Antisemitism is increasing. Acts of vandalism and violence have skyrocketed since October 7. But the overwhelming love shown parents of a hostage at the DNC tells us that it is time for us to refocus.
The most encouraging thing I can say about the current state of Jew-hatred in our world, and particularly in our country, is that everything new is old again.
Back in mid-2010, I received an email from a 20-something congregant, telling me of her shocking experiences while attending the 2nd U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, a conference addressing every social justice cause imaginable.
She was struck by the overwhelming anti-Israel presence there.
“As early as the opening march,” she wrote, “I saw more kafiyas and Palestinian flags than I'd ever seen before. There were numerous workshops each day with titles such as "Unlearning Zionism: Unlearning Racism," “The Case Against the Jewish National Fund," "Understanding Israeli Apartheid," and the list goes on. The word “Zionist” was bandied about the way people used “Communist” in the 1950s. A session organized by a pro-Israel group was cancelled.”
“I've never encountered anti-Israel temperament on such a large scale,” she wrote. “It’s not as if I thought the world was on our side. But, seeing and hearing these things in-person changed me forever.”
Inspired by that plea, later that summer I penned a Rosh Hashanah sermon with the title, “Why do they hate us?” which I could basically cut and paste in its entirety into a sermon today. Its salient points have not yellowed with age - and probably never will.
It’s actually a little comforting knowing how little has changed. Hatred of Jews has become entirely predictable.
You can listen to that sermon in its entirety and judge for yourself.
Here are some of the concerns I addressed back then, nearly 15 years ago, with some updates in italics:
A poll in the Boston Review indicated that a fully 25% of the American people blamed the Jews for the economic crisis. Hardly a fringe phenomenon. As then, Jews today are being called communists, anarchists, globalist puppet masters, colonialists and, heaven-forbid, Zionists - by the far right, the far left, and many in between. A potential candidate for vice president, an exemplary person, was dubbed “genocide Josh” simply because he happens to support Israel AND IS JEWISH. And the other party’s presidential nominee singled him out as “the Jewish governor” of Pennsylvania, for no reason at all, except to attack him and his coreligionists. We Jews are being battered around like a pickleball this campaign season, and yet - yet - it is nothing like having 25 percent of the American people blame us for a financial meltdown, as happened in 2010.
Back in 2010, Jews were being delegitimized by European intellectuals, with biased inquiries like the Goldstone report - which dealt with, you guessed it, Israel’s treatment of Gazans. Jews were also being delegitimized on American college campuses, and attacked by Iran and its proxies. The goal of Israel’s enemies was not as much to defeat Israel militarily, but through propaganda, and even at a time when social media was still in its infancy, it was working. That has intensified since then. Except now, for the first time, Israel’s enemies smell blood in the water, and Israelis are sensing that this time the existential threat may be real. See Daniel Gordis’s posting today, in which he quotes Prime Minister Netanyahu saying in a meeting with hostage families, “our survival is not a certainty.” Some people were shocked that he said that, Gordis adds. “But what was shocking, if anything, was simply his honesty.”
Back in 2010, an Israeli held hostage by Hamas (Gilad Shalit) was ignored by an uncaring world. That has changed. See below.
In 2010 pollster Frank Luntz advised Israeli government officials on how they could improve their PR skills in talking to Americans. “American’s want to hear empathy,” he advised. “They want to know that you feel the pain of the people in Gaza.” Luntz described a focus group he did with Harvard and MIT students. He only told them that he was going to ask them about the Middle East. There were 35 people in the room: 20 of them were non-Jewish, 15 were Jewish. And he didn’t tell anyone who was which.
“Got them all into the room,” he said. “It was so crowded that we had kids sitting on the floor. But that added to the intensity. They felt like they were in a dorm room. And within 10 minutes, the non-Jews started with “the war crimes of Israel,” with “the Jewish lobby,” with “the Jews have a lot more power and influence…”
The Jewish kids, who included several student group leaders, were silent. After Oct. 7 2023, Jewish students were blindsided as well, but regained their bearings and have responded heroically, standing up for themselves even as they have found the voice also to criticize Israel at times.
But for Jews, for everyone, the pevailing question remains: Why do they hate us?
It’s the wrong question.
REFRAMING THE QUESTION - THE DNC SHOWS HOW
OK – time to redefine the problem. We see that what we are dealing with now has basically not changed. The problem is NOT that everyone hates us. Jews have been hated for 3,000 years.
And guess what! We’re still here! Get over it!
Yes, antisemitism is increasing. Acts of vandalism and violence are increasing - they have skyrocketed since October 7, according to the ADL.
But the overwhelming, tearful reception given at the DNC to Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the parents of Hamas hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, tells us all we need to know.
The reception given the Goldberg-Polins became even more meaningful when it was followed up by an additional outburst of sympathy for both Israel and Palestinians during Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech. Love and empathy need not be a zero-sum game. The love expressed for the hostages was not being weighed against all the crazy antisemitic accusations against Jews or people’s feelings about the Israeli government. The parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin also extended a hand of sympathy for innocent Palestinian who ware suffering. It was simple human compassion - the kind that has always been a staple of Judaism and the Jewish people.
This magnificent human moment should galvanize us all. Jews need to take heed and then take the lead.
The paranoia of feeling hated is threatening to take over our souls. That’s the real problem. And if that fear takes over our souls, if feeling the hate is all there is to being Jewish, we could lose our kids, Israel and a whole lot more. Israelis need us to be the bearers of light - to ‘bring the joy,’ as they kept saying at the DNC - at the time of their deepest darkness.
This conversation gets us into scary territory. Do we in fact take perverse pleasure in being demonized, because it allows us to demonize in return? Because it enables us to send out panicked emails, galvanize and raise money? Not that the dangers aren’t real – they most definitely are, but the greatest danger is that such negativity will turn off the next generation and sully a tradition that for 3,000 years has left a beautiful legacy of love.
IS IT SUFFICIENT TO “LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR?”
There’s an argument in the Talmud between Rabbi Akiva and Shimon Ben Azzai, over which is the most basic principle of the Torah. Akiva says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He was a big fan of love. He LOVED love. He’s the guy who put the Song of Songs into the Bible, and his late-blooming romance with his wife Rachel is maybe the greatest Jewish love story of all time.
But Ben Azzai won the argument by saying, “No, even more important than ‘Love your Neighbor’ is the verse from Genesis that states, “On the day that God made human beings, they were made in the likeness of God, male and female God created them.”
Rabbi Arthur Green, in his book “Radical Judaism,” thinks Ben Azzai was on to something important. It’s not enough simply to love your neighbor. Anyone can love a neighbor. Ben Azzai says that’s not enough! We have to love everyone. Not just the person who lives next door. Not just a fellow Jew. Every human being is in God’s image. True, some are harder to love than others. Some are nearly impossible.
And we all know who they are!
Some days you can love them, and some days you can’t. Even if you can’t love them, you have to treat them with dignity. We should reach out even to those whom it might be hard to love: the stranger, the indigent, the immigrant, the sinner, do-gooder, the office snitch, the teacher’s pet, the right wing activist, the left wing activist, the enemy, the former friend.
I know very little about God, except that God looks something like all of the above. All are created in God’s image. And we’ve got to love them all – but if we can’t love them, and God knows it’s not easy, we’ve got to treat them with respect.
The Sh’ma, Judaism’s seminal prayer, commands us to love – V’ahavta – “You shall love the Lord your God.” So, one may ask, how can you command love?
Well, it’s not really a command, as professor Reuven Kimelman has pointed out. Read properly, “V’ahavta is a response. An instinctive reaction projecting love out into the world. Projecting back what we have received.”
In both the morning and evening liturgies, the Sh’ma is immediately preceded by a prayer about love. In the morning, that prayer is Ahava Rabbah – “A Great Love,” a transcendent love, an unconditional love.
The word for love, “Ahava,” appears in various forms no fewer than six times in that single prayer (above, circled in yellow), including the first, middle and last words. Love, love, love, love, love, love. Six times! Like a mantra. Lin Manuel Miranda would love-love-loved it!
And that’s not counting synonyms for love that are found there, like mercy, grace and compassion, plus a focus on the love of learning and Torah, and finally, a paean to Jewish gathering, a unity that might be considered Zionist. That prayer is a veritable verbal love-bombing, a symphony of love for God, Torah and Jewish peoplehood.
We are loved by an unconditional love – a “boundless love,” as is written in the corresponding prayer said at night, Ahavat Olam. When you’ve been loved in that way, when the world has loved you in that way, the only way to respond is to give love in return.
BASIC TRUST AND A LIFETIME OF NURTURING
You’ve undoubtedly heard that old bit of wisdom from Dorothy Law Nolte, “Children learn what they live”
If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with security, he learns to have faith.
If a child lives with acceptance, and friendship, he learns to find love in the world.
This is a popularized version of Erik Erikson’s idea of basic trust. The psychologist conducted an enormous amount of research showing that children who have a secure attachment with loving, sensitive caregivers come to know a world that is predictable and reliable.
The Sh’ma is saying that such a world is at the root of the Jewish concept of love. A loving parent is doing God’s work. A nurturing community becomes God’s place, an ever-embracing community, from womb to tomb, a conduit of divine love, nurturing our family and then projecting it out into the world.
Well, our prayers seem to be telling us that we have lived in a child’s paradise. A world of freely given love, an unending flow of love. And all we have to do is recognize it – and return it. And return it with ALL our heart, which for the ancients meant with our intellect, and ALL our soul, our nefesh, which is life itself, and with all our might, all our physical and material capacity. Love the world as best you can, in any way that you can, because we’ve been loved.
We take that love and hurl it right back at ya’ God, right back at ya’ to the world. That’s what we are here to do as Jews. We are here to love. Not because we are commanded to – rather because, when we have been enveloped by so much love, it is natural to want to give love back.
V’Ahvata, then, to summarize, is not a command but a natural response to a lifetime of nurturing.
I will grant that it is often not easy to give love back for those who have felt very little love in their lives, either as children or adults. And that indeed is a tragedy.
But no matter how horrible your childhood, it could never match the historical experience of the Jewish people. If the children of Israel were really children, God would have been picked up by Child Protective Services long ago. And supposed heroes like Abraham, Sarah and David would be next in line.
And that is the crux of the problem once again. We want to love, but our experience has coarsened us. The heavenly Parent seems to have been AWOL while six million were butchered, and while terrorists were allowed to run amok on the buses of Jerusalem, the kibbutzim of southern Israel, the towers of Manhattan and the schoolyards and synagogues of America - and this past weekend, France. It’s hard to love when we have not always felt the love. We’ve been burned more recently too, when so many are suffering. It is easy to succumb to fear. It happens all the time.
And yet somehow, through all our travails, Jews have historically been able to transform sorrow into song. And that is because, despite it all, we’ve never forgotten how to love – we’ve never stopped feeling that Ahava Rabbah – that expansive love.
It is easy to be cynical. It is easy to be suspicious. It is easy to throw up our arms and disengage.
It is easy to hate. But if we hate, the haters will have won. They will have turned us into them.
Our job is to turn “them” into “us” ( It has a ring to it: “Goys R’ Us”). Not that they should take on our identity, our views, or our opinions, but that they - and we - cease to be seen as “others” to anyone.
Us is us is us is us is us!
No, they don’t all hate us. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter who hates us and why. All that matters is that we remain strong and resolute, and open to loving the multitudes who don’t.
We heard them cheering and we saw them crying, last week at the DNC.
No comments:
Post a Comment