Time to Step Up and March

Aside from the out-of-town guests of this morning’s Bnei Mitzvah, whose travel plans may prevent them from joining tomorrow’s “No Hate. No Fear.” solidarity march, I imagine that most everyone in this room is actively thinking about whether or not they should attend Sunday’s planned rally in Brooklyn.

If by some chance you have not yet heard, received an email, or read the editorials in the New York Times and elsewhere, tomorrow morning the Jewish and non-Jewish community together will meet at Foley Square at 11:00 am and march across the Brooklyn Bridge to Cadman Plaza – a communal response to the rash of antisemitic incidents and attacks that have afflicted our community this past month.

The facts are as startling as they are alarming. Thirteen reported attacks in New York in December, and that does not include the Jersey City attack which killed three. Every night of the just-completed festival of Hanukkah, including last Saturday night’s horrific attack in Monsey. This is not Europe or some distant yesteryear; this is your city, our city – our “I Heart NY” home – shaken to its multicultural core. The New York Jewish community is on high alert; law enforcement has been deployed; and resources are being mobilized.

Last night at Kabbalat Shabbat we heard from Mitchell Silber, the incoming director of the newly created Community Security Initiative. Next Friday evening we will hear from Deborah Lauter, Director of the NYC Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. The synagogue has signed on to interfaith calls to action; we are participants in the synagogue initiative of the Anti-Defamation League, whose National Director and CEO and, Jonathan Greenblatt, spoke here last month. Rabbi Zuckerman is working with our lay leadership to craft our evolving communal response. Next week I will be traveling to Rome for a Vatican meeting on how the global religious community can be mobilized in the fight against hate. Members of this PAS community should be touched by the number of my local clergy colleagues who have reached out to me personally, offering words of comfort and support.

Please be assured that the security and safety of our congregants and staff has always been and continues to be the highest priority for the leadership of PAS. While the rest of the world may be slowly waking up to the realities of this new year, you should know that your synagogue is fully alert and responsive to the emerging landscape.

And yet, when it comes to tomorrow’s community-wide march, I sense hesitation. As I have worked the phones, read my emails, and spoken with folks these last two days, to the degree that I can measure these things, I have not yet heard a full-throated commitment. I am not convinced that the urgency of the hour and the need to show up is felt fully or felt by all.

Some of the hesitation comes, understandably, from concern regarding safety and security. There are those who wonder if a public spectacle of outrage is the most prudent course of action at this time. Now, they say, is the time to lay-low and not draw attention to ourselves. To escalate with a rally is neither politically expedient nor physically safe. God knows what can happen in this charged environment.

Alternatively, there are those who are wondering, a little more benignly, what good does a rally do anyway? Rallies are the political instruments of yesteryear. “I care deeply,” they say, “about the scourge of antisemitism, which is why I post on social media, why I sit on boards of communal Jewish organizations, why I write checks. I care . . . but it’s cold, it’s football Sunday and, well, I already gave at the office.”

Dynamics of the rally aside, if you scratch beneath the surface, some of the hesitation goes to the heart of the issue: the nature of the antisemitism itself. Some question whether the “sky is falling” narrative of the return of antisemitism is not a little overstated. It was not lost on me that the same Jewish Week edition that covered the attack in Jersey City also contained a lead article on the rededication of our own synagogue – a statement of the vitality of New York Jewish life if there ever was one. Is this the best of times or the worst of times for the Jews of New York? I could, and I imagine you could, make the argument both ways. Besides, some may say: “Antisemitism is the oldest and most persistent hatred. This is nothing new. A synagogue should devote its energy to building Jewish identity. Let the ADL take point on this one.”

There are also those who have said and written that this hatred is not actually about the Jews. Rather, it is a symptom of a societal malady felt by all – a social ill that is not about Jews but about something much deeper – a loss of civility reflecting social and economic anxiety and uncertainty. Just five days ago, there was a church shooting in Texas – nothing to do with Jews, nothing to do with New York. Our attention is better directed at gun control, at political change, at tighter borders, at more porous borders, at education, at mental health, or maybe toward building bridges to communities for whom the Jewish community needs to be demystified. Antisemitism is just a symptom, and a rally is no antidote for the systemic disease that lurks beneath.

Part of the hesitation, I imagine, is rooted in a bit of confusion. I myself have a hard time piecing it all together. Swastikas on synagogues smack of a resurgence of right wing neo-Nazism. Jersey City’s attacker was a Black Hebrew Israelite. Monsey’s attacker had a mental health history; it is not so clear what prompted him, and it may never be. Given the world events of the last 48 hours, our most pressing concern may actually be from a radicalized Muslim community. And not every attack against a Jew is necessarily antisemitic. It wasn’t New York, but you may have heard of the incident at a college campus last week in which some Jewish students were beaten up by other students. The attack was labeled antisemitic, the incident shared widely. When I asked my nephew, who attended that university, he explained that it was a bunch of drunk college kids – an idiotic intra-fraternity party-crashing fistfight. I am sure Deborah Lauter will speak directly to the topic next Friday evening: When is a crime a hate crime? When is an attack against a Jew antisemitic? Are all antisemitisms equal and equally threatening? The answers are not entirely clear.

And while we are probing the guts of our communal response to antisemitism, let’s poke at some of the really uncomfortable questions. The outrage of the non-Orthodox community has no doubt been tempered by the question of to what degree attacks on the ultra-Orthodox community are actually attacks on us. Most of us have very few contacts, family members, and close friends in the ultra-Orthodox community. They dress differently; they attend different schools; they lead insular, separate lives. It is not just that they are siloed from us and we from them. Their Judaism is different from ours, and our Judaism is not Judaism to them. Three weeks from today we will be having our annual Shabbaton, devoted this year to an exploration of the future of synagogue life. We have a great line-up, but I also really wanted the views of a non-liberal rabbi, so I invited a Chabad rabbi of some repute. He told me point-blank that he would not speak here because to do so would “legitimate” (his precise word) me and my synagogue. God forbid, God forbid! But if something should happen to his community, how do I mobilize my community in support of a rabbi and a community who does not see my Judaism as Judaism and my Jews as Jews?

You and I both know that the internal divisions of the Jewish community fall not only along the religious spectrum but the political as well. We are living in a painful time when those holding the loudest megaphones in our community are spending more time pointing fingers at each other than at the antisemites themselves. As fast as the political left castigates the right for trafficking in classic antisemitic tropes about Jews – financial self-interest and dual loyalty – the political right is quick to point out the very same sins on the progressive left. Both sides claim to be prompted by Jewish values and interests; neither side has totally clean hands; unholy alliances have been made by all. It is mind-boggling and altogether depressing to consider the energy that has been expended stoking division among Jews as the noxious fumes of antisemitism pollute our society.

There are and will always be reasons to hesitate, to hedge, to stay silent, and to sit the round out. Lest we forget, the central drama of this morning’s Torah reading revolves around the question of whether Judah will step up at the moment that the fate of his brother Benjamin hung in the balance. Judah had a million reasons to stay silent – his own self-preservation being the most obvious. Did he have any assurances that stepping up would not cause his downfall – or possibly the downfall of his brother or of all his brothers? As our Etz Hayim commentary notes, Judah knew the underbelly of fraternal rivalry and the sting of his father’s favoritism. Why should he stand up for Benjamin? What did he care for his father’s feelings – a father who had repeatedly slighted him? Why should he step up and stick his neck out for them?

But as you know, as I know, Judah does step up. At the very moment when Judah had a million reasons to keep his head down, he does what he didn’t do when Joseph was first thrown into pit, what Jacob didn’t do for Esau, what Isaac and Ishmael couldn’t do for each other, what Cain couldn’t do for Abel, what no biblical brother had done thus far: He stood up for his brother. In fact, as my colleague Rabbi Savenor has insightfully pointed out, Judah’s action may be understood as a rejoinder to the beginning of Genesis, to Cain, who asked, Hashomer ahi anokhi, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9). It is here, when Judah steps up on behalf of his brother, that Judah becomes Judah, worthy of his name – emphatically his brother’s keeper and the father of our people and nation.

It is Judah’s willingness to step up, one sibling for another, even when – especially when – there may be reasons not to, that make you and me Judah’s descendants: Jews.

I urge the members of this community to show up for the march and rally tomorrow because that is what Jews do for each other when someone is hurting, when someone is in danger, when someone is in need. We show up. To a shiva house, to make a minyan, for Israel, for Soviet Jewry. In our religion simply showing up is a commandment, a mitzvah, and tomorrow is a time for that mitzvah.

I urge you to show up for the rally because I believe that now is exactly not the time to keep our heads down. Now is the time for a numerical show of political will. To announce that Jews will not be made to remove our yarmulkes in public. That Jews reject a world which makes us choose whether to hire another Jewish educator or a security guard. That no community should have to endure hatred, violence, or fear. That we demand that our government, law enforcement, and fellow citizens publicly and demonstrably come down hard against this epidemic of Jew hatred.

I urge you to you show up tomorrow because whatever you believe politically, now is the time to announce to the world that no matter what our internal fissures may be, we stand united as allies in the fight against antisemitism and hatred.

I urge you to show up tomorrow because I have never and will never live or lead this institution based on what someone else thinks of me. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Do we really believe that in the eyes of the antisemite there is a difference between a Conservative synagogue in Pittsburgh and a Chabad in Poway? Antisemites do not make distinctions between Jews and neither should we.

I urge you to show up tomorrow because there is a time to intellectualize, and there is a time to act. Antisemitism may be the disease or it may be the symptom, but that symptom is killing Jews. I have no idea if this is the best of times or the worst of times, whether the events of the last month signal the opening of a new chapter or the return of an ancient hatred. We can all read the next article by Deborah Lipstadt or Abe Foxman. We can all debate where our philanthropic and political muscle is best directed. Those articles and debates and requests for your money will be there on Monday – I promise. Tomorrow is not about analysis. Tomorrow is about doing the one thing we can all do equally: Show up to announce to the world that antisemitism has no place in New York, in civil society, or in this world.

I urge you to show up tomorrow for a million reasons, but most of all because that is what one sibling does for another. No person bearing the pedigree of our patriarch Judah should ever stand idly by as Jewish blood is shed. As Judah came to understand at the critical hour, as Moses understood when he saw his brethren suffer under the Egyptian taskmaster, as Esther came to understand when the fate of the Jews of Persia hung in the balance, we step up. That is what we do. As taught in Pirkei Avot, The Ethics of our Fathers: “In a place where there are no upstanders, strive to be an upstander.” (2:5)

Tomorrow morning, 11:00 am. No Hate, No Fear. Let’s be upstanders together.

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The march begins at 11:00 am, in Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, and then crosses the Brooklyn Bridge. The march will be followed by a rally in Columbus Park (near Cadman Plaza).

We expect so many to participate that it will not be practical to gather as a community before the march. Please coordinate with others you to know to come downtown and we will all march with our larger community!