Love Has a Cost. So Does Silence.

One of the first photos I took after moving to Prague, waiting for a night tram. In hindsight, it feels like the start of everything that followed.

Over the past few months, since I spoke openly about converting to Judaism — and why — something has shifted.

Not just in me. Around me.

Because once you say it out loud, you don’t just share information. You force people to reveal themselves.

And here’s the part I didn’t fully anticipate: how quickly some people decide that your identity is now a problem they need to manage. How some friendships quietly evaporate. How the room changes temperature. How, in a small town like New Brighton, you can feel the walls develop ears. Not always because people are shouting — but because they’re whispering.

I said I converted. I explained why. I also shared something deeply personal: that my DNA is intertwined with the story of the Jewish people — not as an abstract interest, not as a “phase”, not as a costume you can put on and take off — but as bloodline, love, commitment, and consequence. Something that fuses you into a story you cannot escape. Something you have to face as a person, with your eyes open, and decide what it means to stand up for your people — and for the love of your life.

You don’t choose who you fall in love with. Love doesn’t check passports. It doesn’t run background checks. It doesn’t ask the tribe for permission.

I’ve always judged the person — not the label, not the badge. But I’m learning that plenty of people don’t extend the same courtesy back. They see the label first. They decide what you “must” think. They decide what you “represent”. They decide what you “owe” them in terms of performance: explanations, denunciations, disclaimers.

And then, when you don’t play the part they’ve written for you, they punish you for it — politely. Quietly. Socially.

That’s what hurts, if I’m honest. Not disagreement. Not debate. Not even ignorance.

It’s the casualness of it.

The casual antisemitism. The lazy recycling of things people “just know” because they’ve heard them said with confidence. The way myths travel faster than facts because myths come with a feeling attached — and feelings are more addictive than truth.

And what being open has shown me — with brutal clarity — is who my real friends are.

Because friendship, as it turns out, is not proved in good times. Friendship is proved the moment there’s a cost.

The moment staying close to you might make them look risky. The moment your name becomes socially inconvenient. The moment they sense that backing away requires less effort than backing you.

That’s when you learn something simple: most people don’t consciously abandon you. They just drift. They tell themselves they’re staying “neutral”. They call it “not getting involved”. They think they’re being reasonable.

But neutrality isn’t always neutral.

Sometimes it’s just the easiest way to keep your hands clean while somebody else is being made dirty.

So I’m drawing a line.

I will no longer sit at a table with people who can casually spout antisemitic tropes, or talk with certainty about things they simply do not understand. I won’t laugh along to keep the peace. I won’t swallow it to avoid making things awkward. I won’t shrink my own life to fit other people’s comfort.

Because I’ve learned — the hard way — that silence doesn’t “keep things calm”.

Silence trains the loudest person in the room to go louder.

And I’m also done watching how this toxicity has soured everything around us — how parts of the far left, and yes, even mainstream parties here, have been hijacked by a kind of moral theatre that rewards anger and punishes nuance. Where the fashionable thing is to have a cause, but not the unfashionable discipline of understanding it. Where people treat complex history like a meme: one villain, one victim, one simple story — and anyone who complicates it becomes suspect.

That’s not justice. That’s scapegoating with better branding.

The Scapegoat - William Holman Hunt, 1854 - 1855 - Lady Lever Gallery

And scapegoating is one of the oldest human tricks. It’s a cognitive shortcut: pick a visible target, pour your rage into it, and you get the warm sensation of righteousness without the inconvenience of learning anything.

I’ve been on this journey for over seven years. Longer, if I’m honest — because looking back, there were cues, signals, chance meetings, strange little coincidences, friendships that didn’t make sense at the time but make sense now.

Living in Prague was the trigger. It opened my eyes — not just intellectually, but emotionally — to Jewish culture, to Yiddish, to history you can feel in the stones. It set me on a path that eventually took me to the holy land.

And something changed in me there.

Not a slogan. Not a political position. A deeper shift.

It showed me that what you think you know… you often know through other people’s mouths. That you can inherit certainty the way you inherit bad habits. That “everyone knows” is usually just another way of saying “no one checked”.

And that beneath all the noise, there is a stubborn, universal truth: love, life, and light. And once you’ve seen it up close, no one can take it from you. Not the whispers. Not the ghosting. Not the smear campaigns dressed up as “concern”.

I live in a place where a certain strain of radical thinking has poisoned the atmosphere — where some people now behave as if I’m personally responsible for every action of a government and three millennia of history.

As if I’m a proxy. As if I’m a stand-in. As if I’m a container for their rage.

I’m not.

I’m just Rory — Uri — a person trying to live a life built on love and truth.

And to the people who have pretended to be friends, who have performed kindness right up until the moment it required backbone: I’m still not full of hate.

I still love you.

Not because you’ve earned it — but because I refuse to let your fear turn me into a smaller person.

But I will say this plainly: If you want a friendship with me, you don’t get to treat Jewishness like a problem to be managed. You don’t get to indulge conspiracy, or casual slurs, or dehumanising language — and then act shocked when I don’t play along.

You don’t get my silence anymore.

And if that makes me inconvenient, so be it.

I’d rather be inconvenient than complicit.

RW

---

The cognitive bias bit (woven into the meaning, not a lecture)

What I’ve watched happen is basically a greatest hits album of human bias:

• In-group signalling: people echo the “right” opinions because belonging feels safer than thinking.

• Social proof: if a few people act like you’re “controversial”, others follow — not out of conviction, but out of herd instinct.

• Fundamental attribution error: people reduce you to what they assume you represent (“you = politics”), rather than seeing you as a person with a life.

• Confirmation bias: they notice only what supports the story they already want to believe, and ignore anything that complicates it.

• Moral licensing: they say something cruel, then absolve themselves because they believe they’re on “the right side”.

• Scapegoating: the oldest shortcut of all — blame one group, feel powerful, avoid the real work.

And the most painful one?

• Bystander effect: people don’t step in, not because they agree, but because they don’t want to be the first to move.

Friendship, it turns out, is often less about loyalty — and more about courage.

And courage is rarer than people think.