Bernece Berkman, (American painter; 1911-1988), “Jews Fleeing War.” 1939.
Everywhere you turn, Jews are fearful.
“The climate is very, very difficult for Jews,” says Yonatan Arfi, the president of the Council of French Jewish Institutions. “People are very, very worried about the future.” And many headlines sound a remarkably similar ring – “Is there a Future for American/Canadian /European Jews?” “Will Israel Survive?”
Back in 2013, the well-known antisemitism scholar Robert Wistrich was trying to adopt a balanced view. On the one hand, he conceded that all over Europe, public opinion towards Israel was “very, very hostile, and it automatically affects Jews. The only Jews it does not affect are those who very loudly and ostentatiously denounce Israel. For the time being they’re okay, but that too will change eventually… It’s an irreversible trend at this point in time.”
But Wistrich, who died in 2015, refused to confirm that there existed a scenario of mass, wide scale Jew hatred throughout the Continent, opting instead for the “ignorance” explanation: “A person who says [that Israel is waging a war of extermination against Palestinians] is: a) a complete idiot, b) doesn’t know what a war of extermination looks like and c) doesn’t know the first thing about the Holocaust or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It doesn’t tell me he’s an anti-Semite; it tells me he’s a bloody fool and a complete ignoramus.”
So said Wistrich at the time. What might he have concluded this year about the fate of Jews in Europe?
Meanwhile, in North America, articles have been springing up with titles like “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending” and “The Dead End of Liberal American Zionism”, or “Why Some Jews are Giving up on Canada.” Regarding other countries in the Diaspora, we get this headline from the Jerusalem Post in March 2024: “Antisemitism in Australia isn't a simple problem to fix.”
Of course, the solution to all of this millennia old enmity was supposed to be the State of Israel. The late Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of the fiercest internal critics of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, still proudly considered himself a Zionist, which he defined as simply “the endeavor to liberate Jews from being ruled by the Gentiles.” This is Zionism in its most stripped-down form – no illusions of messianic grandeur, no grand statements about the “first flowerings of redemption”, no claims of a Jewish renaissance. Just a place to go when the world has shown, through pogroms and gas chambers, that it can never be trusted.
On September 10, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu warned Israelis not to travel to Uman in the Ukraine [where Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav is buried], by announcing that “In the State of Israel, when rockets fall, civilians go into shelters and there are protections, [but in Ukraine] there are no shelters and no protections.” It is hard to generalize at this point whether Israelis feel protected, and certainly Israel is the only country in the world where Jews have the agency to defend themselves. But still, no one around here is prone to smug assertions, given the events of October 7 and their aftermath.
The paradox is incisively addressed in this recollection of Amoz Oz: “When my father was a little boy in Poland, the streets of Europe were covered with graffiti, ‘Jews, go back to Palestine,’ or sometimes worse: ‘Dirty Yids, piss off to Palestine.’ When my father revisited Europe 50 years later, the walls were covered with new graffiti, ‘Jews, get out of Palestine.’”
So where in the world can a Jew be safe? And what constitutes a barometer of safety? Or are these the wrong questions to ask?
The Torah narrates that when the Aron [the ark containing the tablets of God] was moved through the desert, Bnei Yisrael were instructed to place four golden rings on the corners. They are then further told: “You will bring poles into the rings on the sides of the ark, to carry the ark with them. The poles [ הַבַּדִּ֑ים] of the ark will be [inserted] in the rings; they will not [ever] be removed.”
The ark was ready to be transported at a moment’s notice; the poles placed in the rings resided there permanently. One could interpret this, as many commentators have, as a sign of the Torah’s ultimate flexibility and mobility - that it can be taken and studied anywhere, under any circumstances. But one cannot escape a certain anxiety underlying these images, of the holiest object of Judaism always on the run. Naturally one could argue that this is a mere prelude to entering and settling the Land of Israel, and which point the Torah (and the Jewish people) can finally rest. And yet, even after the ark arrived at its putative last stop in the Beit Hamikdash in Jerusalem, the poles were not withdrawn but remained attached to the ark.
The `law of the בַּדִּ֑ים’ challenges us to consider what is temporary and what is permanent, and where, and in what, can safety and security be found. Post-Holocaust Jewry, to this very day, understandably have placed a lot of hope in Zionism as our last stop in a perilous world, such that the bomb shelter in my apartment building in Jerusalem might symbolize a shelter for every Jew on earth. But for Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, in 19th century Germany, the status of the unmovable poles embodied the message that “the Torah is not parochial, restricted to the particular country where the Temple is situated. Independence of place is an essential characteristic of the Torah.”
In the end, nothing really keeps us forever shielded in this world, as Albert Camus implies in La Peste, his stark allegory about illness and contagion: ”Everyone has it inside himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, can ever be immune.” As the contemporary thinker Alain de Botton adds, “In Camus’ philosophy, we are all – unbeknownst to us – already living through a plague: that is a widespread, silent, invisible disease that may kill any of us at any time and destroy the lives we assumed were solid. The actual historical incidents we call plagues are merely dramatic instances of a perpetual rule: that we are vulnerable to being randomly exterminated, by a bacillus, an accident or the actions of our fellow humans [or by antisemitism. EM]…Proper recognition of this absurdity should not lead us to despair. We assume that we have been granted immortality and with this naïveté come behaviours that Camus abhorred: a hardness of heart, an obsession with status, a refusal of joy and gratitude, a tendency to moralize and judge.”
So, Jewishly, it is more about how we live, and in what we invest our time and commitment, that matters, rather than the endless search for security. In the meantime, we need to take care of one another, defend one another, support one another, elevate one another, love one another, wherever we are, with the full knowledge that, as De Botton certifies, “For Camus, being alive always was and will always remain an emergency, as one might put it, truly an inescapable ‘underlying condition’.”
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I’d be interested in all of your views about where and how you think a Jew can feel safe today. Please write into the comments section and let me know how you think.
Further Reading
Alain de Botton, “Camus and the Plague.” www.theschooloflife.com
Albert Camus, “La Peste, 1947
Amos Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic, 2010.
Harvey, your thoughts about Camus are spot on. What I have seen, repeatedly, is that despite Camus' engaging depiction of absurdity and hence the need to live and feel meaningful in "the now," for many people there is an unquenchable need for an "ultimate explanation: and even, in religious discourse, a place where one is "rewarded." For all of the contemporary push towards mindfulness and staying in the present, the mind strays to thoughts of redemption and deliverance.
Joel, that is a very interesting notion. I'm not sure the "recipients" understood much at all, given their emergence from slavery and the fact that all of it was mediated by Moshe, and thus contingent on his communication skills and the process of "downloading" the information. The universality of Sinai is constructed later on by human beings of different cultures, including many non-Jewish ones, right through to this day.