golders green – Sim Lev

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.

Once, Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founder of the Musar movement, visited a new matzah bakery in order to check its work practices and level of kashrut. He reviewed all the manufacturing procedures extensively and observed the intense labor and toil of the employees. At the end of Rabbi Salanter’s visit, the bakery owner proudly asked him, “What does the rabbi say?” He answered, “The Gentiles accuse us, God forbid, of using the blood of Christian children in matzah. While this is not the case, from what I have seen here, there is indeed a violation of the prohibition on blood in food. The blood of the workers is mixed with the matzah! I will not certify this bakery as kosher.”

For me, my proudest moment of 2020 came in the middle of a Torah shiur. Early on into the lockdown, I was teaching a class over Zoom. 8pm was nearing and one teenage girl in attendance interrupted. “We have to go clap for the carers!” she said. At once, almost the entire class got up and walked away from their screens. I did the same. We whooped and cheered, then, ten minutes later, returned to our studies. Clapping for the carers became part of our weekly Torah study.

That, I thought, was real Judaism. It is not in our texts or our rituals, although those are important. Judaism lives in the dignity and respect we show to each other. It is in the solidarity and love we demonstrate to each other, even when we cannot physically be together.

This year, for the first time that I can remember, care workers received the recognition they deserved. In this pandemic, we learnt who really keeps the country ticking. It is the nurses, the cleaners, the teachers, the nursery workers, the porters, the social carers and home support. So often, this work, which constitutes the majority of work, is ignored or made invisible.

In this parashah, we get a rare insight into that kind of work. Jacob and Joseph both die. We hear of how the dignitaries and officers of Egypt mourned them. But we also hear, just in passing, of the physicians who embalmed their bodies. Or, rather, as Rabbeinu Bachya points out from the grammar of the sentence, that the physicians instructed others, who were lower-ranking and skilled in the matter, to embalm the bodies. We glimpse, if only momentarily, amidst the hullabaloo of important people wailing, what care work looked like in Ancient Egypt.

Care for the elderly must have been one of the hardest jobs to do this year. The Coronavirus pandemic spread fastest and with most deadly impact in the elderly care homes. The workers, without adequate protective wear, on low wages and with few rights, went in to care for older people. These workers had to return to their own vulnerable family members, potentially infected.

For many older people, their care workers were the only human contact they received, as families were prevented from mixing in the homes to prevent the spread of the virus. Care workers have done an amazing job this year, and everyone is forever indebted for their service.

So it should be a cause for absolute disgrace, for moral outrage, that a care home within the Jewish community should be spotlighted for its abhorrent treatment of elderly care workers.

That’s right. I’m talking about The Sidney and Ruza Last Foundation at the Yehoshua Freshwater Centre, better known as Sage Care home, in Golders Green. The staff there have been asking for fair wages, full sick pay and union recognition since September. These domestic and maintenance staff are paid well below the London Living Wage, denied fully paid time off if they are sick, and their grievances have been brushed aside and ignored. The management have flatly refused to have any meaningful negotiations with them, or made the workers any offers.

What an insult, then, that this care home calls itself Jewish, and says it serves the Jewish community! Who in the Jewish community is it serving? It certainly does not serve the care workers in this congregation. It definitely does not serve our elderly and vulnerable family members if it puts them and their carers in danger. Above all, it does not serve our Jewish God and our Jewish values if it exploits people.

The great conservative rabbi and posek Jill Jacobs, says that a Jewish company must meet certain labour standards to be considered kosher. It must treat workers with respect; pay a living wage; protect workers’ living conditions; and recognise their trade unions. Needless to say, the owners of Sage Care Home have failed on every single one of these fronts.

Moreover, the elderly are not safe from the pandemic if staff cannot be open about when they are sick to get necessary time off. The elderly cannot receive high quality care if employees don’t feel like when they complain about risks to health and safety they will be taken seriously. This is a grave issue for residents and staff alike.

As a result, the staff at this care home have now ballotted to strike. Unless the management intervenes swiftly to meet the carers, the whole workforce will walk out this month. The strike is scheduled to begin on 15th January.

It should never have reached this point. Many care homes manage to look after their residents and staff, by focusing on the human beings they are, rather than just profit. By ignoring the workers’ legitimate requests, the owners are endangering both staff and vulnerable older people. They must be held to account.

I know that the elderly people in these care homes and their family members want to know that their care workers have safe and fair working conditions. I know the Jewish community in London has high ethical expectations of its communal institutions.

The care workers are calling on the Jewish community to give them support. I know you will. The same community that came out to applaud care workers in the spring will surely stand by them in their struggle for a livelihood through winter.

If you have family at this care home, please write to the management to let them know your concerns. Express to them your concern for the welfare of the workers and your family.

Alternatively, take action by signing the petition or donate to the strike fund.

Let us join with the elderly and their carers to demand more from our communal institutions. May we be able to take pride in our care homes. May we truly be able to call every Jewish space kosher.

I am giving this sermon on Saturday 2nd January 2021 at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue.