Dear {{first_name}},
October 7, 2023 is a day that will live forever in the collective memories of the Jewish people and all people of conscience in the world. For those without a conscience, it will be a day like every other day, a day of nothing out of the ordinary. 90 years prior to October 7, 2023, an obscure thing happened that was buried in the newspapers of the days. Dr Albert Einstein boarded a ship in London to travel across the Atlantic to seek safety here in the US. This little-known fact is one I dug up to examine just how different things are today. In 1933, there was no such thing as 24-hour cable news or the World Wide Web and people had to patiently wait to consume the latest events.
The New York Times, on October 8, 1937, reported on page 6 that the German government had passed a law forbidding Jews from being taught music. An attempted revolt at Auschwitz Birkenau on October 7, 1944 was ultimately put down by the Nazis and resulted in the deaths of 250 inmates during the fighting and an additional 200 afterwards when the guards murdered scores of other Jews. The year is now 2024, and for the first time in my life, I’m struggling to tell fellow Jews to take a breath and recognize everything is going to be okay. We’ve all been asked if we thought the Holocaust could happen again. We’ve all said no time and again as we recognize the strength of American Democracy and of our community’s involvement in the preservation of that democracy. October 7, 2023 was the bloodiest single day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and since October 7, we’ve been caught in a continual spiral of ugliness we haven’t witnessed on this scale since the days of the Holocaust.
The institutions which Einstein came from Germany to build up, the American universities, have completely abandoned the Jewish people. Across the country we’re witnessing students and PROFESSORS and other PAID MEMBERS OF THE FACULTIES of these universities call for a globalized intifada… for a Jew-free land “From the River to the Sea…”, “no peace on stolen land…” and “APD (Atlanta Police Department) KKK and IDF are all the same”. These are just a sampling of the words being said on Emory’s campus. The same people calling for a “cease fire” call for a globalized intifada. This is 2024 and this is what we’re living through?!?
We must all believe in the freedom of assembly and the freedom of speech. We must all agree that those rights, enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, are enshrined to protect even what we find awful. At the same time, we must all accept that no singular right is absolute and there are indeed limits to everything in this world. The limits in speech and in assembly include intimidation, provoking violence as well as other limits. Many have asked the real question: “If the vitriol being screamed on campuses was directed at women, people of color, or any other marginalized group, would the response from the world be quite different”? The reality is in my heart, I wish it wouldn’t be different, but in my deepest fears I suspect it’s true. Simply put, the oldest form of hatred continues to be accepted around the world no matter how much we wish it weren’t.
The Jewish people have gifted the world with numerous things and yet we’ll never be enough for them to accept us. We expect to be allowed to be a unique people in the world but we seem to continue to be hated by people for so many reasons. The basis of a basic liberal arts education… of a university education, is the concept of academic curiosity and critical analysis. This essential concept has been usurped and used against us. A world that believes in moral relativism is a world without morality. A world that believes rape and torture and murder are crimes only dependent on context, is a world that has lost all understanding of contextual appreciation. A world in which one population is held to a separate standard from all others is a world without any standards at all.
This week, we’ll read אחרי מות which begins by invoking the memories of אהרן/Aaron’s sons: נדב ואביהו/Nadav and Avihu before going into great detail about the rituals of יום כיפור/Yom Kippur. Perhaps the message is that after people’s deaths we need to reflect and find how we can gain atonement. Perhaps the connection is we’ve cleansed our world on behalf of those who came before us. There are many messages. The one I’m most drawn to today is one I spoke of when we read פרשת שמיני/Parshat Shemini, and I recalled the silence of אהרן following the deaths of his sons. I spoke of the תלמוד/Talmud and how it says שתיקה כהודאה, Silence is Consent, and that we have an obligation to never be silent.
This week I’m drawn to something even deeper and that’s the origin of the “Scapegoat” which is found in the יום כיפור ritual. The ritual involved the High Priest confessing the sins of all the Jewish people on the head of a goat and then sending it off (probably to its death) as it would thus take our place and hold all our sins for us. That’s the origin of the phrase; yet, historically we’ve found the art of scapegoating as a time when people/society blames another people for the wrongs of the world. Who is the greatest scapegoat of history? The Jewish people. Who is the scapegoat of the masses around the world today? The Jewish people. You can claim all you want that it's “Zionists” or “Israelis” or “the Israeli Government” but it would just be telling a lie. The anti-Zionist is merely the latest incarnation of the oldest hatred dressed in new clothing.
This week, as we memorialize and honor the memories of the victims of the שואה/The Holocaust, let us not be hoodwinked by those who would’ve been on the wrong side of history then, and are on the wrong side of history now. Let us not be complacent and believe our influence and our engagement here in the US is so much greater than it was in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. Let us not forget that a certain homicidal dictator, Adolf Hitler, blamed us for all of the ills that afflicted Germany following their defeat in World War I. In his scapegoating of us, he managed to expose a violent hatred of our people we never thought was possible.
Let us not think our silence will simply let this pass us by and things will get better. Our silence today will do us no better than the silence of the world in the 30s and the 40s. As we recite the sacred words of “NEVER AGAIN”, let us recognize we don’t yet live in that world. We need to continue to fight and to build a world where it will never be possible or imaginable every again.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Hearshen
