 

And like Anton patients, we deny and fabulate. 

In Jewish identity, we also have Anton syndrome, we refuse to see how sick it is that the richest community in the history of the Jewish People, is failing to provide high-quality, affordable Jewish education to every Jewish person.  

Even after the enormous trauma and dislocation of the last two years, we keep refusing to see the many ways in which our community needs to change. 

So that’s the first disease we suffer: we are willfully unaware of our dysfunctions and, instead of addressing them, we deflect, we come up with justifications and excuses. Eventually, we end up living in our own world of certainty, unable to see the real world. 

Needless to say, this condition is potentially fatal, because those with Anton-Babinsky, by denying their illness they also refuse treatment. The same way in which we, many times, refuse to change.

The second rare condition we suffer from is called the Cotard delusion, and it’s a peculiar illness in which the patient is healthy but is convinced that she’s dead. 

Eventually, these patients refuse to get out of bed, eat or drink; and then, of course, their delusion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

We, as a community and a society, suffer from this disease as well. Instead of addressing our problems, we play dead. We assume that there’s nothing we can do because we are in the midst of an irreversible and inevitable decline. In fact, declinism and catastrophism seem to be the dominant ideologies of the 21st century. It’s the only thing the left and right agree on: that we are in decline and we are on the eve of something catastrophic. 

Declinism is a tool of power. When people believe society is falling apart, they are more willing to surrender freedom to avert catastrophe. Every autocrat comes to power saying that the country needs to be saved — and for that, people have to give away freedoms and invest more and more power in the autocrat. 

Because it’s all about power, today’s declinism has no vision. Politics today is about preventing stuff. It’s about preserving privileges or rights, which is fine, but it’s never enough, never about the things we can build together. 

We keep hearing, “Make America great again,” but “again” like when? When were we better off? 

The left tells us that we need to deconstruct, but after we finish deconstructing, what are we building? 

Today, we are caught between a right that wants to take us back to a mythical past that never was and a left that proposes a future that can’t be. 

In the same way that Cotard patients end up really dying, communities obsessed with decline start producing their decline; for example, they stop innovating. They worship the past while destroying the future. 

In the Jewish world, we have our version of declinism and catastrophism and our own version of negative politics. 

We are anti-antisemitism or anti-assimilation, but we are silent on what type of Jewish life we want to build. 

A double negative is not a positive.

In Israel, too, people are defined by what they are against, not really by the vision they have for the society. Many in the government are anti-liberal democracy, but what are they proposing, besides more power for themselves? And many of us (myself included) are anti-anti-democracy, but what’s our vision for Zionism besides opposing a corrupt and incompetent government?

Declinism is based on fear, and in a vicious circle, it creates more fear. 

Which takes me to the third rare disease I found. And this is one that we don’t have, but we should. 

It’s called Urbach-Wiethe disease, and it’s the complete inability to feel fear. 

Now, in real life, this is a very dangerous disease. Patients will pet rattlesnakes because they look cute or decide to jump out of the window because the elevator is taking too long. 

But we seem to have the opposite of that; we seem paralyzed by fear. 

So, imagine if we had a dose of Urbach for a while. 

Imagine what we could do as a community, as leaders, and as funders if we weren’t afraid! 

Afraid of what others would think. 

Of losing your job.

Of losing your space at tables. 

Imagine what you’d be doing now, both personally and philanthropically, if you weren’t afraid of failing. Imagine what the Jewish people could achieve if we weren’t obsessed with the fear of not being liked and accepted by others. 

We all sing “ve haikar lo lefached klal” — the world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid. But we are on our way to building our entire identity around fear.  

Fear prevents us from dreaming. It kills imagination and it destroys empathy. And because we, as funders, are in leadership positions, our fear trickles down to the entire community. 

Now is the worst time for leaders to be afraid, because these times demand more courage than ever. We need to find our voice and speak out in defense of our people, in defense of our values, in defense of democracy. If we say that this is not the time, then it will never be.  

So, how do we extricate ourselves from our delusions? How do we get unstuck? In other words, how do we lead in these times? I’m far from having all the answers, but I’d like to offer a few ideas. 

One: If we want to lead, we need to take responsibility. 

Our elected leaders have become champions in the shady art of not taking responsibility. We, alas, don’t have that luxury. When Moses saw that an Egyptian was beating a Hebrew slave, he didn’t say, “Oh, it’s the previous administration.” The Bible says, “vay’ar ki ein ish,” and he saw that nobody else was taking responsibility, so he stepped up. 

The biggest leadership journey of all time started with a simple act of taking responsibility. 

Our journey needs to start in the same way: by taking responsibility for our failures and understanding that we are now at the wheel. 

Two: To lead, we need to develop and communicate a vision. 

The Bible says, “ve’ein chazon ippara am.” When there’s no vision, the people perish. 

We obviously can’t wait for our political leaders to give us a positive vision for the future. It’s on us to develop it, or help develop it. 

We are the people who created the most positive vision in human history. We surely can do it again. 

Let’s think not only of what we want to fight but of what we are fighting for. Let’s dream big, and equally important, let’s give others — our grantees, our communities — the permission to dream big. 

Three: We need to stand tall and proud. 

Many Jews have internalized the idea that we are a people on probation, as if our acceptance by others is conditional. We aren’t perfect, or even better than others, but we must command the same dignity and respect that any other community would demand. 

It means that you don’t go through life asking forgiveness for being. 

And of course, to be proud, you need to know who you are: your tradition, the history of your people and the commonality of fate that unites us all.

Four: Good leaders learn. 

They study more than others. They read more than others. 

Of the king, the Torah says that he must write his own sefer Torah, which “must always be with him, and he shall read from it all the days of his life.” 

Without constant study, leadership lacks direction and depth.

We live in a time of enormous change, and that requires of us permanent learning. And requires something even more difficult: unlearning; getting rid of mental biases and conceptual frameworks that have become obsolete. 

Five: Philanthropic leaders can’t lead alone. 

In this crisis, we have become much better at collaborating – examples like the “Day After Fund,” to help in Israel’s reconstruction, or the “Hayom” fund, are massive steps in the right direction, but much more is needed. 

This is the time to think less in terms of “me” and more in terms of “we.” 

And six: Be kind. 

We live in a time in which people equate being a jerk with being brave. It’s the exact opposite. 

When you’re unkind, you show weakness, not strength. 

In these unprecedented times, everybody is fighting a tough battle in their hearts. I know I am. Everybody needs kindness. Give it to others and yourself. 

My friends, let’s make a commitment here and now: We won’t deny. We won’t play dead. We will try, at least, to be fearless. 

Decline is never an inevitability. It is always a choice, and the antidote to declinism is not optimism, it’s action. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that we are now in a time that will be studied in history classes 1,000 years from now. What do we want history to say about us? We don’t choose the time in which we live — this is when and where the cosmic lottery, or the will of God, placed us, and every person needs to ask herself what for. 

As we go back home, we need to remember that we are way stronger than we think. We are not limited by our abilities or our strength, but by our lack of vision. 

We just celebrated Purim, a holiday about antisemitism but also a holiday of joy. It looks contradictory, but it isn’t. Our joy, right after narrowly avoiding extermination, says something critically important: We will not be intimidated. We will not be paralyzed. We will not be defined by our enemies. We will not stop laughing — or, as the Nova survivors say, “we will dance again.”

In our times, when we are reliving the nightmares of the past, we feel that the Bible was right when it said that “there’s nothing new under the sun.”

It’s true. But the Bible forgot one critical detail: each of us can be a new sun.  

Andrés Spokoiny is the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network.