The murderous Chanukah attack at Bondi Beach should not have happened.
That statement is not merely moral. It is philosophical.
One of the dominant assumptions of modern Western thought is that history is moving, more or less inevitably, toward justice, tolerance, and moral enlightenment. Under that framework, acts of naked antisemitic violence are predicted to be fading into irrelevance. They are relics of a less educated, less inclusive, less enlightened past. When they occur at all, they are assumed to be marginal, residual, or explicable as temporary aberrations.
Bondi Beach is therefore not just a tragedy. It is a refutation of a specific belief: that history itself is doing the moral work for us.
This belief has become accepted as fact in the Western world. And that is dangerous.
Secular Teleology
Teleology is the belief that history has an inherent direction and an endpoint: that events are not merely unfolding, but unfolding toward something. In religious traditions, that “something” is redemption, salvation, or divine judgment. In modern secular thought, God is removed, but the structure remains.
Beginning in the Enlightenment, a range of philosophers secularized this idea. History was no longer guided by divine will but by impersonal forces: reason, science, economic laws, technological development, or moral awakening. The destination remained moral improvement; only the engine changed.
This secular teleology appears in multiple modern forms. In Marxism, history inevitably culminates in a classless society. With scientific or technocratic optimism, knowledge and innovation will dissolve moral conflict. Progressivism says social norms converge toward justice over time. Decolonial and liberation frameworks claim historical forces guarantee emancipation.
What these systems share is not policy content, but structure: history is treated as a moral agent, and the future as a validator of truth.
What is striking about secular teleology is not that it hopes for progress, but that it asserts inevitability. There is no historical law demonstrating that societies must become more just. There is no empirical data showing that hatred naturally declines with education (recent studies show the opposite.) We have no scientific principle proving or even suggesting that moral norms converge over time rather than fracture, mutate, or regress.
None of this is to deny that many things are better today than in the past. Local improvements exist. Institutional reforms can work. But inevitability is a faith claim, not a finding. It is asserted, not demonstrated. Once inevitability is assumed, evidence no longer tests the theory; it is absorbed by it.
Despite its lack of necessity, secular teleology has become ambient in modern Western thinking.
We speak casually about “the right side of history.” We assume that moral disagreement is generational rather than substantive. We expect that today’s taboos will expand tomorrow, and that yesterday’s hatreds cannot seriously return. We have inherited a narrative - in education, in media, in political speech - that simply has no factual basis.
It is a narrative about how time works. And time doesn't really care about inevitable social justice.
Backlash: The Non-Falsifiable Escape Hatch
Every dogma must contend with counterexamples. Secular teleology does so through the concept of backlash.
Backlash is presented as an explanation for regression: when hatred or violence increases, it is framed not as evidence against progress, but as proof that progress is succeeding and provoking resistance.
This logic allows even extreme historical regressions, including Nazi Germany, to be interpreted not as refutations, but as temporary backlashes against inevitable progress. This idea can even explain how the most modern, industrialized, culturally mature nation can choose genocide as its most important task. It is not viewed as a refutation but an inevitable temporary backlash against inevitable progress.
When a theory claims to explain all evidence and counter-evidence as proof, the theory becomes non-falsifiable. If bigotry declines, progress is working - and if bigotry increases, backlash also proves progress is working.
No possible outcome can count as disproof. At this point, secular teleology quietly shifts its theory of truth.
It pretends to embrace scientific thinking, but instead of correspondence theory used by science, it relies on coherence theory: only accepting new facts can be fitted into the existing narrative.
This is why regression is reinterpreted rather than confronted, and why warning signs are treated as misreadings rather than data.
Teleological Secularism as Religion Without God
Once history itself is sacralized, secular teleologies take on all the functional features of religion. They have an eschatology (“the arc of history”). a moral hierarchy (progressive vs. regressive), a theodicy (backlash), heresy (questioning inevitability), and even clerisy (authorized moral interpreters like academia.)
God is absent, but destiny remains. Redemption is promised, but vigilance is dismissed.
This causes major problems. A worldview that assumes history will take care of injustice becomes complacent in the face of threats that do not obey its narrative.
If hatred is supposed to be disappearing, early warnings are dismissed. If violence is assumed to be regressive noise, preparedness feels unnecessary. If time is the moral engine, human responsibility diminishes.
This is not merely mistaken. It is dangerous.
Antisemitism as the Persistent Falsifier
Every teleological system eventually encounters a fact it cannot absorb. For secular teleology, that fact is antisemitism.
By its own logic, Jew-hatred should be declining steadily. Instead, it resurges repeatedly, often in morally confident societies, often clothed in the dominant ethical language of the era.
This is not new. Antisemitism has previously appeared as historical analysis, scientific racism, economic justice and anti-imperialism. Each time, it presented itself as progressive, enlightened, and necessary. Each time, it was treated as history moving forward.
This is a cycle, not an arc.
Modern secular dogma resolves the problem by redefining antisemitism as anti-Zionism and then recasting it as a progressive force rather than a regressive one.
If antisemitism can be reframed as resistance, liberation, or historical necessity, then the theory survives. Jews - not so much.
The language gives this away: “right side of history,” “inevitability,” “everyone knows a Palestinian state is necessary,” “justice will prevail.”
These are not political arguments. They are teleological claims.
Groups like
Bend the Arc are especially revealing. They explicitly invoke the moral arc of history as an authority that overrides Jewish historical memory and Jewish ethical vigilance. In doing so, they abandon Judaism's historically grounded skepticism of inevitability in favor of a secular redemption narrative that has repeatedly turned against Jews.
This is not a new error. It is an old one with modern language.
History Is Not a Straight Line
History did not begin in 1948 or October 7. It did not begin with colonial theory or modern nationalism. It stretches back thousands of years, and Jews have been unwillingly centered in its false redemptions more times than most societies can remember.
That is why Jews recognize false teleology quickly. It isn't cynicism; it is lived experience.
Bondi Beach did not violate history. It violated a false story we told ourselves about history.
When we believe that history will inevitably solve our problems, we lose all agency. We lose vigilance. And we lose the ability to analyze and protect ourselves against entire classes of very real dangers.
Judaism never taught that history improves automatically. It teaches responsibility, today, for all of us, to guard against the constant possibility of regression. It recognizes hate clothed in the garb of justice.
Secular teleology promises moral comfort. It reassures us that time itself is on our side.
Bondi Beach reminds us that it is not. Antisemitism is not fading - it is accelerating.
Progress is possible and historic improvement is real. But inevitability is a lie, and a costly one. When societies outsource moral responsibility to history, they stop seeing danger until it arrives fully formed.
Antisemitism has always been the warning sign. The question is whether we will finally treat it as such.
History does not bend. History doesn't even care.
That is our job.
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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