Last week, something shifted in the world. We all knew that Iran preached wiping Israel and the United States off the map, but most of us assumed these were threats that could never actually materialize. After all, the destruction of whole countries and the whole world is the stuff of movies.  Surely a sane adult is in charge, and life in the United States will go on tomorrow as it has today.

The world is blessed that Israel is not like the United States. Israel is one of 100 or so countries which are less than 80 years old, but Israel is the strongest and most developed of them. Israel has enormous military intelligence and power but is unique in that it feels its vulnerability deeply. The past, for the Jew, is present. Eighty years ago, we had no power, we were thrown from place to place and every third Jew was murdered. Now the Jewish country is the only one willing to stand up to an enemy that, with its mix of nuclear development and medieval hatred and aggression, threatens to destroy the world.   

Israel’s memory of the Shoah obligates it to face reality like no other country. Others fool themselves into taking for granted that in the developed world, for us wealthy westerners, there will be a tomorrow. But Israel sees things differently. As the Israeli ambassador put it, had Israel done nothing and Iran launched a nuclear warhead at Israel, the world would have given beautiful eulogies for Israel. But we don’t want eulogies; we want life.

In the past few Torah portions, the Jewish people have prepared to march into the Land of Israel and face war. The people were counted for war and put in formation. The leaders were appointed, and Temple vessels—the Ark and the trumpets—were given secondary military roles. But in this week’s parsha, Shelach, when we got to the land we were too afraid to enter it and had to spend 40 years in the desert. To be a nation in a land requires independence and bravery. One must be responsible for one’s own people and take action and risks. The Jewish people, a people only a year out of slavery, were afraid and said they wanted to go back to Egypt. Slavery is the opposite of being an independent nation. No decisions are one’s own to make; there is no freedom that comes from responsibility, which is the prerequisite for an independent nation.

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. It seemed that the whole of human history pointed in the direction of liberal democracy as the only regime consistent with “the nature of man as man.” The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union had broken up, and Fukuyama theorised a “last man”—the sort of person who will live when history has reached its end, when everybody is satisfied with society and no new social ideal will upset it. There will still be events, but nothing fundamental on the world map will change.

Liberal democracy did not unfold as Fukuyama theorized in The End of History, but perhaps this moment of Israel’s power to redraw the world map in the blink of an eye is the kind of ending which could anchor democratic values and make a statement on the world stage about what it means to be a moral, free nation today. The road there is not as utopian as Fukuyama’s, but it may be more realistic.  Perhaps defeating in the blink of an eye the enemies of democracy and of the Jewish people is indeed the end of history and the beginning of peace. If so, the Jewish people, who were the first man of Western history, will, in Fukuyama’s terms, be its last man.