Adversity, Resilience and October 7th

What follows is my Yom Kippur evening sermon about how we can foster resilience in the face of the October 7th attacks and the antisemitism they fomented.

This past year in one of my classes with our sixth graders, we started talking about antisemitism. The discussion was prompted by yet another incident at one of our local schools. A student shared that a swastika was scrawled on a bathroom stall. Another chimed in that one was also painted in a town park. We then discussed the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. They had lots of questions. And then one sixth grader asked, “When will antisemitism end?” And I paused, took a breath and then responded, “Good question. I am really sorry to say this. It will never go away. Jews have been asking that question for thousands of years and sadly antisemitism is still here. Sometimes it is louder like today and sometimes this hatred of Jews only happens behind closed doors, but it’s always going to be here.”

And to be honest, that moment was one of the saddest in my career. It’s not that I thought antisemitism was only for the history books and a thing of the past or that I dislike it when my students ask me challenging questions. It’s instead that in twenty-five years no sixth grader has ever needed to ask me that question. Sixth graders usually ask me things like what happens if I make a mistake reading one of the prayers at my bat mitzvah or what if I forget a word in my Torah portion at my bar mitzvah. Now they are so well acquainted and so familiar with antisemitic hate that they bring different questions to their rabbi. Sixth graders should be worried about friends and sports, school and tests, and yes, bar and bat mitzvahs rather than trying to understand why swastikas are so hateful and struggling to unpack the how’s and why’s of a faraway war. But those October 7th attacks struck us at home. They terrorized us as well. They reminded us that antisemitism is never, ever going away.

And we better figure out how to steel ourselves up so we can better face what is to so many of us an unfamiliar reality. This evening is not about this antisemitism—that is for tomorrow. Tonight, I want to focus on our internal attitudes and our responses. This evening, I wish to offer suggestions for how we can fortify our souls. I wish to suggest how we can remain strong in an age when we are daily reminded that such hate is always and forever.

One answer that people seem to toy with is to pretend it does not exist. I reject this as an option. If our sixth graders see that as impossible then all the more so should we. We must not; we cannot deny reality. Let us not be fools. The ADL reported that there were 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2023. That represents a tenfold increase in ten years. The numbers have skyrocketed since October 7th. There were over 10,000 antisemitic incidents recorded in the year since October 7th. Honesty and truth-telling are the first steps towards maintaining resilience. That’s what I want to focus on. How do we remain resilient is my question.

And honesty is ingredient number one. Then again so is perspective. Antisemitism is on the rise. Most of us have never experienced such levels of antisemitic hate. But the world is not ending. To be resilient a person must be both tenacious and flexible. That is what the origin of the word resilient implies. It comes from the Latin meaning to rebound. To bounce back one needs be grounded on the one hand and be able to move on the other. And so, as Daniel Schwartz argues American Jews must be tenacious and flexible. Think about this image. Buildings constructed in earthquake zones are built to withstand earthquakes. How? They are constructed to move enough when the earth shudders so as not to crumble. (Daniel B. Schwartz, “The Mystery of Jewish Resilience”) That is what we must aspire to become like. Earthquake proof buildings. You cannot eliminate the earthquakes. You can figure out how to be strong and flexible in the face of them.

In order to construct ourselves in such a manner, in order to fortify ourselves for the earthquakes we are currently facing, we must agree about the facts. There are two issues here. One is the speed with which such incidents spread in our age. Take one example from last week. A rabbi was hosting Michigan students at his home for Rosh Hashanah dinner. A man entered the home, brandished a gun and said “I’m taking everything. Give me everything.” By the time I heard about the incident at my Rosh Hashanah table, the gunman was shouting antisemitic hate and threatening the students because they are Jewish. This was not the case. It’s not antisemitism every time a Jew is victimized. Although also frightening, and extremely worrisome, sometimes it is just a robbery. Slow down. Be certain of the facts. Honesty requires thoughtful consideration. It requires patience.

Another issue is that we sometimes end up arguing about the meaning of symbols. Again, an example from these past weeks. A young Muslim woman who is a student at a nearby high school decided to decorate her parking spot with a watermelon and the words “Peace be upon you.” The watermelon’s seeds were drawn to look like checkered keffiyehs. She also wrote her name in Arabic. Jewish students, and in particular parents, found this design threatening given that the watermelon has become a powerful symbol of Palestinian pride. The superintendent erased her artwork. But a watermelon is not the flag of Hamas. Asserting support for Palestinian rights, and even criticizing Israeli policies and actions, are not antisemitic. A watermelon is not a swastika. I get it. We are feeling vulnerable. We are under attack. We feel misunderstood and misrepresented. But we have to be thoughtful. Just because someone identifies with what may be called the other side, just because they see things in a wildly different manner than we do, does not mean that person is an antisemite.

My feelings of discomfort cannot become the barometer for what is right and what is wrong. Feelings must not come to replace facts. By the way, there is another Rabbi Moskowitz who serves a nearby Long Island synagogue and who I happen to be madly in love with who views this incident differently. Yes, it is true even the Rabbis Moskowitz do not always agree! This year has made for passionate debates among family members. Emotions are running high.

It’s really hard to steel ourselves up in such a climate. We tend to get each other riled up rather than calming each other down. “Did you hear what happened at Syosset high school today?” we repeat to each other. We debate with our spouses. And this chips away at our fortitude. I understand why we feel this way. What should have elicited widespread understanding and condemnation, namely the October 7th massacre, appears to have engendered more support for the attackers than the attacked. This bewilders and befuddles us. And we then start seeing haters where there might be none. I have no interest in talking to a Nazi sympathizer who paints a swastika. I have tremendous interest in sitting down with a young student who paints a watermelon to show her support for Palestinians. I want to know more about what she thinks and how she sees this conflict even if her supporters shout hateful things towards Israel. I want to see if it is possible to hear each other’s pain and understand each other’s perspective.

There are real threats out there. Let’s be exacting and clear what those are. Remember. Resilience is a marriage of tenacity with flexibility. It’s not just about holding fast. It is also about knowing how and when to bend. Hamas and Hezbollah are our enemies not every Palestinian and not every Muslim.

Moses Maimonides, who as I taught last week, suggested it is a mitzvah to scream—which I have been doing a lot of this year—and who is also the most important thinker in Jewish history, led an extraordinarily interesting life. (That may go hand in hand with being really, really smart.) There is an important part of his biography that we tend to avoid discussing. (Jewish Virtual Library) It is this. He was born in Cordoba but soon that part of Southern Spain was taken over by a fanatical Muslim sect who persecuted the city’s non-Muslim residents. The Almohades offered Jews and Christians this choice: conversion to Islam or death. At the age of thirteen Maimonides’ family was forced to leave and wander from place to place. During these years they practiced their Judaism cautiously and no doubt, secretly. Other Jews even became Muslims outside of their homes and Jews in secret. At the age of twenty-five Maimonides’ family arrived in Fez, Morocco but soon the fanatical Muslims there executed one of his teachers for being a Jew. So, they again ran, first for a brief time to Palestine until finally settling in Cairo, Egypt. I share this not to frighten or to say again to my sixth graders, “Antisemitism has always been around,” but instead to think about those years of running and hiding. According to his own writings, these turbulent years were when he laid the foundations for much of his subsequent works. I have never thought about this fact until this year. The man who became the most important Jewish thinker spent his young years living a scared and secret Jewish life!

I have heard parents tell their children not to wear their Jewish star necklace when they go to the city or to instruct them tuck it into their shirts. That has never been a choice I remotely considered until now. A personal story. I was raised on the family legend that my grandfather was the first Jewish salesman for Pabst Blue Ribbon. It’s a different story for a different time how a man who did not like beer, wine or spirits could be such a successful liquor salesman, but I am pretty sure we were the only ones who ever spoke about this Jewish fact or more importantly even knew this. I am 100% certain this Jewish tidbit was not hailed at Pabst Blue Ribbon’s corporate offices. Why? Because they were completely unaware of my grandfather’s Jewishness. He was a Jew in private but not in public.

We had naively thought that his grandchildren and great grandchildren were on the path to a different destiny in which they could wear their Jewish pride out in public. Are my sixth graders set to become like my grandfather’s generation? Will they likewise become Jews in private but not in the public square. Are they going to live like that thirteen-year-old Maimonides? Then again, I have heard other students say that they make it a point to wear a kippah out on the streets, especially after October 7th. Antisemites be damned, they argue. That is still my go-to approach. We gave our kids only Hebrew names whereas my grandfather changed his name from Shmuel to William. Forthright and in your face is who I am. But this year I realized that quiet, silent and cautious approach stands in the company of giants. That is the house Moses Maimonides grew up in. We have to be flexible as well as tenacious.

This is what I believe. Be proud to be a Jew. Tenaciously hold on to this Jewish people and this community. We are only going to get through this together. That is Judaism’s central message. Community is how we celebrate. We rejoice together. We mourn together. You cannot say the kaddish by yourself, and you cannot dance the hora by yourself. That is what Judaism is all about. It’s also how we survive. We live on, moving into the future by holding on to each other. When a fellow community member is down, we wrap our arms around them. We may not always agree, and we often do not, but there is only one way to move forward and that is together. Remind yourself of this. We have survived far worse. If you read enough Jewish history, you come away with two determinations. 1. Wow. They really seem to hate us. And 2. Wow. We are still here.

People seem to think that we survived because in past generations there was uniformity of Jewish opinion. You will hear people say, “Back then we were of one mind. Today we are so divided.” This is false. We also seem to think that we can only hold on to each other if there is agreement, but that too is an inaccurate reading of history and antithetical to the rabbinic tradition. The rabbis teach us agreement and unity are not the same thing. Loyalty does not always mean saying yes. The rabbis elevated argument to a holy endeavor. It is called machloket l’shem shamayim, argument for the sake of heaven. I would suggest it is this passion and argument that gave us the defiant chutzpah to survive when world events suggested it might be impossible.

Perhaps part of the secret of how we survived is that we never had one answer to historical circumstances. In fact, Simon Rawidowicz, a great historian, argued that because every generation of Jews saw themselves as the last generation who if they did not do this or that, the Jewish people would not survive, is exactly why we survived. He coined the term, the “ever-dying people” and suggested that this worry about the future, this angst about the precariousness of our situation provided us with that extra spark that energized our continued survival.

Take hope from the past. Find strength in our disagreements. I know it’s hard when you think the person sitting in the pews next to you doesn’t really get it and understand things the way you do or the person standing on the bima shouting with passion doesn’t really grasp the stakes and is still talking about morals and how we should behave when it seems like they are trying to kill us but take a measure of hope that we are sitting here together. Passion and argument lead to resilience. I have faith that we will figure this out together. Hang on to community in these most difficult of times.

It takes tenacity to hang on to each other when we so passionately disagree, but this is what this moment calls us to do.

We must be tenacious. And we also must be flexible. And we must be honest. These are the three crucial ingredients that spell resilience. And it is these qualities we need to marshal when facing our now, uncertain future.

Millenia ago when Moses and the Israelites likewise faced a precarious future, God came to their rescue and redeemed them from Egypt. God freed them from slavery. It is this redemption and promise we continue to celebrate at our Passover seders. And while I do not have the patience or think it wise to wait around for God to come to our rescue again—for that we must look to ourselves—we can still glean important lessons from that saving moment. We know the story. We retell it at our Seders. God told Moses to get the people ready because come the fourteenth of Nisan God will come to the people’s rescue. But here is an interesting fact we often forget when retelling this story about the tenth plague, when we relive that moment when God takes care of our enemies for us.

The Torah states, “In the middle of the night God struck down all he first born in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 12) We are all familiar with the seder ritual enacted by our rabbis. We take out ten drops of wine from our kiddush cups for each of the ten plagues to lessen our joy.

That other people suffered so that we can be free must be acknowledged. Our cup of joy is not full because others suffered. It cannot be full because our joy came at the expense of others. Even though the rabbis believed the ancient Egyptians deserved it, they still insisted we give voice to their pain. It’s never just about us.

And here is the other lesson, although this one hidden in those words. We don’t know the exact time of our redemption. The Torah does not provide it. It just says, “in the middle of the night.” In fact, we can read the Hebrew “chatzi halila” as saying, “about midnight.” Perhaps even God does not know the exact time. Or maybe God did not provide the exact time. Or the Torah thought it better not to record the hour. Why? Because our redemption is always going to be “about then.” It cannot have a date or a time. It can never have an hour or a minute attached to it. It’s always going to be “about then.”

We can find the uncertainty about that time dispiriting, but I choose instead to see it as uplifting. Redemption is always going to be a little bit ahead of us, but never so near that I know the hour. And that is going to keep me on my toes. And that is going to keep me alert. And that’s going to keep me busy working for better days.

Antisemitism is always going to be here, but I am going to be honest about it, flexible in my approach and tenacious in my attachment to my people. We are always going to be near the hour but never, ever arrive.