How the Light Gets In

Some people first heard the late Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” while listening to his 1992 album, The Future. Others, probably way more, were first exposed to its haunting melody in Oliver Stone’s 1994 controversial (but also terrific) movie, Natural Born Killers, starring Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis. (For a terrific clip of the great man singing his great song, click here.) All the song’s lyrics are eerily compelling, but most stuck of all in my head is the chorus: “There’s a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

For some reason the sound of that voice (truly like none other) singing those words has been in my head for the last few weeks.

Other than the day of Thanksgiving itself, which I spent surrounded by family and the house was filled with music and light, it’s been a dismal few weeks featuring a world-wide surge in anti-Semitic incidents and a parallel, and public, diminution of sensitivity to the legacy of Shoah that feels, at least to me, unprecedented.  The vicious verbal and on-line abuse leveled at Auschwitz survivor and Italian senator-for-life Liliana Segre because she dared call for the creation of a parliamentary committee devoted solely combatting hatred, racism, and anti-Semitism was shocking. (Click here for more details.)  A recent campus-wide surge in racist and anti-Semitic incidents at Syracuse University was so intense that the university was obliged to take the unprecedented step of suspending the social activities of all fraternities through the end of the semester. (Click here for the fuller story.) Reports of intense anti-Semitism, only sometimes dressed up as anti-Israelism to make it appear marginally less odious, in places once known as bastions of civility and learning—places like Vassar College, Duke University (where the level of anti-Semitism on campus has actually provoked an inquiry at the federal level by the U.S. Department of Education), the University of Toronto, Brown University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, the University of Virginia, San Francisco State University, and Columbia University (where the openly and unapologetically anti-Semitic Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, was greeted with a world leader’s welcome just two months ago)—have only added to my general sense of discomfort and ill ease. If you’re not depressed enough, click here to read a round-up report of the latest anti-Semitic incidents in Poland. And here to read a similar survey of incidents in Hungary. There was a time when the ADL survey released two weeks ago according to which a full quarter of Europeans harbor strongly negative attitudes towards Jewish people would have shocked me to the core. Now it just seems like more bad news. (Click here for the full story, complete with depressing specifics.) Oh, and a white supremacist skinhead named Richard Holzer was charged just last week in Denver federal court with plotting to blow up a synagogue in Pueblo, Colorado. (He pled not guilty.)

Given the gravity of the above, the kerfuffle over Amazon selling Christmas tree ornaments depicting various images of Auschwitz seems almost amusing. (And, no, I did not make that up. Click here.)

And yet, despite it all, there are also cracks through which light has lately been seeping in a bit and making the world feel at least marginally less dark, less anxiety-provoking, and less bad. So I thought this week I would focus on the cracks and the light, and invite you all to join me in looking away from the darkness for at least a few minutes. Trust me, it won’t take that long.

In Malmö, Sweden, a city whose Jewish citizens haven’t felt safe or secure for a very long time, an imam—and, at that, the founder of the city’s Academy of Islam—attended a public commemoration of Kristallnacht. It is amazing that this was considered an amazing gesture. But given the intense level of anti-Semitism in that place, his gesture was hailed not only as welcome and overdue, but truly as brave. So that certainly qualifies as a ray of light.

At the United Nations, an organization of which I couldn’t possibly think less, the annual round of Israel-bashing resolutions produced an unexpected ray of light—or, more precisely, thirteen of them when thirteen nations that have previously merely abstained when the same resolution was introduced in past years—Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Brazil and Colombia—actually found the courage to vote against one of the General Assembly’s more egregious efforts to condemn Israel for the world’s woes. Of course, there will be nineteen (not a typo) other bills introduced in the General Assembly condemning Israel this year…but at least in this one instance thirteen countries behaved decently and reasonably. (In the final vote, fifty-four nations still abstained, just twenty-three (including the countries listed above) voted against the measure, and eighty-seven supported it. So there wasn’t much light, just some. But sometimes a single ray of light is comfort enough when the alternative would be pitch darkness, which is what I believe all rational people have come over the years to expect from the United Nations.

In France, where I was counselled against daring to walk down the street wearing a kippah just two years ago, the National Assembly (i.e., the lower house of the French parliament) voted to approve the draft of a resolution that formally acknowledges hatred of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism and which calls upon the French government to join other European nations in adopting the definition of anti-Semitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. (That definition is an interesting document to consider in its own right: click here.) And that too constitutes a ray of light.

In the U.K., where Chief Orthodox Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis took the unprecedented step a few weeks ago of issuing a statement calling the Labour Party out on its apparently endemic anti-Semitism, that party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn—who has been accused widely and repeatedly of himself harboring deeply offensive anti-Semitic attitudes—actually apologized for the anti-Semitism in its ranks. Yes, he did so only after being prodded repeatedly by a persistent reporter. And, yes, he followed up his remarks by pointing out that other parties—he specifically mentioned the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats—have had to deal with anti-Semitism in their ranks as well. But, at the very least, the man went on record as decrying the scandal that at times has engulfed his election campaign—the elections in the U.K. are scheduled for December 12—and saying, at least formally, that he considers anti-Semitism to be an unacceptable form of racism. And that counts as a ray of light too. Sort of.

And, speaking of England, there was the incident on the subway the other day that could reasonably go into the light and the darkness columns, but in which I prefer to see the light. A visibly Jewish man and his children were taking the Underground on their way somewhere when a man came up to them and started hurling anti-Semitic abuse at them and accusing them of worshiping in the synagogue of Satan. (The history of that expression, which appears twice in the New Testament in the Book of Revelation, is more complicated that it might at first sound. But that the man on the tube meant it as a nasty slur against Jewish people goes without saying.) So that’s the bad part of the story. But then Asma Shuweikh, a visibly Muslim woman wearing a head scarf, stood up and defended the Jewish children against whom the man was so openly and so viciously venting his spleen. She had nothing to gain and everything to lose. (If the man doesn’t like Jews, he almost certainly also doesn’t like Muslims.) But she saw an open act of bigotry directed against innocents and instead of looking away, she stood up for the victims. It was a minor incident—you can actually see most of it on youtube by clicking here—but we’re talking this week about cracks that let in light. And this surely was a crack through which, albeit briefly, light shone. And that counts too.

Sticking with the U.K. for a moment longer, the Anglican Church issued a momentous report just last week—one that took three years to research and compose—in which it acknowledged, finally, that centuries of Christian anti-Judaism in Europe helped create the atmosphere that made the perpetration of the crimes of the Nazis during the Shoah years possible. Nor does the report focus solely on the past, noting specifically that “some of the approaches and language used by pro-Palestinian advocates are…reminiscent of what could be called traditional anti-Semitism.” Will the average Brit read this report and take its message to heart? Probably not. But the average pastor preaching in church week in and week out—and coming over and over to the question of whether Judaism remains a legitimate religion in today’s world or if Jews by clinging to their ancient faith are actually thwarting the possibility of redemption—will read it and, I hope, feel chastened by its various implications. And that too counts as a ray of light in a world awash in dark, menacing tides.

I am not a Pollyanna in any sense of the word. If anything, I’m a pessimistic realist when it comes to considering the future of the Jewish people in the various lands of our dispersion. And yet, even despite my general tendency to expect the worst from the world (and my sense that anyone who knows anything about Jewish history could hardly think otherwise), I find myself circling back around to Leonard Cohen’s line and, eager to see the light that the cracks let in, feeling slightly better about things and at least slightly more hopeful. 

It’s been a brutal few months. There is no particular reason to expect things to get better any time soon. And yet, “the wars they will be fought again / The holy dove, she will be caught again / Bought and sold and bought again / The dove is never free. / Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering. / There is a crack, a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in.”