Why do giants feature so prominently in our stories for children?
I recently had the joy of reading some chapters from Roald Dahl’s BFG to my six-year-old godson. Reading to him as he got ready to sleep gave me such warm nostalgia. I remembered my own childhood, hearing this story for the first time; feeling at once so safe, and like anything was possible.
To children, the whole world feels populated by giants. Grown-ups are so much larger and, just like in Giant Country, have built everything to their size. Some adults, like the BFG, are kind and fun. But some, like Fleshlumpeater and Bonecruncher, are decidedly nasty and cruel.
So we give children stories where they defeat giants, and help them process these menacing creatures so much larger than themselves.
The Austrian-Jewish psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim explored fairy tales as one of the ways that children gain their sense of self and develop confidence. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim writes that “although adults can be experienced as frightening giants, a little boy with cunning can get the better of them.”
Such is the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. I remember so gleefully participating in the school pantomime of this story. (I played Jack’s mother, of course.) Through play, we children could act out a world where we saw those bigger than us for the lumbering oafs they were and used our wits to bring them down.
Giant stories have probably existed as long as we have had the words to tell them. In our Torah portion, Shlach Lecha, Caleb, Joshua, and their intrepid band of boys set out on an adventure to see the Promised Land.
Upon arrival, they spot frightening giants, the children of Anak. “We looked like grasshoppers compared to them, and they must have seen us the same way.”
To show the other Israelites back in the wilderness how enormous their foes were, they brought back the ogres’ food. A bunch bearing a single cluster of grapes required two of them to carry it on a pole. They rolled a pomegranate the size of themselves back out of the land of Canaan.
Throughout the camp, everyone burst into terror. Only Joshua and Caleb had faith that the giants could be beaten. We, of course, identify ourselves with those fearless leaders.
“Fairytales,” says Bettelheim, “intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one’s reach despite adversity – but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity.”
“Do not be afraid,” say Caleb and Joshua. “Have faith. Trust in each other. Trust in God.”
Here our Torah gives us the same gift of instruction as a fairytale. It reminds us to be brave and use our cunning, because the giants can surely be defeated.
In Torah, grammar is always important. Joshua and Caleb insist: “we can defeat them.” This is not an instruction to others or a profession of their own greatness. It is an invitation to collective power: together, we are going to conquer the giants.
Later, Joshua and Caleb are proven exactly right. They destroy the children of Anak and drive them out, cowering, into Philistine towns. Later still, King David will slay the last of the remaining giants, a monster called Goliath. No wonder this is one of the best stories to tell at cheder.
These fairytales continue to serve us long after we have outgrown them. Now that we are grown-ups, the world may not still feel so magical, but we still have giants to slay.
The problems facing us are manifold in this world dominated by racial injustice. The oppressions of our age are many-headed monsters, far bigger than the enormous ogres of our stories.
I look at the children in our synagogues and feel pained that, perhaps, they will be less protected from the horrors of the world than we were. I wish we could insulate them a little longer from harsh realities.
As an adult, I discovered that my beloved Roald Dahl actually didn’t much like Jews, but, by then, I was secure enough not to be bothered by it. I see that our young people are far less protected from the nasty views others hold. They are already having to learn the skills to deal with antisemitism in their schools and in the material they see online. I feel blessed not to have had to confront such evils until much later.
I do not envy the challenges our young people face, but I feel deeply proud of how they have risen to the task.
On Sunday 10 May, members of RSY and LJY joined the rallies against antisemitism in central London. Holding true to our Progressive values, one of the movement workers’ placards denounced Islamophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant hatred, alongside their condemnation of antisemitism.
They held their heads high, and refused to back down on the prophetic call for unity. Racism are enormous giants to conquer, but these are the battles that have animated the Jewish religion since its inception. The earliest prophets promised “vindication and justice for all who are oppressed” (Psalm 103:6).
For the supposed infraction of drawing connections with other oppressed groups, our young people were harassed as they marched. They were completely unobtrusive, but drew great ire from the Christian fundamentalist sect, Stop the Hate.
Yet, according to the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, the UK’s only academic thinktank on anti-Jewish hatred, drawing connections with others’ struggles is precisely what we need to do.
In their report last year for the Runnymede Trust, these scholars showed that, by pitting the fight against antisemitism against the struggles of other minorities, the problem was only getting worse. Jews were becoming more isolated, and finding their battles harder.
What we needed, the Institute said, was to build alliances with other racialised minorities, so we could take on the mammoth system of racism together.
Here, the wisdom of established academics meets the optimism and zeal of youth. Just as in the earliest days of Judaism “the old dream dreams and the youth see visions” (Joel 2:28).
Young people – as you go out to fight antisemitism; as you lock arms in the struggle against all forms of racism; as you protest for a more equal world – please know that you are never alone. We are with you, and struggling alongside you.
However small you may feel, come stand on our shoulders. Don’t worry: we are standing on shoulders too. Shoulders of generations before us who battled poverty, war, pogroms, and genocide.
Yes, we Jews stand on the shoulders of ancestors going back centuries, who fought against the same giants you tackle now.
And when you realise that you are standing on top of this human pyramid, you will see that the ogres are much smaller than they first appeared. We may feel like grasshoppers in their eyes, but we stand together on a foundation they cannot even imagine, and that makes us enormous.
Just as Caleb and Joshua once cohorted the Israelites in the desert, we know we need not fear.
Have faith. In your traditions. In each other. In our God.
If you are looking for a religion to make your life easier, give you comfort when you’re troubled, and to help give you certainty in life… I wouldn’t recommend Judaism.
Judaism gives us many things, but certainty, comfort, and ease? You won’t find those here.
Our religion is one of ‘ol Torah – the yoke of Torah. Our Talmud teaches: We must subjugate ourselves to the Torah like an ox to a yoke. Like a donkey to its burden.
For everyone, life feels heavy. It feels like too much to bear.
For Jews, our Torah comes along and says: would you like some more obligations to go with your struggles? I can add a few more worries to your load.
At Shavuot, we read the story of Ruth. Ruth has lost her husband. She has no land or property. There is famine and disease. She is in the middle of nowhere. She and her sister, Orpah, face a choice. They can go back to their own people, the Moabites, get new husbands and start life anew. Or they can stay in the wilderness with no possessions to look after their mother-in-law, Naomi.
Ruth takes the harder option. She chooses to stay with her mother-in-law, learn new ways, and take on a new God. It is an act of remarkable bravery.
We read it at this time of year to remind ourselves that we are always out in that wilderness, always with the option to turn our backs and leave behind this people and this God. But, like Ruth, we keep on choosing to stay.
Ruth’s is a personal story of her connection to Judaism. Shavuot is also the story of our collective embrace of the Torah.
This is the festival that commemorates when forty thousand freed slaves received the Torah.
Our Talmud says that, when they came to Sinai, God lifted the mountain up over their heads. From underneath, they could see the enormous peak suspended above them like a keg.
Out of the clouds, God declared: “Accept the Torah, or this will be your grave.”
Now, our Talmud concedes, in that situation, accepting the Torah would be the easy option. (When a robber says “your money or your life,” they’re not actually expecting you to think it over.)
If that’s the case, the rabbis say, we should be able to reject the Torah now. If our ancestors had to accept it under duress, faced with threats, we are not bound by the decisions they made.
But, says the Talmud, our ancestors affirmed their Jewishness in the time of Esther. Here, the shoe is on the other foot. In the time of Esther, being Jewish was a dangerous thing that might get you killed at the hands of a tyrannical regime. But, the story says, the Jews reaffirmed their Torah and took upon themselves even more commandments.
That’s right, at the time when they were carrying the heaviest burden, they chose to weigh themselves down more.
Look at our present situation. There is no threat to us that we must keep being Jewish. Everyone here has the right, without consequence, to walk out of this synagogue, and never come through the doors of another one again. We could take the easy choice, and forget this old religion.
But what actually happens? On the days when there are attacks on Jews, synagogue attendance goes up. When it feels dangerous to be Jewish, we get more requests from people who want to connect with their heritage. In just the last few weeks, we have had more requests than usual from people seeking conversion.
When being Jewish is the toughest choice – that’s when our people really show up, and take on the burden of the Torah.
Now, you may be thinking, this sounds like an awfully Orthodox sermon from our extremely liberal local rabbi. All this talk of the burden of Torah, and the yoke of submitting to Heaven – it sounds like something that belongs to the black-hats.
Let me tell you something I feel quite sure of: being a Progressive Jew is a much greater burden than being an Orthodox one.
A year ago at this time, we brought together our Liberal and Reform strands to build the Movement for Progressive Judaism. A uniting figure from our shared history is Sir Basil Henriques, who led both Reform and Liberal communities in the Jewish East End. He set out his vision of what our shared belief system is, saying:
“The Law has been handed down to the Prophets of Israel. That Law is not static, but ever expanding and progressing. It has been revealed to Israel in every generation, and every age should be able to stand on the shoulders of the previous generation, and to see further and be able to see more clearly what is the perfect Law of God. The Law, the Torah, should be the highest ethical code of which man can conceive. If the Perfect Spirit of Righteousness demands of us perfect righteousness, then the Laws of Righteousness must be as perfect as we can conceive them to be.”
In other words, we Progressive Jews must embody, through our lives, the highest moral standards possible. The question we ask is not: “what does the tradition say I should do with my life?” but, the far tougher question: “what does God require of me?” An individual Jew ought to wake up every morning, asking how best we can serve our Creator. As a movement, we should be in a constant struggle to work out together the morally best choices.
It is relatively difficult to say no to pork and shellfish, as I do.
But it is far harder to grapple with the morality of food itself. Should we be eating any kinds of fish? What are the air miles on our vegetables? Can we truly eat ethically in this unjust system?
But a Progressive Jew wants to know what the morally right thing to do is, not just what conforms to ritual law. So these are the questions we must ask ourselves.
A Progressive Jew can live life just as an Orthodox Jew would, with one exception. We can never unlearn the Enlightenment. We cannot backslide into racism and sexism; or magical thinking and superstition. We must always face the world full-on, with all its problems, to see how we can live up to the highest moral ideals in our time.
That is far harder.
Let me give you some living examples.
Here in the UK, in the last few months, we have experienced some real threats as a Jewish community. Things that make us rightly scared.
Cantor Zoe Jacobs’ shul, Finchley Reform Synagogue was attacked recently. What did she do? She threw open the doors and welcomed in the whole community. People of every nationality and religion came to join her in prayer.
Do you think that was easy? Do you think it is comfortable to open doors when your instinct is to put up walls?
But that is what Progressive Jews do. We refuse racism and fear. We refuse to be pushed back into the ghettoes.
In Israel, compare our religious leaders there.
On the one hand, the Ashkenazi Orthodox ‘Chief’ Rabbi Kalman Ber has supported Netanyahu, his corrupt cabinet, and his wicked war every step of the way.
On the other hand, Rabbi Avi Dabush, one of the leading Reform rabbis, comes from Kibbutz Nirim, a place that was attacked by Hamas on October 7th 2023. For the last three years, he has been demanding answers from the Israeli government for why his community was abandoned, while at the same time, physically putting himself in the way of attacks against Palestinians and trying to stop this war.
Now I ask you, who took the easy route? And who took the hard one?
And let me ask the real question: which response is the more godly; the more moral; the more Jewish?
Doing the correct thing, the Progressive thing, is harder. It takes real courage, and most of us will not live up to such high standards.
This is the burden of our Torah.
That, no matter how difficult things are, we will take on responsibility for doing what is right.
And, we all keep taking on that challenge, in every generation.
All has been foreseen. That is a warning, not a comfort.
When the Progressive Jewish movement was born, its founders pledged to uphold the religion of the Prophets. Our guides would be those men of ancient Israel who courageously denounced injustice and proclaimed hope to the world.
At the time, I wonder how much attention they paid to the lives of the visionaries they sought to emulate. We know little about most of the historic prophets, if indeed they existed at all.
But, if we have one image of what they looked like, it’s probably Rembrandt’s painting of Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem.
Jeremiah is surrounded by darkness, slumped on the craggy rocks of the Negev. His left elbow rests on what are possibly his only possessions, including a book that we know will become part of our Bible.
The most illuminated part of the composition is Jeremiah’s bald forehead, drawing our eyes into his face. That face. It is so intensely pained; so sullen and exhausted. The wrinkles furrow, as if calling us to ask whether anything of this destruction was avoidable. I am captivated by the eyes, which cannot be more than two dark brushstrokes, but communicate more anguish than any scream I have ever heard.
Jeremiah spent his entire life warning Israel that it would be destroyed. He chastised them that their social injustice and complacency would be their ruin. He promised them plagues, persecution, exile and war.
Jeremiah had the unfortunate honour to see all of his visions come true.
At every stage, he promised them they could be redeemed if only they would repent of their ways. Whether that part was true, we will never have the fortune of knowing.
This is the model of our religion; the person whose mantle we have chosen to take. It is that of a man miserable enough to have been proven right; to watch everything he loved, and all that he held sacred, burn.
In some ways, prophesying doom is an easy gig. Economists are always predicting the next crash and defence experts are forever prepared for the next war. Misery is one of life’s guarantees.
When Progressive Judaism began, its progenitors insisted that prophecy was about forthtelling, not foretelling: speaking the truth about how the world really is, rather than guessing what is to be. But really one yields the other. When you see clearly how terrible the world is, you can accurately predict its tragic ends.
In Greek antiquity, Cassandra was cursed by the god Apollo to always tell the truth and never be believed. She issued accurate prophecies, and nobody took note.
Perhaps with hindsight, what she foresaw was obvious. War was coming and Troy would be defeated. Then King Agamemnon would be captured and slaughtered, as would she. The Greek ships would sink. As the city states fell, people would spend decades at sea without mooring. Disaster awaited.
All Cassandra had to do was see clearly what was happening in Greece’s unfolding civilisational collapse to know that destruction was inevitable.
And we cannot blame her countrymen for disbelieving her either. If someone stares that far into the abyss, nobody wants to be dragged into the darkness with them. Their misery sounds cloying and narcissistic. It feels impossible to bear.
If somebody tells you that the world you know and the people you love are on the brink of destruction, you have to disbelieve them. How else will you go to work, raise your children, care for your sick? How can you live in this world if you honestly believe it is ending?
Torah warned us that if a prophet predicted something and it did not come to pass, you could ignore them. They prophesied in vain.
The grand visions of peace on earth and justice rolling out like a stream haven’t happened yet.
The Christians circumvented this by writing their texts so it looked like their carpenter was fulfilling all the visions; even if the world self-evidently was not perfected. They deferred it by saying the other prophecies were still to come.
And we Progressive Jews have avoided the problem too, by claiming that the Messianic Age is forever not yet.
Perhaps it is forever not at all.
The only prophecies that have come true are the promises of disaster. The only accurate predictions were of death, plague, humiliation, and exile.
We said we wanted to be heirs to the prophets. We saw in their proclamations antecedents to the Enlightenment values of truth, equality, peace, comradeship, progress and righteousness. We heard God’s word refracted through them like a clarion call, and said we would now take it as ours.
Scattered in exile, we would be a light unto the nations. We would teach the world to study war no more. We would bring on the day when the false gods of prejudice and materialism were finally vanquished before the altar of Infinite Unity.
I need you to know that I believed every word. Even if nobody else did, I really did.
I thought I might see it in my lifetime. The great unfolding of history. Our glorious march towards true justice and equality. Call it the Revolution or the Messianic Age or Peace on Earth, I truly believed it was coming.
And it didn’t matter to us that the only full life story we knew was Jeremiah’s. Jeremiah went to jail and we would go to jail too. For the climate, for peace, for civil rights, for democracy. Progressive Jews have proudly broken the law and resisted injustice to take up the place of the suffering servant.
In Lamentations, we see the words Jeremiah spoke when he witnessed his city destroyed.
“I am the man who has seen afflictions at God’s hands…”
“…We have suffered terror and pitfalls, ruin and destruction. Streams of tears flow from my eyes because my people are destroyed…”
“…My people have become heartless, like ostriches in the desert…”
“…All this has happened because of the sins of the prophets and the iniquities of the priests…”
“…The visions of your prophets were false and worthless; they did not expose your sin to ward off your captivity. The prophecies they gave you were false and misleading…”
“… All our friends have betrayed us, and become our enemies…”
I am not sleeping well.
I wake up multiple times in the night with my fists clenched, gripping my bedsheets. I’m scared and angry and I feel so alone.
In the last month, an Iranian was arrested for hostile reconnaissance on the college where I trained to be a rabbi. A close friend, my witness at my wedding, had her street evacuated because terrorists were hiding in the gardens. A close friend, who I’m going on holiday with at the end of the month, had the synagogue where she works targeted with a petrol bomb.
None of these incidents made national news.
They are background noise to stabbings in Golders Green; murders at Heaton Park; arson at Nelson Street; smashed windows with lighter fluid at Kenton Park. Every festival, I interrupt the running of religious services to say Jews have been killed somewhere.
Am I even praying any more, or am I just trying to keep people calm?
All of this was so foreseeable. At least it feels so in hindsight.
We Progressive Jews fully embraced citizenship in Europe. We aligned ourselves with the British establishment for our protection. We swore fidelity to the monarchy in our weekly prayers. We embedded ourselves in this country and became integral to the state.
Then, in a moment of counter-culture, when people became anti-establishment and angry at the state, we were the accessible human bodies they could grasp, and stab.
We Progressive Jews rejected all politics of race and nation. We would be a moral movement, expressing only the best of the prophetic message.
But the rest of the world is based on racism and nationalism. Everyone else sees the world through the lens of race. Through their glasses, a Jew at prayer in London is indistinguishable from a Jew driving a tank in Gaza. They think they can exact war and revenge on us.
We aligned ourselves with Israel because it promised us hope. After the Shoah, we needed some guarantee of safety to cling to. We advocated for Israel and defended it. Maybe in our own eyes, too, the Diaspora and the State became indistinguishable.
We muddied the waters of our own understanding of what antisemitism was. We fought with each other, to define it, and to show where our loyalties lay. People couldn’t trust us to say what was happening. Now they absorb hateful propaganda that says we are doing all this to ourselves.
We chose bad allies to bring down people who weren’t real enemies. At the time, I expressed my fear that because of all this, people would blame the Jews for Britain’s problems.
‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ a friend assured me. ‘That would be antisemitic.’
Now, we attend rallies addressed by Nigel Farage. It is the last gasp of a failed effort to find security in race, the state, and the establishment: the very things that are making us unsafe.
The Progressive Jewish answer was always supposed to be different. We would, instead, find safety in solidarity. Our best defence is our neighbours. True security is in the positive relationships we build across other faiths, with all the oppressed communities of the world.
Where are our allies now?
I suppose we may never know whether our way would have worked.
Jeremiah told the Israelites, he told them it would happen. “Do not ally with one power,” he warned, “or another one will destroy you. And then your allies will destroy you too.”
“Do not seek surety in militaries and empires. You can only count on God.”
And then God will abandon you, too.
After the Shoah, Progressive Jews rejected the cruelty of Orthodox theologies that insisted we only had ourselves to blame. We were the victims of unjust systems, who only had bad choices in a world stacked against us.
What a great promise the worker’s revolution had been! The proletariat would shake off the chains of capitalism and all would finally be free. And yet, in every country where Jews lived under communism, they were so far from free.
The Bund: the Jewish worker’s movement; the Yiddish pamphleteers; the revolutionary singers. They would save us!
I think, now, that we romanticised them so much because they were all dead. They couldn’t make mistakes or show their weaknesses or try out their ideas and see them fail. They are all dead. All of them. The dead cannot save us.
Maybe some day, we will be the subjects of nostalgia too: the last Jews crazy enough to have faith in the prophets.
And the tolerance of liberal democracy, what of it? Didn’t it offer the very first promise under Napoleon’s tricolor that Jews might have freedom?
The safest places are safe until they are not.
I think of my great grandmother who left Lima for Berlin at the start of the 20th Century. How confident she must have been that she was heading to the safest haven on earth. I don’t need to tell you what happened to her.
I don’t think we have anywhere safe to run this time. Not Israel, even with its Iron Dome and bomb shelters. Not America, even with the hegemon’s promise to be the land of the free. I cannot imagine escaping to anywhere.
And do not pretend to me that there is any virtue in the Orthodox fantasy of good wives helping their little husbands do mitzvot while they all pretend the world is unchanging and grow ever more sadistic with it. You cannot pray your way out of reality, or study your way out of people’s dignity.
Every option available to the Jews failed miserably. Zangwill imagined that Salonika would be a great centre of Jewish life as part of an international community. The Nazis had a near complete kill-rate there.
After the Shoah, we had to find hope somewhere else.
Israel may have been a mistake, but it was the only mistake the Jews had left to make. Zionism was the only dead end the Jews hadn’t yet gone down. And, after all that, sadly, it will not bring us safety in the end either.
Why would the Palestinians give up their land and abandon their homes without a fight? How could we expect the Muslims to tolerate Jews controlling Jerusalem? There was no way any of it could survive without subjugating the Arabs and contorting the Jews until neither were recognisable.
The Jewish Left said that the Israelis and Palestinians would either all live together or all die together. I fear the choice has been made for them in board rooms they have not entered.
If I could see into the abyss as clearly as Cassandra did, I would wager that, in less than a hundred years, Jerusalem will be a desert wasteland, where every few weeks a new man will declare himself Pope, Emperor, Caliph, or Mashiach. The only thing we can’t yet imagine is what awful weapons they will have.
The only option still not explored is the prophets’ dream of lions lying down with lambs and justice flowing like an ever-flowing stream. It hasn’t happened yet.
I need you to know that I still believe in it. Even if nobody else does really, I still believe.
I just don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. It may never happen at all.
When Progressive Judaism was born, we renounced all claim to Israel. ‘Berlin will be our Jerusalem,’ promised Mendelssohn, as he cajoled us out of the ghetto. The enlightened democracies will be our Zion.
Berlin was Jerusalem, for a while. And then it was a graveyard for a generation of my family.
I’m not sleeping well. I feel like a balding man, clutching his bible, watching his city burn.
With such pride we said that I was the first person in my family to be born in the same country as his father. England was our home.
England is our home. Jewish life here is beautiful and vibrant. If they could only see how our children run around at house parties; how we spend weeks immersed in study; how our musicians play the house down; how our theatremakers make us laugh our guts out. How we bless our babies, our bnei mitzvah, our teens, our weddings, our anniversaries, our dead; how we pray with all our soul and might.
A quarter of Britons say it would make no difference if we disappeared tomorrow.
England has been our Jerusalem too. I do not know what it will become.
Maybe it isn’t too late.
The future is unwritten. That is a threat, not a promise.
The following essay is published in the Movement for Progressive Judaism’s first book, Progressive Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel, alongside 40 other contributors.
Stand on the edge of the canyon of history. Clasp your hands around your mouth and call out: who are the Jews? A hundred answers will echo back at you. Throughout the cavern, stories will reverberate. Voices saying you are monsters. Voices saying you are victims. Sounds of priests and prophets; legends and laws; heroes and martyrs. How do you choose? Which version of the story of the Jews is you?
***
From out of history come the sounds of persecution. In September 2025, Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner appeared as a witness on the BBC’s Moral Maze. One of the panellists brought her a question. He said: “Sadly, the problem in the Middle East conflict is that both sides are right about each other. Do you share that view?” Rabbi Laura responded with a question: “Can you finish the sentence?” For a moment, the questioner fumbled, then put forth that both Israelis and Palestinians had “very little good intent, very little willingness to compromise.” He averred that, given half the chance, either the Israelis or the Palestinians would destroy the other. Their positive views of themselves were lies, and their demonisation of each other was the truth. Rabbi Laura ignored the simplistic stereotyping and talked about how interconnected Israeli and Palestinian lives are. I shuddered. I heard unspoken echoes of old European prejudices. The questioner certainly did not intend malice, but the well of antisemitism goes deep, and people draw from it without realising. Medieval passion plays depicted Jews as greedy, bloodthirsty baby-killers. Crusader propaganda portrayed Muslims as barbarous, fundamentalist hordes. The unflattering stereotypes of Palestinians and Israelis go back centuries, and do not originate from either party. They are the product of systematic othering. Who the Jews are is not only determined from within: it is, unfortunately, a conversation with bigotry. In some minds, you are still Shylock pursuing his pound of flesh. You are the snivelling moneylender. No matter how assimilated you have become, you are Fagin trafficking children into crime.
***
Go ask Bondi Beach who the Jews are. Dare those academics, who arrogantly proclaim that Jews are not oppressed, to tell that to Heaton Park Synagogue Manchester, or Tree of Life Synagogue Pittsburgh, or Hypermarche Paris, or Lee Park Charlottesville, or The Great Synagogue Copenhagen. From coast to coast, the voices echo. So many places will tell you that Jews are victims. History is littered with millions of Jewish corpses. In some minds, you are still the helpless child in striped pyjamas, with a yellow star stitched on your lapel, and a number tattooed on your arm. But don’t let that be your only answer. If we think of ourselves as permanent victims, we will rob ourselves of the agency God gave us. We will forget our power: to hurt and to heal. We must retell our story as Jews. We cannot think of ourselves exclusively as the persecuted, and never as the persecutor. Jews have entered history. We must take responsibility for what we do there.
***
Take a walk to the well and call into it. Ask the well who the Jews are. The voice of the prophets will rebound, telling you that righteousness will flow out like an ever-flowing stream. You will hear the song of Miriam, whose fountain followed the Israelites in the desert; the cries of Hagar, who found water when she needed it most. At the well of Beersheva, our father Abraham and his rival Avimelech chose to share water. Abraham, the first of our people, showed that a Jew was one who could negotiate and apportion according to need. Still, the well may tell you that there is not enough water for everyone. That either we will drink or they will. The water might tell you that you have only one commandment, and that is to survive. If you do not drink, you will die. Atop West Bank settlements, religious Jews rejoice at surviving. They chant: “the nation of Israel lives on; our father lives on.” Let the water show you how some settlers have mains pipes filling their swimming pools, while Bedouin shepherds have to ration their water in butts. Yet other Jews fight for shared resources and shared futures. Rabbi Dana Sharon stands in the way of settlers who want to attack Palestinian farmers in the West Bank. She is an organiser for Rabbis for Human Rights. When I first met Rabbi Dana, I asked what had inspired her to get involved in peace activism. She said: “Ever since I was a child, I wanted to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course, I thought the problems in my own country would be sorted by the time I grew up, and I’d have to do it somewhere else.” She knew what kind of Jew she should be, and became it. In November 2025, Dana was shot with a drone by a settler wearing military fatigues. She was seriously injured. When I think of Dana, I believe that our father Abraham lives on. His message resounds: that sharing is a greater guarantor of survival than fighting.
***
Go to the Cave of Machpelah and stand at its entrance. This is a holy site in Hebron, where the founders of monotheism prayed. It is a tomb many thousands of years old, in Area A of the West Bank. You will have to get past checkpoints and walls and into a fortified compound, but you will find a cave. Clasp your hands around your mouth and call into the hollow: who are the Jews? A hundred answers will echo back at you. Here, Abraham procured a burial place for Sarah, and in turn was buried there. Abraham’s two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, came to bury him in Hebron. Ishmael had been cast out by his father. Isaac had nearly been killed by Abraham. We can’t imagine the pain they felt seeing each other, and performing a funeral for this man. Nevertheless, they prayed together at that sacred site. Here is an answer to who Jews are. We are the descendants of Isaac, who prayed at the same tomb with his brother, Ishmael. We are the people who choose non-violence, reconciliation, and prayer. The cave’s echoes continue, coming ever closer to the present day. The cave is a mosque and a synagogue, but the brothers do not pray together. In 1929, Palestinian rioters killed 67 Jews as part of a pogrom based on false rumours. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Muslims at prayer. Murder reverberates over the South Hebron Hills. Only last year, Palestinian peace activist Awdah Hathaleen was murdered by settler Yinon Levy. Despite the assassination being filmed, the killer has not been charged with a crime. Is this not also an answer about who Jews are? Can we reject it so swiftly because we abhor it?
***
So ask the shtetl yeshiva who you are supposed to be. Confronted with the horrors of some Jews’ deeds, you may wish to retreat back there. You might imagine life would be simpler before Jews had power that they could weaponise against others. Maybe the Satmar Hassidim were right and we all just need to keep our heads down until the Messiah arrives. So, go ahead. Pretend the Enlightenment never happened. Go back to the old Jewish study houses of a vanquished world. Sit at the rebbe’s table. Unless you’re a woman, of course. But, gentlemen, by all means, take a seat and open a holy book. There, in your Mishnah, you will read: “be disciples of Aaron, loving peace, pursuing peace, loving all creatures, and bringing them closer to Torah.” Hillel reaches out through the millennia-old books and grabs you by your shirt collar, and growls: did you think you could escape your responsibilities that easily? Our tradition demands you seek peace in your own world and lifetime. You cannot shirk away from the task of building a perfected world just because reality frightens you! The study of Torah may happen in the yeshiva, but you live out its precepts in the streets. You fulfil the commandments by acting and taking risks. If you want to be Jewish, you must know your past, but you cannot live there. You have to resist hatred, war, and greed in your own time. Be a disciple of Aaron. Love peace and pursue it.
***
Stand on the streets of any major city and start a chant: who are the Jews? In New York, London, Cape Town, Paris, and Sydney, you will find people protesting for peace. In every demonstration, no matter where you are, you will find a Jewish Bloc. You will see Jews standing proud in their heritage and furious at oppression. You will hear them invoke their ancestors and their traditions in the name of human rights. Truth echoes out through skies and seas as thunderous clouds. The prophet Jeremiah went to jail for protesting against the powerful. He chastised the false prophets who proclaimed peace where there was none. He accused them of putting tiny plasters on great gashes. Jeremiah’s rebuke of Israel was harshest because he knew that peace was possible and he saw what Jews could be. Go ask the streets and they will tell you: those who wave placards and chant songs of dissent today stand in the footsteps of the prophets. But the streets have other stories too. On those same marches, in other sections, there are people who chant words denouncing Jews. There are those who glamourise terror and those who monger hate. Yes, it is true that not everyone in the coalition for Palestine is there for Palestinian human rights. Some march because they want to see Jews destroyed. Some march against militarism, nationalism, and fundamentalism. Others march for militarism, nationalism and fundamentalism of their own. When Jeremiah denounced Israel, he chastised them they could not trust Egypt or Babylon. He attacked those who would ally with their enemies. The judgement of the prophet falls on every nation.
***
Go stand at the viewing point in Sderot. Look out over the ruins of the Gaza strip. From this point, for two years, tourists watched bombs explode on houses like they were fireworks. Spectators could watch Jewish boots carry Jewish guns under Jewish flags into a densely-packed enclave. Why don’t you ask Gaza who the Jews are? Will you like the answer that you hear from the unnumbered dead and rubble? Does the bombed-out rubble think the Jews are heroes? You need not speculate. The words of Palestinians are publicly available, if you can brave the burning eyes of Gaza. Asmaa Al-Ghoul is a secular feminist in Gaza, who campaigns against the corruption of Fatah and the terrorism of Hamas. She witnessed more corpses than any soul could bear. After her cousin’s home was bombed, killing everyone inside, she wrote: “the house and its future memories have been laid to waste, its children taken to early graves, homes bombed into oblivion, their inhabitants homeless and lost, just as their camp always had been. Never ask me about peace again.” In the days of the Judges, Samson was held captive in Gaza; all his strength sapped and his eyes gouged out by Philistines. With the last ounce of energy left in his battled body, Samson pulled down the pillars of the temple, killing himself and everybody in it. We are brought up with stories of Samson. We call him “Samson the Hero.” I met with a father from Gaza who had not seen his daughters in two years. They were trapped in that war zone. He told me: “They are destroying the world on top of our heads.” I wondered whether echoes of Samson were still there in Gaza, raining down destruction on their heads. Is this our hero? In Hebrew, the word for hero, strongman, and warrior are the same. On military checkpoints, teenagers in IDF uniforms smile out from stickers, with words about who they were. For some, they are proof of ongoing Israeli heroism. All I see is dead kids, cast aside as cannon fodder for a vainglorious war. We need to find a way of separating out heroism, masculinity, and war. Vivian Silver used to transport people from Gaza back and forth from this borderland. She lived on Kibbutz Be’eri, and was murdered there by Hamas on October 7th. 3 days beforehand, she organised a march of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian women against war. Which is more heroic: to destroy an enemy or to make a friend? We need heroes whose strength is not in force but in fortitude. Maybe Vivian Silver’s spirit still echoes on Gaza’s borders, too. And maybe, then, there is another way to be a Jew.
***
Go to your own heart and ask it who you are. The great medieval sage Rabbi Moses ben Maimon told us that the ultimate question was not “what should I do?” but “who should I be?” Rambam wrote that the point of our religious laws, stories, and rituals was to help us morally perfect ourselves. Our goal should be to become the best possible human beings, in terms of character and intellect. Rambam saw our religious inheritance as a guidebook on how to become moral agents. He taught that human beings are free to choose the right course, and showed that repentance is always available to us. You are not stuck with a fixed version of who a Jew is. You always have the ability to make yourself anew. You can become more peaceful, more loving, and more devout. Seek to be the kind of person who wants peace and justice. Let your actions follow the highest inclinations of your heart. Ask your heart who you are as a Jew. Let it tell you that you are a work in progress.
***
Now, return to the valley where it all began. Go stand on Mount Sinai. Surely this is the canyon of history. From atop its peak, the Ancient of Days spoke to you. Clasp your hands around your mouth and call out: who are the Jews? From out of this desert, the Jews spread knowledge of ethical monotheism throughout the world. At Mount Sinai, you once heard a voice: “I am the Eternal One your God, who redeemed you from the land of Egypt, to be your God.” It is time you introduced yourself too. Ask the canyon: who are the Jews? The question will come echoing back at you. Canyons echo. The canyon of history is no different. If history repeats itself, it is only because we keep asking the same question. Like a boomerang, your question returns to you: who are you? History is Jewish. It likes to answer a question with another question. This is your power and your burden. You must decide who you will be. You are the answer to who the Jews are.
Two Jews sit on a park bench in 1930s Germany. One sees that his friend is reading Der Sturmer, the mouthpiece of the Nazi Party. Horrified, he asks: “what on earth are you doing reading that rag?”
His friend replies: “This newspaper says Jews control the banks, the media, and the governments of every country. These days, that’s the only good news I get!”
I try, where I can, to pay attention to the questions people in this community are asking, and make my sermons answer them. The question I have heard most frequently in the past few weeks is: “why do people hate Jews?”
I’ve heard it from young and old, Jew and non-Jew, left and right. It’s a heartbreaking question, because it shows how anxious people are. It is a serious question, so it deserves serious answers.
Why do people hate Jews?
My first answer is: they don’t.
Look at our neighbours, friends and coworkers. We are surrounded by love.
Whenever the Jewish community faces attacks, this synagogue is inundated with messages of support. (You will remember that, for a while, we kept all our letters of solidarity on a board.)
When Finchley Reform Synagogue was threatened last week, their local community came to uplift them. Mosques, churches and community centres. The Lebanese community brought doughnuts. The councillors, politicians and emergency service workers filled up the shul until it was standing-room only.
These people don’t hate us: they stand with us.
But that doesn’t mean no people hate Jews. Clearly, some do.
On Monday night, the BBC ran a Panorama called “Why are British Jews afraid?” It brought the wider British public’s attention to the reasons for fear of which we are already aware.
The attack on Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur. The murderous gunman on Bondi Beach at Chanukah.
In the last month, terrorists set fire to Hatzola ambulances and attempted arson against multiple Jewish gathering points in north west London. Recently, an Iranian operative was arrested for plotting to attack the site where I trained to be a rabbi, the Sternberg Centre.
Reports once distant are coming closer to home, affecting my own friends and colleagues.
It is because of these abhorrent acts that the question is even asked: why do people hate Jews?
Yet, even in these cases, I don’t think the perpetrators actually hate Jews, because I don’t think they even know who we are. Had the teenagers from Leyton who set fire to Hatzola ambulances ever met a Jew?
They were not even thinking about Chabad of Golders Green. Presumably, they were responding to news from the Middle East, but that doesn’t mean their violence is just misdirected anger against Israel.
I find it quite perverse to entertain the idea that, if only Israel would behave itself, British Jews wouldn’t warrant terror threats. I think most of us have expressed great anguish over Gaza, but that doesn’t prompt us to attack ambulances. The same is true of the rest of Britain.
As Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust said on the BBC documentary: the vast majority of people attending pro-Palestinian protests in London are motivated by a sincere concern for human rights. It is a minority of interlopers that are the cause for concern.
The primary groups who radicalise against British Jews are white nationalists and Islamists. Neither group particularly cares about Palestinians or Israelis, but only makes a pretence of it to serve their own supremacist agendas.
People were attacking Jews and Jewish institutions for many centuries before Israel was founded. They don’t need Israel to commit war crimes to justify burning synagogues.
Antisemitism is not really about Jews. Not real, living Jewish people. It is about a fantasy boogeyman who causes all the world’s problems.
The people who commit crimes against Jews are generally boys whose lives lack meaning. They know that something is wrong with the world, but they have no words to say what. So they invent an enemy, and their fabricated villain is a Jew.
The problem is not that they don’t like Jews but that they don’t like themselves.
Still, you can’t get from feeling dissatisfied with life to chucking petrol bombs at a synagogue without encouragement.
Antisemitism, like all forms of bigotry, is created from the top down.
April Rosenblum’s pamphlet The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere is a fantastic introduction to what antisemitism is and how to fight it.
Medieval antisemitism, she says, worked by having a group to sit in between the masses and the ruling class. Unlike other forms of racism, which are about making sure the boot is always on some minority’s neck, antisemitism worked by creating a buffer class so the people in charge could blame someone when things went wrong.
So, England on the brink of bankruptcy from Crusades banished the Jews; the Tsar’s supporters in decaying Russia invented The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and in the 1930s Nazis gained power in impoverished, humiliated Germany by promising to deal with the Jews.
Judaism has changed much in the last thousand years, but antisemitism hasn’t. When Donald Trump says “the Jews don’t like me because they can’t buy me” or Elon Musk says Jews push hatred against whites, they’re standing in a long tradition of elites pointing at Jews for problems they created.
When Iranian leaders say that terrorist attacks are false flags launched by Jeffrey Epstein’s cabal to undermine Europe, they’re not even trying to hide their conspiracies behind innuendos.
These people don’t hate Jews. Jews are just convenient fodder for their smokescreens. What they hate is that they might lose some of their wealth or power. What they can’t stand is the thought that people might see past the lies and blame the real enemy: them!
Whether in America, Iran, or Britain, demagogues want people to hate Jews so that they won’t ask questions about what really causes social problems.
If only people did just hate Jews, it would be easier to defeat antisemitism. We could find every one of our enemies and bash them down like an anti-racist game of whack-a-mole.
But antisemitism runs deeper than that. It is a system of distraction and confusion, baked into the world’s contradictions over hundreds of years. It may draw on myths from religious texts or items from the news, but its core object of hate is not a real Jew.
Its Jew is a pantomime villain, created by corrupt elites to give desperate people someone to blame. The Jew they hate is a phantom, who vanishes on contact with reality.
So, to all those in this community asking why people hate Jews, let me say with surety: there is nothing in you that deserves hatred.
There is nothing you have done that made terrorists mad. There is nothing you could have done differently to stop fools attacking synagogues. Their hatred is not for you.
But the love is real. The relationships we have with our neighbours are based on genuine connections. The friendships we have built across faiths are sincere. The good work we do in our community has a real impact.
May we never let anybody’s hatred diminish that. May we only love harder.
Let us love our neighbours more. Let us love each other more. Let us love, ever more, our synagogue, our Torah, and our God.
In 1633, Galileo Galilei was brought before the Roman Inquisition and instructed to recount his heretical views. Galileo had said, contradictory to the views of the established Church, that the earth rotates around the sun. He had to retract this claim or face death.
So, to protect himself, Galileo assured the Church that he was wrong. The earth remained still.
As he left the courthouse where he had been tried, Galileo raised his eyes to the sky, then back down to the earth. He stamped on the ground beneath his feet and muttered: Eppur si muove: yet it moves.
Yet it moves.
For we who stand on this rock in the solar system, it does not feel like the earth is spinning. We can understand how people once thought the sun moved around them.
We, educated in our modern world, understand that the globe is rotating, and that this rotation is responsible for times and seasons.
But if you don’t know the laws of the earth’s orbit, every winter feels like a divine abandonment.
The earth feels static. And yet, the earth moves.
Hundreds of miles beneath the ground where we stand, plates are shifting in the earth’s mantle. For millennia, continental landmasses have drifted apart and pushed back together. Their pace is imperceptible from where we stand, so we cannot know what a profound impact they are having on the structure of our planet.
We, educated in our modern world, know that migration in the oceanic lithosphere explains mountains, lakes, and volcanoes.
But if you don’t know the laws of tectonic shift, every earthquake will feel like an act of God.
The ground beneath us feels static. And yet, the tectonic plates move.
Right now, the forces of history are at work.
Since the dawn of civilisation, people have arranged themselves into complex societies with varying levels of specialisation and hierarchy.
Within those systems, they have developed new technologies, made laws, and created cultures. They have struggled over resources, sometimes to the point of complete social overhaul, and sometimes to the point of common ruin.
We, educated in our modern world, know that the science of sociology explains how civilisations operate. We have learnt to recognise economic trends, like that spikes in oil prices result in increased interest rates. We have also learnt grand trajectories, like what causes empires to collapse.
But if you don’t know the laws of history, every rupture to the social order feels like a curse.
The social order feels like it will never change. Our world feels stuck on the same trajectory. And yet, the people move.
To everyone in ancient Egypt, the rule of Pharaohs felt like an unshakable fact. By the time the Israelites were enslaved in Goshen, the Egyptian empire had already existed for 2,000 years. The pyramids had already stood for a millennium.
Every Pharaoh was called Ramses and every Pharaoh declared himself a god. He claimed that he controlled the flooding of the Nile and the rising of the sun. He could not be moved.
When Moses killed a slave driver, he did not only have to fear Egyptian retribution. The Hebrews themselves were ready to mete out punishment.
Moses’s own people, turned on him and demanded: “who made you ruler and judge over us?”
Moses had rattled the social order, and this terrified even his kin. He could not be the ruler and judge over them. Their ruler was supposed to be the slave master and their judge was supposed to be Pharaoh. They could not even imagine moving.
In the Torah story, we only hear what happened forty years later, when Moses returned from his years as a goatherd for Jethro.
Yet, on his return, tens of thousands of Hebrews, and many others, were ready to leave the only land they had ever known for a barren wilderness.
In fact, even the ordinary Egyptians were in a revolutionary mood. They handed the Hebrews wealth and resources for their journey. They were co-conspirators in sedition against Egypt.
Hebrews and Egyptians alike were willing to bring down a structure that had lasted for twenty centuries, and risk existence itself.
We might attribute this sudden change of mentality to acts of god: those Ten Plagues the Eternal One wrought upon Egypt to bring down the might of Pharaoh.
But I wonder what else happened in those forty years. What were Aaron and Miriam, Moses’s siblings, doing in the four decades when their brother was absent? What did Shifrah and Puah, the rebel midwives, do in the time when all seemed lost?
I can think of no other explanation: they organised.
With Moses gone, the dissidents were preparing the Hebrews for the great exodus to come. They had faith. They knew that the slave system could be defeated. They knew that people would move.
I imagine they were knocking doors, spreading the word in the marketplace, gathering slaves for secret meetings, building alliances across the divides of race. I imagine they were keeping hope alive; sowing seeds of possibility; encouraging people to imagine a future without domination and toil.
To those who do not know their history, the Hebrews’ decision to leave would have felt like a greater miracle than the plague of locusts.
But we know that people can shift the way tectonic plates do: so imperceptibly that anyone higher up might not even notice.
The more they move, the more they realise they have been kept captive. And then they realise they can move some more.
Then what was impossible suddenly seems inevitable.
What was unalterable becomes intolerable.
Then, it is a law of history that they will come crashing against the structures that bind them, like an earthquake.
Yes, the downfall of Egypt at the hands of rebel slaves was a seismic rupture of earth-shattering proportions.
It showed the immutable Pharaoh that everything moves.
Everything, even whole social systems, move. But today, it is easy to feel stuck.
I look at the world around me and feel afraid. It seems that, in every country, our leaders are set on a course to global war. Everywhere, antisemitism is rising and hatred is spurting out on the streets. Everywhere, governments are determined to pursue authoritarian policies.
All of this can be explained by the laws of history. When people do not have enough to live, they turn on each other. In our own history, we know that they often turn on Jews.
When people feel like the world is ending and there is no hope, they become apathetic enough to let cruel demagogues take control.
And when governments fear that their power is threatened, they can quell all dissent with a war.
Fascism and chaos both drink from the same pool of despair.
Some nights I go to sleep despairing, too.
And then I remember that is what the Pharaohs of our own time want. They want us to think that nothing can change: that racism and war are the only way.
They want to keep us heading in one direction.
But we move too.
We are the people too, and we will move where we decide to go. We do not have to follow the shift towards tyranny and hate. Like tectonic plates, we can push the other way.
We can point steadfastly towards a world of equality and peace, and insist that we will go nowhere else. If we start pushing, we can lock arms with others, and build a coalition that can defeat every despot.
Yes, we move. And when we move, God moves too.
God, the great hand of history, is always directing humanity towards justice. God’s hand may be the hardest to perceive of all the forces in the universe, but the Power of Moral Truth is always trying to push us forward.
The Eternal One, revealed through history, is most visible in eras when we decide to do God’s will.
There may be days when it feels like nothing can change.
But, everywhere, at all times, the earth spins, the tectonic plates shift, the people move, and God guides us.
We will not fall into despair. We will not stand still.
One day, word came to Joseph, “Your father is failing rapidly.” So Joseph went to visit his father, and he took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.
When Joseph arrived, Jacob was told, “Your son Joseph has come to see you.” So Jacob gathered his strength and sat up in his bed.
Jacob was half blind because of his age and could hardly see. So Joseph brought the boys close to him, and Jacob kissed and embraced them. Then Jacob said to Joseph, “I never thought I would see your face again, but now God has let me see your children, too!”
He drew them close, so close, and kissed their foreheads, then offered his blessing, his last testimony upon his grandchildren. He placed his hands on his grandchildren’s heads and said:
“The whole world hates us! They’ve always hated us, right from Pharaoh until today. They’ll never accept us, because they’re jealous of us. They can’t stop thinking about us, even though we’re a tiny fraction of the world. Well, good! We’re going to keep being Jewish to spite them. That’s it, boys, be Jewish to wind up the antisemites. As long as they hate us, wear your yarmulkes.”
Of course, this is not what Jacob said to his grandchildren.
What would have happened to Jews and Judaism if this was all Jacob had to pass on?
Ephraim and Mannasheh would have nothing on which to base their identities but a negative. They would see themselves as Jews only by victim of circumstance. Their choices would be to reluctantly accept their Jewish status as a miserable burden from previous generations; or to concoct a paranoid worldview that lashed out at everyone; or to ditch being Jewish as soon as they got the chance.
Jacob would just have left the boys a neurotic mess, with no pride in themselves or joy in their lives.
Jacob would not have said this to his children, but what are we teaching to ours? Are we teaching them to love being Jewish, with all its culture, rituals, festivals, beliefs, and ways of building community? Are we showing them how to love themselves and their heritage so that they can delight in it for many generations?
Or, are we imparting a negative identity based on misery and fear?
If you open up some of our communal newspapers or listen to some of our representative bodies, it is very much the latter. Maybe it is not as vulgar as the parody I just made up for Jacob, but it comes through in how they talk, and what stories they choose to tell.
It is as if, for them, Jews only exist because of antisemites, and our Jewishness is only exerted when defending ourselves against antisemitism.
This idea is not new.
In 1944, as the war came to an end, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was trying to understand antisemitism. He wrote “Portrait of an Antisemite,” in which he looked to his contemporary antisemitism in France. Sartre saw antisemitism as a lie to uphold class distinctions. The rich relied on antisemitism because it gave them an excuse to put the blame for inequality and injustice somewhere else. The poor turned to antisemitism because, by creating outsiders, it gave them a feeling of belonging to a nation in which they really had no portion.
Antisemites, he said, were people who couldn’t face their own reality, and absconded from their own freedom, to project their fears onto Jews, both real and imagined. From this, he coined the famous saying that “if Jews didn’t exist, antisemites would invent them.”
This was a useful way to begin to understand antisemitism – as a fear constructed about Jews, but in spite of what any Jews were actually like.
Sartre then goes on to ask a question: “does the Jew exist?” That is, if antisemites are just angry at imaginary Jews, what does that make of real Jews? Sartre concludes that Jews do exist, because of their shared experience of antisemitism. Jews exist in response to the persecution they face. Quite literally, he says, “the antisemite creates the Jew.”
The Jews themselves, he said, were outside of history, but victims of its oppression. If antisemitism were to disappear, then, so, too, would Jews. If only everyone were to throw off the shackles of class society, the Revolution would resolve the contradictions that antisemitism needed, and Jews would be able to assimilate into a newly-ordered utopia. Then, they could give up being Jews, and finally become citizens of their countries.
What he outlines is really a popular Bolshevik understanding of antisemitism, sprinkled with existentialism. For many opponents of antisemitism, its appeal was that it could suggest a way out of hatred and racism.
But, for those of who are Jews, that’s not helpful at all. If being liberated as people means being destroyed as Jews, why would we want such a thing?
Sartre had a friend, interlocutor, and fellow intellectual, in Albert Memmi. Like Sartre, he was a French-inflected socialist. But, unlike Sartre, Memmi was a Jew. Born in Tunisia in 1920 to a poor Jewish family, Memmi became a leading thinker, and a revolutionary in Tunisia’s war for independence. Sartre admired Memmi, and brought his anticolonial writings to a European audience.
In response, Memmi wrote “Portrait of a Jew,” and its follow-up, “The Liberation of the Jew.” Memmi was able to describe first-hand experiences of antisemitism on two continents. His personal struggles with prejudice elucidated very clearly why Jews would not want to assimilate into Christian France, even in the classless society Sartre imagined. Centuries of racism and religious discrimination showed him that neither Christianity nor Frenchness offered much hope for Jewish emancipation.
More interestingly, Memmi decided to answer for himself the question, “does the Jew exist?” For Memmi, the answer was a resounding “yes.” Jews exist, and, contra Sartre, have our own history, culture, and civilisation. Yes, that has been created in response to antisemitism, but also in spite of it. Jews were constantly creating our own culture.
Jewishness, said Memmi, was what Jews decided to create in each generation, and could be constantly remade, as part of Jews’ engagement with their own heritage. For Memmi, if antisemitism did not exist, Jews still would. Even if, as many Bolsheviks imagined, the world could be freed of superstitious religion, the Jewish national culture would carry on, and thrive in new ways.
So, antisemitism may create the Jewish condition, but it was the Jews who created Jewishness. We were the authors of our history.
After the service, we will hear from Rachel Shabi, as she talks to us about antisemitism and its challenges. Her thoughts are prescient, and we should pay close attention to them. We need to understand antisemitism, where it comes from, and how to combat it.
Yet we must remember that studying antisemitism can only tell us about antisemites. It cannot teach us about Jews.
Jews make Jews. We decide who we are. Through our love of our heritage and community, we build up Judaism, and we make it what it should be.
So, when we talk to the younger people in our communities, we cannot let their identities be formed by fear of antisemitism.
We must tell them why we have chosen to keep on being Jewish, and give them good reasons to keep it up too. Whether raised Jewish, converted, or affirmed, all of us have chosen being Jewish, and for good reasons that are bound up in love, not defined by hate.
Tell them about your favourite recipes and the best of Jewish songs. Show them Jewish art and take them to Jewish plays. Celebrate the festivals with them because you truly want to bring them to life. Mourn and fast with them because it is filled with meaning.
Teach them that God has given us a sacred task on earth; that we exist in this world to perfect it. That everything we do can light up divine sparks. That we are called upon to unify all that exists with its Creator.
Bless them with the words that Jacob actually spoke, and say:
“May the God before whom my grandfather Abraham and my father, Isaac, walked— the God who has been my shepherd all my life, to this very day, the Angel who has redeemed me from all harm. May the Eternal One bless these children. May they preserve my name and the names of Abraham and Isaac. And may their descendants multiply greatly throughout the earth.”
Take a moment and think about what you love about being Jewish.
When I think about it, there are certain feelings, sounds, tastes and smells that transport me into this place of true Jewish joy.
I smell cloves, absolutely anywhere and at any time, and I am immediately transported to havdallahs of my childhood.
Similarly, leather seforim- those big bound Jewish books. I touch them and I can suddenly feel myself back in my grandfather’s study.
That feeling of stillness of being in a Jewish sanctuary. I used to love sitting in our little rented synagogue in Reading. Sometimes I come into this space, when nobody is here, and feel that same connection.
There’s the music, there’s the text study, there’s the Friday night dinners, there’s meeting a complete stranger and finding you’re related, there’s the beigels, so much better here in East London than anywhere else… I could go on.
Yes, I love Jewish life. And I love seeing others love their Jewish lives.
Last week, I felt a certain eeriness walking around central London. Wherever I went, wearing my kippah and tzitzit, there was a massive picture of a smashed Star of David in every newspaper stand. The Evening Standard bore the harrowing headline “London’s antisemitism shame.”
This came after Mark Gardner from CST said Central London had become a “no-go area for Jews” on Saturdays. He wasn’t explaining where the eruv boundaries were.
He was saying that Jews were not safe when the protests for Palestine were happening.
I don’t feel I need to go into much detail on the headline. We all know that antisemitism is real, and some members here have had horrible experiences. It is not just about central London, as the local area can feel very intense. The demonstrations outside Lidl this week were intimidating, and clearly did include antisemitic harassment.
We all also know that London is mostly very safe, and comparisons with Nazi Germany of talk of mass Jewish departure are overblown. I have always felt absolutely fine being visibly Jewish in London. I can also feel the great tension that affects this area. We are all smart enough to come to a balanced judgement about the true picture.
What struck me about Mark Gardner’s statement was not in the headline, but buried in the text of the newspaper article. When asked about Jews who themselves go on the Palestine marches on Saturdays, the CST chief said:
“There are two types of Jews who attend the protests in the main – ultra orthodox Jews who believe the state of Israel prevents the Messiah coming. Then you have revolutionary socialists using their Jewishness so people get the impression the movement is not fundamentally antisemitic.”
This was such a dismissive and unkind way to talk about fellow Jews, as if they could just be brushed aside and ignored. I bristled with indignation.
Certainly, Haredim and socialists have always been regular attendees of pro-Palestine rallies. But, so what if they are?
Are Haredim, the most visibly Jewish group and the most likely to experience structural discrimination for being Jewish, any less qualified to comment on what is antisemitic? Are socialists, who pride themselves on their culture and traditions, any less able to say what being Jewish means?
These are two groups of people who love being Jewish.
You may not want to be Haredi (I don’t) and you may have criticisms of their approach to their religion (I do) but I would never dream of questioning their love of Jewishness, or their sincerity of conviction.
The strictly Orthodox Jews in places like Stamford Hill and Hendon are crucial to London Jewish life. We have our kosher delis, our judaica shops, and our bookstores because of the commitment of Haredim to building up Jewish life here.
When I think of the strictly Orthodox, I have no doubt that they, too, love being Jewish. They might not love all the same things that I do, and they might love some things I don’t, but they are fellow Jews, creating vibrant community.
I do not know the Haredi world, and have never been part of it, but I believe they have important things to say about being Jewish and facing antisemitism.
I feel I can speak with more confidence about the revolutionary socialist Jews. That’s much closer to my world, and one that I interact with readily. That is a group of people I can say, with certainty, love being Jewish.
It would be easy for such people to disregard their Jewishness, or downplay it. Plenty of Jews have, in all times and from all political persuasions, for varying different reasons. But the Jewish socialists have chosen to wear their Jewishness as a badge of honour.
These are people who have regular book groups, looking at Jewish thought. They are deep-divers of Jewish history, who keep alive the stories of the East End and the shtetl. They are Jews who will insist on telling me they are atheists, before heading off to Friday night dinners with each other, where they will sing the same songs and recite the same blessings that you all will at your dinner tables.
The revolutionary socialist Jews often see their politics coming precisely from their Jewishness, and not in spite of it. They are, in my experience, serious thinkers about antisemitism, who have done the reading, experienced the vitriol, and arrived at smart and nuanced conclusions about how to combat anti-Jewish hatred.
They are with us, loving being Jewish, and building Jewish life.
What good does it do to dismiss them out of hand like that?
Perhaps it is simply that they are easy to dismiss. They have no stake in the formal institutions of Anglo-Jewry, like the Board of Deputies, nor do they want to. In both cases, they will carry on living their Jewish lives as they want to, unhindered by such dismissal.
But I don’t think Gardner is quite right that socialists and Haredim are the only groups who march on Saturdays: increasingly, they are joined by young people who grew up in movements like Reform Synagogue Youth (RSY-Netzer.) They are the bulk of Jews in groups like Naamod.
To see such people marching, especially in such numbers, was unthinkable only ten years ago. When they demonstrate, they are singing the songs they learnt in Reform youth camps. When they speak, they talk about the rabbis and leaders that shaped our Jewish world. They are attending as Progressive Jews.
One month ago, the movement workers for LJY-Netzer issued a statement, calling for a ceasefire, and decrying Netanyahu’s war. In their public message, they shared their dual sadness: on the one hand, at rising antisemitism; and, on the other, at a seeming inability to talk about Gaza.
LJY-Netzer is Liberal Judaism’s youth movement, parallel to the Reform one, RSY. The “Netzer” part is Hebrew, meaning Reform Zionist Movement. Today, while I lead here, Rabbi Jordan is meeting with them at Chagigah.
These critics of Israel are young people firmly within the institutions, who participate in their local synagogues. They love being Jewish, and, more than that, they love Progressive Judaism, our Judaism.
Are they to be dismissed too? Will they find their Jewishness cast aside in some press release? Will they, for their principled stance, find they are no longer worthy to comment on Jewishness or antisemitism?
Ignoring them is not an option. It would be unconscionable to throw them away, with their opinions.
That doesn’t mean you have to agree with them. You should certainly disagree with them if that is how you feel!
But do so from a place of love. Because you love being Jewish. Because they love being Jewish. Because you should love each other as Jews.
Disagree, by all means, but disagree as Jews. What could be more Jewish than lovingly disagreeing?
If we are faced with hatred, we will only love more. We will love ourselves more. We will love being Jewish more. We will love the sights and smells and sounds and rituals and families and discussions and Scriptures and songs.
We will love each other more. We will love others’ ways of being Jewish more. We will all embrace each other, seriously, and with affection, as fellow Jews. We will encourage others to love what they love about being Jewish. So that they will keep on loving being Jewish, long into the future.
Do you remember the first sermon that really moved you?
I do. It was a primary school assembly.
Mrs. Kilou stood at the front of the hall, as all us uniformed children awaited the morning messages.
She began with a question: “who knows what I hate most in the world?”
A kid suggested: “Lateness.”
“No, not lateness.”
Another offered: “scruffiness.”
“No, not scruffiness.”
One more: “When we don’t do our homework.”
“No, this is the thing I hate most in the world. Way worse than lateness or scruffiness or not doing the homework. The thing I truly despise.”
Finally, a kid ventured: “racism.”
“Racism, that’s right!” She spat the word and the whole crowd sat up to attention. The fury in her voice was palpable.
She had good reason to be angry. Somebody had spray-painted a large swastika on the outer wall of our primary school.
***
For the last two months, I have been trying to work out what to say. There have been days recently when many of the parents from this community didn’t send their children into school, worried that they would be targets. Members have shared stories of taking down their mezuzot, and hiding their symbols of Jewishness. I have felt, at times, like the community is overtaken by panic.
What do you say to people who are so anxious and angry? How do you meet people in their fear, and help them move beyond it?
I haven’t known what to say. So, the last few times I have stood on this bimah, I have just shared what is in the Torah.
But there is a trauma that needs to be addressed.
It doesn’t help to tell people that there is nothing to fear. That only makes people feel alone in their feelings, and that just makes them more afraid.
What repeated studies show is that what matters about handling traumatic events is less what happens afterwards than what happened before. People are better able to negotiate destabilising situations when they already have a strong sense of self; feel proud of who they are; and have a clear story about themselves.
So, I think the best thing to do from here, for now, is to tell my own story. My own relationship to antisemitism.
My account is, of course, personal, and not definitive. But I hope it will open up spaces for others to share their stories, and for us to begin a conversation about who we are, and what experiences formed us.
***
The swastika on my school wall was not for me. Not in the direct sense. That is to say: whoever drew it did not have Jews at the forefront of their minds.
We were not a Jewish school. We were a multicultural one in the centre of an industrial town, surrounded by white suburbs, and even whiter countryside. The other students, my friends, were Pakistani Muslims, kids from the Caribbean, refugees from Kosovo… we were a little bubble of people from everywhere, and, though I did not know it then, were a source of moral panic among readers of certain newspapers. We were, to those that feared integration, a symbol that Britain wasn’t British anymore.
And, of course, that swastika very much was for me. It was an attack on my community. It was antisemitic because all swastikas are. It was calling to me, because all racism does.
Around that time, my parents began telling me stories. But not the stories you would expect. They didn’t tell me about family members who had escaped Germany or died there. They did not explain why some members of the synagogue had tattoos on their arms, or how others had met each other on refugee trains. I only came to learn that much later.
They told a story about how, not long ago, the Council had erected a new housing block. One of the first people to be offered a home there was a black woman. Racists came to protest. ‘Houses should be for whites.’ The Pakistani community centre came out in large numbers and escorted the racists back to the train station and out of town.
This is an oral history, and I won’t be able to verify it from newspaper reports, but I suspect my parents made it sound more peaceful than it really was.
They told me other stories too. Stories of hundreds turning out to see off the National Front. Stories like how the Jews and the Irish united to defeat the Blackshirts at Cable Street. Stories of partisans and resistors.
They told me how people could stand up against racism and win. They told me about how, when it comes to racism, our greatest strength is each other.
I don’t know if this was their intention, but I learnt then that the swastika was not something to be feared. It was something to be destroyed. And that people could, and did, destroy it, wherever it appeared.
So, I grew up feeling not so scared of Nazis as determined to stamp them out.
***
Some university students spend their weekends studying. Others spend them partying. Me and my friends? We spent our weekends chasing the English Defence League.
Don’t get me wrong. I did study. And I did party. But some of my most formative memories from that time were of bundling into minivans and car convoys with my housemates to towns in the Midlands and the North.
At that time, Tommy Robinson had assembled a band of white supremacists, bored football hooligans, and lost boys, to go and protest wherever there was a mosque. They usually targeted the mosque itself, and would go to the towns with the express aim of intimidating the Muslims.
Opposing them felt like the only right thing to do. Fighting fascism felt like a calling in a very similar way to how the rabbinate does today.
There was a group of us, from different towns, who always went along, led by a gentle couple called Simon and Sadia. We were always met by locals, usually gathered from community centres and religious groups, who would join in showing the racists that they weren’t welcome.
I learnt from these forays into antifascist activism that, while there were always some who resisted fascism, they weren’t necessarily popular. Media narratives after each protest often framed the unfolding events as if the fascists and their opponents were equally bad. As if it would be better if these small groups of students and locals stayed home and let the racists go unchallenged.
I might have believed them, if it weren’t for what I saw happen in Dudley. There, the English Defence League significantly outnumbered the protesters. Police lost control of the situation. Over that weekend, in broad daylight, those thugs went round smashing in the windows of any house with black and brown people living in it.
As we ran away from the violent gangs storming the town, we passed a house where a black teenager had been visiting a white family. Their windows had been smashed. “I’m sorry,” he was saying, “I think it’s because of me.”
I learnt from this a lesson that has informed how I think about all racism and antisemitism since. Our strength is in each other. Our defence is our neighbours.
This runs contrary to some of the received wisdom about antisemitism. We are, after all, a small minority that lives in concentrated areas of large British cities. One story about how to handle the prejudice we face is that we must depend on the state to defend us against the baying mob of our neighbours. It is because of this that older members will share the axiom: “as long as the king is safe in his castle, we’ll be safe in Tower Hamlets.”
My experiences turn this on its head. The non-Jewish majority is not our enemy. They are our most reliable bulwark against racism. When it comes to fascists, we are the masses and the masses are us. Our greatest strength is each other.
***
That story, of solidarity in the face of racism, is also played out in the story of this synagogue. My friend, Joseph Finlay, just completed his PhD, looking at Jews and race relations in post-war Britain. During his archival research into the history of fighting racism, one shul kept cropping up. This one.
During the 1960s and 1970s, this synagogue was led by the visionary rabbi, Dow Marmur. He arranged visits from volunteers to homes of new immigrants to Redbridge, as well as English conversation classes to help neighbours settle in. In 1978, the synagogue held a “multiracial dance,” in a clear statement of unity against racist scaremongering about miscegenation.
Rabbi Marmur brought a motion to the RSGB Conference of 1968, which encouraged other synagogues to adopt similar policies, and follow SWESRS’ example. He accompanied his motion with a powerful sermon.
While others shied away from fighting racism, or even expressed sympathy with the anti-black and anti-immigrant feeling, Rabbi Marmur issued an impassioned plea. Yes, he said, the racists do draw comparisons between Jews and black people, and “we have a special duty to remember the Prophet’s comparison and to affirm that we are, in fact, alike -in the beneficent eyes of God!”
He encouraged meaningful solidarity, urging “let us beware of condescending and patronising “do-goodery” … “And at no time must we allow ourselves to be fobbed off with cowardly calls for “prudence” and “caution” when these are euphemisms for inactivity and indifference.” Finally, Marmur compelled his listeners: “the primary force of our involvement must be our religious conviction; God bids us act-and we must obey!”
This summons stands at the centre of my own response to antisemitism. It is not only the swastika that calls me, but, more importantly, the voice of the Living God.
In that voice, I hear the demand to continue being Jewish, without apologies.
In God’s Word, I hear the call to resist antisemitism, not only out of self-preservation, but from a religious demand that there must be diversity.
And in God’s Torah, I hear, always, that most-repeated verse: “love your neighbour.” Yes, love your neighbour as yourself. Love them because they are you. Love each other because that is our strength.
The things you hate in others are the things you hate in you.
All too often, we create monsters out of others because we fear there is something monstrous in ourselves. We turn outsiders into figures of hate because there is something we cannot stand inside ourselves.
In the Talmud, Laban is called the trickiest of tricksters. He came from a family of tricksters, in a town of tricksters, and all he ever did was trick.
Now, Laban was indeed a trickster. He was a thief and a manipulator. But was he really the worst of the worst? Most importantly, was he really worse than Jacob?
Laban did wrong, multiple times. He behaved appallingly.
From the outset, he took Jacob in on false pretences.
Laban told Jacob that, if he worked for him for seven years, he could marry his younger daughter, Rachel. Jacob adored Rachel, and was willing to do anything for her, so fulfilled his obligations.
Then, on the day of the wedding, Laban swapped out Rachel for her older sister, Leah. Laban made Jacob work another seven years to marry the woman of his dreams.
Once Jacob had married both daughters, Laban continued to trick and deceive. He kept trying to rob Jacob, arbitrarily changing the terms of the contract.
Jacob says that Laban had tried to swindle him with new rules ten times. In our midrash, the rabbis say it was in fact a hundred. Laban absolutely stole, and absolutely tricked.
Now, can we compare this to Jacob?
Only last week, we saw how Jacob tricked his father and his brother to steal from them. Jacob dressed up as his brother, pretended to cook like his brother, and stole his brother’s birthright. Jacob took advantage of his elderly father, who was going blind, to swindle him out of a blessing.
Jacob, too, stole and tricked.
To read the rabbinic tradition, however, you would think it only went one way!
The midrash bends over backwards to exonerate Jacob. It says that his father, Isaac, knew what was going on all along, and was only pretending to be deceived. It says that his mother, Rebecca, was given prophecy by God, so she knew what the future of her sons entailed. Throughout rabbinic commentaries, we get apologia for why Jacob was really right to receive the birthright, and why Esau would have been a terrible choice.
None of this is in the text. It is really a PR campaign to protect Jacob’s reputation.
Laban, by comparison, is subjected to thorough demonisation.
The rabbis say that Laban sought to kill Jacob, despite there being no evidence of it. They go further: Laban wanted to massacre the Israelites entirely so they would have no future. Laban wanted to subjugate the Israelites worse than Pharaoh ever could. The rabbis say Laban lived hundreds of years, and could think of nothing else but swindling Israelites throughout that entire time, motivated only by spite. They call him ugly, and stupid, and say he slept with animals.
Contrary to the plain reading of the text, our tradition turns Laban into a monster, with every flaw exaggerated to absurd degree. They warp him from being a simple trickster into a demonic tyrant.
Our rabbis’ goal is to divide the world into the two camps: the innocent and the evil. On the one side, they have Jacob, who, no matter what he did, can never be held accountable. On the other side, they have Laban, the pinnacle of malice. No matter what may have motivated him, Laban will always be depicted as a corrupt crook, lusting after the death and misery of others.
In fact, the crimes of Jacob and Laban were almost identical. Laban tricked; so did Jacob. Laban stole; so did Jacob.
There is a good reason why the rabbis would want to defend Jacob and castigate Laban in this way. Jacob is us. He changed his name to Israel and became the founder of the Jewish people. If Jacob is bad, so are we.
Laban is our enemy. If he can be excused, what does that make us? How can we be the good guy, if he is not the bad one?
Naomi Graetz, a scholar at Ben Gurion University, compiled all these sources and suggests that what is going on here is a classic case of negative projection.
We know that Jacob did those bad things. But, if we throw them all onto Laban, they no longer stick to us. By constructing Laban as a monster, we can feel assured in the positive self-image we want to hold.
This, she says, is what groups often do. They create “others” – people that they imagine to be different to them – so that they can throw at them the worst fears of what they themselves might be.
The things we hate in others are often, really, the things we like least about ourselves.
Hating others gives us an easy way to escape our own feelings of discomfort. If we can hate them, we don’t have to look too hard in our own mirror.
In mediaeval Europe, that was a big part of how antisemitism functioned. Jews were the “other” onto which their neighbours projected all their anxieties.
The Jews, according to the antisemitic imagination of the time, were usurers, stealing money from people. In the Middle Ages, most money-lenders were not Jewish. They were Christians. At this time, certain Christians were also becoming very wealthy as landlords and merchants. Rather than deal with it as a social problem shared by everyone, they racialised it. They turned it into a Jewish problem, so that they did not have to face it as their own.
Even the blood libel, a mediaeval conspiracy theory that Jews drank Christian blood, can be understood as projection. As part of regular Catholic services, they drink the blood of Jesus, in the form of wine. Clearly feeling some guilt about their own rituals, they thrust this fear onto the Jews. It is not us who drink blood, it’s them!
It is probably not a coincidence that the modern antisemitic trope of Jews ruling the world came about when the European empires were at their height.
Antisemitism was a way for Europeans to resolve their discomfort about who they were by turning it into hatred of someone else.
Still, if I only talk about how bad and racist others once were, I would be projecting. The point is not that they can do it, but that we can.
We are very capable of making demons where there are just people. We can just as equally project our own fear by turning it into hatred of others.
We need to remember that the world is not made of heroes and villains. Humanity cannot be divided up so easily.
If we look at the biblical story, as it appears in the Torah, Laban is not a monster. Nor is Jacob. They are just people. Flawed, messy, human beings, doing wrong, and making mistakes. They both did wrong. But neither of them were evil.
The Torah gives us a whole host of complicated characters. They are not models of perfect behaviour. They are not even moralising cautionary tales. They are just a reflection of reality: which is complex and scary. We learn best from our imperfect prophets.
Rather than trying to resolve our anxieties with hatred, let us look inside ourselves.
When you see something in someone else that you hate, ask: what is it in me that makes me feel this?
When another group seems like devils, ask yourself: are we really angels?
People will do wrong. All the time. They will mess up and cause pain in all kinds of ways.
Most of the time, we cannot change that.
But we can work on the things we can change in ourselves.
We can forgive the things we cannot change.
And if you accept that you are capable of harm, without it making you evil, you may be able to have compassion for yourself.
And you may find that you love yourself, after all.
You may see yourself the way God sees you. As an imperfect human who makes mistakes. Not a monster. Just a mess. A thoroughly lovable mess.
And if you can love yourself, warts and all, you may find you have less space left to hate others. You may find that you contain more compassion and empathy than you knew.
The things we hate in others are the things we hate in ourselves.
The things we love in ourselves, we can love in others too.
Sim Lev 