In Every Generation: The Return of Anti-Semitism – Pesah Day 1, 5779

It was indeed tragic to watch Notre Dame de Paris on fire last week, to ache for the loss of a building so deeply connected to the history of Paris and Europe, to lament the destruction of antiquities and works of art. But the burning of Notre Dame is, I am sorry to report, a fitting metaphor for our current moment, when religious engagement is on the decline in the West, and the order of the Old World continues to slip away.

It is notable to me that we are living in a time in which many Jewish people feel kinship with our Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist neighbors, our partners in faith; consider the interfaith cooperation that has happened here in Pittsburgh in the wake of the 18th of Heshvan (the Hebrew date of Oct. 27th, 2018) – the local Muslim community fundraising, the churches that have reached out to us, the huge interfaith vigil, the members of our community that stepped forward to offer comfort to the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh after the Christchurch shooting, and so forth.

That has certainly not always been true. Religious differences, as we know, have historically yielded enmity and outright hatred between people of different faiths; blood libel accusations, wherein Jews in medieval Europe were falsely accused of killing Christian children to use their blood for making matzah, often emerged around this time of year.

One theory about why we actually open the door “for Elijah” during the seder is that it is an attempt to show the non-Jewish neighbors that we are not doing anything nefarious. Nowadays, we might think of the open door as, rather, a metaphor for seeking opportunities to collaborate with our neighbors for the common good. Consider the program 2 for Seder, created by the daughter-in-law of Joyce Fienberg, z”l, an opportunity to share the Pesah ritual with people who have never been before.

***

I attended a meeting last week in New York that I need to tell you about. The meeting was convened by the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, at the office of the American Jewish Committee in New York.

The purpose of the meeting was for people knowledgeable about anti-Semitism in America to share information about it with a very special guest, Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, who is the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief. Dr. Shaheed, a diplomat from the Maldives whose last big project was documenting human rights abuses in Iran, is preparing a report on worldwide anti-Semitism to be delivered to the United Nations General Assembly next fall.

Seated around the table were a bunch of bold-faced names from the Jewish world who are experts on anti-Semitism. Among them were Mark Potok, formerly of the Southern Poverty Law Center and a well-known authority on hate groups, Ira Forman, US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in the Obama administration,  Oren Segal, director of the the ADL’s Center on Extremism, Deputy Inspector Mark Molinari, head of the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Unit, Steven Bayme, Director of Contemporary Jewish Life at AJC, Brian Levin, Director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University, San Bernardino, and others. Now I am clearly not an expert on the subject like all of these folks, but Dr. Shaheed had specifically requested hearing from the Pittsburgh Jewish community, so Jeff Finkelstein (CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh) and I were also seated around the table.

Among the things I learned were the following:

• Our nation has seen annual increases in hate crimes for the last five years.
• Hate crimes against Jews are vastly over-represented; 13% of all hate crimes are anti-Semitic. In NYC they are the majority of hate crimes.
• The biggest single day for hate crimes in America in recent years was Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Election Day.
• White supremacists have turned their focus to fighting the “white genocide,” which is, according to their understanding, engineered by Jews.
  
• There is, in particular, a spike in online anti-Semitism. White supremacists gather in the darkest corners of the web to foment horrible ideas about Jews. It is worth noting that the Pittsburgh shooter and the Christchurch, NZ shooter were motivated by more or less the same types of online hatred, even if the latter did not go into a synagogue.
  
• Anti-Semitism is now evident on the left and the right of the political spectrum, and although we tend to think of these two varieties as coming from different places, they now share memes and other material about the evil of the Jews.

I was asked to speak about how anti-Semitism has affected us in Pittsburgh, and I reported the following:

Five months after October 27th, many of us have returned to what looks outwardly like normalcy.  Even so, I have congregants who are still grieving, whose children are traumatized. I am told that it is difficult to get appointments with local therapists. The recent mosque attacks in New Zealand brought some of the pain back to the surface for many of us in Pittsburgh.

Brad Orsini, the Director of Jewish Community Security at the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, has informed me that there has been a marked increase in anti-Semitic activity since October 2018 – more graffiti, more threatening phone-calls, leaflets, etc. He is called to respond to new threats almost every day. There are now four white supremacist organizations operating in Pittsburgh, whereas prior to Oct. 27th, there were only two.

Every Jewish building now has expensive armed guards, and is spending money we don’t have on making ourselves harder targets – metal detectors, silvered windows, electronic doors, and so forth. At least one synagogue in my neighborhood is opting to arm congregants with proper training. We cannot manage hatred, but we can at least try to prevent it from entering our communal spaces.

And beneath the surface, while we continue to grieve for those whom we lost in October, we are now all more anxious, more circumspect.”

Toward the end of the day, all of us in the room were challenged to state whether or not there might be some good news in all of this. Rabbi Noam Marans brought us back to interfaith cooperation: religious groups and individuals today are far more willing to cooperate with one another, and we see evidence that civil society is largely united against those who hate.

Certainly, in the wake of the 18th of Heshvan here in Pittsburgh, we all felt a very strong sense of neighborliness infuse the already-pretty-neighborly feel of our city. On Monday, two days after, I was visiting a congregant in the hospital, and after parking my car, an African-American woman saw me on the street, asked “Are you Jewish?” and when I said yes, offered to give me a hug, which I gladly took.

So the bad news regarding this is that, going back to where we started, religion and faithful living have a diminishing audience and therefore much-reduced influence in our society. So while at one time, anti-Semitism flowed to some extent from people of faith, today its primary purveyors are not religious. As you have heard me say before, the fastest growing religion in America is “None.” Rabbi Marans pointed out that 23% of Americans are now people without any religion, so no matter how much interfaith cooperation there is, we are not going to reach them.

Others around the table pointed to various types of initiatives that seek to help skinheads and Klansmen and other disenfranchised haters to see the humanity in the objects of their hatred, and to lift them up out of the swamp of racism and anti-Semitism. But while these groups have had a few successes, these are tiny compared to the challenge of entrenched fear and loathing digging ever deeper online.

So while there is not a lot of good news, perhaps the only thing we can lean into is Jewish tradition. Anti-Semitism is not new; we have always lived with this. Two items, in particular, from the traditional Pesah haggadah text, might be helpful to recall:

1. The haggadah reminds us that,
   אֶלָּא שֶׁבְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר עוֹמְדִים עָלֵינוּ לְכַלוֹתֵנוּ
   “In every generation, there are those who rise up to destroy us.”
   While for some decades now, many of us believed that this ancient fear was passé, we can no longer think that way. We must be more vigilant than we have been in recent decades.
2. Later in the haggadah, we read,
   בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם
   We are continually obligated to see ourselves as having personally come forth from slavery, and to act on that vision to eliminate oppression from this world. In light of our new reality, this year we will very much see ourselves as being allied with people of faith around the world who are targeted for their religion, and we will act in solidarity with them. No Jew will feel the freedom to worship in safety when people of faith around the world feel that they too are bound by the shackles of fear.

We have to support initiatives that bring people together to breed harmony and compassion for the other. We may not be able to reach everybody we need to reach, but more love and connection will yield a bulwark against hatred.

As we gather once again tonight around the seder table, perhaps you might ask your family members and friends what they have done to gain allies, to raise the bar of cooperation, to ensure that those of us who love our neighbors win out over the forces of those who hate.

There is a custom from Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Horowitz of Ropshitz (Ropczyce, Poland, 1760-1827) that Elijah’s cup, the fifth cup on the table representing our desire for future redemption, be filled with wine from the cups of all the participants around the table. The suggestion is that we all have to play a role in bringing about that redemption; now is the time for us all to work together, even with those who are not at our seder table, to box out the forces of hate.

Shabbat shalom and hag sameah!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning and the first day of Pesah, 4/20/2019.)