Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

A killer on the rampage in Sydney’s Bondi Westfield Shopping Mall murdered six people yesterday, and succumbed to the gunshot of a policewoman who fired from close range. This was naturally headline news in the UK, resulting in prompt speculation about the killer, whose name was withheld by the Australian authorities. There was some blurred footage of a thin, dark haired man walking swiftly through the mall, as well as an image of his lifeless body.

The Australian police said they did not believe the attack was terror related, but there was speculation on social media and from some, a presumption that this was an instance of Islamist terror. While the killer had not been identified, this could not be known and later, when he was named as Joel Cauchi with a history of mental illness, it was shown to be false.

Before the killer was named, I saw that the column on an X/Twitter page which shows trending topics, displayed the trend ‘Benjamin Cohen’. I assumed this was a participant in one of the TV reality shows which I never watch, but which account for certain social media trends which, as far as I am concerned, are an undiscovered country. Through various chat groups, I soon saw that ‘The Jew Benjamin Cohen’ was also a significant trend and that a person of this name was being identified as the Bondi mall killer. I did not find any authoritative source for this and saw that a photo of a dark-haired young man, Ben Cohen of Sydney, was being used to assert identity with the man who turned out to be Joel Cauchi.

A baby had been stabbed in the mall and afterwards received surgery and I saw this kind of tweet proliferating on X.

I saw that the identification of the man as Benjamin Cohen was being promoted by anti Israel or anti Jewish activist accounts and thought it was likely to be false but could not know for sure. Why did I care? Answer: the rumour was already being used to abuse Jewish people in general.

Late last night, Australian police divulged the name of the deceased attacker, Joel Cauchi. So far and, as far as I know, this has not been used to libel any particular demographic. The real Benjamin Cohen has made a brief and dignified video in which he regrets the rumour mongering of social media.

Those who yesterday were asserting his guilt have today moved on to Iran’s overnight attacks on Israel, with drones and missiles, 99% of which were intercepted before they could do harm. They are celebrating this as a great victory for Iran.

Social media puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes. It has the speed of a ballistic missile, powered remotely and intended to cause maximum damage. Intercepting a lie or an error is not always possible, but one must try.

Sometimes – often, to be honest – if I’m appalled by some garishly antisemitic tweet which grabs my attention, I make a screen shot and post it, as an exposé of the platform X, and the author of the offensive tweet. I screen shot rather than repost as I know I’m likely to block them before long or they will block me and I want to keep the evidence.

It then happens sometimes – often, if I’m honest – that a sympathetic person replies along the lines broadly speaking of ‘Your tweet is antisemitic. You are disgusting.’ I look twice, to see if their words are addressed to me and, seeing that they are meant for the tweet’s author, I point out that the word ‘You’ seems to refer to myself, the actual offender being absent. I understand their meaning but if someone tells me ‘You are disgusting,’ I feel as if they mean me, or as if a third party will think they are speaking to me.

This is when the second person singular is misdirected, as if GPS had found a street with a similar name but in the wrong county.

In English the second person plural, ‘Ye,’ is archaic and we neither tutoyer nor vousvoyer. When someone tells me ‘You are a genocidal maniac. You have killed 30,000 innocent people, most of them children,’ do they mean you singular, that I personally and alone have done the deed, or you plural, that all Jews/some Jews/ all Zionists/ some Zionists are the perpetrators? Yesterday an imaginative lady insisted that I have suborned King Charles and the UK government with my ‘filthy blood money’. How many Waterstones booksellers, retired, have the wherewithal to bribe a King? Not I, certainly.

A well known actor tweeted to a well known Jewish actor, demanding that she give some answer regarding the awful killing of seven aid workers in Gaza. There was, I am pleased to say, a backlash from many who thought that Tracy Ann in the UK should not be answerable to Samantha for IDF errors in Gaza. But we know how it goes: we are all expected to answer, unless we slip under the barrier like John Glazer or, restaurant critic Jay Rayner, to show we are not part of that you plural on which the ‘anti Zionists’ fix their sights.

In the Hebrew bible, the author[s] of the Psalms use the first person singular, ‘I’ rather than ‘We’, the latter being more common in liturgy unless the liturgy is taken from the psalms. ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ asks David in Psalm 22, famously repeated, in Aramaic, by Jesus on the cross. In congregational prayer, the kehilah prays as one, the quorum of ten persons ensuring that we are engaged in communal worship and yet, in the Shema, the central prayer of all services, the imperative second person singular is used. Hebrew, like French has you singular and plural: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might.’

The King James Version deployed ‘Ye’ and ‘Thou’ to translate Hebrew atem and atah which is an advantage of the Authorized Version over subsequent translations. It does make a difference.

When the social media trolls tell me ‘You killed children’ (and, believe me, they do), do they mean ye of thou?

I will not say ‘Not I,’ because I will not concede that ‘We’ are guilty of the charges they like to confront us/me with. These accusations come to anyone overtly Jewish on social media or in the public eye, unless they slip under the barrier, exchanging we for ‘they’ and joining in the anathemas.

If you belong to a community, you get accused as a community and you answer on behalf of the community. Likewise, you are created as a community, for example at Sinai:

אַתֶּ֨ם נִצָּבִ֤ים הַיּוֹם֙ כֻּלְּכֶ֔ם לִפְנֵ֖י יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶ֑ם רָאשֵׁיכֶ֣ם שִׁבְטֵיכֶ֗ם זִקְנֵיכֶם֙ וְשֹׁ֣טְרֵיכֶ֔ם כֹּ֖ל אִ֥ישׁ יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

You stand this day, all of you, before your God יהוה —your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials, every householder in Israel.

Deuteronomy 29:9

Rabbi Tanhuma said ‘You are pledges, one for another,’ which is a bit like John Donne’s ‘No man is an island.’ The paradox is that each one of us really is an island and, at the same time, the multitude at Sinai, or in the ghetto or in the increasingly edgy and hostile streets and campuses of the United Kingdom.

׃