Several years ago, just before he began training as an officer in the Israeli navy, my nephew Yoni visited us in Canada for the first time.

 He grew up in Be’er Sheva, in the heart of the Negev desert, so our tourism with him focused on water sites: Niagara Falls, the Toronto Islands, the Beaches. My husband even took him on a whirlwind canoeing circuit in Algonquin Park – seven lakes in one day. But wherever we took him, the trip home always occasioned the same comment.

We live near a major intersection in Toronto that sports a giant advertising billboard atop a lowrise commercial property. For several years running, the billboard always carried fundraising ads for a philanthropic organization. During Yoni’s visit, the ad on the billboard featured photos of several frowning people with sad, imploring eyes, mostly children. I no longer recall the precise caption, but it read something like “Israel: They need your help.” Each time we passed it, Yoni’s annoyance increased. As an Israeli, he felt the billboard poster diminished him, depicting him as needy, dependent and unresourceful, reliant upon the charity of others. He called it the yisraelim miskenim poster – the poor Israelis poster.

The billboard and those who commissioned it meant Yoni and his countrymen no unkindness. On the contrary, its goal was to inspire kindness, to support projects that would benefit Israel and its inhabitants. And Yoni, of course, was not its intended audience.

But the poster’s designers understood that bad news sells. It sells newspapers. It elects political candidates. It sells organizations. It promotes group cohesion. It has the power to unsettle us, fascinate us, make us anxious, rock us from our complacency and mobilize us to action. In fact, to our credit, when we hear bad news, most of us want to do something about it.

But bad news can be too good a tool for mobilization, whether for political action, fundraising or identity affirmation. And, in the imperfect world we inhabit, there’s always something alarming going on for us to glom onto and enlist to our cause.

But there’s a price for utilizing this powerful tool. The short-term gains may be great, but long term, it costs us. Take anti-Semitism, for example. A touch of anti-Semitism in the air, I have heard it argued, is “good for the Jews,” because the feeling of beleaguerment strengthens the sense of Jewish identity. Indeed, Jean Paul Sartre observed in the mid-1940s that Jews will remain Jews so long as hatred against them persists. Because of the anxieties it stirs, our concern with anti-Semitism can be exploited.

I’m not suggesting that we should not name anti-Semitism when and where we see it, and work against it. Indeed, as I have argued previously in these pages, the “oldest hatred” endures in our times. Its deadliest manifestation is still in living memory of our community, and we must treat it as a real threat.

But sometimes I feel that the issue of anti-Semitism takes over our channels of thought and communication, so much so, that we forget to emphasize that – pace Sartre – Jews remain Jews not because others denigrate us, but because Judaism and Jewish culture is a source of spiritual and ethical values, a rich font of texts, culture, and history that inspire and challenge.

While bad news has the power to rally us, putting it at the centre of our religious, cultural or organizational lives can stunt us as a community. We need to celebrate our accomplishments, whether in education, culture, science, community building or helping ourselves and helping others. Affirmation, not fear, should lead our Jewish commitments. Not anxiety, but joy.

Having fulfilled his commitment as a naval officer, Yoni will be visiting us again this spring. Last time I checked, the billboard nearby carried an ad for women’s clothing.

The coast is clear.

It’s time for some good news.