We Are the Weather

Foer’s grandfather escaped the Nazis, running for years until he met Foer’s grandmother. They immigrated to America with $10,000 in a suitcase, which is equivalent to $100,000 today. He opened a grocery store. All his life, Foer was told that his grandfather was resourceful, but later in his life, Foer learns that his grandfather died by suicide. Foer debates the meaning of resourcefulness. Maybe it means surviving with few resources. The author then equates not doing anything about climate change as death by suicide, except that we aren’t killing ourselves, we are killing future generations and the poor.

In 72 C.E., troops from the Roman Empire set out to kill every Jew in the Masada community. When it became clear that the Jews would lose, they died by mass suicide. In contrast, the Warsaw Ghetto Jews battled till the end. While there is evidence of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, there is no evidence that the Jews of the Masada community died by suicide. If they had, Foer wonders why. Why didn’t they pretend to convert? Why didn’t they just die fighting? Death by suicide is the worst kind of sin in the Jewish culture. Despite being a myth, the Masada suicide story lives on, Foer argues, because people need to believe in the myth, since it shows how a tiny community did what it had to in order to survive through time.