(RNS) — As somebody who appears the a part of the Orthodox Jew I’m — darkish swimsuit, white gown shirt, black fedora — I’ve skilled my share of hatred directed at me as an emblem of the Jewish folks.
However, regardless of the “Heil Hitlers!” and diverse insults shouted from home windows and vehicles, I’ve by no means considered my nation as harboring any substantial streams of antisemitism.
There was, in fact, the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom (price some Googling, if you happen to’re too younger to recollect). Nevertheless it was, I assumed, an aberration.
Making that assumption tougher to cling to had been subsequent occasions, just like the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge capturing, the 1999 Los Angeles Jewish Neighborhood Middle capturing, the 2002 one at Los Angeles Worldwide Airport, the 2006 Jewish Federation of Seattle one and the 2009 one at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. And, extra lately, the 2017 “Jews won’t substitute us!” chant in Charlottesville, Virginia; the Tree of Life capturing in Pittsburgh and people in Poway, California, and Jersey Metropolis, New Jersey; and the Monsey, New York, Hanukkah stabbing assault, all the next yr. And scores of much less lethal assaults over these years perpetrated on Jews merely for being Jews.
A private punctuation of the plague occurred in Could of final yr, when a fellow sat down reverse me on the Staten Island Ferry and, totally unprovoked, started shouting insults and curses at me on the prime of his appreciable lungs, to the purpose the place bystanders felt compelled to summon police.
However even all these issues didn’t put together me for the really surreal sight and sound of Americans tearing down posters of civilian hostages kidnapped and held by vicious terror teams — whereas shouting praises for these pledged-to-Jew-murder teams.
As Bari Weiss lately put it: “We anticipated Hamas to attempt to kill Jews. We didn’t count on People to have fun once they did.”
Had been the demonstrations clearly restricted to protesting Israel’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, bloodbath of males, ladies and youngsters, I might take difficulty with the demonstrators however a minimum of perceive their emotions. However too most of the actions and slogans of what purport to be “pro-Palestinian” activism are barely disguised, if in any respect disguised, Jew-hatred.
The Anti-Defamation League experiences that there have been greater than 10,000 antisemitic incidents within the U.S. since Oct. 7, when Hamas gleefully butchered greater than 1,200 males, ladies and youngsters in Israel.
In line with the Jewish non secular custom, till the Jewish messiah arrives, there’ll all the time be those that hate Jews. Their hatred might take any variety of types and present itself in an assortment of how. If one “cause” for hating Jews eludes the haters, they’ll discover one other. The reasons for the hatred will check the boundaries of preposterousness. And so it has been.
In the event that they haven’t appeared already, momentary constructions of assorted supplies, sizes and shapes will quickly be sprouting like post-rain mushrooms throughout Israel and all through Jewish neighborhoods in American cities and world wide.
Extremely-orthodox Jews construct a Sukkah, a short lived construction constructed for the Jewish vacation of Sukkot, in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood, Sept. 26, 2023. (AP Picture/Ohad Zwigenberg)
The vacation of Sukkot (“tabernacles” or “huts”) takes its identify from these constructions, which Jews are enjoined by the Torah to inhabit for per week every year. The partitions of sukkot may be made from any materials. However in success of Jewish custom’s insistence that the dwellings be “momentary” in nature, their roofs should encompass items of unprocessed wooden or vegetation, and the fabric will not be mounted in place.
At first look, residing in sukkot — by definition susceptible to wind, rain and pests — would appear solely to compound any innate Jewish proclivity to fret. And but, a minimum of for Jews who respect the vacation’s import, the very reverse is true.
For Jewish custom considers the sukkah symbolic of the divine “clouds of glory” that the Torah recounts and that protected the ancestors of at present’s Jews as they wandered within the desert after leaving Egypt. The miraculous clouds destroyed no matter obstacles or noxious creatures stood within the folks’s path.
Thus, the sukkah represents a deep Jewish fact: Safety shouldn’t be a perform of fortresses; it’s a reward granted, in the end, from above.
There’s a Yiddish poem by poet and author Avraham Reisen (1876-1953) that’s sung in numerous sukkot. The phrases, and a melody to which they had been way back put, are each stirring.
The poem/music paints the image of a Jewish father sitting in his sukkah, as a storm rages. His anguished daughter tries to persuade him that the sukkah is about to fall. He responds (rendered, maintaining the poem’s meter and rhyme scheme, from the Yiddish):
Pricey daughter, don’t fret;
It hasn’t fallen but.
The sukkah’s wonderful; no want for fright.
There have been many such fears,
For nigh two thousand years;
But the little sukkah stays standing upright.
Many a sukkah, in fact, has in actual fact succumbed to a storm. And plenty of, many a Jew has been murdered, in antiquity by latest instances.
However as Reisen’s metaphor poignantly reminds us, there may be timeless which means in the truth that the Jewish folks, as a folks, has survived.
The sukkah’s fragility teaches that true safety, ultimately, comes from solely One Place.
So, all of the world’s craziness and evil, all of the unreason and hatred and plotting and violence, can not shake the serenity of the sukkah. We’ve, if solely we benefit it, an impenetrable shelter.
And so, irrespective of how loudly the winds might howl, irrespective of how susceptible our bodily fortresses could also be, we give harbor to neither despair nor insecurity. As an alternative, we redouble our recognition that, ultimately, God is in cost, that each one is in his arms.
And that the sukkah, because it has for millennia, continues to face.
(Rabbi Avi Shafran writes broadly in Jewish and common media and blogs at rabbishafran.com. The views expressed on this commentary don’t essentially mirror these of Faith Information Service.)
