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By: Suri Davis
I hope not to offend all of you, it would be nice if I didn’t offend any of you, but we live in a sensitive world these days.
THERE IS NO PLACE IN THE WORLD FOR ANTI-SEMITISM, except that G-d thinks that there is. That’s the fact Jack. There is anti-Semitism in the world. HUUUUHHHH shocker. Really? As far back as the time the Haggadah was written, it was clear “in every generation there are people who stand up against us to decimate us [and G-d saves us from their hands.]
There is no place in the world for anti-Semitism and we need to fight anti-Semitism. There are two brands of anti-Semitism, I’ll call them passive and active. The passive is when Jews walk down the street, living life, and they are targeted for just being. Then there is active anti-Semitism brought about when Jews act in a way that does not conform to ethical standards.
We are in the midst of fighting another enemy, this one tinier than a hair and can’t be seen. It has killed more Jews in New York than anti-Semitism has.
For the weeks that this virus has played out in New York, we have read every week, alone in our homes, the Book of Leviticus, and every torah portion is VERY clear. I G-d am separate and therefore you need to be separate. Our names are different. Our language is different. Our clothing is different. We stand out, and because we stand out physically, it prevents us from assimilating in society, and this is by G-d’s design, so that we do not get caught up in the material world which would drag us down spiritually and degrade our morals and ethics.
The history of our people set forth in our holidays reveals how we have been singled out for millennia We are about to celebrate the giving of the Torah to the Jews on Mount Sinai. G-d offered it to other nations, and they said no thank you. We got it by design and default. The Torah provides us with guidance on how to live an ethical life among the nations of the world, because once Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden, we have been strangers in a strange land more often than a nation in our homeland, Israel. We have always been citizens of Israel, just not residents.
When a prominent Rabbi died in Brooklyn, word got out and 2,500 chasidim attended the funeral en masse, with or without facemasks and of course with no social distancing. In one fell swoop, they broke the laws and rules in place for the safeguarding of all New Yorkers, suffering in the hundreds of thousands. They selfishly came to honor the dead, instead of safeguarding the living.
Bari Weis, a writer for the New York Times, was vocally against Mayor DeBlasio’s anti-semitic statements. It’s nice to see the New York Times finally with an op-ed outraged by those statements against Jews. The statements were anti-semitic and he should apologize.
BUT HE WASN’T WRONG. He was outraged, and he should have been outraged. The fact is, he showed restraint. The funeral went on to its completion with no police intervention or ticketing, if I were mayor, charged with protecting the masses, I would have told the police to disperse them and ticket them.
It is appalling to me that my co-religionists are focusing on the mayor and anti-Semitism. This is not a period of time to look outward it is a period of time to look inward. It has been so since the time that 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died because they lacked respect for one another and turned a happy anticipation of receiving of the Torah into a period of internal introspection to look within ourselves to see how we interact with others. .
It is no coincidence that we are experiencing our quarantine during this period time. We have time in our home to contemplate and meditate and improve our relationships with those in our homes and society.
Ms. Weiss suggested that the mayor’s office should have hired a Yiddish speaking man with a bullhorn to disperse the crowd. That is assuming the Mayor knew that this crowd would amass and that he had the means to arrange this last minute. An inane argument. It is shifts the responsibility for being law-abiding from the Chasidim to the Mayor.
Those in social media and media and on the phone are outraged at Mayor DeBlasio’s singling out the Jews for their role in the Coronavirus outbreak. They are furious to have been included under the term Jews, even though they did not attend the funeral, “why group us together?”
Lest we forget that this pandemic started in New York on Purim, where there were Jews in 127 provinces in Persia who bowed to Haman, and there was one Jew, Mordechai, who did not bow. AND for that one person who did not bow, Haman convinced the king Achashverosh that there is a nation Mefuzar umiforad bein haamim/strange and dispersed among the nations, and their religion and culture is different from those among the nations. Yes, we were grouped with one person, Mordechai, and for his acts, Haman had cause or merely an excuse to kill thousands of Jews under Persian rule.
We were kept separate from G-d so we can embody the ethical life He set forth to us in the bible. Law abiding caring people. A model of ethics. We know that the other nations hold us under a glaring microscope ready to pounce when any Jew is caught not living up to those high standards. Do we understand that the nations’ scrutiny of us is really G-d’s scrutiny of us? When they want to say to us “you are not living up to standard,” G-d permits this to happen to remind us of two things, we are NOT living up to our ethical standards AND we are responsible for each other’s acts, especially if we don’t hold them to task.
The fact that Jews are focusing on Mayor DeBlasio’s words and are not outraged and speaking out against our co-religionists for their failure to keep the law, for their selfish acts of defiance, is appalling to me.
B’derech hatevah, in the earthly world, yes, we are upset at the mayor’s words, but after all these years on earth, are we surprised that when Jews behave unethically en masse, that anti-Semitism flares up. Hell no!!! G-d has built it into the system, as a means of reminding us that we are a separate people held up to the highest standards of ethical behavior and when those standards are so blatantly breached, we ARE ALL blamed for not preventing it and speaking out against it and ensuring it does not occur again. Kol Yisrael areivim zeh lazeh/all of Israel is responsible for one another, for better or for worse, we are all in the same boat, and instead of focusing outward, during this period of Omer and during our quarantine, where G-d spiritually and physically is screaming at us LOOK INWARD, it behooves us to speak out about the chilul Hashem/desecration of G-d’s name by these chasidim, and not about anti-Semitism.
AGAIN, LET ME BE CLEAR. B’derech hatevah, in the earthly world, we should hold Mayor DeBlasio to task for singling out Jews, b’derech haruchni, in our spiritual world, we have to know that it is G-d’s way of reminding us that we have to act in ways that sanctify G-d’s name, as set forth in the Book of Leviticus we read during this period of time of Omer and Quarantine. We have to look inward to see how we can repair these selfish acts and speak out against those who cause a chilul Hashem and focus on acts that sanctify G-d’s name, to hasten the coming of Moshiach in our days.
-Suri