Recent Sermons

3 IYYAR 5784 SERMON

Because we had a holiday, because we have had a couple lovely bnai mitzvah, I haven’t talked to you about current events recently. Truly, that has been a blessing, and even this morning, when we have a beautiful aufruf, when we read one of the most important Torah readings of the year, I am reluctant to speak of hard things, especially when we could discuss loving your neighbor and loving the stranger. And yet I feel I must.

I don’t have to tell you that as I write, protests, sometimes violent, have erupted across the country and in our own backyard. Graduations have been canceled, American flags have been taken down and Palestinian flags hung in their stead, tent encampments have sprung up across dozens of campuses, and Jewish students have been spat on, intimidated and cursed at. At Yale, Jewish students have been assaulted with taunts, “that death follow you everywhere you go, and when it does, I hope you will not be prepared.” At Columbia they have screamed, “Go back to Poland!” and “We don’t want Zionists here!” University presidents have been hauled before Congress to defend the situation on their campuses and thousands have been arrested.

I want to ask three questions this morning. What is going on? Is it antisemitic and to what degree? and How afraid should we be?

What is going on? To say it is complex is to understate the case. What is going on on campus is multifactorial or, in polite English, a clusterxxx.

Our tradition demands that we dan lecha l’chaf z’choot — that we give others’ behavior the most generous reading — and so I want to begin there. I genuinely believe that many if not most of the students were raised to be caring and compassionate human beings. That Jewish students internalized our traditions’ demand to fight injustice and defend the vulnerable, some of it from this week’s parasha. I believe that many and perhaps most of the students are genuinely brokenhearted about the suffering they see in Gaza, and they want to do something about it. That urge is commendable and we should not belittle it.

Unfortunately, those feelings can be easily manipulated by others with a potent agenda. If, in fact, the protests were simply about how Israel is conducting the war in Gaza or even against the occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank, I could be fully sympathetic to them, even if I didn’t necessarily agree with their position, even if I wondered why protest against this war in particular as opposed to any other. And, by the way, I don’t think it is necessarily antisemitic for Jewish students to be particularly concerned about Israel’s actions or even for American students to be more focused on wars supported by our government and tax dollars. I’m not saying I agree — I’m just saying I understand.

But I think these very students become useful tools for much more extreme voices. And so they chant, “From the river to the sea,” seemingly unaware of the plain meaning

of the words — a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and, by implication, the eradication of the Jewish state. In fact, this chant is translated from the Arabic which goes: From the river to the Sea, Palestine will be Arab. Similarly, chanting, “Intifada revolution is the only solution,” ignores the fact that two bloody intifadas took the lives of over 1400 Israeli civilians in coffee shops, on buses, in university cafeterias, at weddings, at seder, eating pizza and accomplished nothing for the Palestinians, other than hardening Israel’s right-wing. Killing civilians is never a legitimate act of resistance. These are not peace-loving words.

To claim that the protests are merely anti-Zionist is to ignore some basic facts: first, that the vast majority of the Jewish community is Zionist and most of us believe that Zionism is an essential aspect of our Judaism. It is simply unacceptable for others to tell us what Judaism is or to decree that they are tolerant of some aspects of our Judaism but not others, even if, by the way, some Jews are not Zionist. More than that, to deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination is antisemitic in a world where every other people lays claim to a nation state. You think nation states are a bad idea? OK, but Jews don’t need to be the first guinea pig to try out the new internationalist order free of borders and states. As Amos Oz wrote, “The idea of the nation-state is in my eyes, “goyim naches” — a gentiles delight. I would be more than happy to live in a world composed of dozens of civilizations, each developing in accordance with its own internal rhythm, all cross-pollinating one another, without any one emerging as a nation-state: no flag, no emblem, no passport, no anthem. No nothing. Only spiritual civilizations tied somehow to their lands, without the tools of statehood and without the instruments of war.

But the Jewish people has already staged a long-running one-man show of that sort. The international audience sometimes applauded, sometimes threw stones and occasionally slaughtered the actor. No one joined us; no one copied the model the Jews were forced to sustain for two thousand years, the model of a civilization without the tools of statehood. For me this drama ended with the murder of Europe’s Jews by Hitler. And I am forced to take it upon myself to play the “game of nations” with all the tools of statehood even though it causes me to feel (as George Steiner put it) like an old man in a kindergarten.”

None of the protesters demanding the eradication of the state of Israel see it as their responsibility to grapple with what will become of that state. For those who imagine a one-state solution, how exactly will Jews and Arabs live in peace together? How will Jews not immediately be pushed out by their surrounding Arab neighbors? And even if this one-state solution could somehow magically happen, what are we talking about: the dismantling of the state of Israel and all of its institutions — its flag, its Parliament, its currency, its healthcare system, its postal service, its courts and so on. I believe that if most of the protesters paused to think about it, they imagine either that Israelis will all be either pushed into the sea or forced to emigrate, and either way they are fine with it. It’s simply not their problem.

In fact, these students have been fed a steady diet of anti-colonialism, anti-apartheid, anti-racism by their professors, and now see the world only through those lenses. In their minds Israel is a colonialist, apartheid, genocidal, occupying, white supremacist state — in other words, the epitome of evil. Once that equation is made, it is hard to undo and so pointing out that Israel is not colonialist, that the Jewish people have lived in this land since their beginning, that a colonialist project implies a host country from which colonies are built and Jews have no other host country — all of that is screaming into the wind. I could similarly rebut the other list of evils. Once the equation with absolute evil is solidified, than everything is justified — spitting at Jewish students is justified, violent threats are justified, even October 7 is justified — because eradicating absolute evil is justified. Where did this loathsome soup get cooked? Where did they learn to eat it? In part from their curriculum. In part from elitist radical Palestinian operators who share Hamas’ goals and who seek to erode support for Israel and ultimately dismantle it. The students, vulnerable because of their justifiable caring, vulnerable because of what they have learned about the evils of colonialism, white supremacy etc, and vulnerable because of their ignorance, particularly of history and also of Judaism — become their useful stooges. Make no mistake. This has been planned and coordinated for a long time, much as October 7 was. David and I both worked on campus in the Bay Area — at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley — in the 90’s, in the infancy of this movement. We saw the preview there and it wasn’t pretty. The students who coordinated those protests have grown up to be professors and agitators with funding behind them. Isn’t it suspicious that all the encampments look the same? Do you think they all shopped at the same army-navy store? This is a well-coordinated effort by people who know exactly what they are doing — to steadily erode American support for the state of Israel. One of the tragedies of the MIddle East is that extremists always win. The students are supporting Hamas, not Palestinians, even though Hamas not only demands Israel’s destruction but is deeply destructive to the Palestinian people they claim to represent: using billions of dollars in aid to Gaza for weapons and tunnels; attacking Israel knowing full well that a large scale invasion would follow and failing to provide shelter or provisions or healthcare for their people, in fact using them as human shields while the terrorists themselves cowardly hide beneath them underground or in luxury suites in Qatar. And events like October 7 or even the campus protests, only harden the position of the extreme right in Israel which believes, with justification, that a Palestinian state on its border will only lead to more October 7’s. The larger middle — Israelis and Palestinians — who want a two state solution, who want to live in peace, are simply squeezed out. The students, it seems, believe they are advocating peace when in fact they are supporting the most extreme factions whose goals are endless war until one side is eradicated.

As for the students’ demands, divestment is a chimera. Perhaps it made a difference in South Africa but university holdings in Israeli companies are not significant enough to damage Israel’s economy. If the students believe they are serious about their desire not to benefit from anything Israeli, I might remind them of an old cartoon in which a family is living in a cave, cooking over an open fire. One of the children asks the father what they are doing there. The father says, “Well, we decided to boycott everything made in Israel, and this is where we ended up.” The reality is that the students have no influence on the Israeli government and divestment won’t matter. But they do have political influence and that is what is worrisome. It is worrisome in several ways — first, we are beginning to see the erosion of support for Israel among mainstream Democrats. It is hard not to fear that Biden is the last of a generation who knew a vulnerable Israel and loves it, and that a younger generation, including students now on campus who will be running the country in ten or twenty years, will think and vote differently. At the same time, a majority of Americans, I believe, are angry about the havoc created by the protests, are angry that their children’s graduations are being canceled or that their safety is endangered. This ends up strengthening extreme factions on the right. And although, back in the fall, most of us found ourselves agreeing more readily with Elise Stefanik than with Claudine Gay, I for one am not at all eager for Congress to determine university curricula. Finally, the protests strengthen Hamas’ hand as was clear this week when Biden threatened military aid and Hamas stopped negotiating. Hamas clearly believes the protests are helping to turn the tide in their direction. Are the protests antisemitic? Reports vary widely. Jewish students from Columbia just issued a long and painful open letter to the protesters detailing a long list of antisemitic incidents. A Jewish student at Yale wrote an account of horrific antisemitism in the Yale Daily News, all of which has been fact-checked by the Daily. On the other hand, many of the protesters are Jewish, seders are held in the encampments, even minha and ma’ariv. What to believe? I believe that it differs from place to place and moment to moment and even from person to person. I also know that Jewish students have experienced violent assaults, threats of violence, and antisemitic slurs, all of which are unacceptable. I believe that the protesters themselves imagine some distinction between Zionism and Judaism, even as the national leaders of the movement know full well that no such distinction exists, and Jews themselves do not separate Israel from their identity as Jews. While protest against Israeli policies is legitimate, contending Israel’s right to exist is in fact an act of antisemitism. I was a student on campus during the protests against South Africa and I protested on behalf of Soviet Jews. At no time did we call for the eradication of either state, only for a change in policy. And I believe that the presence of Jewish students at the protests, many of them perhaps naive or insufficiently knowledgeable about Judaism, only gives cover to what is inherently antisemitic. I am reasonably certain that if you asked most of the protesters if they hate Jews, they would say, “Of course not,” but they have been manipulated into believing that hating the state of Israel, demanding its destruction, ignoring the October 7 massacre or blaming it on Israel, aligning with a militant group that is openly antisemitic and seeks to kill Jews anywhere and everywhere, as well as destroy the state — that all of these are somehow not antisemitic. How scared should we be? That is very hard to say and I want to acknowledge here that I speak without having visited any of these encampments, without a child on campus who is fearful, without any firsthand knowledge of what is happening. So, on the one hand, in my more optimistic self, the semester will end, there will be protests at the Democratic National Convention, but most Americans will not align with them, and hopefully by autumn, the war will end, or at least its most violent phase will, and students will forget about it and move on to the next cause du jour. In my more pessimistic self, I think about the number of times over the last eight years or so when we have been asked to ignore or contextualize deeply antisemitic actions — Charlottesville, Kanye West, Marjorie Taylor Green, Elon Musk, Ilhan Omer, student protestors shouting that Jews should return to Poland, Congressional leaders asserting that their religion requires them to believe that Jews — presumably all of us living and dead — killed their God, the inaction and waffling of college presidents in the face of blatant antisemitism — and I am scared. Was January 6 our Reischstag? Is this 1933? A few weeks ago David and I saw the play, “The Ally” at the Public Theater in New York. Written by Itamar Moses before October 7, it is about a Jewish professor/ playwright on an imaginary American campus. The character grew up in Berkeley with Israeli parents and never thought much about his Jewish identity, but, through a series of events, he is thrust into the middle of campus politics in which defending people of color and detesting Israel go hand in hand. Near the end of the play, as he is told over and over again that other people — Palestinians, blacks — are in more immediate danger than Jews who are white and privileged, he wonders out loud, when it will be his turn, when will Jewish suffering and hatred of Jews be enough to matter? Does it take gas chambers? And how long before that too is forgotten? I don’t know the answer to these questions. Panic is not helpful; vigilance is necessary although even vigilance is complicated when Jewish donors are seen as driving university or congressional policy, especially if that policy is viewed as adversarial to people of color. And forget about education. The students and the professors who taught them are among the most educated people in America. We will not educate our way out of antisemitism. What I can tell you is this. The last several weeks at beautiful b’nai mitzvah we have celebrated here, around the seder table, at holiday meals, I have sometimes had two film loops running in my head: on one I am watching the scene in front of me; on the other, I am watching film clips of Jewish families celebrating simchas and holidays in Germany in the 1930’s. I keep wondering if some day someone will look at the film clips of this moment and think what I think looking at the clips from Germany — if only they had known. If only I could tell them.