The Jewish community’s own wellbeing, and America’s future as an example of compassion, democracy and freedom to the world depend on it.
By JOSHUA M. DAVIDSONA crowd attends a vigil outside the Tree of Life synagogue Tree of Life synagogue, marking one week since a deadly shooting there, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 3, 2018(photo credit: ALAN FREED/REUTERS)
Hayim Nahman Bialik, the brilliant Hebrew poet, wrote: “If you wish to know the fortress to which your fathers bore their treasure, their scrolls of Torah, their Holy of Holies…if you would find the refuge which kept your people’s mighty spirit safe…turn to the ancient house of prayer….Your heart will tell you: your feet touch the threshold of our house of life, your eyes behold the storehouse of our soul.” Throughout the ages, whether in the shtetls of eastern Europe or the big cities of America, the synagogue has been present for the Jewish people as a symbol of hope and stability even in our darkest hours.Recently, many American Jews crossed the threshold of their synagogues to celebrate the Jewish Holy Days with an unease they had not experienced before, or at least not in a very long time. In the wake of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue one year ago, some synagogues have indeed become fortresses, and not the sort Bialik meant. Now American Jews grasp what European Jews have understood for years: The synagogue is an institution under siege. From whatever lands Jews reached America’s shores and from whatever persecution they fled – including the despotism rising in western Europe in the early 1800s, the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe that followed, the Nazi death camps, the Iranian revolution and Soviet oppression – all of us were blessed to find a home in America, and have depended on America to keep us safe, which it has. But this past year, we were afraid. Jewish, Christian and Muslim houses of worship became scenes of bloodshed. The synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and Poway shook us to the core. Antisemitism in America isn’t new; many of us grew up with it. But never, here, has it been inflamed by such hatemongering ethno-nationalists armed with so many guns. Terrorized by the violent antisemitism of the militant Right, we are also bullied by the insidious antisemitism of the intersectional Left, which even the United Nations now admits employs spurious opposition to Israel as a flimsy cover for antipathy to Jews. Some vocal congressional Democrats have trafficked in it. The New York Times International Edition drew us a picture of it with its vile cartoon of a blind, Jewishly-clad Donald Trump led around by Benjamin Netanyahu as his guide dog with a Jewish star dangling from his collar. Elected officials at all levels of government, including Trump, are guilty of such inflammatory rhetoric which can only sound like music in the ears of antisemites on both extremes. How should we respond? In a recent Times column, Bari Weiss advised: “The long arc of Jewish history makes it clear that the only way to fight [antisemitism] is by waging an affirmative battle for who we are. By entering the fray for our values….” In other words, by decrying hate in all its forms; by offering no quarter to bigots, bigoted speech or bigoted ideologies, including the anti-immigrant nativism with which we Jews are all-too-familiar with as shaping an immigration policy increasingly reminiscent of the 1920s. Many of us, hearing the enmity and the divisiveness all around us – witnessing the assault on honesty, civility and decency and the contemptuous, autocratic finger in the eye of democratic norms – have begun to question the political viability of principles we once deemed fundamental to our identity as Jews and as Americans. But the synagogue has been, and will be, a bulwark against such cynicism and our fortress of hope – upholding in America the values of democratic pluralism that our great-grandparents, our grandparents, our parents, and even some of us came here yearning to breathe free while lifting a voice of moral leadership proclaiming that kindness and justice must always remain the warp and weft of our social fabric. The Jewish community’s own wellbeing, and America’s future as an example of compassion, democracy and freedom to the world depend on it. The author is the senior rabbi of Congregation Emanu-El in New York City.
