First They Came: A Warning Rewritten
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out
—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out
—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out
—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Pastor Martin Niemöller
Niemöller was right. By the time a pragmatist realizes that solidarity is their only refuge, it is too late. Standing against tyranny is always the right thing. Standing together is the only way. These words echo across history, reminding us that the failure to act, the failure to speak, is complicity. And yet, even this powerful trope, the now-iconic confession of a man who saw his own silence come back to haunt him, is not immune from distortion. Any historic trope can be abused, conflated, distorted. What does it mean to skip over a complex reality and describe the victim of tyranny as blameless?
The moral landscape of silence and action is not simple. The world does not exist in binaries of good and evil, pure innocence and absolute guilt. We want, desperately, for the oppressed to be faultless, for the persecuted to be beyond reproach. But to demand such perfection is to ignore the reality of human evil, societal frailty, to flatten a complex history into a digestible narrative, to remove agency from those who suffer. And yet, there is danger in the other extreme as well. If in scrutinizing the persecuted in search of imperfection we allow the sins of the victim to justify their suffering, we cross into a different and just as grievous moral failure.
What if Niemöller’s words were rewritten, re-examined, refracted through the moral grayness of our world today? What if his warning included not just those who failed to speak for others, but those who spoke selectively, those who saw persecution but remained silent because they believed, perhaps even rightly, that the persecuted had done wrong?
First they came for the enablers
of those who sought to hurt my community,
and because I was so hurt
and my children so vulnerable to this hatred
and the enablers so unfettered until this point,
I remained silent.
Then they came for the refuge seekers,
but I was not a refuge seeker,
had not been one for a time,
and wished not to become one again,
so I remained silent.
After a time,
my silence was all there was.
Well, that and my dizzied conscience.
But it was quiet, and my children were safer.
For a time.
Here lies the heart of moral injury, the gnawing wound of knowing that the semblance of safety was purchased at the cost of silence. That silence, itself, can be a weapon. It is tempting, always, to prioritize the security of one’s own over the abstract principle of justice. But justice is never abstract. It is lived. It is felt in the hunger of the displaced, the desperation of the forgotten, the broken bones of those who face tyranny alone.
To be human is to wrestle with impossible moral tensions. We are called to stand against oppression, and accountability for hatred and violence is non-negotiable. But we are also called to stand for our values, hard-learned through centuries of the world’s abandonment of the Jews in times of oppression. We are called to be pragmatic, but we are also called to be righteous. And sometimes, these calls contradict one another. Sometimes, standing up means standing in danger. Sometimes, speaking means risking safety. These are difficult moral questions.
But silence is never neutral. Silence is never passive. As Elie Wiesel famously taught, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Yes, the world remains silent in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, the mass murder of 1,200+ Israelis, the documented sexual violence perpetrated by the Hamas terrorists upon hundreds of Israeli women and men, the torture and execution of manacled hostages, and the ongoing mass-hostage crises. Despite brief flashes of solidarity and the occasional statement of support, the world has largely been complicit in Jewish suffering since October 7, compounding the pain with the sense of widespread tacit approval. Silence is a choice, an action, a force that shapes history. The world refuses to acknowledge Jewish pain, with rallies condemning any Israeli response beginning on October 8, 2023, including explicit support of Hamas’ acknowledged goals of murdering Jews and eradicating the State of Israel. This silence is unforgivable. And, in this acknowledgement, we affirm: silence in the face of dehumanization, of societal cruelty is wrong.
The Jewish community deserves better than we have received from our neighbors in our ongoing pain. It has been 542+ days of grief, of trauma, of our sisters and brothers murdered and hidden underground by sadists supported by an unbelievable network of international enablers, some knowing, some misled into brutalizing complicity.
So what is the answer? What is the Jewish way? If the world is complex, if moral purity in a fragile political moment is an illusion, if silence can be sometimes wise and sometimes unwise—where and how do we stand?
We must stand together. Not because we are perfect, but because tyranny does not wait for righteousness to be proven. And so, we must find ways of acting in defense of the universal vulnerability every human being shares, and we must remember that personal safety and human rights are only as strong as a society’s demand that they be respected and enforced.
We must speak, exercising the Divine gift of thoughtful articulation. We must remember to reject silence, not because it is always wrong, but because it is never truly safe.
First they came. And they will come again. The only question is whether we will be ready to stand.
