My Dear German Cousins

Dear German Cousins,
The Jewish word for repentance is t’shuva. It is only complete t’shuva when we are confronted with the same situation again and choose to act differently. Imagine a river that has flooded its banks once before, devastating the surrounding fields. True repentance isn’t merely regretting the damage or building a temporary barrier; it’s recognizing the signs of rising waters the next time and diverting the flow with wisdom and resolve. Germany, my cousins, stands at such a confluence today. The shadows of the past—economic despair, ideological seduction, and unchecked extremism—loom once more, disguised in new garments. T’shuva demands not paralysis in guilt, but bold redirection toward a future rooted in our inherent strengths.
Judaism also prohibits mourning too severely. One is not allowed to cut or gash oneself as a sign of grief, make a bald spot, or tear out one’s hair. Grieving follows a cycle of crying (three days), eulogizing (seven), and restrictions on various other practices (a month) and celebrations (a year). This ancient wisdom acknowledges the human need to honor loss, yet it curbs self-destruction. Germany has mourned its darkest chapter—the Holocaust and the Nazi era—for generations, and rightly so. Its crimes are a stain it can not remove. But excessive mourning has become a cultural scar, a self-inflicted wound that saps vitality.
On the one hand, it is as if the nation has been trapped in an eternal shiva, the seven-day mourning period, unable to rise and reclaim its place among the living. Anecdotes abound of post-war Germans who, in their zeal to atone, suppressed national pride to the point of cultural amnesia, for instance the young Berliner in the 1960s who tore down family portraits of his grandfather, a mere soldier, fearing any association with the regime, only to later regret erasing the fuller tapestry of his heritage—engineers, poets, and philosophers who built cathedrals, not just weapons and concentration camps. It’s time to complete the cycle: mourn, yes, but then create a new world on the shoulders of those we’ve lost..
On the other hand is a generation resentful that it is reminded of this past, that can’t understand it and won’t identify with it, that has been taught that there is no G-d, and that is willing again to blame the Jews for the current state of the world.
Europe, America, and most of what is great in the world, have come from our shared Judaeo-Christian tradition. It is a tradition of cooperation, of a certain sacrifice today for a greater tomorrow. It is a tradition of the diligent application of the best parts of oneself to advancing the world. It is a tradition that honors what is special about each human being while also calling him to share responsibility for his community.
This tradition is a grand orchestra, the strings weave melodies of liberty and freedom, the brass blares forth the power of industry and innovation, the winds breathe the spirit of inspiration and faith, and percussion punctuates with rhythmic bursts of creativity and art—all harmonizing under a divine conductor. Germany has been a virtuoso in this ensemble, its Christian roots running deep from the Reformation’s Protestant fervor in the north to the Catholic heartlands of Bavaria, fostering a historical tolerance that, at its best, embraced Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike. This spirit of coexistence, embodied in figures like Martin Luther challenging ecclesiastical corruption and Moses Mendelssohn bridging Enlightenment thought with Jewish tradition in Berlin, propelled a nation where diverse faiths contributed to a cultural and intellectual flourishing.
Germany gave us Bach, whose fugues wove complexity into divine order, and Beethoven, who, deaf and defiant, composed symphonies that echoed the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. These are not mere historical footnotes; they embody the German characteristics of precision, perseverance, and profound depth—traits that propelled innovations from the Catholic Gutenberg’s printing press to the Jew Einstein’s relativity.
Ours is a culture prizing industry, efficiency and innovation, like the Autobahn’s unyielding flow, and the cars you put upon it, and a love for nature, evident in the Romantic wanderings of Goethe through the Black Forest, seeking unity between man and the cosmos. These are the threads of greatness that must be rewoven into a new tapestry of exceptionalism, drawing explicitly from Germany’s Christian heritage of ethical rigor, communal charity, and redemptive grace.
We share what you call the “old testament.” Whether you believe it is the word of G-d or not, it is the distillation of deep and ancient wisdom, proven true, or true-enough, over and over again. And while the bible may have been perverted and corrupted, and has seen evil parade around as priests and rabbis, this is a problem of messenger and not message. The ideals it represents, whether in your Jesus and his Apostles, or in our Abraham, Yitzhak and Yaakov, are what have brought us the miraculous world in which we live. In Christianity, these patriarchs are models of faith—Abraham’s unwavering trust in God’s promise, Isaac’s quiet submission, Jacob’s transformative struggle. But as we discussed earlier, their Christian counterparts might be Peter, the rock of bold faith; James, the martyr of steadfast endurance; and John, the apostle of divine love. These figures remind us that imperfection does not negate the ideal; Peter’s denial was followed by redemption, much like Germany’s post-war reconstruction. The message endures: a call to ethical living, community, and transcendence over base instincts, rooted in the Christian principles that once unified Germany through cathedrals, monasteries, and the moral teachings that inspired social reforms.
The guidance is clear, and some of it is just a reminder of our natures: man and woman He made them, their job to cleave to each other, to be fruitful and multiply. Every living being, given the appropriate conditions to reproduce, does so. Some mate for life. Every mother becomes that at a risk and cost to herself. Every one of us is here because our mother took that risk. And every mother took that risk knowing that her child could choose to follow in the footsteps of the ideal, or could be seduced by a darker side.
Still, it is the taking of that risk that brings the world forward. And when done in the right spirit, and often even when in the wrong, those who go here report more satisfaction in life. Those who choose this path simply buy into the future differently. Consider the anecdote of a Bavarian family in the 1950s: amid the rubble of war, a young couple like the Müllers from Munich chose to marry and have children despite scarcity, planting seeds that grew into the Wirtschaftswunder—the economic miracle. Their “buy-in” was literal: investing sweat and savings in family and community, yielding generations of innovators.
Today, Germany’s birth rate languishes at 1.35 children per woman, well below replacement levels. Marriage and family do not occur as gifts of the divine, but as burdens. This is backwards.
Our strength as humans lies the profound ability to adapt and grow, to innovate beyond crises that once seemed insurmountable. We should do more to acknowledge this strength, celebrating it as the core of our Judeo-Christian heritage rather than diminishing it. Too often, we’ve displaced our concern for people—for the flourishing of human lives—with an obsessive worry about an indifferent Mother Earth, as if the planet’s vast cycles care for our anxieties. More than 50 years ago, environmental activists warned of impending collapse due to overpopulation. The American biologist Paul Ehrlich, the popularizer of this idea in the West through his 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” predicted that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s as the world’s population approached 4 billion. (Notably, the Club of Rome’s 1972 report “Limits to Growth,” which echoed these fears of resource exhaustion and societal breakdown, received significant funding from Germany’s Volkswagen Foundation, highlighting early German involvement in such discussions.) These dire prophecies, while well-intentioned, overlooked humanity’s ingenuity—the same adaptability that has turned deserts into farmlands and harnessed energy from the atom.
Tragically, too many Germans have internalized these fears, choosing not to reproduce as their “contribution” to the environment, opting instead to protest, impede progress, and even destroy art as they glue themselves to the asphalt in streets and galleries in disruptive acts of “despair,” as seen with groups like Last Generation.
Let us redirect that energy: the very glue and asphalt which these protesters use to attach themselves in protest to the streets and galleries represent the fruits of science, engineering, and human spirit that can be harnessed to address our circumstances. We can and should forge human solutions and adaptations for a better world, benefiting both humanity and the environment. This buy-in to the future might well include marriage and family, a return to beauty in creation, and the noble sacrifice that elevates us beyond mere survival.
There is no honor in committing national suicide. This brings us to the precipice we must confront: the modern tolerance of the rise of Islam in Europe echoes the allowance of the Nazi party’s ascent in the 1930s. Then, economic turmoil from the Great Depression, hyperinflation, and the Weimar Republic’s fragility created fertile ground for extremism. Many Germans, weary and disillusioned, tolerated the Nazis’ propaganda, street violence, and gradual erosion of freedoms, viewing them as a necessary corrective to chaos. Austerity measures fueled resentment, and elites underestimated the threat, allowing Hitler to consolidate power through legal means like the Enabling Act.
Similarly, today’s Germans are being forced into austerity by skyrocketing energy costs driven by climate alarmism and policies like the Energiewende, which stifle industry and innovation, leading to job losses in sectors like chemicals and manufacturing, economic stagnation, worsened global pollution through offshored emissions and dirtier power production in Germany, and increased dependency on authoritarian bad actors like Russia (formerly for gas) and China (for critical minerals and solar panels).
Moreover, growing resentment simmers over the bureaucratic state’s increasing meddling, prioritizing resources for a non-contributory, destabilizing Islamic asylee community—diverting housing, welfare, and services—over its own needy citizens who face hardships amid these economic pressures. This brew of economic frustration and perceived injustice could, unchecked, ignite the same type of unrest that birthed the Nazi party in the 1930s, especially amid current trends to police speech and silence proud German voices.
Europe’s Muslim population has grown from about 4.9% in 2016 to projections of 7-14% by 2050, fueled by higher birth rates and migration. While some Muslims integrate, contributing economically, the broader reality is fraught: persistent poverty, segregation, and ideologies incompatible with European values, including rampant anti-Semitism and opposition to secular freedoms. Unlike the Jews, who strove to be more German than the Germans—assimilating deeply into culture, science, and society while enriching it—Islam shows scant respect for its European hosts. Its adherents often seek not to adopt but to overthrow, imposing a theocratic order that subjugates all. This is an evil akin to Nazism: both ideologies would burn down civilizations to make a diminished, oppressive world in their own image.
If a culture refuses to adapt, its adherents should be returned to whence they came. This is not the Judeo-Christian ethic of cooperation and mutual uplift that birthed our greatness. Tolerance of the intolerable invites ruin; Germans must reject the worst among us, this invasive force, and reclaim the spirit of growth embodied in the best of our heritage.
Lurking in the background is a larger malaise: the modern world’s tendency to declare crises as pretexts for control by unelected elites. They proclaim emergencies—climate catastrophes, nationalism’s specter, poverty’s grip—and insist we trust governments to deliver salvation through entitlements: food, housing, medical care. This fosters dependency, stifling the self-reliance that defined Judeo-Christian ethics.
Elites exploit these narratives to suppress dissent, labeling nationalism as xenophobia while engineering demographic shifts through open borders. In Germany today, this manifests in throttling liberties: stringent hate speech laws that chill free expression, overzealous policing of assemblies that restrict protests (unless they are for an “approved” cause), and a judiciary overwhelmed by caseloads delaying justice, all under the guise of protecting democracy from its own citizens, which should be the fount of its power. Yet true security comes not from state handouts, but from families and communities rooted in our white, western, usually male-lead, Judaeo-Christian tradition.
My Cousins, let us embrace our history, not as a chain but as a ladder to greatness. Reclaim the characteristics of diligence, innovation, and moral fortitude that birthed philosophers like Kant and leaders like Bismarck. Revive your Christian heritage, with its emphasis on charity and justice, to forge a new exceptionalism: one that celebrates family as both duty and privilege. Marry, multiply, and invest in the future—not through elite decrees, but through personal commitment and the gift of your children.
Imagine a renaissance where Germany’s contributions to science, art, and philosophy are so profound once more that the world studies German to access them directly, as was necessary before the War—when thinkers from Freud to Heidegger drew global minds to the German language and ideas expressed therein. This requires Germans to see themselves as an answer rather than a cancer, to don the mantle of the best parts of what it is to be German: precision in thought, resilience in spirit, and a drive to advance your people as a luminous contribution to the world.
Stop throwing out our ancient wisdom to your personal detriment. Gift yourself the greater satisfaction that comes from living in harmony with these timeless truths. Like the phoenix from ashes, rise renewed, do proper t’shuva and the world will triumph.
There is honor in the path of G-d—and greater personal satisfaction. In it also lies the salvation of the German nation—and indeed, the salvation of the world.