Mina's Musings: Ki Tetzei 2016

This past Sunday I met for the first time with the confirmation class of 2017.  As most teachers do on the first day, I tried to get to know my students a little.  I asked them their names, where they go to high school, and then asked them to share what the most difficult thing they’ve ever experienced because they are Jews.  The responses were not what I expected.  At first, no one claimed to have experienced any anti-Semitism.  A few said it was difficult explaining Jewish holidays, some said missing class for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur was hard, and some said they’ve never had any difficulties.  And then one student explained that in one of her classes at school they all read a book called the Lemon Tree.  This book is explicitly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.  Once this student said the words, several other students piled on, also complaining.  I asked if any of them had complained.  One said her mother wrote a note that got ignored, and another said when she complained, her teacher admitted the book was anti-Israel and therefore subtly anti-Jewish, but that they were still going to read it and that there would be NO “counter” text the class presenting the Israeli viewpoint.

Such bias, though my students didn’t yet know it, is sometimes called anti-Zionism.  In truth, the new anti-Zionism is nothing more than the old anti-Semitism dressed up in fancy clothing. 

Now this morning our Bar Mitzvah chanted the maftir aliyah of our Torah portion.  Here is what he read: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt – how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and wary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear.  Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek, from under heaven.  Do not forget!” 

It is one of the most well-known and simultaneously baffling verses of the entire Torah.  How do we blot out the memory of Amalek yet not forget?  In order to understand the verse we must realize that very though Amalek was a real nation, the name Amalek soon became symbolic of those who would try and destroy the Jewish people out of nothing more than malice and hatred.  We are told to blot out the memory of Amalek, meaning the kind of hatred that they represent.  We must blot out hatred and simultaneously we CAN’T forget it because Jew-hatred erupts again and again and will continue to do so until the world is perfected under the messiah.

Of all the hatreds, there is NO older hatred than anti-Semitism.  It has been around since the moment Pharaoh tried to destroy the Israelites by killing the Jewish baby boys.  As Rabbi Lord  Jonathan Sacks wrote this past spring:  “What then is anti-Semitism? It is not a coherent set of beliefs but a set of contradictions. Before the Holocaust, Jews were hated because they were poor and because they were rich; because they were communists and because they were capitalists; because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they clung tenaciously to ancient religious beliefs and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing. Anti-Semitism is a virus that survives by mutating. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, Israel. Anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism.”

Rabbi Sacks is correct, and unfortunately anti-Semitism, via the new concept of intersectionality, is impacting Jewish college students around this great country of ours.  Thursday (9/15/2016) the Washington Post had an article with the title:  In the Safe Spaces on Campus, no Jews allowed.  The article was by Anthony Berteaux, and I highly recommend you all read it.  Before I read it I want you to remember where the article comes from:  The Washingto Post, a newspaper known for its liberal perspective.  In part it reads: 

“When Arielle Mokhtarzadeh arrived at University of California, Berkeley, to attend the annual Students of Color Conference, she had no way of knowing that she would be leaving as a victim of anti­Semitism.…..For Mokhtarzadeh, an Iranian Jew at UCLA, her freshman year was punctuated by incidents of anti­Semitism….She was shocked during her first quarter in school,….to see the phrase “Hitler did nothing wrong” etched into a table [in the Bruin café]. Months later, [her] friend …was temporarily denied a student government leadership position based solely on her Jewish identity…. The campus was supposed to be her new home, her new safe space — so why didn’t she feel that way? She went to the conference hoping for some answers. But on the first day there, she was horrified when the discussion became an attack on Israel — and soon devolved into attacks on the Jews…….“Over the course of what was probably no longer than an hour, my history was denied, the murder of my people was justified, and a movement whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Jewish homeland was glorified. Statements were made justifying the ruthless murder of innocent Israeli civilians, blatantly denying Jewish indigeneity in the land, and denying the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered,” she said. “Why anyone in their right mind would accept these slanders as truths baffles me. But they did. These statements, and others, were met with endless snaps and cheers. I was taken aback.”  Mokhtarzadeh walked out on the verge of tears. “It was in that moment, during that conference, that I realized that every identity and every intersection of identity was to be welcomed and championed in progressive spaces — except mine.”

The article continues:  “When these events happen, there are no outcries from the progressive community.”  I wish we had time to read the whole article together, but we don’t and this is a simchah, a happy occasion.   So how do we recognize such challenges and remain joyful?  Easily.  We are not helpless.  We can work together to prevent anti­Semitism from becoming  normalized.

Let me pause there.  I want you to think about what I said.  Anti-Semitism is becoming NORMALIZED in this country right now.  For a while, for one of the first times in Jewish history, Jews in the United States lived in a place where anti-Semitism was deemed unacceptable.  That is changing right now and anti-Semitism is becoming "acceptable again."  This has been happening for a while now and we can now longer ignore it.

But don't worry too much yet.  We can do outreach, helping people who believe they are doing social justice to understand the ramifications of anti­Semitic speech. We can engage them and help them change.  Remember.  These social justice warriors truly believe they are doing tikkun olam, repairing the world.  We must commend them for what they are doing well and right, and we must help them see when they have veered off onto the wrong path.

We can do it and we will not be alone.  As we heard in the haftarah a little earlier:  “Enlarge the site of your tent, extend the size of your dwelling…for you shall spread out to the right and the left….fear not, you shall not be ashamed, do not cringe, you shall not be disgraced, …..For the mountains may move and the hills be shaken, but my loyalty shall never move from you, nor my covenant of friendship be shaken – said the Lord, who takes you back in love."  May the words of the haftarah give us all faith as we fight the deadly scourge of hatred and work together to create a world filled with peace and understanding instead, and may that world be created soon.  Amen.