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“Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.” Some might consider this statement by Pharaoh in Exodus 1:10 the first official antisemitism. If I had not given the source of the quote, many might have suggested that this was said yesterday by the antisemite of the day. Sadly, the first was not the last in a potentially eternal expression of the corrosion of humanity. There has been much written and said about the origins and proliferation of antisemitism, and I don’t have anything new to add to the subject. I can observe that American antisemitism is somewhat different from European antisemitism, which is an older, seemingly genetic version. One would expect in Europe an ancient version still spouted by neo-Nazis, right wing H groups, and those whose sense of morality is centered solely on the fight in Gaza, ignoring the clearly identifiable horrors occurring in South Sudan, where 11 million people have been displaced, as just one example. In America, we have left wing antisemites who have excluded progressive Jews from their activities and right wing antisemites who don’t think that we are white. Throughout the panoply of human history, evidence of antisemitism is omnipresent. Yet what is even more powerful is the resilience and perseverance of the Jewish people.

One might have expected that after the destruction of the First Holy Temple in 586 BCE and the exile of a significant part of the Jewish community living in the Promised Land that Judaism might disappear. Yet what happened what the opposite. Jewish life flourished in Babylonia. The Babylonian Talmud was composed and finalized there around the year 700 CE, nearly 1300 years later. The destruction of the Second Holy Temple in 70 CE by the Romans seemed to signal the end of Judaism, yet the portability of Judaism and the evolution from being priest-based to rabbinic-based led to its continued existence. The Crusades, which spanned more than two centuries, approximately 1096-1300 CE, might have wiped out the Jewish communities of Europe, but our people persevered. The Bubonic Plague, which many blamed on the Jews poisoning the water wells, wiped out somewhere between 30 and 50% of all the population of Europe, yet Judaism survived. The Jews were expelled from Spain, Portugal, and England, just to name a few, and made new homes elsewhere and continued. The Holocaust saw the death of two-thirds of all of European Jewry, yet we persevered. Israel has survived continuous assaults since the founding of the modern Jewish State in 1948, and will survive October 7, 2023.

It would be easy to reflect on the above history and see Judaism as a depressing thing. It is most assuredly not. What is more depressing?  The inhumane treatment of human being upon human being, our inability not to live together in peace and harmony. I saw an estimate of approximately 10,000 wars in the history of humanity on this planet, and imagine out in space, somewhere before a space traveler would approach the Milky Way Galaxy, there is a buoy adrift with a warning to avoid the blue planet that is the third one from the star whose precise coordinates are given, with an intergalactic warning: Those people are crazy!

We will continue to teach “love your neighbor as yourself”, “remember the stranger, because you were a stranger in a stranger land” and “protect the orphan and the widow”. We will continue to insist that we are far more alike than we are different. We will model the potential for solving the ills of society that plague us: food insecurity; home insecurity; inequalities in education and jobs; misogyny, anti-LGBTQIA+ and racism. We know what it is like to be treated as less than human, have incorporated that distilled essence into our beings, and must force feed it to an unaccepting society. Yet we persevere. We do so because that is the mission foisted upon us by God, and because deep down, every single human being knows that it is right. As one of the oldest religious civilizations on this planet, we have observed much, and have an oral history, not only of our own that goes back 4,000 years, but also what we have seen others do and say. We continue to persevere because we are resilient. Not only is the Torah a Tree of Life, but so are we.