1. My first reflection is that many scholars have challenged certain historical accounts in Tanakh based on the fact that they can’t find any corroborating evidence in the secular chronicles of that culture’s history outside of Tanakh. For example, they say, there never was a story of a Queen Esther who saved the Jews from destruction in the Persian empire since there’s no record of it anywhere.
2. To that I would respond: look at the headlines this past week. There was a major tsunami that was the obsession of the entire world media. But there was another tsunami, one that rocked the Jewish world with a greater shock on our Richter Scale than the 9.0 tsunami in Japan, the murders of three children and the Fogel parents, hy”d. You’d be lucky if you found the news on page 5 of the newspaper. Yes, it was reported, but always with qualifying language ("intruders" attacking "settlers", etc.), so that their blood for whatever reason isn’t perceived as red as everyone else’s.
3. While it’s true that for the Jewish people, another Jew’s death is more painful, because it’s mishpacha, the opposite is also true for the rest of the world, that our blood isn’t as tragic, since we’re Israelis, or we’re Jews, so we’ve probably done something anyway to bring it upon ourselves.
4. Don’t be surprised, therefore, if you can’t find any confirmation of the Purim story in ancient Persian history. Our blood wasn’t so red back then, either, so we’d have been lucky if our story was in the back of the Persian newspapers. That’s the message of the miracle that takes place when Achashverosh can’t sleep and they remind him that a Jew, Mordechai, had saved his life. It’s no coincidence that Mordechai hadn’t been rewarded; his Jewishness no doubt contributed to his being overlooked by a king who was too busy to bother himself to extend his thanks to a Jew, no matter how indebted he was to him.
5. My second observation is that which I discussed with our children in school before Shabbos : The role of Amalek is “אשר קרך בדרך” – "they made you feel a sense of happenstance on the road," they made you think that everything that happens in the world is happenstance, coincidence, purely random and by chance.
6. Someone asked me how we can come to terms with a natural disaster of such proportions, where 30,000 people are wiped out in mere minutes by an earthquake and tsunami. They told me that they found this more difficult to reconcile than when evil people murder innocents, since that, after all, is human action, not Divine action.
7. This point is a valid one and is discussed by sociologists of religion. Peter Berger wrote The Sacred Canopy and observes that theodicy – the religious doctrine of why G-d allows evil to occur – is what eventually began to unravel religion in modern civilization. For example, he writes that “in 1755, an earthquake destroyed most of the city of Lisbon and killed a considerable part of its population. This event, slight as it may seem in comparison with the mass horrors of our own time, was an important event for 18th-century thought. It violently raised the problem of theodicy and the validity of the Christian solution in some of the best minds of the period, among them Pope, Voltaire, Goethe, and Kant…” But “the immeasurably greater horrors of WWII did not have a similar result,” because people were able to appreciate that there’s a difference between when G-d does something (theodicy) and when evil people do something (anthropodicy).[1]
8. I responded that while a tsunami was difficult to reconcile with a merciful G-d, I personally felt that this distinction between theodicy and anthropodicy was a false one. If anything, it was even harder to reconcile how G-d could allow evil people to exercise their free will and seemingly contravene G-d’s will, who seeks to protect good people, and allow them to be murdered mercilessly. In other words, what is more painful and difficult to reconcile – having someone die in a natural disaster or from an illness, or to be killed by Nazis or a drunk driver when the person is perfectly healthy? The distinction between theodicy and anthropodicy is somewhat empty when one realizes that HKB”H runs the whole world.
9. The strength of Amalek and their whole raison d’être was to try and demonstrate that their will could trump G-d’s will, that no matter how much the Jewish people thought that they were a protected class, they had more power than HKB”H.
10. So why, indeed, did Hashem allow Amalek to attack us? Why didn’t He protect us as we were leaving Egypt, just as he protected us from the elements by placing a cloud pillar around us? Furthermore, why didn’t Hashem drown the Amalekites afterward in some tsunami, just as he had done to the Egyptians who pursued us? Perhaps Hashem felt that He needed to teach us that if we were going to become the Chosen People, we were going to need to learn how to protect ourselves and how to fight for our survival. Perhaps we needed to learn that although we could achieve the manna and the cloud cover, it was far more difficult to protect ourselves from evil people in the world who had a powerful tzelem Elokim and free will; Hashem would more readily protect us from scorpions and other malevolent creatures than he would from the two-legged variety.
11. I think why the Fogel family’s murder is so painful is because it drudges up a perennial history of our people. It’s fairly obvious that more Jews throughout history have died prematurely at the hands of evil men than at the hands of natural disasters and cancer. I remember back in 2001, when there was a wedding in Israel and a dance floor collapsed and 23 people died. It was around the same time that there was an intifada going on and people were getting killed by terrorists. As tragic as the collapse of the dance floor was, it wasn’t nearly as tragic for us as when people were getting blown up by suicide bombers. We know instinctively that a ba’al bechirah’s (free-willed individual) direct acts of malice against us are that much more painful – the sting of someone’s hatred, a hatred that has no basis, is much harder to bear.
12. So how do we react to the terrorism, to the hate? We can only react by fighting Amalek once again, and acknowledging that there is no such thing as happenstance, there are no coincidences. That’s the message of Purim and that’s the message of a tsunami and an act of terrorism happening at the same time right before Purim. Both an earthquake in Lisbon and a terrorist’s bomb are under G-d’s providence, in some strange, mysterious way. How we react to these events is what defines us a people of faith. May we all be granted the blessing of emunah (faith) and bitachon (trust) in the days and weeks ahead. May that emunah make us worthy of such a powerful blessing that will protect us from both natural and unnatural disasters in the future, until the coming of the Redeemer, bb”a.
Showing posts with label Jewish blood is not cheap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jewish blood is not cheap. Show all posts
Monday, March 21, 2011
Friday, November 5, 2010
When Jews Are Targeted, Terrorism Is Graded on a Curve
Why do they hate us?
The news that Islamist terrorists sent letter bombs to two Chicago-area synagogues should have stirred worldwide outrage not just hysteria. Amid the ensuing media feeding frenzy, as video seminars detailed how cargo is shipped and who the suspected Yemeni terrorists are, most journalists ignored the terrorists’ potential victims. Alas, Jews being targeted is not news. Once again we have to wonder, why do they hate us – and why does the hatred against us often invite indifference?
Yes, I know, “they” hating “us,” is the language of paranoids, xenophobes, the illiberal, the intolerant. We are supposed to be more polite, more sanitized, and more self-critical, wondering what phenomenon arose to foment hatred, and what we did to bring this plague upon ourselves.
I confess, I hate writing these kinds of columns. I detest this topic. I was raised in the post-Auschwitz covenant. Anti-Semitism was supposed to be dead, buried in the ashes of Auschwitz by the world’s retroactive remorse when there was nothing left to do but say “sorry” and feebly promise “Never Again” after the Jews endured the ugliest mass murder in history.
But “Never Again” has become “I am not anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist,” as history reshuffles the deck once again. There is a “they” and an “us,” actually, two “theys” and two “us-es”.” The first, obvious “they” is the Islamists fueling an anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-Western nihilist movement addicted to terrorism as a political tool. In a recent Newsweek column Hayri Abaza and Soner Cagaptay clarified the definitional issues which are often purposely obscured. “The left is wrongly defending Islamism – an extremist and at times violent ideology – which it confuses with the common person’s Islam,” they write, “while the right is often wrongly attacking the Muslim faith, which it confuses with Islamism.” Islamists are not reacting to the Ground Zero mosque controversy or settlement expansion. They are fighting a global millennialist Jihad rooted in their perverted reading of their religion, and counting historical time in centuries not minutes. They still mourn Spain’s fall to the Christians, and the Crusaders’ rise – they use the Palestinian issue and fleeting controversies as modern fig leafs, to seduce the naïve, today’s useful idiots.
Surprisingly, it works. Herein emerges the second “they.” Many opinion leaders and elites in the West somehow justify terrorists targeting Jews and Israelis. Israelis’ alleged “crimes” against the Palestinians offer elaborate excuses for multiple abuses; when Jews and Israelis are involved, terrorism is graded on a curve, the world’s outrage dulls. The crimes of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in England generated more horror than the bus and café bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Al Qaeda is considered beyond the diplomatic pale yet more and more Westerners are making nice with Islamist Hezbollah in Lebanon while pressuring Israel to negotiate with Islamist, anti-Semitic Hamas. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Columbia University, his desire to wipe out the Jewish state triggered minimal outrage, but his claim that Iran had no homosexuals alienated his audience.
Too many of the “chattering classes” and cultural elites in the West today soft-pedal the Islamist problem. A surprisingly seductive combination of post-colonial, post-imperial white guilt mixed with liberal condescension has dulled the moral senses. A racist cult of white American terrorists would trigger much more outrage. The logical rage against Islamist anti-Semitism is further diluted, festering in Apologia Alley, at the fog-inducing intersection where Western self-hatred and traditional Jew hatred meet.
Again, I hate writing this but the second “they” are the Islamists’ fellow travelers, the carriers of the West’s anti-Semitism gene. They are the ones who single out Israel, making it the Jew among nations, while excusing the far-worse crimes of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan. They are the ones at UNESCO who can decide the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb are not shared properties, reflecting Jews’ and Muslims’ common cultural heritage, but should be exclusively Palestinian. And they are the ones who will downplay the anti-Semitic intent when a synagogue in Chicago is targeted, or an El Al waiting area in Los Angeles is attacked. This blindspot regarding Jewish oppression offers an odd echo of the reporting during the 1940s. Then, reporters described Hitler’s victims as civilians not Jews, while ghettoizing the coverage of the few anti-Hitler protests by labeling them Jewish protests, which were more easily ignored.
If the double “they” is the Islamists and their fellow travelers – the two “us-es” are Westerners and Jews. Yes, Westerners have been targeted. But Jews are doubly targeted, as Westerners and Jews. In yet another bizarre twist, while many anti-Semites have long rejected Jews for not being Western enough, part of the Islamist revulsion against the Jew rejects Jews as the ultimate Westerners.
It is easy, in such a world, to turn bitter. In the classic documentary “Shoah,” a kibbutznik who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, and seems perfectly normal, stops, stares at the camera and barks: “if you could lick my heart you would be poisoned.” Our challenge is to let only the haters be poisoned by their own hatred. If living well is the best revenge for people who grew up in dysfunctional families, the same advice applies to an embattled people living in a dysfunctional world. We must defend ourselves, our people, our homeland, our values, our Western civilization, as intensely as possible. But we cannot forget our capacity to love, enjoy, hope, dream. Let our enemies marinate in their own poisons. We need to move beyond without ignoring them but without being imprisoned or defined by them either. With apologies to Rabbi Hillel, If I do not defend myself, who am I? but if I only defend myself, what am I? and if not now, when.
The news that Islamist terrorists sent letter bombs to two Chicago-area synagogues should have stirred worldwide outrage not just hysteria. Amid the ensuing media feeding frenzy, as video seminars detailed how cargo is shipped and who the suspected Yemeni terrorists are, most journalists ignored the terrorists’ potential victims. Alas, Jews being targeted is not news. Once again we have to wonder, why do they hate us – and why does the hatred against us often invite indifference?
Yes, I know, “they” hating “us,” is the language of paranoids, xenophobes, the illiberal, the intolerant. We are supposed to be more polite, more sanitized, and more self-critical, wondering what phenomenon arose to foment hatred, and what we did to bring this plague upon ourselves.
I confess, I hate writing these kinds of columns. I detest this topic. I was raised in the post-Auschwitz covenant. Anti-Semitism was supposed to be dead, buried in the ashes of Auschwitz by the world’s retroactive remorse when there was nothing left to do but say “sorry” and feebly promise “Never Again” after the Jews endured the ugliest mass murder in history.
But “Never Again” has become “I am not anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist,” as history reshuffles the deck once again. There is a “they” and an “us,” actually, two “theys” and two “us-es”.” The first, obvious “they” is the Islamists fueling an anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-Western nihilist movement addicted to terrorism as a political tool. In a recent Newsweek column Hayri Abaza and Soner Cagaptay clarified the definitional issues which are often purposely obscured. “The left is wrongly defending Islamism – an extremist and at times violent ideology – which it confuses with the common person’s Islam,” they write, “while the right is often wrongly attacking the Muslim faith, which it confuses with Islamism.” Islamists are not reacting to the Ground Zero mosque controversy or settlement expansion. They are fighting a global millennialist Jihad rooted in their perverted reading of their religion, and counting historical time in centuries not minutes. They still mourn Spain’s fall to the Christians, and the Crusaders’ rise – they use the Palestinian issue and fleeting controversies as modern fig leafs, to seduce the naïve, today’s useful idiots.
Surprisingly, it works. Herein emerges the second “they.” Many opinion leaders and elites in the West somehow justify terrorists targeting Jews and Israelis. Israelis’ alleged “crimes” against the Palestinians offer elaborate excuses for multiple abuses; when Jews and Israelis are involved, terrorism is graded on a curve, the world’s outrage dulls. The crimes of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in England generated more horror than the bus and café bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Al Qaeda is considered beyond the diplomatic pale yet more and more Westerners are making nice with Islamist Hezbollah in Lebanon while pressuring Israel to negotiate with Islamist, anti-Semitic Hamas. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Columbia University, his desire to wipe out the Jewish state triggered minimal outrage, but his claim that Iran had no homosexuals alienated his audience.
Too many of the “chattering classes” and cultural elites in the West today soft-pedal the Islamist problem. A surprisingly seductive combination of post-colonial, post-imperial white guilt mixed with liberal condescension has dulled the moral senses. A racist cult of white American terrorists would trigger much more outrage. The logical rage against Islamist anti-Semitism is further diluted, festering in Apologia Alley, at the fog-inducing intersection where Western self-hatred and traditional Jew hatred meet.
Again, I hate writing this but the second “they” are the Islamists’ fellow travelers, the carriers of the West’s anti-Semitism gene. They are the ones who single out Israel, making it the Jew among nations, while excusing the far-worse crimes of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan. They are the ones at UNESCO who can decide the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb are not shared properties, reflecting Jews’ and Muslims’ common cultural heritage, but should be exclusively Palestinian. And they are the ones who will downplay the anti-Semitic intent when a synagogue in Chicago is targeted, or an El Al waiting area in Los Angeles is attacked. This blindspot regarding Jewish oppression offers an odd echo of the reporting during the 1940s. Then, reporters described Hitler’s victims as civilians not Jews, while ghettoizing the coverage of the few anti-Hitler protests by labeling them Jewish protests, which were more easily ignored.
If the double “they” is the Islamists and their fellow travelers – the two “us-es” are Westerners and Jews. Yes, Westerners have been targeted. But Jews are doubly targeted, as Westerners and Jews. In yet another bizarre twist, while many anti-Semites have long rejected Jews for not being Western enough, part of the Islamist revulsion against the Jew rejects Jews as the ultimate Westerners.
It is easy, in such a world, to turn bitter. In the classic documentary “Shoah,” a kibbutznik who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, and seems perfectly normal, stops, stares at the camera and barks: “if you could lick my heart you would be poisoned.” Our challenge is to let only the haters be poisoned by their own hatred. If living well is the best revenge for people who grew up in dysfunctional families, the same advice applies to an embattled people living in a dysfunctional world. We must defend ourselves, our people, our homeland, our values, our Western civilization, as intensely as possible. But we cannot forget our capacity to love, enjoy, hope, dream. Let our enemies marinate in their own poisons. We need to move beyond without ignoring them but without being imprisoned or defined by them either. With apologies to Rabbi Hillel, If I do not defend myself, who am I? but if I only defend myself, what am I? and if not now, when.
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