Reading Herzl as the Waters Rise

When I was in rabbinical school at JTS, I came across and read a short story by Theodor Herzl called, “The Menorah” that originally appeared in Herzl’s newspaper, Die Welt, on December 31, 1897. (I read it in the translation of Harry Zohn, a literary historian originally from Vienna and who then escaped from Nazi Austria and came to this country.) Buried in a volume with the dry-as-dust title, Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses, the story made a great impression on me at the time and prompted me to read more of Herzl, notably Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) and his novel, Altneuland (“Old-New-Land”). Eventually, I also read Das Neue Ghetto (“The New Ghetto”), the only one of Herzl’s sixteen published plays with any Jewish characters in it. Fascinated by the man still today revered as the father of political Zionism, I went on to read several volumes of excerpts from his voluminous diaries. (His diaries are still the best place to start if you want really to meet the man in a deep and personal way. To whet your appetite by reading Shlomo Avineri’s very interesting essay in their regard, click here.)

I took the time this week to reread “The Menorah” and I found it as interesting and worthwhile now as I did all those years ago when I first encountered it. And so, as a treat for these last few days of Chanukah, I thought I would offer it to you as a Chanukah reading treat. It’s a story for our time too, of course. The unnamed protagonist is a Jewish man whose sense of his own Jewishness is awakened by an unexpected resurgence of anti-Semitism, which Herzl calls “the age-old hatred,” in his time and place. And so is the stage set for a brief, moving rumination on the questions that such a development would naturally bring along in its foul wake. Should we respond to anti-Semitism by trying to become invisible (and hoping the bad people won’t notice us) or by publicly asserting our identity, thereby daring the haters to step out of the shadows and encounter us in the harsh light of glaring public scrutiny. Are we safer in the dark or in the light? Is anti-Semitism a contagion to flee from or a challenge to meet head-on? As the temperature rises, do the wise flee for the hills or stand up boldly where they are? (Is this starting to sound at all familiar?) These questions, asked by Herzl a full 125 years ago as he looked around his world and saw the cultural strictures that kept anti-Semites at bay slowly eroding, have many plausible answers. “The Menorah” is Herzl’s personal one and I offer it to you so you can decide if it can or should be yours as well.

Sincerely,

Rabbi Martin S. Cohen

 

The Menorah

By Theodor Herzl

Translated from the German by Harry Zohn

ONCE THERE was a man who deep in his soul felt the need to be a Jew. His material circumstances were satisfactory enough. He was making an adequate living and was fortunate enough to have a vocation in which he could create according to the impulses of his heart. You see, he was an artist. He had long ceased to trouble his head about his Jewish origin or about the faith of his fathers, when the age-old hatred reasserted itself under a fashionable slogan.

Like many others, our man, too, believed that this movement would soon subside. But instead of getting better, it got worse. Although he was not personally affected, the attacks pained him anew each time. Gradually his soul became one bleeding wound.

This secret psychic torment had the effect of steering him to its source, namely, his Jewishness, with the result that he experienced a change that he might never have in better days because he had become so alienated.

He began to love Judaism with great fervor. At first he did not fully acknowledge this mysterious affection, but finally it grew so powerful that his vague feelings crystallized into a clear idea to which he gave voice: the thought that there was only one way out of this Jewish suffering — namely, to return to Judaism.

WHEN his best friends, whose situation was similar to his, found out about this, they shook their heads and thought that he had gone out of his mind. How could something that only meant an intensification and deepening of the malady be a remedy?

He, on the other hand, thought that the moral distress of modern Jews was so acute because they had lost the spiritual counterpoise which our strong forefathers had possessed.

People ridiculed him behind his back, some even laughed right in his face. But he did not let the silly remarks of people whose judgment he had never before had occasion to value throw him off his course, and he bore their malicious or good-natured jests with equanimity. Since his behavior otherwise was not irrational, people in time left him to his whim, although some used a stronger term, idée fixe, to describe it.

In his patient way our man over and over again displayed the courage of his conviction.

There were a number of changes which he himself found hard to accept, although he was stubborn enough not to let on. As a man and an artist of modern sensibilities, he was deeply rooted in many non-Jewish customs, and he had absorbed ineradicable elements from the cultures of the nations among which his intellectual pursuits had taken him. How was this to be reconciled with his return to Judaism? This gave rise to many doubts in his own mind about the soundness of his guiding idea, his idée maitresse, as a French thinker has called it.

Perhaps the generation that had grown up under the influence of other cultures was no longer capable of that return which he had discovered as the solution. But the next generation, provided it were given the right guidance early enough, would be able to do so. He therefore tried to make sure that his own children, at least, would be shown the right way. He was going to give them a Jewish education from the very beginning.

IN previous years he had let the festival which for centuries had illuminated the marvel of the Maccabees with the glow of candles pass by unobserved. Now, however, he used it as an occasion to provide his children with a beautiful memory for the future. An attachment to the ancient nation was to be instilled early in these young souls.

A menorah was acquired, and when he held this nine-branched candelabrum in his hands for the first time, a strange mood came over him. In his remote youth, in his father's house, such little lights had burned and there was something intimate and homelike about the holiday. This tradition did not seem chill or dead. The custom of kindling one light with another had been passed on through the ages.

The ancient form of the menorah also gave him food for thought. When had the primitive structure of this candelabrum first been devised? Obviously, its form had originally been derived from that of a tree: the sturdy stem in the center; four branches to the right and four to the left, each below the other, each pair on the same level, yet all reaching the same height.

A later symbolism added a ninth, shorter branch which jutted out in front and was called the shammash or servant. With what mystery had this simple artistic form, taken from nature, been endowed by successive generations? Our friend, who was, after all, an artist, wondered whether it would not be possible to infuse new life into the rigid form of the menorah, to water its roots like those of a tree. The very sound of the name, which he now pronounced in front of his children every evening, gave him pleasure. Its sound was especially lovely when it came from the mouth of a child.

THE first candle was lit and the origin of the holiday was retold: the miracle of the little lamp which had burned so much longer than expected, as well as the story of the return from the Babylonian exile, of the Second Temple, of the Maccabees.

Our friend told his children all he knew. It was not much but for them it was enough.

When the second candle was lit, they repeated what he had told them, and although they had learned it all from him, it seemed to him quite new and beautiful. In the days that followed he could hardly wait for the evenings, which became ever brighter. Candle after candle was lit in the menorah, and together with his children the father mused upon the little lights.

At length his reveries became more than he could or would tell them, for his dreams would have been beyond their understanding.

When he had resolved to return to the ancient fold and openly acknowledge his return, he had only intended to do what he considered honorable and sensible. But he had never dreamed that on his way back home he would also find gratification for his longing for beauty. Yet what befell him was nothing less.

The menorah with its growing brilliance was indeed a thing of beauty, and inspired lofty thoughts. So he set to work and with an expert hand sketched a design for a menorah which to present to his children the following year.

He made a free adaptation of the motif of the eight arms of equal height which projected from the central stem to the right and to the left, each pair on the same level. He did not consider himself bound by the rigid traditional form, but created again directly from nature, unconcerned with other interpretations which, of course, continued to be no less valid on that account. What he was aiming for was vibrant beauty.

But even as he brought new motion into the rigid forms, he still observed their tradition, the refined old style of their arrangement. It was a tree with slender branches; its ends opened up like calyxes, and it was these calyxes that were to hold the candles.

WITH such thoughtful occupation the week passed.

There came the eighth day, on which the entire row of lights is kindled, including the faithful ninth candle, the shammash, which otherwise serves only to light the others.

A great radiance shone forth from the menorah. The eyes of the children sparkled.

For our friend, the occasion became a parable for the enkindling of a whole nation.

First one candle; it is still dark and the solitary light looks gloomy. Then it finds a companion, then another, and yet another. The darkness must retreat.

The young and the poor are the first to see the light; then the others join in, all those who love justice, truth, liberty, progress, humanity and beauty. When all the candles are ablaze everyone must stop in amazement and rejoice at what has been wrought. And no office is more blessed than that of a servant of light. 

Chanukah 5783

 In the years following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, Israel bounced back and forth half a dozen times between the Egyptian Empire and the Syrian Empire. Each change of government resulted from a separate war, collectively if vaguely known to historians as the Syrian Wars, but the details have almost all been forgotten. Tens of thousands died on the battlefield. None of these wars accomplished much of anything, however—other than laying the groundwork for yet another war intended by the party that lost as a means of gaining back the territory surrendered to the party that won in the previous one. It’s almost impossible to keep the details straight, and not least of all because all the kings of Egypt involved in all six of these wars were named Ptolemy and almost all the kings of Syria, then called the Seleucid Empire after its founder, were named Antiochus. I remember trying to master the details back in graduate school and thinking that my task was something like what it would be like to attempt to master the plots of all of Shakespeare’s plays if all the protagonists in all the plays had the same names. Possible, obviously. But just barely.

Two battles count more than most: the Battle of Gaza in 217 BCE, which was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of ancient times and which ended with a resounding victory for Egypt; and the Battle of Panium (now the site of a lovely park in northern Israel) in 200 BCE, which led to the permanent annexation of Israel by the Syrians, which in turn led eventually into the events of the Chanukah story. All of this has been long forgotten by all. Indeed, the thought that the “real” reason Antiochus IV, the king who went to war with the Maccabees, was so eager to rule Israel with an iron fist had much more to do with his fear of yet another Egyptian invasion than it did with any specific desire to alter the course of Jewish history will itself seem vaguely blasphemous to most: we have all been raised to hate the wicked king who attempted to outlaw Judaism, but which of us was ever invited into the incredibly complex political background that went into the king’s eventually tragic decision to favor the party in Jerusalem he considered the most likely to return his support later on should yet another war erupt.

I thought I would write my pre-Chanukah letter this week about Antiochus IV, the king we all love to hate. He was, in fact, more of a shlimazel than anything else, the heir to a complex set of political realities he seems to have been only barely capable of mastering, let along using creatively for his nation’s benefit. And here he is in a flattering coin-portrait created by an artist of his own day.

There’s lots to say. First of all, his name wasn’t really Antiochus: his parents named him Mithridates and he merely took the name Antiochus, his father’s name, when he ascended to the throne in the fall of 175 BCE. (Whether his father had a different name too before he ascended to the throne is not known.) But he was not his father’s immediate successor. That would have been his brother Seleucus, who reigned from 187 until his murder in 175 BCE. The legal successor should have been Seleucus’s son Demetrius, who was actually declared king by his father’s assassin even though he was being held captive in Rome. His absence created a vacuum of power at the top which was quickly filled by “our” Antiochus, who declared the new king to be a different son of Seleucus, also named Antiochus (you see what I mean about these people’s names), whom he himself had murdered shortly thereafter…which left him free to seize the throne, illegally but effectively, in 175. And so “our” Antiochus became the king of Syria. Not a nice man, although one with nice-looking hair. (Were the curls natural? Did they even have curling irons in antiquity? I’ll try to find out.)

He was widely thought to be at least slightly demented. In fact, his official name Antiochus Epiphanes (literally, “Antiochus the Magnificent”) was often altered by his subjects to Antiochus Epimanes, literally “Antiochus the Madman.” And he behaved oddly too, often abandoning the palace to show up naked in a public bathhouse or weirdly attempting to run for public office as though his great ambition in life was to become a paid alderman situated a thousand ranks lower than his actual status.

But mostly his foreign policy was about keeping the Romans calm and keeping the Egyptians from re-seizing Israel. He got off to a good start with the Romans by paying off the huge sum of money owed them after their victory in what historians now call the four-year-long Roman-Seleucid War that raged from 192 BCE to 188. The Egyptians, not so much. But the Romans were the allies of Egypt…and in that detail lay the ultimate cause of Antiochus’s undoing.

The real background to the Chanukah story is called by historians the Sixth Syrian War. In 170, the Egyptians declared war yet again on the Syrians with the specific intention of regaining Israel for their empire. This did not go at all well: the Syrians counterattacked ferociously, seized almost all of Egypt except Alexandria, and took their king (called, because what else, Ptolemy) captive. Antiochus allowed the Egyptian king to continue to reign, but only as a servant to Syrian interests. This did not go over well with the Egyptians, however, who revolted and succeeded in putting a brother of Ptolemy, also (of course) named Ptolemy, on the throne. This was a direct repudiation of Syria’s victory, and so Antiochus sent a huge army, headed by himself, to attack Egypt again two years later in 168 BCE. But he didn’t anticipate the degree to which this would anger the Romans. Nor did he anticipate what happened next.

That story, we know only from the great Roman historian Polybius, who lived from about 200 BCE to about 116 BCE. To read the story in his Histories, Antiochus landed and began his march into Egypt, only to find himself facing not a Roman army intent on thwarting his plans, but a single Roman individual, a man named Caius Popilius Laenas who had come from Rome with a letter from the Senate ordering Antiochus to go home and leave the Egyptians be. Imagine the scene: Antiochus, king of Syria, with thousands of soldiers behind him and a single man, an emissary from the Roman Senate, standing in the road in front of him. The latter handed Antiochus a letter from the Senate ordering him to retreat. Antiochus, no doubt uncertain how to respond, said he needed time to consider the offer. Popilius said that was fine, then took a stick from the ground and drew a circle around Antiochus, informing him that he needed to make his decision before stepping outside the circle. Thus humiliated in front of his own men yet terrified to defy Rome openly, he politely—and more than just a bit pathetically, given that he was leading an army and Popilius was one single man—he politely agree to go home, which he then did.

And that instance of public disgrace was the background that led to the Maccabean revolt. Antiochus, more eager than ever to keep the Jews of Judea happy and disinclined to fight with the Egyptians during the inevitable next war, lighted on the idea of putting in power those Jews who seemed the most eager to become part of his world—to worship in the Syrian-Greek style, to speak Greek, to frequent Greek-style gymnasiums, to attend theaters featuring the great dramas of the Greek playwrights, etc. For good measure, he outlawed practices liked the least by the Jews he liked the most, and circumcision foremost among them. Calculating incredibly incorrectly, Antiochus imagined “his” Jews to be invincible with his royal support. But he failed to take into account the detail that the large majority of Jews were revolted by those innovations and wanted only to maintain their ancient ways and their ancient cult without some outside authority bossing them around and telling them how to conduct themselves spiritually or religiously. And it was at that precise moment that the Maccabee brothers, sensing the potential inherent in the situation, began a guerilla war against the Syrians, eventually wresting some kind of autonomy from the Seleucids. So that was in 164 BCE. But within a few decades, the Syrian Empire had become so riddled with insurrection and civil unrest that the Jews of Israel were able to function as an autonomous region within the empire. In 104 BCE, a descendent of the original Maccabees proclaimed himself king…and Jewish autonomy morphed into real independence, which lasted for about forty years. But that’s a whole different story, the one featuring the Romans landing on the shores of Israel and slowly taking over. It’s a good story too, though. I’ll tell it another time.

So Antiochus the Shlimazel. Humiliated before his troops. Illegitimately on the throne in the first place. Mocked as a crazy person by his own subjects. And, in the end, a failure whose own personal poor decision making led not only to Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel, but also eventually to the end of his own dynasty.

By the end, he didn’t look so well either.

Sic semper tyrannis! Happy Chanukah to all!

 

Cakes Are Not Words and Silence Is Not Speech

Discrimination has a bad reputation, but it’s really only the irrational kind that deserves a negative vibe: it’s certainly a kind of discrimination when the government declines to issue driver’s licenses to blind people, but that restriction doesn’t rankle at all, or at least it doesn’t rankle me personally, because I can’t imagine that even blind people themselves think they should be allowed to drive cars. (Whether blind people should be allowed to “drive” driverless cars is a different question, one it will be very interesting to see resolved when such vehicles actually exist.) Nor does anyone think it is wrong to discriminate against children by not allowing them to vote or to purchase alcoholic drinks or cigarettes. All of these restrictions are discriminatory in that they deny a right to some specific segment of society that is not denied to the rest of everybody. But none is controversial because they are all rooted in reasonableness and sensibleness.

What is widely and reasonably understood to be repugnant in a democratic society rooted in the concept of equal rights for all is the kind of discrimination that has no logical basis, the kind that singles out some specific recognizable group within society and denies the members of that group some right merely because of their membership in that group and not for any obvious or even subtle but arguable reason. And only complicating the matter is the fact that society is not a static entity but a dynamic ones that morphs forward ethically in fits and starts with respect to its understanding of itself and the world it inhabits. As such, the ancient law forbidding women from giving testimony in a beit-din, a law grounded in the opinion that women are possessed of flighty intellects and could therefore not be trusted to resist the malign influence of outsiders eager to pervert some woman’s testimony for their own advantage, may well have sounded rational in ancient times (although I doubt it), but sounds somewhere between ridiculous and preposterous today. I’ve written many times in this space about the unsettling effect reading books of pro-slavery sermons preached by ministers and rabbis in these United States before the Civil War has on me. To wave them away as nonsense is really to miss the point: the preachers involved seem truly to have believed that Black people were meant to serve their Caucasian masters and that slavery was therefore not a form of irrational discrimination but simply an institution rooted in scientific reality. Obviously, no normal person thinks that today! And so have we as a society learned to condemn racial discrimination as irrational, therefore morally wrong. All discriminatory laws rooted in false, scientifically unverifiable assumptions about the universe are almost by definition unethical and unjust. Nor does this feel like a controversial observation—indeed, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking issue with it at all.

And now we come to this week’s case before the Supreme Court, 303 Creative v. Elenis, in which “303 Creative” is a web-site design business owned by a Colorado woman named Lori Smith and “Elenis” is Aubrey L. Elenis of the Civil Rights Division of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies. Smith is interested in seeking business opportunities designing websites for couples planning to be married. (This is a thing now. Not all couples do it, but lots do.) She became aware of the fact, however, that anti-discrimination laws in Colorado would require her to agree to create such websites for same-sex couples as well as heterosexual ones and so, because she claimed her Christian faith required her to turn away gay customers, she sued the State of Colorado. She lost in court. But the matter was hardly done with.

This mirrors a previous Colorado lawsuit, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which dates back to 2018 and in which the issue in need of adjudication was almost simple. A baker named Jack Phillips refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple, David Mullins and Charlie Craig. The couple filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission on the grounds that the baker was acting in violation of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which specifically outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Commission sided with the couple. The baker appealed. In August of 2015, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled against the baker and affirmed the couple’s right to be served by any business open to the public. The Colorado Supreme Court declined to revisit the matter, but the Supreme Court of the United States did agree to rehear the case and then, in 2018, reversed the lower court’s decision and granted the baker the right to refuse service based on religious grounds. But the Court’s decision was based on narrow legal argumentation relating to the fact that the Civil Rights Commission itself was not religion-neutral in the way it applied the law to in-state businesses. At the same time, the Supremes specifically declined to rule on the issue at the heart of the matter: whether requiring someone possessed of sincere religious beliefs to act contrary to those beliefs is tantamount to denying that person the freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment, or if the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that all citizens be treated equally and fairly even if doing so requires someone to act contrary to the tenets of his or her faith.

In theory, this is a civil rights issue, not specifically a gay one. And yet why do I think that, in a million billion years, the Supreme Court would not rule in favor of someone whose sincere religious beliefs required him or her to think of Black people as inferior creatures destined to serve white people? Or whose religious beliefs forbade hiring any women in positions that would make them the superiors of male employees? These issues are ridiculous even to raise in today’s America! And yet once we are seriously discussing if one’s religious beliefs can override other people’s innate civil rights, why exactly would prevent someone from justifying prejudice with reference to them? It’s not like you couldn’t make a serious case that biblical religion heartily endorses slavery and condemns the descendants of Ham to be the slaves of the descendants of Ham’s brothers.

And now we come to this week’s case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. The twist here is that the plaintiff is arguing not that requiring her to serve same-sex couples violates her religious freedom, but that it violates her freedom of speech. A website is a form of linguistic expression, so framing the issue with respect to the First Amendment doesn’t sound that far-fetched, at least not at first. And yet there is something fishy about the argument: in the scenario in which a gay couple approaches a web designer and asks that person to create a website for them, it is the couple, not the site designer, that speaks through the website. It’s the couple’s language, their text, their message, their photos on display. The designer, like the printer of a book, says nothing at all but merely facilitates other people’s free speech. To me, personally, the whole argument is wrongheaded: if the same woman declined to serve Jewish customers because creating a website that features solely their content would somehow be requiring her to speak in public as a Jewish person (and thus not as a Christian one), no one would take her argument at all seriously. But since the discriminated-against party here is a gay couple, there are apparently people willing to consider that kind of attenuated third-party speech—in which the alleged speaker remains unidentified and says nothing at all—to be real enough to warrant serious consideration under the laws that govern freedom of speech. Can silence be speech? Maybe in a George Orwell novel!

I write as an interested party here—and specifically not because I am the father and father-in-law of two gay men. Okay, maybe that too. But my primary interest here is the interest of a citizen and has to do with the inherent ridiculousness of the notions that an unsigned cake served without reference to its point of origin can be taken as an expression of religious sentiment or that the construction of a website in which the designer says nothing at all and is left fully unidentified can be seen as a kind of protected speech. Both arguments are, at least to me, smokescreens designed to justify petty discrimination against a recognizable group within society—the very thing the Bill of Rights specifically exists to prohibit.

The Supreme Court should make it clear that website designers, like all businesspeople, are prohibited by law from discriminating against specific citizens merely because they don’t wish to serve them…and that it is not relevant if they perceive the origin of their prejudice to be rooted in religious faith or bogus science. And, after all, it’s not like people who feel it would be a betrayal of their own religious beliefs to serve people whom they are required by law not to discriminate against don’t have a perfectly good way out: acting on principle and choosing to pay the real price of embracing values wholly out of sync with the law, they can choose to go out of business and be done with it.

Fiends on the Patio

Like most American Jews my age, I think, I have mostly only been exposed to anti-Semitism in its least virulent versions: an insulting joke overheard in the locker room at the gym, a hostile slogan painted on a wall I was driving past, an unmistakable chill from some idiot at the registration desk in some low-grade motel when I offered my (unmistakably Jewish) last name to confirm my previously-made reservation. Stuff like that.

Even when I left the Jewish cocoon in which I was raised (and it didn’t get more cocoon-like than Jewish Forest Hills in the 1960s), I experienced nothing like the virulent hatred for which my own lifelong task of reading everything of importance relating to the Shoah prepared me almost to expect. My first foray into the non-Jewish world was in my junior year of college, when I suddenly found myself the only Jew (and the only American) in a men’s dormitory in eastern France where the large majority of the other residents were from French-speaking West Africa or French-speaking Southeast Asia. (If anything, I was a kind of a curiosity: the guy across the hall, Jean from Niger, seemed vaguely surprised I didn’t know Jesus of Nazareth personally, us being cousins and all.) And when Joan and I lived in Germany itself in the mid-1980s, we experienced, if anything, a weird and slightly creepy version of philo-Semitism, as though our neighbors were consciously vying with each other to prove just how unreasonable it would be to consider them as having anything to do with the Nazis merely because they spoke the same language, lived in the same country, and were directly descended from the people who put Hitler into office in 1933. Our strange upstairs neighbors invited us over as we were preparing to leave Germany to show us a life-size bust of, of all people, Golda Meir that they kept in a kind of living-room shrine devoted to her memory. (Being invited over was a very big deal—Germans generally invite guests into their homes only after having known them for decades, if then. If I remember correctly, that was the sole invitation to a German home that we received in our two years in Heidelberg.)

Even my one encounter with vicious Jew-hatred itself came with a silver lining. I came to our synagogue in Richmond (in British Columbia on Canada’s Pacific coast) one Sunday morning in 1987 to discover that it had been defaced overnight by vandals painting horrific things on the front wall of the building, including at the center of the effort, the horrific words “Six Million Wasn’t Enough.” We called the police, of course, but were amazed when the RCMP officers who responded dismissed the whole thing—six-foot high bright red swastikas and all—as just some sort of dopey teenagers’ prank. (Richmond doesn’t have its own police force, so policing is the job of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the national Canadian police force. I particularly remember the officer basing his dismissive analysis of the situation on the fact that an adult would have written “weren’t enough,” not “wasn’t enough,” as though no serious adult anti-Semite would have less than impeccable grammar skills.) So that was horrific. But an hour or so later there arrived at our congregation dozens and dozens of Sunday-morning worshipers from the Catholic church down the block, St. Joseph the Worker. Father Pascal, a friend, had told his people that they had something more important to do than conducting their own worship service, then asked them to go home and regroup at our synagogue with brushes, turpentine, ladders, and rags so that they could assist us in removing the hateful slogans from the front wall of the building. We took pictures. The RCMP guys took their own million pictures. And then our friends from next door got to work. Within a few hours, the building was presentable. But what followed was even more amazing than Father Pascal’s call-to-arms in the first place: we began to receive letters of support and cash donations from all across Canada…and mostly from Christian churches of various denominations and sizes. We ended up with hundreds of such letters and thousands of dollars in gifts. The whole incident, instead of making me terrified, left me feeling supported and encouraged, secure that, even if there are bad people in the world, there are also very good people who loathe prejudice and hatred, and who are willing to put their money where their mouths are. The Reverend Dr. Ed Searcy, known to all Shelter Rockers from his place of permanent prominence on the list of people for whose recovery from illness we pray every Shabbat, was one of the local ministers who came forward to offer his public support and his assistance, and who later also became a good friend.

So that is my story with respect to anti-Semitism. For a Jew born in the middle of the twentieth century, it’s pretty benign stuff. And I think my experience mirrors the experiences of a majority of Jewish Americans of my generation. Yes, of course, there are exceptions, including some gigantic ones. But for the most part, the years of my life in this place have been characterized by slow, but distinctly noticeable, progress towards considering overtly expressed prejudice based on religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender more or less taboo in the public square. I have never felt afraid to be who I am, and to be so overtly and without feeling the need to hide. In this way, among many others, I feel blessed to be of my time and place.

But so did the Jews of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, it was precisely because they felt so at ease, so much a part of things, so fully integrated into the society in which they lived…it was because they were so fully German that they somehow failed to take note of the rising tide of anti-Semitism that eventually became a full-fledged tsunami that left only death, destruction, and exile in its horrific wake. And so I, who feel so fully integrated into the world in which I live, try not to replicate their mistake. When those fascist goons appeared out of nowhere to march in Charlottesville a few years ago while chanting overtly anti-Semitic slogans, I took it more than seriously. (To read my thoughts on that whole incident, click here.) When a bad man came to a synagogue in Pittsburgh one Shabbat morning just a year later with a semi-automatic rifle and three Glock pistols with the intention of murdering as many Jews as he could kill before anyone stopped him, I took that even more seriously. (To revisit my analysis from that week, click here.) As I know so also did all of you.

But, paradoxically, the tide of public feeling isn’t substantially altered by big-ticket events like Charlottesville or Poway or Pittsburgh, incidents that are widely deplored by all. Instead, what marks the end of civility in a given place is the slow erosion of sensitivity to prejudice, to hatred, to bigotry. It can begin innocently enough with tasteless jokes that even thoughtful people like myself feel embarrassed to make a big deal about. B-list celebrities like Kyrie Irving, whom I admitted a few weeks ago to never having heard of, are suddenly famous for making anti-Semitic comments in public. A tidal wave of protest follows. But the barrier has been breached. When Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, threatens in public to murder Jewish people when he’s a bit more rested, there is a similar uproar. He loses some very lucrative contracts. He is ridiculed as a bigot and as a fool. But the uproar dies down and, as it does, the barrier is yet again thinned. When, a few weeks later, a famous comedian like Dave Chapelle speaks resentfully about Jews in the entertainment industry from the very public stage of Saturday Night Live, there is almost no response at all. After all, isn’t it true that lots of Jews work in Hollywood?

And now we have the latest incident to attempt to unpack. A former President of the United States has dinner last week on the patio of Mar-a-Lago with Ye and Nick Fuentes. (Milos Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart News editor who was forced to resign after being accused of promoting pedophilia, was also present.) Ye is the one who is “going to go death con 3 on Jewish people.” Fuentes is a relatively unknown anti-Semite and racist who denies the truth of the Shoah, doesn’t think women should be allowed to vote, marched in Charlottesville, believes men should have the legal right to beat their wives, and would like January 6 to become a national holiday honoring the insurrectionists’ riot at the Capitol. All three, but particularly Ye and Fuentes, represent and actively promote views that should be anathema to all Americans, yet there they were both dining in full view with Donald Trump, who is actively pursuing a bid to win the Republican nomination for President.

Yes, there was a huge outcry. Some of the negative comments came from expected sources. Senator Schumer, for example, said clearly that he considered the former President’s behavior “disgusting and dangerous,” and that the whole incident was one redolent of “pure evil.” So that’s pretty clear. But also expected. As also was the very clear and pointed comment on Twitter by Elan Carr, Trump’s own State Department anti-Semitism monitor, who wrote that “No responsible American, and certainly no former President, should be cavorting with the likes of Nick Fuentes and Kanye West.”  Less expected was the blanket condemnation of the former President’s decision to host Ye and Nick Fuentes at his home from groups like the Zionist Organization of America and the Republican Jewish Coalition. Some actual Republican congressmen and senators also voiced extreme distaste. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), for example, went on record as saying that “President Trump hosting racist anti-Semites for dinner encourages other racist anti-Semites. These attitude are immoral and should not be entertained.” Representative James Comer (R-Kentucky) commented simply that President Trump “certainly needs better judgment in who [sic] he dines with.” Eventually, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy weighed in, the latter apparently comfortable only with condemning the act but not the actual actor.

So that’s all satisfying to hear. But, yet again, the wall is breached, the barrier thinned, the taboo more ignorable. It would be easy to focus on the image of an ex-President dining on his own patio with a Nick Fuentes and to use it to condemn former President Trump himself. But the real challenge is to understand that this isn’t ultimately “about” Donald Trump. It’s about the tenor of American society with respect to anti-Semitism, about the degree to which the water in which we swim has warmed up a notch without us knowing what precisely to do. The incident with Ye and Nick Fuentes will be gone from the headlines almost immediately. But that incident has made slightly thinner the wall that protects Jews from the vandals at the gate. In the end, the incident will be remembered as a footnote. But as a footnote in the story of the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the world, not as one primarily “about” the former President’s bid for his party’s nomination to run in 2024.

Doing the Right Thing

As I wrote last week, Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday…and precisely because it is rooted in a notion of peaceful coexistence between settlers and natives in this place that, if not quite historical, still means that—even at the very beginning of European settlement in North America—at least some of the settlers had in their hearts the notion of living side by side with the indigenes and together forging a new destiny in what was for some a new place and others, a very old one.

Needless to say, that’s not what happened. Slowly but surely, it became clear that there was not going to be any real partnership with the native peoples of North America. Of this tragic part of our American reality, there are a million examples. But none is as horrific as the forced removal of Indians from lands in Georgia, Florida, and other southeastern states they had tilled and occupied since time immemorial so that white people could settle on that land in those places and make believe they owned the property their own government had basically stolen from its actual owners. It is, to say the least, a depressing, shameful part of our past.

Some of my readers may remember my story, published a few years ago as part of our lead-up to the High Holidays, called “To Speak the Truth.” (That story later became the title story in my collection of short stories called To Speak the Truth: Stories 2011-2021. To buy the book, click here.) It concerned a rabbi, Aaron Klass, who, on one Shabbat afternoon read the letter written by Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Martin Van Buren in response to the administration’s decision forcibly to remove the native peoples of the Southeastern States, most of whom lived in Georgia, from their homes and their lands and to march them on foot to what is now the State of Oklahoma. The numbers were staggering: upwards of 16,000 people from a number of different tribes were uprooted from something like 25 million acres of property, then subsequent forced to march carrying their possessions in their arms across over 1000 miles of mostly hostile terrain to their new “home.” Most were barefoot. Thousands died along the way of malnutrition, exposure to the cold, and disease. Rabbi Klass, seeing the disaster about to befall the native peoples of the Southeast, decides to act and publicly to confront the general sent to organize the expulsion. He does that successfully, then ends up in jail for his efforts and is subsequently put on trial. That trial is the centerpiece of my story and I hope you all enjoyed or will enjoy reading about it.

At the center of the trial, however, is the question of a single treaty, the Treaty of New Echota, signed in New Echota, Georgia, on December 19, 1835, by officials of the federal government and a small group of Cherokees who claimed to represent their entire tribe, which they clearly did not. The treaty was not signed by the Cherokees’ chief, John Ross. It was not approved by the Cherokee National Council. But for the Van Buren administration an Indian was an Indian and the fact that it was signed by a group of actual Cherokees was more than good enough. Chief Ross and the Cherokee National Council implored the Senate not to ratify the treaty, since it had not been negotiated with the legal representatives of the tribe. No one cared and the treaty was ratified in the Senate in March of 1835 by a majority of one single vote. The Cherokees produced a petition signed by more than 16,000, nearly as many Cherokee as lived in the State of Georgia, but Congress was not impressed. And because no one cared about anything except making it “feel” legal to expel these poor people from their land, the forced expulsion of the Cherokees westward along what came to be known as the Trail of Tears began almost immediately. More than 4000 people died on the trail. To say this was not our nation’s finest hour is really to say the very least.

To readers who want to know more about this whole horrific story, I can recommend three books I read as I prepared to write my story: The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green; The Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle; and The Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removal 1813–1855 by Gloria Jahoda.

For Jewish Americans, this nightmarish story will be resonant in almost too many different ways to count. People dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. Property owned for generations nationalized and seized without being purchased even fraudulently. The rule of law applied only to other people and not to oppressed people the most in need of its protection. Internment in camps thousands of miles away from home with the openly expressed expectation that most of the people sent there would not survive. And, of course, the death marches themselves. I personally knew and know people who were sent on the infamous death marches from Auschwitz west as the Red Army approached the camp in 1945. The terrible irony—if that is the right word—of people who somehow survived in Auschwitz dying on a journey away from the camp just weeks before the war would end is unbearable. And yet the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that as many as 15,000 prisoners died on those marches. So for me to read about the Trail of Tears and not be fully identified with the misery, the degradation, and the humiliation of the Cherokees would not be possible. Nor should it be for any decent person at all, Jewish or not.

And now the Treaty of New Echota is back in the news. Who ever heard of it? Who has read it through in the last 180 years? The Cherokees themselves, that’s who! And buried deep in its impenetrable legalese prose (click here to read if you’re curious what I mean) is the detail that that Cherokees, supposing any survived, were henceforth to be entitled “to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for same.”  And when exactly did Congress make provision for the fulfillment of that clause of the treaty? Never is when! Assuming correctly that no one would care (or at least that no one who voted in national elections would care), they simply ignored their own freely-undertaken obligation. (Native Indians were not even considered American citizens until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. And even then it was left to individual states to grant Indian citizens the right to vote. Native Americans could only vote in all fifty states as of 1962, when Utah became the last state in the union to enfranchise them.)

And now the Cherokee are back in the news. A major effort has been undertaken to grant Kim Teehee, a Cherokee Nation official, a non-voting seat in the House of Representatives. (The “non-voting” part also rankles. But at least native Americans are represented by the congresspeople and senators who represent the states in which they live.) Lots of people are in favor. But there are also those opposed, mostly on the grounds that seating a Cherokee representative would open the door to other tribes asking for similar treatment because the federal government signed similar treaties with their ancestors. (The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek that the federal government signed with the Choctaw Nation in 1830 would be a good example of a similar treaty featuring a similar promise of representation in the halls of government. And there are others too.)

Refusing to seat Ms. Teehee would be a truly grotesque repudiation of the most basic American values. Our government, eager to exile the Cherokees and trying to dress up their barbarism as “normal” treaty-making, granted the Cherokee the right to send a representative to Congress. We are almost 200 years too late to debate if that was a good idea or not. Nor should it matter if the government made other, similar commitments to other tribes or native nations. At the end of the day, we are either a nation that lives under the law or we are merely acting the part without truly meaning it. In the theater, no one expects the actor playing Hamlet really to think that he’s a Danish prince. But in the real world, we Americans are not supposed to be playing the role of honorable people on the global stage, but actually to be honorable. And just. We’re coming up on two centuries too late to be prompt. But we can still do the right thing.