Tag: community security Trust

sermon · social justice

Why do people hate Jews?

levtaylor



A joke from darker times in history.

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.

So let us love Jews.

Shabbat shalom.

festivals · sermon

Do not leave any part of yourself in Egypt

levtaylor



Several years ago, at a seder, I was introduced to a new custom.

When it came time to sing Dayyenu, a Persian-Jewish friend passed us all a spring onion each.

“In my family,” she said, “we hit each other over the heads with spring onions while we are singing this song.”

“It’s supposed to get out of our heads any feeling that we might want to remain in Egypt. So we remind each other by hitting our heads that we do not want to go back there.”

I instantly fell in love with it, and have adopted it into my own family seders. In fact, in my home, it can turn into a bit of a food fight, as we chuck the spring onions around the room.

One year, a Muslim friend came, and was quite baffled by the proceedings. I put quite a unique twist on my seders, and try to make them fun. That year, I had people dress up as the Ten Plagues from bits of fabric around the house, and do a lip-synching competition to the Prince of Egypt soundtrack. As he left, he said: “I can believe all of it is normal Judaism, apart from that bit with the spring onions.” I said: “That’s the only bit that was a real tradition!”

Maybe you might not bash your dinner guests with greenery, but you do sing Dayyenu, don’t you? It’s such a highlight.

I worry that some of our families’ seders don’t get there. The food’s coming out of the oven, everything has already gone on far too long, you’re anxious to eat, maybe you skip this important bit. I hope you don’t.

How about afterwards, when you’ve finished eating: who does the whole thing? Who carries on and sings hallel afterwards, and does the benching, and drinks the next two glasses of wine?

I hope you do. In fact, if this sermon has a message, it’s this: do the whole seder.

As you will see, this is not just me being a stickler for making sure people treat liturgy seriously, or insisting on the importance of halachah. This is about how we live our lives.

Our story begins with slavery and ends with freedom.

So, when you come to have your Pesach meals, make sure you don’t just tell the story of slavery. Make sure you talk a good deal about the freedom that comes afterwards.

The haggadah is actually split into two parts. In the first half, we are supposed to see ourselves as slaves in Egypt, weighed down by the yoke of bondage. Then, we eat. After dinner, we are free. We cross the Sea of Reeds and sing praises to our God. We raise a glass of wine to our redemption. We raise another glass to our future. We keep back a fifth glass for Elijah, who will come and bring about the final redemption, when everyone everywhere will finally know freedom.

Now, which of those two halves of the meal is more important?

Of course, it’s the second one. We don’t get together with our families and communities to dwell on how miserable it was to be stuck in Egypt. We get together to rejoice that we are free. How wonderful is this festival, the season of our liberation, that reminds us of that miraculous exodus out of oppression.

We sing Dayyenu (and bash each other with spring onions) immediately before we eat. That moment comes on the cusp between staying in slavery and leaving for liberty.

Dayyenu comes at the point where we are leaving slavery for freedom. By bashing each other’s heads with the spring onions, we say: “don’t leave any part of your head there! Don’t go back there, not even in your mind! Don’t dwell on those narrow places that kept you oppressed!”

Come on, we’re about to be free. We’re about to eat. Let’s look now to the future, where we will never have to think about those things again.

There’s a good reason why we might use spring onions in particular for the hitting. When the Israelites do get free, and start wandering in the desert, they start moaning about how much they miss slavery. They whinge about how much better being oppressed was. And what do they say they missed eating? The onions.

Those Israelites understood something. Being oppressed can feel easier than getting free. Sure, Egypt might have involved great persecution, but you always knew where you stood. Getting free, or at least trying, is tough. It’s unpredictable. It combines dizzying excitement with a terror of the unknown.

So we have to remind ourselves, over and over again, that however difficult freedom feels, it is better than oppression. However easy it might be to wallow in misery or stay in a victim mentality, there is so much more to be gained from shaking off our chains.

The first part of the seder says: we were slaves in Egypt. The second reminds us: but God helped us get free.

In the 19th Century, the Progressive Jew Israel Abrahams wrote about exactly this optimism for the Jewish Chronicle. He began his article by saying how wonderful it was that even persecuted medieval Jews insisted on keeping their doors open for Elijah on seder night, adamant that God would protect them. He said: “truly there is no danger to Judaism while such eternal hope prevails over despair.”

Israel Abrahams goes on to talk about the messianic hope that Jews hold at Pesach. Look at the bigger picture of history, he says, and you can see that it is not a delusion. “Persecutions come and go, but the Jews go on.” Away with all pessimism,” he says, “away with all pessimism.”

Can you believe that such words appeared in the Jewish Chronicle? How much can change in just over a century! Today, there is no way our communal organs would say how great it is that Jews would keep their doors open. They’d tell us to keep them locked. They’d sell us a more advanced security system. They’d put in a fundraising pitch for CST while they were at it.

Can you imagine any of our great and noble communal representatives sharing a positive view of Jewish history and an even more positive view of our future? No, their message is always the same: we are terrified; we have always been persecuted; we always will be persecuted. All we can do is build up bigger defences, hire tougher security guards, buy more effective security cameras; and keep our bags packed to run away just in case.

Sometimes I think Anglo-Jewry is stuck in the first half of the seder. It is as if many of us believe that we ourselves were slaves in Egypt, but nobody can believe that we were redeemed.

Do any of us really believe we are worse off than Jews were in the time of Israel Abrahams? Do we have more reason to cower than did medieval Jews? And, if we did, is cowering behind even greater security really our best answer?

The point of the seder isn’t that we were slaves. It’s that we got free.

Think of the wonderful things Jews are doing, and that British Jews have done. We are stars of stage and screen, fully represented at every level of politics, working in every strata of society, innovating, building, and living happy lives among our neighbours.

Sure, you can talk about the bad bits. Whenever I talk about the good, someone is eager to remind me of some proof of how much they all hate us. Some people leap to lecture on antisemitism and misery at even the suggestion that things might sometimes be good. That is a mentality that keeps your head in Egypt.

It’s not that everything is miserable and it’s not that everything is fine. It’s always a bit of both, no matter who you are.

The point is that everything could be wonderful. We could build a future so much better than this one.

Many times, with God’s help, we have achieved wonderful things.

When you take up the third cup at your seders, remember all the incredible things you and your ancestors have achieved.

When you take up the final cup, look towards the great utopia you can build here on earth.

And when you leave your Pesach seders this year, don’t carry around with you the slavery and misery of the first part of the meal. Bring out into the world Judaism’s message of hope.

Keep your eyes always on the best of what may be to come.

Beat out of your head any desire to wallow in misery.

Do not leave any part of yourself in Egypt.

Shabbat shalom.

debate · sermon

We, who love being Jewish

levtaylor

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.

Shabbat shalom.