In J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel The Hobbit, thirteen dwarves and a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins are crossing Mirkwood, a vast and enchanted forest crawling with danger, on a quest to take back the dwarves’ ancient homeland from a dragon.
One of the thirteen is Bombur, whom Tolkien not-so-charitably describes as “immensely fat and heavy.” Bombur lags behind the others, huffing and puffing his way through every climb and every march. He is the heaviest of the company and, by Tolkien’s own telling, the hungriest too.
Before the company enters Mirkwood, they receive one explicit warning: an enchanted stream cuts across the path ahead, and under no circumstances should anyone touch it. Do not fall in. Do not even drink from it. No explanation is given — just a dire warning.
Yet Bombur, as you might have guessed, falls into the stream. The others pull him out fast, but the damage is already done. He sinks into an enchanted sleep, and no matter what they try, the other dwarves simply cannot wake him up. For days the starving and exhausted dwarves are forced to carry his heavy body through the forest, dragging him over roots and rocks while their own strength runs out.
When Bombur finally wakes up, he remembers nothing of the journey. He remembers only his dream: “I dreamed I was walking in a forest rather like this one, only lit with torches on the trees and lamps swinging from the branches and fires burning on the ground; and there was a great feast going on, going on forever. A woodland king was there with a crown of leaves, and there was a merry singing, and I could not count or describe the things there were to eat and drink.”
Bombur sits down and weeps. He wants nothing but to go back to sleep and return to the imaginary feast. As the journey drags on, he refuses to carry his share of the load and finally collapses on the ground: “I’m just going to lie here and sleep and dream of food, if I can’t get it any other way. I hope I never wake up again.”
It is funny, to a point. But Tolkien keeps coming back to it, again and again throughout the book — the fat dwarf, the heavy dwarf, the dwarf nobody wants to carry. At some point the joke stops being a joke.
Was Tolkien fatphobic? A sizeist? A weight-shamer?
Tolkien did not write The Hobbit in a vacuum. In 1937, the year the book was published, Britain was in a precarious position. The economy was still reeling from the Great Depression, and the country was falling rapidly behind in an arms race with Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler was rebuilding Germany’s military in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, remilitarizing the Rhineland, expanding the Luftwaffe, and preparing to conquer Europe.
Yet Britain and France refused to face what was right in front of them. Their leaders searched for any excuse to avoid confrontation, convincing themselves that Hitler was a reasonable man who could be satisfied, managed, or simply waited out.
The Jews of Europe, the people with the most to lose, were asleep too. In 1935, the Nazi regime passed the Nuremberg Laws — a sweeping set of antisemitic decrees that stripped German Jews of their citizenship, banned marriage between Jews and Germans, and excluded Jews from schools, universities, government positions, and most of public life. Antisemitism was no longer a social problem. It was now the official law of the land. The writing was on the wall in letters that could not be misread. And still, most Jewish communities across Europe carried on with their ordinary lives, certain that this was a passing storm rather than the beginning of an extermination.
The Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky traveled from city to city, begging Jewish communities to leave before it was too late. In Warsaw in 1938, he stood before a packed hall and said: “The catastrophe is coming closer. I have become gray and old in these years. My heart bleeds, that you, dear brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano that will soon begin to spit out its all-consuming lava.” He warned them: “Eliminate the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you.”
Tragically, almost nobody listened.
Centuries earlier, the prophet Amos rebuked the people of Judah:
When Amos delivered this prophecy, the kingdom of Israel — the ten tribes to the north — was fighting for its life against the Assyrian empire. City after city fell. The population was slaughtered or dragged into exile. Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, soon fell too, and the ten tribes were ultimately lost.
Through all of this, the kingdom of Judah watched from a safe distance. Assyria had not yet crossed into their territory; that invasion would only come a few years later, in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah. The danger of Assyria felt far away. And so despite the suffering of their brothers to the north, the people of Judah felt secure.
Rabbi David Kimche evocatively describes the people of Judah’s false sense of security. “They delighted in lavish food and overflowing drink, in fragrant oils, in reclining upon exquisite beds, and in the melodies of musical instruments and songs. They immersed themselves in every imaginable pleasure, yet they gave no thought to the coming day of calamity. Nor did they grieve or feel anguish for the exile and destruction that had already befallen their people.”
To be clear, the people of Judah were not a particularly wicked generation. This was the generation of King Hezekiah, one of the most righteous kings in the First Temple era, a king the Sages say could have been the Messiah. And yet even the righteous can fall into the oldest trap in the world. Their failure was the very human inclination of avoidance. They saw what was happening to the ten tribes, and they looked away. Not out of cruelty, but out of comfort. It is far easier to pour another cup of wine and listen to the music than to sit with the unbearable truth that your brothers are dying — and to tell yourself that what is happening to them could never happen to you.
Which brings us back to The Hobbit. The enchanted stream does not kill or wound. It simply puts you to sleep and fills your head with beautiful dreams — and once you are in those dreams, it is very difficult to return to reality. That is what makes it so dangerous. You can fight enemies, but how can you break free from a dream?
Ironically, the most dangerous enemy may not be the one standing at the gate with a sword. It is the one inside us, that part of ourselves that would rather sleep than fight, dream than face reality, feast than feel pain. We do this to ourselves. Nobody puts us to sleep; we fall in.
This, of course, is Bombur. Of all the dwarves, he is the one most bound to food, sleep, and physical comfort. While the others push forward through hunger and fear, Bombur’s whole being strains backward, toward rest and ease. Tolkien’s constant barbs about his weight are not cheap jokes about an overweight dwarf. They are Tolkien’s way of calling out, in the language of fiction, those who are “at ease in Zion” while the world burns around them.
Before October 7, many Israelis were Bombur.
Despite decades of existential war, Israel miraculously built a thriving economy and a booming tech sector. Tel Aviv was hopping with packed restaurants and innovative startups. A sense settled over large parts of Israeli society that while the conflict was never truly over, it was manageable. Hamas and other terror groups were contained. The worst-case scenarios felt like they belonged to another era.
October 7 shattered that dream in a single morning. The enormous scale and horrific brutality of the Hamas attack forced Israelis to wake up from their dream and face reality. Israel was still surrounded by dangerous enemies working day and night to slaughter every last Jew in the Holy Land. The enchanted stream finally released its grip, and the nation opened its eyes.
Israelis are finally awake. But most Americans are still sleeping.
Iran funds and arms Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. It is the head of the snake behind every major terror attack on Israel and every threat to Western interests across the Middle East. When President Trump finally launched a full-scale military campaign against Iran, striking its nuclear facilities and dismantling its military infrastructure, it was the right move, and it was long overdue.
But even as American and Israeli fighter jets achieved enormous success, destroying Iran’s navy and other critical targets, millions of Americans turned against the war. The most powerful military force in history was dismantling the world’s most dangerous terror regime — and Americans were angry about the price of gas.
Now President Trump is desperate to strike a deal with Iran, convincing himself that the mullahs can be reasoned with, that a signed agreement will hold, that the regime committed to destroying America can be satisfied with the right incentives. It is the same illusion Neville Chamberlain brought home from Munich in 1938. A deal will not end the conflict. It will delay it, embolden the enemy, and make the inevitable war far more costly when it finally comes.
In the end, Bombur wakes up just in time. The dwarves drag him to his feet, and together they stumble out of Mirkwood and into the battle that awaits them — a battle they could not have survived had he slept one moment longer.
The enemies of civilization are at the gates. I pray that America wakes up in time.
