Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog
Fighting Anti-Semitism and Other Hates, All at Once
Yom Kippur Morning 5778 (2017) – Temple Beth Abraham
Rabbi Jon Spira-Savett
I love that the rabbis of old put that Haftarah from Isaiah in today's service. On this day of fasting, the rabbis challenged our fasting, and challenged us to match the intensity of our fasting and beating our chests with an intense commitment to take care of those suffering the most in society. Otherwise our fasting is a fraud.
This is the second sermon about the country that I said last week I had in me. If you were here, they go together. I feel compelled to talk about anti-Semitism, and bigotry, and division – and this distracts us from talking about some of the things Isaiah was confronting us with. Usually, this is my boilerplate end to a sermon about division and hate, but I am going to say it at the beginning. Bigotry diverts us from some fundamental suffering in our society. The energy and attention it takes to deal with hate leaves us out of breath for the even harder work that we need to do. About pockets in our wealthy country that are poor, whole regions and parts of our city. About really complicated systems of health care, education, housing. Isaiah names these – the pointing finger, the malicious talk.
Isaiah's conversation has been hijacked. We are playing defense against injustices, when we should be playing offense. I can't get to the real Isaiah sermon, before I get through this one. We'll do that on Shabbatot to come.
But if we can't have Isaiah, we need some prophet. So let's take Jonah.
Later today, when our stomachs are even more growling, we'll be up there with Jonah, sitting overlooking the imperial city of Nineveh. Jonah basically asks: What I am doing here?
Jonah had been sent to that city, far from his home in Israel, to tell the people of Nineveh that they would be destroyed. But the people of Nineveh repented. From their leaders down to their animals they wore sackcloth and ashes, and God changed the decree against them and they lived.
Not a bad day's work for a prophet. But Jonah's response seems to be: Why am I here, of all places?
To get at Jonah's question we have to know something more about Jonah and something more about Nineveh.
Jonah was one of the few prophets in the Bible who actually had some success. Before he ever went to Nineveh, the Bible mentions Jonah. It says that he successful persuaded the king of Israel to strengthen and defend the border of Israel – probably against the Assyrians, the empire based in Nineveh.
Since Jonah was good at it, God selected him for this other mission. This seemingly very different mission. The Book of Jonah doesn't specify what the evil of Nineveh was. But we know something about the Assyrians from history. What we know is that they did not tolerate group differences within their empire. When they conquered a people, they would uproot them from their land and scattered them all over, so they would not have an identity anymore. That's how the lost tribes of Israel got lost – the Assyrians did it.
I really think Jonah's protest to God, before and after he got to Nineveh, was this:
I don't think I can contain both of these missions.
I don't think I can stand up for my own people and defend them, and also stand up in this other place, for other people beyond the Jews who are threatened.
But God sent him anyway. You were good at that mission for the Jews, you'll be good at the other mission.
We are in Jonah's situation, right now. We're asking – am I supposed to fight against anti-Semitism, and also bigotry and racism aimed at other groups? Can we really do both? Shouldn't I either figuring out which one is bigger, or just stick close to home?
God seems to say – you're going to do both missions.
Well, like Jonah, we need to start at home – defending and strengthening ourselves.
There is anti-Semitism, in our world and in our country. We saw it in Charlottesville, Virginia in August – white supremacy and neo-Nazism wrapped and interwoven. The synagogue there was threatened in advance, and menaced during Shabbat morning services, and there was no police protection. The Torah scrolls had to be removed from the building, out of fear that the synagogue might be torched.
Anti-Semitism is the bullying, and the menacing jokes, that our kids in New Hampshire hear in middle and high school, from Nashua to Bow and many places in between – about the comparison between Jews and pizzas, the different ways they burn in an oven.
On college campuses, anti-Semitism looks like the Tufts Disorientation Guide, a student-published document in the news just this month that calls Tufts Hillel “an organization that supports a white supremacist state”, meaning Israel. It's not the criticism of Israel per se, but the inflamed language, the bullying of Jews for support of Israel, and the fact that the same standards are rarely applied to other human rights abusers in the world.
And of course, the most threatening anti-Semitism in the world comes from the brutal terrorism against civilians in Israel, and the threat of nuclear war from the government of Iran.
I hate to say these words. It's not where I want my Judaism to be, I want this room to be a place of holiness and joy. I don't want to live in a clutch, or to teach fear to our children.
I have been thinking about whether anti-Semitism seems to be growing or not, and whether it matters if it is stronger on the extreme left or the extreme right. We can try to count, but I think the right approach is: It doesn't matter. If we have learned anything, it is that even one incident is too much, and there are no excuses.
And at the same time, I think we ought to have anti-Semitism in perspective in the United States. This is not the 1940s, and this is not today's Europe even. Jews have allies and power in this country, and a sovereign state with an army. After all the JCC bomb threats, over half of all the centers in the country last winter, all 100 Senators, every single one, wrote to the administration demanding more resources to investigating anti-Semitic hate crimes – this means something.
We got a lovely letter and a flower at the synagogue, someone brought them in and gave them to Judy one day.
And of course, those threats turned out in fact not to be the work of white supremacists at all. We have to learn to say thank you, and to know what is good when it happens.
But anti-Semitism is not over. We feel what we feel. We know what we perceive, we know that we're not so far past the Shoah to breath easy.
So we have to play some defense. I don't believe that Charlottesville could happen here but I'm not in the guarantee business. We have such a good relationship with our police that they would never leave us vulnerable. We have to show up in protest at public displays of neo-Nazism. There is no negotiating with that, no dialogue.
I know that I and the other full-time rabbis have gone into schools after anti-Semitic bullying, and worked with administrators and teachers, and they are appreciative of the help.
But we have to play some offense too, and for the long term. Our Religious School vision group realized this fall that we need to put more focus on teaching children to be proud as Jews in our difference, and advocates for themselves as teens and young adults. To find that impossible sweet spot of joy and pride without fear and worry.
We have been working to make ourselves more understood as Jews in our local community. In June, we took part in the interfaith council's house of worship tour. About 50 people from at least seven different congregations came here, and about ten of our members staffed stations around the synagogue to talk about beliefs, our books, our space, our community. I wanted it not just to be me – many of us have to be community educators about Judaism and Jewish culture. The people who came joined us for a weekday evening minyan in our Sanctuary. Some were people we knew, but even among them most knew relatively little about us and our practices and culture.
I have been mulling over how we get out beyond the big cities of New Hampshire, such as they are, and teach people who really don't know Jews about us by going to them, or getting them to come here. I'm working on a date to speak at the local mosque, where many people are from countries where they had no real contact with Jews. Our relationships with Muslims and new Americans are going to be critical for us, as our country changes.
In the political conversations about Israel, we have to say that other people can't tell us that support for Israel is a corruption of our true religion, or pretend that Jewish lives would be at no risk in a single state of Palestine, or accuse Israel of genocide, what must surely be the least-effective genocide ever. If people are going to engage us, about the role of identified Jews in public policy, or the meaning of Zionism, they are going to have to understand what we experience, our memories and traumas, what we bring to the table.
We have to live the best, to make sure our outrage and anger in defense of other Jews is matched by our care for each other. It is much easier to be seethe at a common enemy, than act together out a common purpose.
And – we have to confront the Jonah challenge – not to let our own experience of anti-Semitism blind us to the hate directed at others.
The Torah teaches 36 different times that we are not to oppress or wrong a stranger – an outsider, an other – in Hebrew, a ger. And the explanation is that “you know the soul of a ger” – literally the life, the experience, the clutch in the throat that a stranger experiences – because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
I've been thinking about this. Obviously the Torah wasn't just saying – avoid doing what Pharaoh did, throwing babies into the river because they are from another group. The Torah means that we should draw on our own experience as outsiders to recognize that there are 36 ways other groups can be wronged, in their own ways. We aren't supposed to care about the hate and bigotry directed at others only when it's similar to what Jews have experienced in history.
I learned this from Elie Wiesel z”l. He talked about the fact that when he was liberated, he decided that not to write about the Shoah for ten full years. He wrote that it was important to take the time to say correctly and specifically what had happened to him and the people he knew. Not to fall into lazy cliches, to repeat what other people say about oppression because it comes easily, or is easier for others to understand.
So we, all of us, have to understand and hear what others experience as hate, as racism, in their own terms. We have to make room for that. Sometimes, other groups compare something to the Holocaust because they think that's the only way to get our attention.
Imagine if someone tried to tell us what anti-Semitism felt like, or what the Holocaust really means. We wouldn't stand for it.
Each group has something to say. And so we need to know what things are like – for Latinos, for African-Americans, for Muslims – before we can do anything else.
We need to hear, as I have heard from two Latino pastors in Nashua, how Latinos are afraid to be out in public places since the election last November. Pastor Jose Luna, who is on the NH State Human Rights Commission talked to the interfaith council about this. Father Marcos Gonzales-Torrez, from the St Louis Church in the tree streets, told me about a man in his congregation who was detained by Federal authorities on his way to church. He was with another man whose documents were suspect, and who the authorities knew would be on his way to church – so the friend was taken too, because he was with him, and it was no problem to detain several Latinos in case they had issues, and they could release them later. There are people who are afraid to send their kids to school, or to come to a parent conference in school – people who actually are legally entitled to be here.
We need to hear, as I heard in the New Fellowship Baptist Church in Nashua, stories like the one I heard from an African-American graduate of MIT, a professional, who decided to have her hair done in a Caribbean style.
She said that she joked with her stylist that this would guarantee that she would be pulled over at some point by the police, and many African-Americans worry that their lives are at risk. Can you imagine having to think about this when you have your hair done?
We insist on our right to define what anti-Semitism is to us, what it feels like to us. So we too have to be willing open ourselves to hear others describe their experience of racism, anti-Mexican bigotry, Islamophobia, for instance.
That doesn't have to be where the conversation ends. It's just the ticket to entry. I have been wearing my kippah that has both the Jewish star and the American flag this year more than I ever have before, as my expression of hope about America. I have always felt like I had standing, as a Jew who is therefore a minority, to claim that America's welcome is real, that we are all on the inside. What shakes me to the core is the thought that large numbers of African-Americans, in the middle class, might be giving up on that hope, on the idea that America is more than white supremacy. Just because I feel accepted for the most part as a Jew here, that's not proof that it's the same for any other minority. Charlottesville happened to African-Americans and to Jews. In the moment the physical violence was the same for all of us. But the significance of it was very different.
We need to listen when other groups identify their own crises and ask for our help. I say we – but the Jewish community is not only a white-skinned community. Jews who are dark-skinned have told me about their experiences with the police in some towns around here.
It won't always be about us; anti-Semitism isn't always part of the picture. Sometimes this will be a stretch, will challenge our thinking. But as we want people to care about anti-Semitism, to learn about the Shoah – we have to be open to seeing what the world is like for others. If we don't all choose to do everything for them, we have to understand why they aren't as alarmed by anti-Semitism as we are. Some of our congregants have been in Manchester at the ICE office, at vigils for immigrants who were welcomed here often long ago, did what they were asked, and are now being threatened with deportation.
Playing offense means getting out there and building more relationships. To talk about race and policing, or immigration, or Islam and terrorism, or Israel and the Palestinians – we each have to start by hearing and acknowledging what others are experiencing. It's impossible to solve anything without that curiosity. And it's impossible for others to see us without it either. Now you see where last week's sermon and today's come together. This is something that advocates for immigrants, political and civic, are hoping we will do.
I am involved in One Greater Nashua, which works these problems from the standpoint of shared values in town, and building an economy that works for people of all backgrounds, and creating a civic leadership in town of many cultures.
Last year we invited Imam Muhammed Musri to speak, a prominent so-called “moderate” Muslim leader. He came during Sukkot, and he answered our questions about all kinds of things – and he didn't shy from talking about Muslims and terrorism, or Muslim social views, or Israel. This was very good. We're still working on the next step, and hope to have a small dinner this Sukkot with people from our congregation and the local mosque.
I'd like to invite people from Father Marcos' community, and from New Fellowship, to come and tell us what they are experiencing, and to study and sing with us.
We need especially to be together at this year's CROP Walk, with people from many faiths – and not just to be in the same room for the ceremony, but to find new people to walk and talk with.
We are starting here a Tzedek (Justice) Committee, to explore among other things issues of human rights. And part of that will involve exploring our relationships with other groups, and talking about where our principles and our experiences overlap with those of others, and where alliances are more challenging.
We need a democratic America, an America of many groups, that aren't just all here but that work on their relationships with each other. Jews will not survive without it. And this country will not survive either. But as much as the past two years have surfaced hate in various forms, out in the open, they have also surfaced alliances and connections, in places where you didn't know they were. And it doesn't matter how much, though I think it's a lot. Just as we shouldn't tolerate a single act of hate, so too we shouldn't forget to be thankful for each good relationship.
We have, as Jews in this country, so often done what God asked Jonah to do – to strengthen his people and to stand up in Nineveh. More than 100 years ago, when the ADL was founded to combat anti-Semitism and racism in America; through the years when Jews worked for civil rights and freedom for Soviet Jewry.
God taught Jonah that indeed, his capacity to do both was more than he realized. All God had to do was to put a plant next to him – a smelly plant, that provided him with a little shade – and Jonah couldn't help but feel tied to it.
Surely, then, he could walk through the streets of Nineveh, speak to the king, and feel tied to all the people from all the places that the Assyrians had brought them, even as he was tied to his own people.
And generations later, Jonah's willingness to struggle with that mission, that multiple mission inspired our prophet Isaiah, whose words we read this morning:
You will rebuild the age-old ruins,
and raise up again the foundations from prior generations.
And you shall be called repairer of the breach, restorers of the path for living.
Then you can seek the favor of Adonai,
and I will set you astride the heights of the earth
And let you enjoy the heritage of your father Jacob
….
Ki pi Adonai dibber – For the mouth of Adonai has spoken.
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