Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Response, Page 2

Neither do they keep the king's religious laws

There have been times when the pressure exerted upon the Jew to conform to the dominant religious pattern, at least in addition to his own, has been direct and open. But even in democratic countries, where freedom of religion is legally guaranteed to the Jew, the same pressure exists, though concealed.

Social exclusions, occasional political and economic disabilities, discriminatory practices even in education, act upon the Jew's consciousness as a very real pressure to melt and reduce his own spiritual stature towards conformity with that of his surroundings.

In such a setting, blatant religious persecution may be replaced by friendly calls for Jewish self-effacement as a means of finding favor in the eyes of the Gentile world; the Jew finds himself dependent upon Gentile goodwill even in democratic countries. The net result is the same. There, destruction inflicted by outside hate; here, spiritual suicide, indirectly stimulated from without. (Let it be noted that these indirect pressures need not be decisive. In democratic societies they are not imposed through the total assent of the general community. In America, for instance, there are powerful currents which strive for the final removal of all inequity from American life; and for untrammeled liberty of body and soul for all Americans. Our point is that uncritical surrender by us to pressures for conformity to the mores and standards of our environment is by no means an indication of loyalty to America. Such surrender destroys the American dream. Our insistence on the right to remain what we are through Jewish history, experience and destiny, is precisely in line with the aspiration of the best of America. What is criticized here is the widely held fallacious notion, that in order to be good Americans, we must make common cause with those elements in American society that strive to mold America in a monolithic cast in every area of life other than the political.)

Nor would it profit the king to let them remain!

This is the final hammer blow. Substitute the idiom of the twentieth century for these words, and you will hear in them a most familiar note.

"Do you, little Jew, perchance live under the illusion that your genius and your efforts have contributed something of abiding value to our country? Are you foolish enough to imagine yourself indispensable to us, on the basis of your record of achievement? How pitifully mistaken you are. Our future welfare is not dependent on whether you stay or go. Your Einsteins and Frankfurters we hate. Your Rickovers we know how to snub. In some places you are dirty communists, and in others, dirty capitalists. Some of you are too grasping in business. Others preach too loudly and too passionately against social injustice. Your children fill our academies of higher learning out of all proportion to your numbers, and many of them are much too brilliant. Too many of you are physicians and attorneys. You are almost a controlling force in our entertainment industry. And of late you have even invaded engineering in force."

As of today, these sentiments are shared consciously by, probably, only a small minority of the American people. Let us hope and pray that the numbers of that minority may change only by diminution. On too many occasions in our past history, however, such minorities have become majorities. It would hardly be the best part of wisdom, therefore, for us to seek security in the knowledge of our great contributions to the well-being of our land. Too often have we learned that the anti-Semitic cry "nor would it profit the king to let them remain, " is not stilled by reference to charts of Jewish achievement.

A Proper Jewish Response Pattern to the Threat of Anti-Semitism

Let us re-read the elements of the response pattern of the Persian Jewish community to the menace of Hamanism. Those elements were:

The ingathering of the Jewish community for common effort; fasting and repentance; Esther's intercession with the king.

The ingathering of the Jewish community

The first step in planning a Jewish defense effort against anti-Semitism must be the cultivation of a sense of common Jewish destiny. It may often be true that "where there are nine Jews there are ten opinions," and that, in the formulation of our own views and opinions on Judaism and the problems of Jewish life, we have often been a very fragmented people. It is equally true, however, that the threat of physical injury or annihilation from without has always served us as a unifying agent of uncommon effectiveness. We often may ardently and zealously differ in defining the character of Judaism. We have always known instinctively, however, that anti-Semitic blows aimed at the body of any single Jew, are aimed equally at the collective body of all Jews -- whether of low or high station, whether materially poor or wealthy, whether religiously devout or not. An alarm of physical danger, therefore, has always transformed our inner divisiveness and our jealous insistence on unregimented individualism, into unity of purpose and self-regimented collective discipline.

Fasting and repentance

A sense of Jewish solidarity alone, however, for all its importance, will not suffice. Vitally necessary is a collective effort to retrieve the lost sense of Jewish spiritual unity, and to bring about a reunion between the people of Israel and its G-d and Torah. A central pillar in the structure of Jewish resistance against anti-Semitism has always been the unclouded awareness that our own mental and emotional alienation from Torah is one of the most potent unseen allies of our enemies. Through weakening our Jewish pride, such alienation makes us receptive to the unspeakable suspicion that perhaps our enemies are at least a little right. Sometimes it even reduces us to the degradation of "embracing the soul of our enemies," through blind aping of their way of life, at the very moment that they physically seek to destroy us.

On other hand, rootedness in the knowledge and the love of Torah gives us an inner strength and dignity that physical persecution can never take from us. It spares us the humiliation that is the cruelest torture our enemies can inflict upon us. It safeguards us against the emotional collapse that is the lot of victims of physical persecution, who are made to feel that their own existence is senseless. In one of the Jewish schools of Nazi-occupied Vilna, a Jewish child was asked: "If you could go to a non-Jewish school outside the ghetto, in which you could enjoy the warmth of sunshine and the pleasures of going to parks and playing with toys, wouldn't you rather go there, even if you had to become a Nazi to do so?" The child answered : "No, I would not. I would rather stay here." The choice of that child is the secret of Jewish eternity. In a lightning flash, anguished as we are by the hester panim (hiding of the Divine countenance) which attends Jewish suffering at anti-Semitic hands, we learn once again, that unless the soul takes precedence over the body, humanity must return to the jungle. We also learn, from the child's answer, that the only hope for a humanized humanity lies in the assertion of that supremacy.

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