1938 vs. 2012

It is tempting, I know, to draw parallels between 1938 and 2012. My inbox is filled with emails about appeasement, about Neville Chamberlain’s haunting 1938 proclamation of having secured peace in our time. We see a leader on the world stage who has repeatedly declared genocidal intent against our people and has an ambition to develop the capacity to carry out such acts. Who can blame us for an insistence on confronting a threat before it materializes? We see the mobs in the streets, the anti-western sentiment. This week a video has been attributed to the Jewish people, a seeming modern incarnation of the age-old blood libel, when false crimes were blamed on Jews as a pretext for violence. We see the virulent anti-Semitism in the Arab world. “Never again,” we have said again and again, and here we seem to be – again.

Jews are particularly fond of citing Santayana’s refrain, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Later this fall, we will be hosting Ambassador Yehuda Avner as a scholar in residence. In his book The Prime Ministers, he relates a conversation Prime Minister Begin had with American Jewish leaders on the relevance of the Holocaust for the contemporary American Jewish community. “First,” Begin said, “if an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him. Don’t doubt it for a moment. Second, when a Jew anywhere is threatened or under attack, do all in your power to come to his aid. Never pause to wonder what the world will think or say. The world will never pity slaughtered Jews. The world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew but the world will have to take account of him.” (Avner, p. 545-6) The list goes on and the entire exchange is worth reading, but the point is one and the same. There is a direct line from the events of recent history to what would become known as Begin doctrine – a policy invoked for the bombing of Osirak in 1981 and Syria in 2008 – that “On no account will Israel permit an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against the people of Israel.” With another threat looming if not already present, is it at all a surprise to realize that there is connection between the darkest chapter of our people’s history and the decision making of today?

I have a difficult time making sense of the news of this past week, changing as it has been every day. So rather than focus on 2012 this Shabbat, I want to turn our attention to the other side of the comparison, 1933-1938, and try to understand what was taking place for the Jews of Europe prior to the Second World War. The newest book on the subject, which has received stellar reviews, is appropriately called On The Eve, and is by the eminent British historian Bernard Wasserstein, now of the University of Chicago. In full disclosure you should know that Wasserstein was incredibly supportive to me when I began writing my doctoral dissertation on pre-war England. It was a fair deal, given that Wasserstein’s childhood Hebrew School teacher in Scotland was my dad – here this morning and known to my children as Grandpa.

Wasserstein’s book is an important study of pre-war Europe, but for the purposes of our discussion this morning it is the last four chapters of Wasserstein’s book that are most relevant. In these chapters he tackles the question of “Who knew what and when did they know it?” After all, if we are trying to determine the tipping point for our own moment, then it makes sense to reflect on the degree to which Jews of pre-war Europe did or didn’t see the looming horrors on their horizon. Were they fully cognizant of what was coming, did they do everything they could? Or did they think, to quote the parashah, Shalom yihyeh li, I will be safe (Deut 29:18) – believing they could sit it out, keep their heads down, dodge their fate and wait for the storm to pass – an act of self delusion and deception that would ultimately be their undoing.

Wasserstein makes clear, contrary to any other claims, that there was widespread awareness among European Jews of the gravity and precariousness of the Jewish position. Already in 1933 Rabbi Leo Baeck declared, “the thousand-year history of German Jewry has come to an end.” It wasn’t black and white. In retrospect these years were a paradoxical blend of rising Nazism and the final spasms of freedom. In Germany itself, fifty thousand Jews left in 1933, thirty thousand in 1934. The wealthy could acquire a visa more easily, and there existed a surging black market in travel documents. Wasserstein tells the story of one boy, Abraham Asher (now the CUNY historian), who was sent to the consulate on a Saturday with an envelope of cash on behalf of his strictly Orthodox father, because it was only on the Sabbath that nobody would suspect such an act. By 1938, HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, had received nearly 600,000 letters appealing for help. Only the smallest fraction, we know, would receive it.

The condition of European Jewry grew more and more precarious with every passing day. With the Nuremburg laws, Jewish stores were expropriated. Jewish children were expelled from state schools. Jews were banned from practicing professions. Jews were forbidden from owning cars, barred from restaurants, attending cinema, public performances and much, much more.

As Jews began to flee one land only to be refused entry to another, something emerged that Wasserstein calls “refugee tennis.” In the frontiers, undocumented refugees took shelter in ditches in open fields. The top swimmer of the Hakoach sports club swam the Danube from Vienna to Bratislava. The Youth Aliya movement, established in 1932-33, brought about 5400 teenagers to Palestine from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The famed Kindertransport moved about 10,000 children between the ages of 5 and 18 to Britain by 1939. High oratory came from some corners of the world, but yielded no results. In Wasserstein’s mind, not only did they fail to alleviate the hardships of refugees, but these conferences served to harden the existing barriers to their admission. The Jewish suicide rate rose to unprecedented heights.

Movement restricted. Desperate attempts at emigration. Nobody knew how bad it would get, but Wasserstein’s book is a powerful rebuttal to the false notion that Jews were blissfully unaware of the perils confronting them. This is not just the stuff of history books. Our Bar Mitzvah Jack Silver’s great-grandparents – married in Cologne – turned to each other following one of Hitler’s parades and knew it was time to leave. [Turning to the Bar Mitzvah] Your grandfather Jack was born in Belgium as everyone was scrambling to get out. The family was eventually able to leave, thank God, in 1939. The title of one of Wasserstein’s chapters, “In the Cage Trying to Get Out,” tells the story that some in this room know all too well. In his own words:

They tried emigration, but the exits were blocked. They tried persuasion, but few would listen … They tried political organization of every kind, but they were politically weightless. A handful, even before the war, tried violent resistance, but their enemies could wreak vengeance a thousandfold…Some tried prayer, but their God abandoned them. They might be captains of their souls but they were not masters of their fate. Theirs was, for the most part, the agitated ineffectuality of flies sealed in a bottle, slowly suffocating. Wholly defenseless, largely friendless and more and more hopeless, the European Jews, on the eve of their destruction, waited for the barbarians. (Wasserstein, p. 436)

This subject is a difficult one and deserves far more time than we are giving it today. But for the moment, let’s turn to the question with which we began. To what degree are the challenges of 2012 clarified by looking at them through the prism of 1938? It may surprise you to hear that my take-home message in reading Wasserstein is that the most important thing brought into relief by comparing the two moments is not what is the same, but what is different. The desperation, the powerlessness – one thing is clear: 2012 is not 1938. Why? Because of Israel. Putting aside the question of how the existence of the State of Israel does or does not affect the status of Jews in the Diaspora, what we know is that today, the Jews of Israel are positioned to do exactly what the Jews of Europe desperately sought to do in 1938 but could not – be masters of their fate, have their destiny in their own hands. To quote our friend and teacher Dr. Ken Stein, the establishment of the State of Israel meant that for the first time in Jewish history, Jews could be the subject of their own sentence and not the object of someone else’s. It is because there is a sovereign Jewish state now, making its own decisions and protecting its own interests, that the threats of 1938 are not analogous to our present predicament.

And lest there be any question, let’s be clear: this is a good thing. As a sovereign state, Israelis can say what they want, vote for their own leadership and defend themselves as is the right of any sovereign nation. I have my opinions about the elected government of Israel; I am sure you do too. I am free to express and advocate for those positions – as are you – as an American, as a Jew with an opinion, but not as a citizen of Israel. I have no idea what the governments of Israel and America do or don’t know, nor anyone else for that matter. I don’t know how close Iran is or isn’t to a bomb and I don’t know what the consequences would be if they were able to proceed. I don’t know any of this. All I know is that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t dream and pray and fight for the day when Jews can have their own state and be empowered to make the decisions for their own security and then begrudge them the right to that very thing.

I am sure Israel knows that on her end, as a sovereign state, she bears the burdensome responsibility that with self-determination the decisions she makes will have consequences far beyond her own defense. Israel’s choices will undoubtedly have national, regional and global consequences. Israel must devise the terrible algorithm by which she determines how to balance her own national interests with consideration of other outcomes and with her other webs of relationships. These are tense, agonizing choices that lack clarity. But they are choices, not the powerless fate of the Jews of 1938, but choices that can be made only by a sovereign state,.

In his newest book, The Promise of Israel, Danny Gordis reminds us of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s comment in his 1762 book Emile: I will never believe that I have heard what it is that the Jews have to say until they have a state of their own. The year is 2012, 250 years since then, and the world is adjusting to that imagined hypothetical, when Jews have their own state with something to say. And Jews are also adjusting to what this new reality means. Not just to hear ourselves speak, but to bear the gift of responsibility that comes with our new circumstance. But new it is, different than before. And I know one thing for sure: I would rather have the agonizing balancing acts of today than the powerlessness of yesteryear any day of the week.