Jonathan Infeld: May we do all that we can to allow love to replace hatred
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2020 02:00:59 +0000
I just spent Hanukkah in Pittsburgh celebrating the holiday with family. But our joy was diminished this year with the news of two terrible anti-Semitic attacks. The first was in Jersey City, N.J., in a kosher supermarket and the second was at a Hanukkah party in Monsey, N.Y. These attacks occurred after a recent rise of anti-Semitic incidents in New York.
My late parents first arrived in Pittsburgh seeking shelter from anti-Semitism in Europe. My mother and her parents were among the few Jews from Germany to immigrate to the U.S. in 1938 as the Gestapo were seeking to arrest my grandfather. My father wasn’t as lucky. The Nazis invaded his native Poland in 1939 when he was 13 years old. Through luck, strength and sheer determination he survived one year in the Kraków Ghetto and four years of concentration camps. The rest of my father’s family, including his parents and four siblings, were murdered in the Holocaust. Their only crime was being Jewish. My parents sought a new life in Pittsburgh and were happily granted that blessing.
Both of my parents died 10 years ago. Had they been alive last year to witness the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh when 11 people were shot dead, I know that they would have been horrified and dismayed. The worst attack on the Jewish community in North American history took place in my parents’ city of refuge. The worst irony of all was that the attack took place in the sanctuary of a synagogue. Our sacred spaces are meant to not only be spiritual spaces of comfort and peace, but physical ones as well. This past September on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, in my sermon I called for a return of sanctity to sacred spaces of all religions around the world as they have been under attack too often in the last number of years.
As Jews, an attack on a sacred space is an ugly reminder of the Nazis’ use of synagogues throughout Europe as places to round up Jews and even murder them by burning the building down around them. Since the end of the Holocaust, Jews in North America, especially in Canada, have felt safe and benefited from our liberal democracy that is open and welcoming to people of all backgrounds, nationalities and religions. Yet ugly comments, quotas and random acts of hatred and violence have reminded us of the fact that anti-Semitism never truly disappeared. The past months have put our community on edge.
Anti-Semitism is on the rise once again. As Jews we feel trapped. The renowned Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt from Emory University in Atlanta recently said anti-Semitism is where the extreme left and the extreme right meet each other today. From university campuses to white nationalist websites and rallies we feel besieged.
There is a real fear today in the Jewish community that has never existed before in North America. Even though the physical attacks on the Jewish community happened in the U.S., that feeling is shared by Jews in Canada. My own synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, has taken a number of steps in past months to tighten our security. We are certainly not alone in these efforts in the Vancouver Jewish community. We are all extremely grateful to the Vancouver police and the RCMP for their extra support. If trends continue on the same trajectory we fear that there will be more attacks in the year to come. The only question is where and when.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of N.Y. declared the attack in Monsey last week to be an act of domestic terrorism. The very goal of terrorism is to plant fear in a population that goes beyond the reach of the evil act itself. We can fight terrorism by guarding against it. We can also fight it by finding the inner strength to resist the natural human tendency toward fear.
The greatest enemy of terror and the hatred that feeds it is love. For example, the Jewish community of Vancouver and North America will never forget the outpouring of love that came from the Muslim community in the days and weeks after the attacks on the Tree of Life Synagogue. We unfortunately had to repay that gesture after the horrific Islamophobic terror attack on the mosques months later in Christchurch, New Zealand.
But far more important are the honest loving relationships that have been built in response to the hatred of others. Our synagogue, for instance, recently did a program on the concept of sacred fasting with the Az-Zahraa Islamic Centre in Richmond and Congregation Beth Tikvah. We are proud to consider the mosque and their leaders our friends.
On the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, we place extra emphasis on reflection and introspection instead of jubilance. We see the beginning of the new year as a chance to learn from the past for the sake of today and tomorrow. As the world begins a new secular year and decade I pray that we can all be inspired by this Jewish tradition. May we learn from the pain and suffering that has been caused by anti-Semitism, racism and chauvinism of all types in the past. May we do all that we can to allow love to replace that hatred in the months and years to come.
Jonathan Infeld is the rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Vancouver.
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