The Cathedral in Uppsala Sweden is one of the more important buildings in the history of the world. Uppsala is the home of the first university in Scandinavia, a place of learning that could boast of scholars like the botanist Linnaeus, who defined the plant classification system used to this day, and Celsius, who developed the measurement of temperature.
For centuries, some of the foremost scholars in Europe would attend services in the Cathedral. Kings were crowned and buried there.
On the wall of the cathedral, still in view today, is an odd relief sculpture, a medieval depiction of Jews suckling at the teats of a pig. Judensau, it’s called. If I asked you to come up with the weirdest image of Jews you could think of, you would surely not have come up with that. But such is the nature of anti-Semitism. As historian Paul Johnson wrote, “In all its myriad manifestations, the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms, a thesaurus of illogic and inconsistency.” In fact, historically, the origins of anti-Semitism were rooted in the world of bizarre fantasy. Anti-Semitism only became anti-Semitism when hatred for Jews was just too weird for words, when the accusations made against us Jews couldn’t possibly be true.
When the Romans fought against ancient Israel, it wasn’t anti-Semitism, it was a normal, if unfortunate and brutal, geopolitical struggle. When early Christianity criticized Judaism, it wasn’t anti-Semitism, it was a perfectly legitimate and understandable, if ominous, theological disagreement. But when grotesque medieval fantasies began to proliferate—the notion that Jews had tails, like the devil, or horns, or a unique smell, or, even worse, poisoned Christian wells, or, worse still and most devastating, drank blood from Christian children—then anti-Semitism burgeoned into the hydra-headed monster we have come to know and fear. Later manifestations—the idea that Jews are capitalists that control all the banks and at the same time Communists that want to take over all the banks—are simply echoes of the same absurdity.
How was it possible for kings and scholars, the movers and shakers of their world, obviously capable and intelligent people, to accept and foster this obviously absurd image of Jews? And, more important, with such delusional enemies in the world, how could the Jewish community engage in honest self-criticism without giving ammunition to its external enemies, who would use any negative self-perception of the Jewish community as confirmation of, and justification for, their otherwise loony fantasies?
The first question is somewhat academic. Anti-Semitism is, as we know, a disease that non-Jews catch and Jews die from. Denying anti-Semitic fantasies is about as effective as yelling at the back of a deaf person.
How do you know Jews don’t drink milk from pigs? Because (and a shoulder shrug)… is about as good a proof as we could possibly offer.
The second question, about our self-critique, is no easier to answer, but as I said, more important. As Jews, we have our own inner life, an inner life that centers on self-improvement—this sacred evening being a parade example—and self-improvement is impossible without self-critique. Deluding ourselves into thinking that we are perfect, that there is nothing worthy of criticism, is not an option for Jews. But how do we engage in self-critique without giving aid and comfort to our enemies? How do we speak our truth without bolstering their lies?
In our time, the focus of anti-Semitism is Israel. The new anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism. It shares all the characteristics of medieval anti-Semitism—the same irrationality, the same malevolence. It creates for us the same dilemma regarding self-criticism as our medieval ancestors faced—only worse. In the medieval world, we were a virtually closed community. It was only through traitors that outsiders would have any inkling of what we thought of ourselves and our communities.
Not so today. There is no purely internal Jewish debate about Israel. Everything we say, every critique, no matter how well-meaning and lovingly offered, is immediately available to everyone, friend and foe alike.
So here’s the truth about Israel. On the one hand, there is the conflict with the Palestinians. It’s a difficult conflict, bitter, sometimes brutal. As Giulio Meotti has pointed out, “Israel is the only, I repeat the only, country in the world whose geographic map is subdivided by sectors whose demarcations are the time calculated to find a shelter from a missile.” As I said, brutal. But it’s not intrinsically anti-Semitic. It is a geopolitical conflict, completely understandable if also unfortunate. Simply put, after what happened to the Palestinians, what did you expect them to do, throw roses at us? Our enemies may be our enemies, but they are still human beings, and that is something we must never forget.
On the other hand, this rationally coherent, if ugly, conflict has been overlaid with macabre mythological fantasies that would make Hieronymus Bosch proud. The examples are as numerous as they are grotesque, and entirely contrary to reality. “Israel destroys the health of the Palestinians.” In fact, because of Israel, they have the best health care in the entire Middle East. “Israel destroyed the Palestinian educational system.” In fact, because of Israel, they are the best educated Arabs in the Middle East. Israel, according Jasbir Puar, a professor right up the road at Rutgers, Israel claims a right to intentionally maim Palestinians. In fact, Israel claims no such right, but when necessary of course chooses to wound rather than kill. And it goes without saying that if Israel chose as a matter of policy to kill rather than wound, G-d forbid, Puar would be the first to complain about it.
And on top of all these outright lies are truly meshuga fantasies about Israel being behind 9/11; Israel sending aphrodisiac-laced chewing gum into the Arab world to corrupt their youth; Israel sending HIV smitten prostitutes into the Arab world to infect them (an interesting one/two punch, if you think about it); Israel committing genocide. In fact, the Palestinian population has grown 15 fold since 1948, and the total number killed in all the wars from 1948 until today, including, tragically, innocent non-combatants, is less than the number who die in traffic accidents in America every year. But the grossly misinformed say, “The Israelis are doing what the Nazis did to them.” Or even worse. “Israel uses the blood of Arab children to bake matzah.” I kid you not. Just as Jews were seen as demons in the Middle Ages, so, too, Israel is demonized today as beyond the pale of civilization.
And then, there is the third hand. (For Jews, it’s always complicated.) Beside the entirely understandable conflict, and the anti-Semitic mythology, there are the real issues with which Israel, and we, must contend. To build settlements or not. To stay in the territories or not. To negotiate with Hamas or not. To welcome African refugees, or not. To wait for a “peace partner,” or to act unilaterally. To privilege Black Hat Orthodoxy as the religion of the Jewish people, or to allow for a religious pluralism that reflects the reality of the Jewish nation. Are we not supposed to talk about these things?
And on top of all those issues, there are the problems which inevitably rise in any ethnically divided society, especially one at war. What are we to make of the fact that two thirds of Israeli Arabs say they are opposed to Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish and Zionist state, nearly 30% would like to see Israel disappear altogether, and nearly 40% do not believe there was a Holocaust? These things, too, are true. What are we to make of Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara who said, “Hizbullah should be proud of their achievement and of humiliating Israel.” Imagine if a Japanese American congressman praised Japan after Pearl Harbor. Of course, there weren’t any Japanese American congressmen, which can tell us something about the vibrancy of Israel’s democracy.
On the other hand, what are we to make of Yeshiva students chanting “Death to the Arabs,” of Arab-owned olive trees uprooted in so-called price tag attacks, of harassment of Palestinian children by Jewish settlers? These things, too, are true. Sadly and shamefully enough. True.
Are these also things we aren’t supposed to talk about? Are we not supposed to talk about the arrest of a Conservative Rabbi for performing a marriage of which the chief rabbinate did not approve? Are we not supposed to talk about the forced displacement of Bedouin for the sake of a Jewish housing project? And, not least, are we not supposed to talk about the denigration and betrayal of the liberal streams of Judaism by the Netanyahu government? These things, too, are true.
There are indeed some that insist that we should not discuss these things, even if they are true. Discussions of such contentious matters, they say, could lead to internal dissention. While we debate among ourselves, sometimes bitterly, our enemies are planning our destruction. They point out, quite correctly, that the rabid enemies of Israel will use all these to slander and malign us, and to squelch any outside support for us. In fact, even good things will be twisted into condemnation. Consider Israel’s recent rescue of more than four hundred Syrian relief workers, the White Helmets, and their families, from certain death at the hands of Assad. The New York Times reported it this way: “Israel, in a move that may have created more friction with Syria, …helped… the White Helmets.”
There they go again, those Israelis, creating more friction.
And on the other hand there are those who cannot fully engage in an ambivalent love affair. Israel has to fit their idealized image to be worthy of their love, and any revealing talk about Israel, warts and all, will undercut that love. The issue here is not what our enemies will do with the information, but rather what the information will do to us.
But I must point out that if we insist on a standard of perfection to merit love, then for sure every husband in this room is in trouble.
And some of the wives.
Not mine.
On the third hand, there are those who insist we must talk about these truths, and that we do so, at every juncture. You may have heard of a few of the young people on free Birthright trips to Israel, who protest against what they see as a one-sided presentation that ignores the Palestinian narrative. We can leave aside the chutzpah of taking a gift of many thousands of dollars and then using it to push the agenda they, with all their adolescent certainty, have decided upon. And beyond that, we can ask the question if exploring the Palestinian perspective should really be on the 10 day agenda for a bunch of kids, most of whom have never been to Israel, some of whom can hardly find it on a map.
If you were bringing a bunch of Israeli kids to America for the first time, would you put an opioid detox clinic on a Native American reservation high on your priority list? How about a barrio in LA? Or the South Bronx? Or would you prefer instead the Lincoln Memorial, the Liberty Bell, and Yellowstone?
But the Birthright protestors are half-right, even if they have a lousy sense of timing, not to mention gratitude. We must indeed educate ourselves, and our children, to understand the whole of Israel, with all its complexity and all its nuance, and all its pluses and all its minuses—but at the very same time, we must also remember that we have enemies that couldn’t care less about complexity and nuance, but instead simply want us gone, or dead, or both.
And here’s another truth about Israel: it forces us, as diaspora Jews, to reconsider our Jewish identity. For the past two thousand years we Jews have lived as a minority. We were exiles, vulnerable exiles, exiles commanded to pray for the peace of the places in which we found ourselves. We created identities which were a mix of our Jewish traditions and the unique cultures—religious, ethnic, national—in which we found ourselves. We were enriched by other cultures, and we, in turn, quietly and subtly influenced them. In Manhattan, Temple Emanu-El has a rose window—think Notre Dame in Paris. Two blocks away is Park East synagogue, which imitates the Moorish style from late medieval Spain. A little further uptown is the Jewish Museum, which once housed a model of a synagogue, unfortunately never built, designed by my favorite artist Barnett Newman, based on a combination of, if you can believe it, kabbalah and baseball—you would all be sitting in the bleachers, while I’d be standing on the mound. All this serves to underscore the richness of diaspora Jewish life.
But that life is based on the foundation of a millennium of life in our own country, linked to our own soil, immersed in our own environment, speaking our own language, generating the culture of our own people—our own kings, and priests, and prophets; our own scribes, and artists, and workers, and soldiers; our own capital; our own Temple; a people ready to proudly assert—as equals—our own values on the world stage. And that is the stage to which we, thank G-d, have returned. These things, too, are true. Through the State of Israel, a Jewish voice can again be heard in this world, and that can be a glorious thing.
On the other hand, if we don’t like what we are hearing from Israel’s leaders, we diaspora Jews are especially pained by it. We can revel in the wonderful things that Israel does—and they are many, far too numerous to mention. But the price we pay is to cringe when, as sometimes happens, an Israeli leader says something crude or insensitive or worse. We are held responsible for it, but are unable to do anything about it.
Also, I cannot escape the feeling that there is some resentment toward Israel, among those Jews in America used to riding on their moral high horse, for being as stunningly successful as it is. How is it possible that such a place—appreciative of the military, openly nationalistic, brusque, contending with religious intolerance and ethnic conflict, refusing to make peace on suicidal terms, with a political animal like Netanyahu as Prime Minister (yet again)—in a word, illiberal—how is it possible that such a place could be so wildly successful, can rank, in fact, among the most moral states in history, in so many regards. Remember that when all is said and done, there are more women flying F-16’s in Israel than there are women driving cars in Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, seen from the Israeli perspective, and backed by statistics, Jewish identity in American society centers on liberal politics, food, Jewish humor, and remembering the Holocaust—not exactly a reassuring guarantee for cultural creativity, much less survival. These things, too, are true.
The traditional siddur states that we were exiled from our land because of our sins; in the 19th century, the reform siddur asserted that we were not exiled but instead were sent from Israel to be a light unto the nations. The reestablishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel forces us to choose on which side of that divide we stand, and that can be an uncomfortable choice.
This tension lies at the core of the recent controversy about the nation state law passed in Israel. The law declares that the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people. This has been misinterpreted by the law’s critics to imply a right to discriminate against Israel’s non-Jewish citizens. If that is what the law meant, then without doubt protesting vociferously against it would be the only decent thing to do. But that’s not what the law means to do.
The fundamental opposition to the law is not based on the fear of discrimination, which is an entirely legitimate, if also, I believe, unfounded fear. It is, instead, based on the belief, widely held within the Arab world, that Israel is not the homeland of the Jewish people, but rather a place that European settlers (who happen to share the Jewish religion) decided to colonize, in the same way the British colonized India, and the French Algeria—and the European settlers colonizing Palestine, i.e., Zionists, will and should suffer the same fate as the British and the French.
Simply put, it is the fundamental Jewish right of self-determination that is enshrined by this law, and denied by its critics. If the critics were right, then privileging Zionist Jews over any other ethnic group is at the very least arbitrary. And if, as the critics claim, it were the Arabs who were indigenous to the Land, then privileging Zionist Jews would be not merely arbitrary, but also perverse, an usurpation.
But the critics are wrong. And if we don’t say so, no one else will.
This, too, is true.
Complicated, no? Well, no one said it was going to be easy. As Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.” We need to be able to walk, breathe, and chew gum all at the same time.
At the end of the day, these are the intertwined truths about Israel we must remember:
First, we are in a bona fide conflict with another people. Our challenge, first and foremost, is to win. But almost as important, we must not lose sight—even under extreme circumstances—of the humanity of our enemy; nor may we lose sight of our own humanity, and our attendant moral responsibilities, even in conflict. This is true.
Second, we are also the victims of a vicious, evil, anti-Semitic attack, a worthy heir to the poisoned legacy of ancient times and ugly myths. We must wholeheartedly, and without quarter, resist such attacks. This too is true.
Third, our society, like every other society on earth, is not perfect. The ideals enshrined in the founding documents of Israel, like the ideals embodied in our American Constitution, have not yet been fully realized. We must devote ourselves to the task of perfecting our society as much as we seek to perfect ourselves. To do this, we must know everything. No fact, no truth, should be withheld from us for any purpose whatsoever. We must not resent or fear facts about Israel, however unpleasant they may be. It is lies about Israel that we cannot, must not, ever abide.
And this, my friends, this too, is true. May we, on this holy night, pledge to learn everything we can about Israel: reject all that is false, embrace all that is true, and act in a way that brings honor and strength and, please G-d, peace to our people and all people everywhere. For Torah will emanate from Zion, and the word of G-d from Jerusalem. Amen.