It’s a byword these days, among us. Resilience is how we describe the way in which our people are continuing to weather this unrelenting storm we find ourselves in. We turn on the TV or social media, and see yet another protest, another violent attack, another scrawled swastika or vandalized Jewish site. After 20 months, it's brazen, and unlike the cowardly perpetrators, the motivation is unmasked.
I’ve been at this work for a long time, as I have shared in the past. There’s nothing new about the experience of being targeted, especially as a practicing, visible Jew. Nonetheless I continue to be alarmed by the volume, the coordination, and the integration of anti Jewish hatred into the fabric of everyday life, from diplomacy and civil society, to academia and religious pulpits, from schoolyards to street corners. The ADL shares statistics every year, and the number of antisemitic incidents in the US alone has grown TEN TIMES over the last nine years, even including months at a time when everyone was socially distancing and dealing with COVID.
That is exponential growth. It would be challenging for anyone, let alone a people just three generations away from almost being exterminated. So how do we do it? What quality do we possess or do we harness to survive and eventually flourish?
We have many sources in our tradition that provide some helpful clues and in fact inform our resilience. On Monday we’ll celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, when our tradition tells us we received the Torah at Sinai. One of the first descriptions of the Jewish people in the Torah was that we are “stiff necked”, which is usually translated as stubborn. And we are stubborn. But we are persistent, indefatigable too.
We survived 210 years in slavery even BEFORE we were any more than a collection of families and clans. We hold on to things desperately, as the Torah commentators tell us, we retained our identity because of names & language, distinctive cultural practices, and hope based on the Abrahamic covenant through generations in Egypt. That speaks to a high degree of stubbornness.
On Shavuot we also read the Book of Ruth, telling the story of a young woman who determines to attach her fate to that of the Jewish people, showing resilience in the face of loss, famine, and being a stranger in a place she doesn’t know. Yet she quickly adopts the characteristic persistence of the Jewish people, telling her mother in law Naomi - where you go I will go, your people will be my people, and your God my God - and she refuses to be dismissed even as her sister in law abandons the same plan. Ruth eventually becomes the ancestor of King David, and, as tradition tells us, of the Messiah anticipated in every generation. Her strain of resilience multiplied that which we already had and created something even stronger.
And we are strong. Stronger than we, the Jewish people, have ever been before in our entire history. Stronger than any one moment of weakness or jeopardy, stronger than the fetid swamp of libelers and butcher-apologists we wade through, stronger than religious radicals bent on more bloodbaths and more carnage, stronger than far right thugs, whether they wear jackboots or bowties, carry weapons or spread lies.
Why? Is it because of material wealth, or a capable military, maybe a few key allies? No. All of these things are useful, even essential. But our strength is in our capacity to be refined through grave suffering and threat, through hardship and privation, and through what (in context) looks like the challenges we face today. Our capacity to learn from adversity and pass on to our children - and to those, like Ruth, who throw their lot in with us - the essence of our blueprint for living ( as Rabbi Noach Weinberg zt’l described the Torah).
It is this essence that we celebrate this holiday and through all of our holidays. The ideas and ideals that underpin the societies where we find our freest existence and expression come directly from the tradition we have carried with us through every single trial and tribulation. We carry it because we are resilient, and we are resilient because we carry it. And that is why we will triumph in this moment as well.
From all of us at the Federation, have a wonderful shabbat and a joyous chag!