Shabbat Vayera 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
I have an image from films, TV dramas, novels and sadly also the news, an image of the accused sex-offender, who knows he is innocent but is left skulking around town waiting for their trial. The local community have already found them guilty so as they walk down the road, collar up and hood of their coat pulled down over their faces, worried parents tug at the arm of their child so as not to get too close as they hurry past. Red paint, always red paint, daubs their front wall with obscenities and they, knowing their own innocence, step back from society, for protesting their innocence seems futile and exhausting. Awaiting trial means questioning whether they will be imprisoned and step out of the world or win their trial but know life will never truly return to normal because people have made up their own minds and truth doesn’t seem to come into it. Being accused when everyone has made up their mind that you are guilty makes you feel lonely and afraid but if only the accused remembered they have choices about how they respond. The problem is, sometimes everyone else’s judgement can be worse than the truth. It is why the suicide rate among the accused is so high. What happens when you feel everyone around you is accusing you of something you haven’t done? When you feel misunderstood and like you are on the wrong side but you don’t know how you became the enemy because you still don’t think you have done anything wrong.
When wild mobs chase around an airport looking for the Jews who have just landed, I wonder what I’ve done to be hated. When people use social media to post “Hitler was right” or rallies to chant “from the river to the sea” I know they mean they would rather we weren’t here. When a woman called the shul to ask me, the Rabbi, to stop bombing Gaza, I know there is a very strange narrative out there, Jews are killing Palestinians and therefore Judaism should be wiped out.
How can I, along with all of you, have been branded guilty? We may not have our collar up and our hoods pulled down over our faces but we are questioning whether we want to be wearing outward symbols of our Judaism whether it be a Magen David or identifying school uniforms – well when Liverpool Street station can be taken over by mobs, we have to think twice, we could have been getting off the train at that moment. When the red paint comes out to daub kosher restaurants or to paint mice to infiltrate others. When parents pull their children off the football pitch, forbidden to play against a Jewish team, you know we’ve been found guilty and yet we are still settling our displaced, saying Kaddish for our dead and reeling from the shock of untold horror.
So, I’m stuck. What is the response? Is to protest our innocence by stating our values? Do I have to put my name on a list to say, I am innocent, to say I want what’s best for everyone. Who is listening to my protestations and why do I feel the need to state what I believe. A website has been set up to out “our Jewish values”, but not in order to help our communities flourish by being more confident in our basic principles, it hasn’t been set up to invite converts to join us or bring the unaffiliated home, it’s been established to confirm we aren’t the enemy, we aren’t guilty but who do we want to read it? Who are we trying to convince? As the website states so eloquently, we, and I am going to say ‘we’ as I suspect we, on the whole agree that we,
“…believe wholeheartedly in the right of Israel to exist and flourish and the right of Palestinians to self-determination in a state of their own. We refuse to give up on the vision of Israel and a Palestinian state one day existing side-by-side. This is the only long-term solution that will not involve untold bloodshed.
We mourn the lives lost and the Israeli communities cruelly destroyed by Hamas terrorists on 7th October in the biggest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. Along with family and friends in Israel still sheltering from rockets, we grieve for the bereaved, injured and missing and call for the immediate release of the hostages taken by Hamas.
We are anguished by the unfolding humanitarian crisis and catastrophic loss of life of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza, caught up in the intractable conflict between Hamas and Israel.
We are deeply concerned that our community is facing unprecedented levels of antisemitism in the UK and around the world.”
Has anyone who is buying a “Free Palestine” T-shirt from Amazon with the slogan “from the River to the Sea” checked out this website to know we want to live in peace before they kit themselves out for a rally? Do I need to don a Magen David, inviting people to accuse me personally rather than just say it of a faceless crowd? And then what? Will they listen to my beautifully nuanced retort?
While the swell of antisemitism in this country is palpable, I feel it is important to remind ourselves of one supremely important fact. Antisemitism has been around far longer than 1948 and when it is pinned to unrest in the Middle East it is too simple for us, as Jews, to blame Israel and yet antisemitism can only bubble to the surface of British society when there is war in Israel because it exists here all the time and has done here and across Europe and the Middle East since early Christianity.
Last week in Madrid we went to the national art gallery Del Prado. It took an extra half an hour to get in because as someone explained they had to tighten security as they had an exhibition about the Jews. The exhibition was of art based around the conversos, (Spanish: “converted”). Spanish Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity after severe persecution in the late 14th and early 15th centuries and during the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the 1490s. In the minds of many Roman Catholic churchmen the conversos were still identified as Jews, partly because they remained within the Jewish communities in the cities and partly because they held occupations which had become synonymous with being Jewish: merchants, doctors, tailors. Such identification caused many Christians to regard conversos as a subversive force within the church. It was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that some of the legalized prejudice against Jews in Spain was modified.
The paintings which depicted the frustration of the church at the Jews who would not convert and the taking over of Jewish practices and rooting them in Christianity - essentially the rewriting of history to exclude Judaism - was hard to see even in their gilt frames and useful audio tour. It certainly wasn’t the most palatable way to teach my 12 year old about antisemitism but it was an important one. It was a valuable reminder that it’s here and it isn’t new so as not to fall into the trap of saying that the establishment of the state of Israel is the cause of it. We shouldn’t need reminding that Israel as a political entity came into being after the Holocaust.
Why am I saying this? Because when our young adults at university step out of the safe bubble of North London they face antisemitism. When so many are grappling with unpleasant situations at work and when our kids are being told to tuck in their Magen Davids and hide their school uniform, it’s all too easy to blame Israel for the persecution. To make the leap and say, maybe it would be more simple to give up the homeland and bring an end to antisemitism. We mustn’t fall into that trap. When the levels of antisemitism rise we need to remember to support Israel and not allow ourselves to take the path of the falsely accused who skulks back into the darkness. The hate won’t go away if we try and hide from it. We need to be who we are and not be afraid. We need to challenge the hate and not hide from it. We are our own ambassadors and by ensuring that each and everyone of us continues to put a proud face to our Judaism, to support Israel and to add nuance to the conversation and we will ride out yet another storm.
Why establish a website with our values? I can only hope it gives language to all those who signed it to have the difficult conversations which remind people we can be proud Jews who support Israel, pray for release of the hostages and for the safety of the residents of Gaza. We can be better than our matriarch Sarah in this week’s Torah portion. We do not want to cast Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness; we want to learn to live together.
What if Abraham had said to Sarah, I cannot cast out our handmaid and her son into the wilderness, they may not survive, it is perilous out there. Rather we must make our tent a place where Sarah and Hagar learn to be the women of the household together, where Isaac and Ishmael can enjoy a brotherly bond without sibling rivalry, where the five of us can dwell harmoniously, each with their own role in family life, their own personality respected and accepted. Where would we be now?
We are not guilty. Don’t let a global and national discourse change your behaviour. Don’t hide your Judaism or your love of Israel. Explain your grief and the peace we pray for. Antisemitism is not Israel’s fault. Don’t conflate the too. It’s there and it’s bubbling up, but we can and will continue to enable our Jewish communities to thrive with our support for Israel and the pride in our identity.
