I did some basic math, and over the course of my career, I have delivered at least a couple hundred sermons. And yet, none of them prepared me for this one, which is of a different tone and covers different content than any I’ve delivered before. This is a different sort of sermon than any I’ve ever delivered.
For most of my life, I have approached my relationship to my Jewishness differently from most of my peers. Most American Jews are quick to say they are more culturally Jewish than religious, more connected to their Jewishness through a sense of community than through a sense of spirituality. For years, I would have said, not me. I was an outlier: spiritually Jewish, but not especially communal.
I was raised in a deeply spiritual home; ritual and prayer were woven into our lives. And that was a gift. We all experience moments of hurt, of regret, of heartache in our lives, and Judaism, and the relationship for me that it has facilitated with the Divine, with God, have sustained me through trying moments. But as I said, it was not always a deeply communal experience. We moved many times throughout my life, which made it difficult to put roots down, so this spirituality was expressed through small family gatherings, and, as I got older, on my own. I was the rare Jew who resonated with the old definition of religion which says “religion is what a person does with their solitariness.” If that definition includes the internal stirrings of the soul in the presence of the divine, for years, I would have said, yes, that’s me, that’s my Judaism.
And yet, as I have come to learn in my years immersed in Jewish community in general, and in this Society Hill Synagogue community in particular, while no doubt there is space in Jewish life for this richness of private prayer, while we Jews are certainly encouraged to avail ourselves of the spiritual riches that come from private reflective moments, you all know I was missing a core element of Jewish life — community.
Alongside my dad, my other spiritual hero is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who writes as follows: “We have learned how to pray [in the first place] by listening to the voice of prayer [of those around us], by having been a part of a community of [people] standing before God.”
“Judaism,” he continues, “is not only the adherence to particular doctrines and observances, but primarily living in the spiritual order of the Jewish people, the living in the Jews of the past and with the Jews of the present.”
“Belonging to Israel in the Diaspora is in itself a spiritual act,” he continues. “It is utterly inconvenient to be a Jew.” “But,” he says, “neither an individual person nor a single generation by its own power can erect the bridge that leads to” God. “Judaism,” he says, “is primarily the existence of the community of Israel. Our share in holiness we acquire by living in the Jewish community.”
This brings me to the topic I want to discuss today, which will perhaps feel like a sharp turn from where I began, but I assure you it is not. It is connected, and that topic is antisemitism.
Now, my hunch is that in even saying that word, a cascade of different reactions has entered the room: for some, it makes total sense as a sermon topic at a time when, at least statistically speaking, we’ve seen a rise in the level of antisemitism in recent years. For others, the topic, while not irrelevant, might be off base; there are so many other ills in the world, one might say. Certainly, there are legitimate instances of antisemitism, but, some feel, charges of antisemitism are often used as a cudgel to squash dissent when discussing, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Or maybe there are questions: I hear that there is an increase in antisemitism, one might say, and I do sense that to be true, but it is hard to tell where, for example, legitimate criticism of the State of Israel ends and antisemitism begins.
We’ll touch on all of that, but I want to start by telling you that I have long been an antisemitism skeptic. Not skeptical that there was a long history, millennia, of prejudice against Jews; that is well documented, really indisputable. I mean skeptical of the degree to which it has truly been a significant force in my lifetime.
I grew up attending Solomon Schechter Jewish Day School, now known as Perelman Jewish Day School, in Elkins Park, outside of Philadelphia, and we learned a lot about antisemitism, and yet, when I left the four walls of that place, first for Masterman, a public magnet school here in Center City, in seventh grade in 1995, and then, in 1997, to a public high school in Eugene, Oregon, a college town Wikipedia accurately describes as known for its “countercultural lifestyle and hippie aesthetic,” I was not consciously aware of much antisemitism around me. I didn’t exactly wear my Judaism on my sleeve in these places, but I attributed that more to my teenage desire to fit in than to any form of prejudice.
This was the ’90s, after all: the Soviet Union had fallen; books like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man were being written: we’d reached “the end of history” — we had found the best, most just ways to govern ourselves. There were still remnants of war and racism and poverty, but democracy had won out, and the rest, as the title says, would be history.
Antisemitism, I assumed, would fit this trajectory. The horrors of the Holocaust had, I thought, essentially proven to everyone the ultimately heinous nature of antisemitism, and antisemitism was therefore going to be a relic of days gone by — maybe grasped onto by marginal, desperate groups; nothing could be entirely stamped out — but no longer of mainstream concern.
Yes, as I suggested, during this time, as I was in spaces with fewer and fewer Jews, my Judaism became a more and more private affair. And yes, in Oregon I was surprised when I encountered, for example, a rally, I think shortly after the tragic events of 9-11 some 25 years ago yesterday, protesting the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, with attendees displaying signs declaring something like “the US aims and Israel shoots,” which struck me as strange, since Israel did not participate in that invasion. But none of this struck me as antisemitic. Some of it might’ve been, and some of it probably wasn’t. But none of it struck me that way.
Flash forward 15 years or so — through time in AmeriCorps VISTA in Baltimore and Washington, DC, law school and legal practice in Berkeley, Palo Alto, and San Francisco, and then back here to Philadelphia, and I’ll say it: my perception has shifted. It was gradual, but it did shift.
Part of what shifted is how immersed I have become in Jewish community; how intrinsically communal I have experienced Jewish life to be, which is relevant to this conversation, as I’ll share in a moment.
Religious moments in Jewish life are intrinsically communal: a crowded house when someone is grieving a loved one, sitting shivah; Hesed volunteers lining up to make food deliveries to people in need; a vibrant Torah discussion on Shabbat; a raucous Sanctuary on Purim or Simhat Torah; a still, small voice from the bimah on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. Jewishness is bound up in the communal. We can pray in our loneliest moments, pouring out our heart before God; and our most sacred prayers are reserved for a minyan, for when we are gathered together.
The Jewish religious experience is intrinsically communal, and so is the non-religious experience. Being Jewish far transcends the experience of being religious. An extensive study asked thousands of American Jews what being Jewish is mainly about from among three choices: religion, ancestry, and culture, and guess what percent said religion? 11. Only 11% of American Jews, when given the choice among religion, ancestry, and culture, said being Jewish is mainly about religion. 20% said all three, and 52% said some combination of culture and ancestry, but not religion. I promise you most religions do not have a majority of its members say their “religion” is mainly not about religion.
Which helps us understand that Jewishness is not just a religion. It has a religion — religion, which the dictionary defines as an organized system of attitudes, beliefs, and practices relating to a deity. We have that. I’m a dedicated practitioner of it. It’s not all that organized and it’s not all that systematic; but we have one. And yet most of our members, most Jews, don’t actively practice that religion, and yet they are still indisputably, often proudly, Jewish. That is not something we say about most religions: that a religion’s proud adherents are not religious.
So if we’re not exclusively a religion, what are we? In the Torah, we were known as B’nei Yisrael, the People of Israel or Am Yisrael, the nation of Israel. We Jews, and the loved ones who join Jews in participating in Jewish community, are a people, a nation, or, as one scholar (Dara Horn) defines it, a tribe: a joinable, tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture.
Now, to be clear, we don’t all have the same interpretation of what that shared history, homeland, and culture means; some of us have diametrically opposed interpretations, which we’ll touch on in a moment, and there is diversity within all three of these, diverse additional histories, lands, and cultures within the Jewish experience — Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, to name a few. And yet there are shared touchstones across all of these that serve as the bonds that make us B’nei Yisrael, the people of Israel, the tribe, even within and across difference.
This is sometimes hard for us moderns to wrap our heads around, in part because there are very few groups like us left in the world. Most groups like this were destroyed or were absorbed into empires. We don’t run into many Moabites or Ammonites or Philistines these days, groups that would have fit this description. The best modern analogue to this sort of tribal group are other groups we often think of when we hear the word tribes: Native American tribes, for example — the Cherokee, the Navajo, and other indigenous peoples of the Americas. As with Jews, in the case of these tribes, religious beliefs tend not to be the primary marker of their group identity — those markers tend to include a historical community, connection to particular land, culture, traditions, and collective memory. Sound familiar?
In the definitional sense of how do we form a connection to a group that we belong to, being Jewish is far more analogous to being part of a tribe than it is to being, say, Christian, which is largely about: what theological beliefs do I subscribe to, what is my belief in God and in the spirit? What belief do I subscribe to about what happens to me when we die? Again, these are certainly present in Jewish life in a significant way, but for most Jews, not the most significant parts.
This matters in the context of antisemitism, because antisemitism does not only take the form of prejudice against Jewish religious practices or beliefs. If you’re looking for antisemitism only in the context of how people discuss the Jewish practice of religion, you are going to miss most of it. Our relationship to our Judaism is not what we do with our solitariness. We’re part of a tribe. And when you are in a tribe, whether you love the fellow people in your tribe or not, part of being in that tribe means you are invited to feel a special sense of connectedness to fellow people in that tribe all around the world. Not a sense of supremacy alongside that people, not a sense that your people is better than other peoples, more inherently worthy than other peoples; of course we are not. Everybody is equally made in the image of God, we say. But we are invited to feel a special sense of connection and intimacy and empathy with other people in our tribe, through that shared history, homeland, and culture, even recognizing the differences across those attributes. Connection and intimacy and empathy are experiences that are essential to what it means to be human. Part of what it means to be human is to know and be known on an intimate level, and community facilitates that. Community, writes the scholar Arnold Eisen, facilitates “the discovery that, only five minutes into the first encounter, one can abandon small talk in favor of short-hand conversation about things that matter.” That’s part of what it means to be Jewish.
It is sometimes hard for people who are not Jewish to understand that this experience of tribalhood, of peoplehood, is, for many, core to being Jewish. It can be similarly hard for people who don’t experience this to understand why some Jews feel such a sense of connection to the State of Israel and its people. If Judaism is simply a religion, then how the world relates to a separate state has very little relevance for one’s relationship to one’s Jewish identity. But if you feel like you are part of a tribe, part of a people, and the state that is organized around that peoplehood is central to our national conversation, it’s likely that you’re going to have a heightened relationship to that conversation and to the occurrences of the people of that state, in multiple possible directions.
If you disagree with that state’s actions, if you vehemently disagree, that state’s actions might feel especially concerning to you, might bring you a heightened sense of concern, deepened feelings of reproach. “I share a connection to these people,” one might think, consciously or unconsciously. “They represent me in some way, even if I don’t want them to, and I feel deeply distressed that they are acting in ways I see as anathema to our values.”
Meanwhile, from another perspective, you might be especially sensitive to invocations of that state that you feel, to use one approach, dehumanize, delegitimize, or apply double standards to the people of that state, and which are therefore, in your view, antisemitic.
Which brings me to the second part of what changed for me in my relationship to antisemitism, beyond my increasingly communal experience of Jewish life, and that, as you might guess, is the world we now live in after October 7, 2023.
It goes without saying that the attacks of October 7, 2023, were horrific, and the subsequent wars unfolding from that attack have been devastating to all people in the region. I cannot fathom what people in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran — I could go on — have been through. My heart hurts thinking about it all.
I can speak to my own experience here in the United States, and here, I’ve felt a shift.
I’ve felt a shift, and in reflecting on that shift, I need to go back to the history of antisemitism.
Antisemitism is one of the world’s oldest prejudices; that is well documented. What is sometimes less clear is how it got that way. Scholars, notably David Nirenberg, demonstrate how it is in many ways unfortunately woven into the very fabric of Western civilization itself, because the seeds for the possibility of antisemitism were embedded, whether unintentionally or otherwise, into the most influential document in the history of Western civilization, the New Testament.
I say unintentionally or otherwise, because the earliest layers of the New Testament were written, in some respects, by Jews for Jews. Written by Jews like Paul, who believed that Jesus was the messiah, for Jews who did not believe that Jesus was the messiah. And the earliest layers of the New Testament contain fierce arguments against these Jews who didn’t follow Jesus. “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life,” writes Paul, in the first epistle to the Corinthians — the letter being later interpreted to refer to the traditional Jewish approach to life, the practice of mitzvot, the importance of actions in Jewish life; “the spirit” Paul is framing as the Christian approach to salvation through faith.
At the time, this was a largely intra-Jewish conversation, Jews to Jews, but over time, the internal nature of the conversation fell away, and texts like this were interpreted by the broader world as identifying Jewishness with all that was anathema to Christianity. As the New Testament expanded, more texts depicted Jews or, more often, Pharisees, in this way. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” the Book of Matthew says. Pharisees, a subset of Jews, which later interpreters understood to mean “the Jews writ large.” “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” These are among the tamer examples. Jewishness began to stand for everything that was antithetical to the pathway forward that was good and true.
All religions, including Judaism, have texts that can be interpreted in ways that are problematic at best and hateful at worst. So in this respect, I am not trying to single out Christianity.
But not all religions became the dominant religion in the Western world. Christianity did. And with religion being the primary way people made sense of the world for millennia, until at least the Enlightenment in the 18th century, that meant Christianity was the primary way most people made sense of the world. And which people did interpreters of this religion, and societies around which this religion was based, depict as the root of the problems in their societies?
You got it, the Jews. In society after society, for nearly two thousand years, based on these interpretations and the accumulation of additional teachings on which these were based, Jewishness came to represent — whether theologically, economically, politically, or racially — whatever was most problematic in society in a given moment. When medieval Europeans expressed their frustrations with debt, Jews were depicted as the greedy lenders. When many Jews converted to Christianity around the Spanish Inquisition, Jewish blood represented impurity. When Shakespeare wrote a play about the dangers of commerce and mercantilism, whom did he position as the embodiment of that danger? Shylock the Jew. Shakespeare might not have even known any Jews; Jews had been formally banished from England since 1290, almost 300 years before Shakespeare lived. But that’s who had been depicted in generation after generation as the negative force in various societies, and that legacy remained. When the Enlightenment began, lessening the influence of religion, elevating rationality and science, the die was already cast: Jews were going to be positioned as whatever was most harmful to Western society’s new values system. And they were: Modern philosophers depicted Jews as the backwards traditionalists clinging to their superstitions — even though Jews were among the leading thinkers within the Enlightenment. For the ruling elite, the dangerous revolutionaries were the Jews; for socialists, Jews were the bankers. When relevant, Jews were depicted as rootless cosmopolitans, globalists, with no home; or insular tribalists, fixated on an old home.
Under this worldview, opposing Jewishness — in other words, antisemitism — was not bigoted; it was a righteous act, an act of virtue; it was not injustice, because whole swaths of society had been raised to believe, whether consciously or unconsciously, that Jews are the problem. It was an act of righteousness to oppose Jewishness.
When we reached the 20th century, the Nazis, of course, took this to a violent extreme. To solve society’s problems, their conclusion was, get rid of the Jews. And they carried out the Holocaust.
As the world began to sort through the rubble and the ashes of the Holocaust and as Jews picked themselves up through organization and institutional self-advocacy, people started to recoil from professing this sort of outward antisemitic thinking, from being openly, proudly against Jewishness. Except for at the margins of society, it became no longer tenable to explicitly say Jews are the problem.
And this is the period in which I came of age, hence my initial understanding that antisemitism was possibly receding.
But, as I’ve learned over the last three years, two thousand years of deeply ingrained history is hard to unlearn.
I should have known. We know prejudice can take hold of us in ways we are not fully conscious of. We know that societies we are a part of, the messages we take in through media, through how the news is presented, through the cultural messaging we receive — we know all of this can lead us to form biases and prejudices we are not even aware of. We’ve experienced this with racism in the United States. It was formed over centuries of history, and it will take centuries, if not more, to unwind. Racism in the United States did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863; it did not end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964; it did not end with the election of the first Black president in 2008. It’s still present; it takes a long, long time to unlearn messaging that was present in the very formation of a society. When you look at which schools get better funding, which neighborhoods get better services, which names on a job application are more likely to receive a second look and which aren’t, prejudice against Black people remains. We know it is incumbent upon each of us to seek out our blind spots, to see where we are holding sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, racial prejudice.
So why would we imagine antisemitism acts differently? What has disappointed me is not so much that antisemitism still exists. As we said, it takes generations to unlearn something that has been passed on for generations.
What disappoints me is the reflexiveness, the incuriosity with which some have dismissed the possibility that antisemitism could be showing up today in conversations, for example, around Israel and Zionism. Typically, at least in recent years, we’ve seen some level of deference given to a historically oppressed group when it comes to defining prejudice against that group. We show deference to the group itself in seeking to understand what prejudice against that group looks like. Not always. But I’ve been impressed with that kind of respectfulness in conversations around many forms of prejudice.
I don’t know that I’ve seen that kind of deference and humility when it comes to seeking to understand antisemitism. At times I’ve seen the opposite — a defiance in telling Jews, or pointing to examples of Jews who agree with them, in articulating what is antisemitic. It’s true that there have been bad-faith invocations of antisemitism, investigations of antisemitism that are actually about pursuing an entirely different agenda. And as Jews we should call that out. But I’m not sure that explains all the opposition to the antisemitism conversation.
We said that the way antisemitism has worked is that whole swaths of society were raised to believe, whether consciously or unconsciously, that Jewishness tends to stand for whatever is problematic in society — whether that is in the realm of theology, politics, or economics. And we said that the horrors of the Holocaust, at least outwardly, seemed to put the brakes on that trend.
And yet the memories of the Holocaust are receding. In the next ten to twenty years or so, we will read a headline which says the last remaining survivor of the Holocaust has died.
And while, in many communities, it remains problematic to explicitly depict Jewishness as the problem — that is still an idea seen as largely beyond the pale — there has developed a modern analogue that operates similarly. It’s not publicly seen as righteous to oppose Jews; but spend more than five minutes online, and it is still seen as righteous to oppose a word sometimes used as a euphemism for Jews, and that’s Zionists.
Zionism can mean at least two things. It can mean the development and protection of a Jewish nation in its ancient homeland of Eretz Yisrael. I consider myself a Zionist: I see the virtues in Jews having a state that can serve as a refuge for oppressed Jews all around the world and that can foster Jewish life in ways not possible in the diaspora. And by the way, that state already exists and has existed for 78 years. It’s the only place many Israelis have called home. And so in that respect, I’m a Zionist.
But at the same time, as should be obvious, and is repeated each time we have these conversations, being a Zionist doesn’t mean not having criticisms of Israel. Regardless of your characterization of the war in Gaza, there can be no doubt that the communities there have been devastated, families torn apart. There can be no denying that Palestinian residents of the West Bank have been bullied and terrorized by Jewish settlers, and that continued settlement building jeopardizes the best pathway we have to peace. We’ve witnessed political leadership in Israel appear to put its own political interests above broader peacemaking. Just as personally, I see the virtues in Jews having a state, I pray one day for a Palestinian state that can live side by side with Israel in peace. Each of us, Jews, non-Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, is created in the image of God, each worthy of the dignities of life. Advocating for Palestinians, it should go without saying, is not inherently antisemitic. It’s often necessary.
But just because not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, just because some criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, doesn’t mean that no criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Sometimes it is.
How do you know when? As I suggested, I find the 3D test from Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky — who spent nine years in a Russian gulag trying to help repressed Jews escape Soviet Russia — helpful. 3Ds: When does the criticism demonize, as in dehumanize, Israelis, not conceiving of them as real live human beings with their own heartbreaks and joys, their own yearnings and concerns about safety and freedom, but rather sees them just as symbols, demonic figures? When does it delegitimize Israelis, denying the very real, documented history of the Jewish people’s connection to one another and to the land? And when does it apply double standards, applying standards to Israel not applied to other nations? For me, each of those can be signals for when legitimate criticism of Israel or legitimate advocacy of the rights of Palestinians has crossed into antisemitism.
But the other invocation of the word Zionist, I’m afraid, is not even about Israel. We said that it used to be that Jewishness stood for whatever was especially problematic about society, and that while the use of the word Jew has mostly fallen out of favor in that respect, use of the word Zionist has begun to take its place. We’re seeing that more and more.
After the United States raided Venezuela to capture its president (a phrase I never thought I’d say), the new acting president said that the raid had been, quote, “without a doubt, Zionist in character,” unquote.
Just a few days after that raid, we witnessed on video a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis kill Renee Nicole Good, aged 37, during the current administration’s mass deportation campaign. One day later, a synagogue in Pasadena, California, which had burned down as a result of wildfires the year before, was vandalized with graffiti that spelled out “RIP Renee, [expletive] Zionizm.”
If these incidents were outliers, not representative of broader trends, it would not be helpful for me to share them. But unfortunately they are representative. On Instagram and TikTok, platforms where billions of people get their information in today’s world, this kind of discourse is not uncommon.
This sermon has largely been about naming that, where once I was skeptical of the degree to which antisemitism was still a force in our world, I have become less skeptical. For some of you, this is obvious; I think it’s often subtle. I say this in part to help affirm for people who believe they are witnessing it, but are being told they are not, or have questions about what they are witnessing, that yes, I do believe it is present in ways that are not always so clear, which I’ve tried to spell out today.
Of course, the follow-up question, which we’ll be discussing over the course of the next year at Society Hill Synagogue, along with many other facets of these conversations — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Judaism as peoplehood, spirituality in Jewish life — is, what do we do about it? What do we do about antisemitism?
Here’s the good news: you’re doing it right now. It’s more of this. As I learned over the course of my journey in Jewish life, the strength of Jewish life is immersion in Jewish community. All those same communal settings we mentioned earlier: a crowded house when someone is grieving a loved one sitting shivah; Hesed volunteers lining up to make food deliveries to people in need; a vibrant Torah discussion on Shabbat; a raucous Sanctuary on Purim or Simhat Torah; a still, small voice on the bimah on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. Each of those helps sanctify our experience of life, helps connect us to eternity.
Trust me, it’s working; I’m proud to say that in this decade, Society Hill Synagogue has grown from 270 households to 440 today; from 65 students in our Hebrew School to 120. Communities all over the Jewish world can do this. We’re the ones who have the capacity to make it so.
Living Jewish life for ourselves, for its own sake, for our own sake, models it for the next generation and passes it on.
Judaism was a source of strength and resiliency when I was on my own; even more so now that I’m in community. In her recent novel, Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver defines resilient as “strong beyond all expectation.” We draw our strength from community. Look around this room right now. As a Jew, or as someone supporting a Jewish loved one, or someone exploring becoming Jewish, you are not alone.
You have a Jewish community to love you and support you in this moment, to understand your experience, in this diverse tent. Let’s just keep showing up for each other. We are not alone.
Wishing you a year of strength and togetherness. Shanah tovah.
