By Rabbi Avi Shafran
The story, an old one, is told of an elderly Jewish man sitting on a park bench reading an anti-Semitic newspaper. A Jewish passer-by interrupts the reader and asks him incredulously why he is reading such trash rather than some reputable newspaper.
“It’s simple,” the older man replies with a tone of stating the obvious. “When I read the other papers, all that greets me is bad news – Jews are threatened, we’re being attacked, killed, we’re without hope.”
“But these wonderful papers,” he continues, sagely holding his reading material high, “tell me that we are protected, powerful and invincible, that everyone fears us and we control the world.”
Well, most of us might not go quite so far as that. But there are, all the same, great rewards to be had from listening to anti-Semitism.
The thought is occasioned by the recent gaggle of protests against Google, the storied internet search engine, which has been taken to task because its first entry for a search on the word “Jew” is (or at least was) an anti-Semitic website.
Hand-wringing, of course, is always an option in such cases, as is protest. There might be some value in the latter.
But ultimately protests can treat only the symptom, not the underlying malady. And so, whether or not some of us choose to raise voices in outrage or wage web-link-warfare, all of us might consider doing something else — trying to learn something from the Google geshrei.
Real and ubiquitous
The lesson is that anti-Semitism is real and ubiquitous, and that even if we manage to throw a drop-cloth over one or another of its manifestations, or to avert our gaze, the monster’s still there.
Hardly, to be sure, a novel revelation these days, when rank forms of contempt for Jews reside no farther away than the morning paper’s headlines. Like those that not long ago reviled the decision of some Jews, a sovereign government’s leaders, to execute a Palestinian mass-murderering “spiritual leader”; and then his replacement, a pediatrician who advocated the slaughter of Jewish babies.
Unremarked upon in that context by most news media (Newsweek was a notable exception) were the extraordinary measures Israel took, and always takes, to protect the innocent (and even not so innocent) lives of bystanders in such operations.
Not atypical of some of the foreign press was a cartoon in a Greek paper, wherein a woman asks, “Why did the Jewish government kill a religious leader?” and is answered: “They are practicing for Easter.”
We American Jews are citizens of a country that protects us, and are blessed with an administration that has spoken and acted on the principle that Jewish lives are as valuable as those of others. Most of us don’t generally perceive anti-Semitism in our daily lives.
But a dose of reality is always a healthy thing. And so we do well to ponder the fact that anti-Semitism is in fact thriving. And, more important, to ponder why it is that Jew-hatred is so apparent and so resilient.
There are many theories, of course. The “Jewish question” has been around for centuries.
Classical Jewish thought’s approach to anti-Semitism may have been most pithily rendered by the renowned Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik of Brisk (1820-1892).
He wrote: “Know that the more that Jews minimize the ‘apartness’ that the Torah mandates through Torah study and the observance of the commandments, the more G-d allows hatred [within others] to bring about the necessary outcome – that the Jewish people remain a people apart.”
That thought will likely strike many Jews as outrageous. How, they will object, can a rational decision to blend into society or to relinquish observance of the Torah’s laws possibly increase anti-Semitism?
And yet that is precisely what the Torah repeatedly predicts and what authentic Jewish religious leaders have always maintained.
And after the initial umbrage at the thought has dissipated, what remains is the troubling question of why indeed – after the Holocaust, amid compulsory education and interfaith efforts and our hearty embrace of the cultures in which we live – we Jews seem as hated as ever, perhaps more so than ever.
And so, it’s a thought well worth thinking, an approach that may seem paradoxical but is unarguably Jewish: By more strongly and determinedly embracing our identity as Jews, by committing ourselves to greater observance and study of Torah, we might just render anti-Semitism superfluous.
Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.
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