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Antisemitic deadly weapon attacks surged 39% in 2025 — even as headlines faded and men stayed silent. Sacrifice means standing visibly between the vulnerable and the threat, at a cost to yourself.
Wednesday, May 6, 2026 • Today's Principle: Sacrifice
The ADL's 2025 report reveals antisemitic violence is getting deadlier even as raw incident numbers ease — and today's episode names the male silence behind that pattern as a failure of sacrifice. Drawing from Esther 4 and 1 John 3:16, Carlos calls men to stop calculating the cost of standing with vulnerable neighbors and start paying it. The charge is specific: find the real, local opportunity to stand this week and take it, regardless of what it costs in comfort or reputation.
Scripture: Esther 4:13-14; 1 John 3:16
Today's Charge: Stand visibly between a vulnerable neighbor and a real threat this week — in conversation, in public, or in your household — at a cost to yourself.
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Today's Sacrifice chapter reference: Ch 6 — The Way of the Cross
The Republic Briefing is a daily news podcast for men who take their faith, their families, and their responsibilities seriously. Host Carlos Reyes covers the same headlines everyone else is covering politics, culture, economics, world events but reframes them through Scripture and challenges men to respond with conviction, not reaction. Every episode ends with The Republic Charge: a direct call to lead your household, govern yourself, and steward the republic entrusted to you. The news. The standard. The charge.
This is The Republic Briefing. I'm Carlos Reyes. For men who govern themselves, their households, and their public square — this is your daily charge.
Today's principle is Sacrifice — and what the surge in antisemitic violence in 2025 reveals about the men who looked away.
The Anti-Defamation League released its annual report, and the number that matters isn't the headline count. Total antisemitic incidents actually decreased slightly in 2025. Some people read that and exhaled.
Don't.
Here's what the report actually says. Deadly weapon attacks — physical assaults with knives, clubs, firearms — surged thirty-nine percent. The violence isn't getting broader. It's getting more savage. Men are being targeted. Families are being targeted. And the attacks aren't random — they're concentrated, they're escalating, and they're happening in neighborhoods, on campuses, outside synagogues.
So where are the men?
Not the politicians. Not the pundits. The men. The ones who live on those streets, who sit in those pews, who send their kids to those schools. The ones who see what's happening and calculate — silently — whether speaking up, whether standing in the gap, whether putting themselves between the threat and the neighbor is worth the cost.
Most of them decide it isn't.
That calculation is the problem. And it isn't a new one. It's the oldest failure in the male playbook — seeing what's required and choosing comfort instead. Calling it wisdom. Calling it strategy. Calling it "waiting for the right moment."
The right moment was last year. And the year before that.
So what does a man do with this? He asks himself a straight question. Not "what can I do about antisemitism?" That's too big and it lets you off the hook. The question is this: What has it already cost me — in reputation, in relationships, in comfort — to stand visibly for my neighbor? And if the answer is nothing, that's your conviction right there.
Today's principle is Sacrifice. And here's what it demands: a man pays the price that leadership requires. Not when it's convenient. Not when it's cheap. Not when everybody else is already standing. He pays it first, when it's costly, because that's the only time it counts as sacrifice at all.
Chapter six of Men of the Republic frames this around the way of the cross — and the argument there is blunt. Most men aren't cowards in the dramatic sense. They won't run from a burning building. They'll fight if someone breaks down the front door. But they will absolutely stay silent in a meeting. They will absolutely look away on the street. They will absolutely choose career safety over a neighbor who needs a man to stand with him. That's the sacrifice they won't make. The quiet one. The daily one. The one that costs them something real but not everything.
That gap — between the crisis courage they'd show and the daily sacrifice they won't — is where the republic dies.
Look at what Esther chapter four tells us. Mordecai's words to Esther when she calculated the cost of going to the king uninvited. He says this, starting at verse thirteen: "Do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"
Mordecai doesn't comfort her. He tells her the truth. Silence isn't safety. It just feels like safety while it's destroying you. And the destruction isn't only personal — your family goes down with your silence. Your household inherits the consequences of the price you refused to pay.
Esther was a woman in an impossible position, and she paid the price anyway. She walked into that throne room and said, "If I perish, I perish." That's not bravado. That's a woman who understood that the cost of silence was higher than the cost of sacrifice.
Now apply that framework the way this principle demands. Start with yourself. Where are you staying silent because the cost of speaking feels too high? That's the sacrifice you're refusing. Move to your household. Your sons are watching you measure every stand you take against what it might cost you. They're learning that math. They'll use it. Move to your church. Is your congregation known in its community for standing with the vulnerable — visibly, physically, at a cost — or are you known for good programs and a full parking lot on Sunday? Then the public square. The violence escalating against Jewish neighbors isn't happening in a vacuum. It's happening because the men who could make the square dangerous for predators have made a different calculation.
That calculation has a name. It's called the refusal of sacrifice. And it's destroying the republic one silent man at a time.
Which brings me to your charge for today.
Stand between someone vulnerable and the threat — this week, in your actual life, at a real cost to yourself.
Here's what that looks like. It might be speaking up in a conversation where someone mocks or diminishes your Jewish neighbor and you've been letting it slide because you don't want the friction. It might mean showing up — physically — at a local institution, a school board meeting, a community gathering, where your presence as a man of conviction changes the room. It might mean calling your pastor and asking why your church hasn't said a word publicly about rising violence against a minority population in your own city. It might mean teaching your son — this week, not eventually — what it means to stand with someone who's being targeted.
Don't do any of that for applause. Don't post about it. Do it because a man who follows Christ has already settled the cost question. The cross settled it. You don't get to follow a crucified Lord and then spend your life protecting your comfort.
Here's the cost of not doing it. Your son learns that men calculate before they act — and he'll grow up to be a man who never acts at all, because the calculation is never favorable enough. Your marriage loses something it can't recover — the quiet respect a wife has for a man who shows her he'll pay a price for what's right. Your neighborhood gets a little darker. Your church gets a little more irrelevant. And you get a little smaller — not all at once, but one refused sacrifice at a time.
Men aren't built for safety. They're built for this.
First John chapter three, verse sixteen: "By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers."
That's the standard. Not a feeling. Not a sentiment. A willingness to lay it down. Whatever it costs. Today.
If today's charge moved you, Men of the Republic is where this goes deeper. The book is at carlosreyesiii.com. I'm Carlos Reyes. Govern yourself. Lead your household. Take your square. This is The Republic Briefing.