Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast, as I often do while I’m driving. The podcaster was the incredibly articulate Jonah Platt, son of recent Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) Board Chair Julie Platt, who championed the LiveSecure initiative which helped fund our own security initiative right here in Rockland.

Platt’s podcast, “Being Jewish” has become a staple of mine, as I listen to him as often as I do Haviv Rettig Gur, Dan Senor, Yossi Klein Halevi. I highly recommend listening to his show.

Platt began the latest episode talking about his experience with a JFNA trip to Salonika, Greece, where the largest center of Jewish life in Europe existed and thrived for hundreds of years.

You can picture the story: Thriving Jewish life, under Roman, Muslim and Christian rule, leading to dhimmitude, dispossession, discrimination, theft, eradication of whole neighborhoods, elimination of the glory of what had been, leading inevitably to deportation and extermination. More than 50,000 of Salonika’s 55,000 Jews (far fewer than at its height and glory), or 96%, left this world through the chimneys of Auschwitz. And today? Aristotle University sits atop the ancient Jewish cemetery, the largest one to ever exist, with over 400,000 Jews interred. Eradicated. Razed.

The single, tiny monument to Salonika’s Jewish legacy on the campus, Platt described, is faced across perhaps a 5 yard wide lane, with signs and graffiti saying “Death to the IDF”, “Fuck Israel” “Zionists Out!”. Listening to him describe the scene twisted my gut with an anger that has never been far from me over the last three years.

This is the legacy of Europe in the hearts and minds of our people. This is the memory engraved on our bones. And we are all children of these experiences. For centuries and for ages.

I am a child of Spain. My ancestors lived and learned and led communities in Gerona and Barcelona a thousand years ago. They persecuted us, despoiled, raped, burned, and tortured us, then drove us out. When the Nazis came to power they shut their gates to us. And now? Spain stands at the wellspring of bile and hatred flowing against the Jewish people and their sovereign presence in their homeland.

I am a child of France. My ancestors were sent by the Emperor Charlemagne to establish trade in the Ile De Paris when it still had only one or two bridges and the only stone buildings were the ones the Romans built seven centuries earlier. They also lived in Languedoc, in Normandy, in Lorraine, and across the principalities and kingdoms that became France. They burned our holiest books by the thousands in the square that now houses the Hotel De Ville, next to the river in the heart of Paris. They slaughtered our communities during the crusades, fell upon us during the great plague, hounded us from their cities when they couldn't or wouldn't repay the loans their petty princes and dukes and archbishops begged for. They branded us as traitors less than two centuries ago, on the basis of lies and falsehoods and libels (sound familiar?). And when the Nazis came, they marched us out to our fates.

I am a child of Italy. My ancestors lived in Rome during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, even before the second Temple was destroyed. They thrived, they traded, they wrote commentaries and decided matters of Jewish law, they studied the stars, they were forced into - and won - disputations with Christian clergy. They hailed from Rome, from Padua, from across the Italian boot. And from city after city they were exiled with nothing. They were forced to run through the streets to be ridiculed and spat upon. They were burned at the stake. And when the Nazis came, save for a brave few, they predictably gave us up to be shot in caves or transported to our deaths.

I am a child of the Rhineland. So many of my ancestors lived in these cities on the German and French sides that I cannot count them. They wrote the Tosefot commentaries on the Talmud. They were winegrowers and traders. They established a mercantile system across the entire continent. They delved into the mysteries of Kabalah and Zohar. And the streets ran with rivers of their blood again and again as the unending crusades and medieval persecutions came through. Then they suffered again under Martin Luther’s indignation at their refusal to be converted by his “kindness”. And then they birthed the ideology that evolved into Nazism. They grew to execute the most monstrous crimes we have ever experienced.

I am a child of Poland. My ancestors were welcomed by King Casimir as he beckoned them to live in Krakow. They helped to fund and build a flourishing Polish state before it became a battleground for the Germans, the Swedes, and the Russians. Jewish learning and Jewish culture thrived for centuries. Jewish life in Poland waxed and waned with the rise and fall of persecutors and protectors. Yet they persevered and often they thrived. And then, the Nazis came, and too many were happy enough to turn over the Jews, take their property, and even work for those who eventually came to kill them too. So the fragile remnant of my family, coming back from being refugees in Khazakstan, were hounded and beaten upon their return, their land and property confiscated, their belongings looted, their very continued existence infuriating those who were once their neighbors. So they turned their backs, and they left.

I could go on, to talk about Russia, about Bohemia and Austria (where my great grandfather served on the Imperial General Staff as an aide to the Quartermaster-General of the Austro Hungarian Empire during the first world war), about England, where I stood before Clifford’s Tower in York some 35 years ago, feeling that anger twist my insides as I recalled the events that led to both the murder of York’s Jews and the suicide of the remainder who refused to be tortured and raped by the bloodthirsty mobs surrounding them). I could speak of Ireland, who’s venerated forefather Eamon De Valera was still expressing his support for Nazism and Hitler days after the War had ended with Germany’s surrender, and whose republican heroes scapegoated and hunted Jews in Cork and Dublin even before the Easter Rising of 1916. I could speak of the persecution of Jews throughout the Islamic world for over 1300 years, which only has the tiny saving grace (!!) of being slightly less murderous than the Europeans for some of those years. Oh, what a low bar to clear. But I think the point is made.

Europe is a charnel house, built upon the bones and ashes of our families and our earliest ancestors. It has no credibility. It has no righteous history to stand upon. It is the last civilization on earth to be preaching its twisted version of morality and probity to the people it has trod underfoot, and done its best to destroy for century after century. It has no standing at all.

It infuriates me to hear of their militant rejection of Jewish self determination, peoplehood and identity. To paraphrase another virulent European antisemite, “How DARE You!”

The only emotion that surpasses my anger in these moments is my pride. Pride in the contributions of generations of Jews to the moral, humanistic, and righteous development of societies, like that in the USA, birthed upon the bed of Deist and Jewish influenced philosophy. Pride in the imperative of literacy and scholarship that has animated our people since before we were exiled. Pride in the contributions to science, medicine, literature and Peace that is evidenced by 30% of Nobel Awards being earned by 0.3% of the world’s population. Pride in the resilience that a wounded, nearly broken people demonstrated in defiance of a continent and a world that tried to end them. Pride in the state they created, through the Almighty's Providence. Pride in the military they have wrought, which, though it has had its failures, has come to a point where Israel’s strategic position is as strong as it has ever been. Pride in an American Jewish community which has made huge cultural contributions to whatever vestige of unity and common cause we still have here in these United States.

My pride in my identity rises above my anger only because I choose to elevate it. But I leverage and use my anger as motivation - to defend my people in every way that I can, so that the garden we have planted for a flourishing Jewish future may grow behind the safety of the walls our history demands that we build. To keep the wolves at bay.

Your task? I know you are frustrated and angry and sad and hurt. I know all of what you see hear and read is depressing. But I also know this: first, you have friends and allies. Foster them. Second, leverage your anger but don’t let it own you. Third, your children deserve to know about the glory of Jewish history, Jewish ideas and ethics, Jewish contributions to society. Don’t let them go through life only seeing you lament our current challenges. Show them where they can draw inspiration and pride.

At the end of the trip, Platt shared, he determined to focus on the celebration of Jewish life the group engaged in, rather than focus only and solely on the unrelenting hate all around. That’s sound advice.

Shabbat Shalom