The Empty Boat

Blaming people who aren't there

I recently read an old story from the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi about a man rowing on a river. Another boat crashes into his. He erupts in fury, shouting and swearing at the other vessel. Then he looks closer and realizes: the boat is empty. It drifted into him on its own. And just like that, poof, the anger dissolves. There’s nobody to blame and nothing to sustain the outrage. He pushes it away and rows on.

The lesson Zhuangzi draws is about the nature of anger itself. We aren’t really upset by what happens to us. We’re upset by the story we tell about it, and specifically, by the imaginary pilot we install at the helm of every bad thing that touches our lives.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because a large and apparently growing portion of the world believes that the Jews are piloting every boat.

Campus protests, failed economies, Middle East conflict, Western imperialism, media bias, bad weather probably, the vibes being off generally. Look hard enough, and someone will tell you there’s a Jewish hand on the tiller. The pilot may be invisible or the vessel may show no signs of navigation. But trust them, the Jew is in there somewhere, scheming.

Which brings me to a quote I came across recently: the reason Jews are successful is that, unlike other people, they don’t blame the Jews for their problems.

It’s a joke. It’s also, like all good jokes, completely serious.

Think about the sheer opportunity cost of antisemitism. The hours spent. The energy marshaled. The intellectual infrastructure built to explain why a people representing 0.2% of the world’s population is somehow responsible for the full weight of human suffering. You could learn a language in that time. Start a business. Read books. Make something. As the Iranian regime looms on the edge, imagine how much money they’ve wasted trying to destroy the Jewish State rather than investing in their own people, their own water pipes, their own electric grid.

Instead, you’re fighting with an empty boat.

And what a boat! Jews have been blamed for the Black Plague, the invention of capitalism, the destruction of capitalism, communism, the fall of communism, 9/11, COVID-19, and - this is real - the 2010 Haiti earthquake. A Malaysian government minister blamed Jews for a global decline in moral values, which is a remarkable thing to say about a group that invented the concept of moral values. We’ve been accused of controlling Hollywood, the banks, the media, the weather, and at least three separate theories about what’s really in tap water (hint: it’s not matzo ball soup). A significant number of people believe Jews engineered both feminism and the patriarchy, presumably in the same meeting, back to back, with a kosher deli platter.

The boat doesn’t have a pilot. It never did. The Israeli government is not controlling your country’s housing market. The Zionist lobby is not responsible for your personal failures. The Jews are not, in fact, sitting in a room somewhere deciding what happens to you. They are, for the most part, doing more or less what everyone else is doing: trying to make a living, raise their kids, argue about things, eat too much on holidays.

Maybe the anger is real. But the target? Invented. It’s been like this from time immemorial.

What Zhuangzi understood is that the empty boat reveals something true about the person in the other boat, not the drifting vessel. Rage at an imaginary helmsman is not a political position. It is a psychological condition. It tells you everything about the one doing the shouting and nothing at all about the Jews. As Vasily Grossman once said, “Tell me what you accuse the Jew of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”

Row around the empty boat. The river is wide.