By Rabbi Shmuel Klatzkin, Chabad of Greater Dayton
Chaim had an identity crisis. He lived in a shtetl in Russia. No one had indoor plumbing. One Friday afternoon, getting ready to go to the village bathhouse, Chaim was struck by a worry — everybody looks pretty much the same without their clothes. What if I mistake myself for somebody else?

Being a thoughtful man, he tied a red thread around his toe. Now he’d know who he was! Feeling clever and happy, he left for the bathhouse.

But in the pool, the thread slipped off his toe, and unnoticed, onto the toe of another man.

When Chaim got out, he panicked. He ran about looking at people’s toes until he found the man on whom the thread had taken up residence.

Chaim looked up and said: “Excuse me, sir. I know who you are but could you please tell me who I am?”

Some of us share Chaim’s problem. Without knowing who we really are, we turn the governing of our life over to our ego, which pretends to know what it is doing, while being constantly afraid of being exposed as an impostor. When that happens, we ruefully say, “That wasn’t really me.”

And then — we must pray! — we look deeper into that self that is worthy of the life it has been given.

We Jews have another reason for losing track of our true self. We have run up against identity thieves interested in appropriating it for themselves.

People are distinct and different because of our Maker. Each creation embodies a new perspective on the Infinite who is the source of all. When we admire another, we try to learn from the good that we see. Like a little child playing the parent they admire and love, we first imitate what we see. As we grow, we realize we cannot be them, but can learn from them and become better.

But sometimes people get stuck in the Terrible Twos. They do not learn. They want to just take what they want. They get angry and they get violent.

Centuries ago, some people made it their faith that they now were us. We used to be Israel, but now, they said, they were and we were not. They took offense that we did not concede their claim. Holding power, they used it against us, decorating their violence with the holiest rationalizations.

This identity appropriation took a new form a century ago. Out of Nietzsche’s abyss arose a new god, whose believers thought themselves the truly chosen ones.

Worshiping the blind power they ascribed to their new deity, they set about to exercise their power to prove their point. They would conquer the world and eliminate the God of the Bible and the people He chose.

That experiment didn’t work. We survived the genocide and responded by building a new home in our ancient Holy Land, dedicated to universal rights and being home for the people that had carried through hell and back the message of one God and of all humans created in that God’s image.

Now there are people who try to steal this identity as well. Even as they unleash terror, rape, and murder in tribute to the Nazism they have taken as an adjunct to their faith, they cry out that it is they who are the real targets of genocide.

Their societies are not kind. Intent on eliminating or subjugating all opposition, they nonetheless denounce those who make free societies as colonialists. They learned the Big Brotherism of their former patrons, the Soviets, who called their gulagocracies People’s Republics and taught their clients how to pervert language to confuse and control.

Aiming for the same genocide the Nazis attempted, employing the debased language of the Red champions of mass murder and slavery, these clients seek to drive us from our home and from our identity. While they read the Final Solution into their texts, they flood our culture with claims that they are really the ones targeted for genocide and hatred. They have the help now of the self-styled leaders on the converging extremes of the political horseshoe, in our media, politics, and schools.

Like Chaim, some of us bend before the onslaught, and try to take up the identity of those who are stealing theirs. But it is no laughing matter when we make the lie our own identity. May we all be healed.

To resist and triumph, we have what we ever have had — the truth of who we really are. It faces down the unappeasable lies of those who oppose this most basic truth.

Instead of appropriating, we all need to learn from each other. We are all made in God’s image and so irreplaceable.

The life of our people testifies to that for all humankind.

To read the complete January 2026 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.