This sermon was delivered at our 5785 Erev Rosh Hashanah service. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Contact Chai podcast.
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A few months ago, Mishkan welcomed 30 (!) brand new Jews into our people. They finished the conversion process in August, either at the Community Mikvah in Wilmette or in the waters of Lake Michigan. For them, this Rosh Ha’Shanah means entering the coming year as a Jew for the very first time. It is an incredible privilege to be present for each person’s immersion. They enter the mikvah just as they entered the world, without clothes or jewelry or makeup. They take a deep breath and dunk their head under the surface, suspending themselves in the water for a few seconds. And when they resurface, they say the blessing: Barukh atah HaShem eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav vitzivanu al ha’tevilah, Blessed are You, Source of All Things, Who brings holiness into our lives through our actions asking us to immerse ourselves in water. This blessing is their first words as a Jew; the immersion their first mitzvah.
And when they come out of the water, they are wrapped in a towel and the embrace of their loved ones. It is a moment overflowing with joy.
But this is also a challenging time to be choosing Judaism. For this cohort, their first class was only a few days after October 7. In that moment of grief, with over a thousand people murdered and hundreds taken hostage, we could not have predicted how the year would unfold – the unbearable heartbreak of so many innocent people killed, the darkening shadow of antisemitism in the diaspora, and painful questions around our relationship with and responsibility toward the State of Israel. I sat with my students as they wrestled with what it means to be a Jew in this moment, tangled in the gordian knot of power, privilege, and persecution.
There is a teaching about joining the Jewish people, recorded in the Talmud (Yevamot 47a). The rabbis dictate that when someone comes to convert at a time such as this, we say to them: What did you see that made you want to be a Jew? Don’t you know that the Jewish people are anguished, oppressed, despised, and harassed, with hardships frequently visited upon them? And if this person says: I know, and I nevertheless desire to do so – then the rabbis accept them immediately, to begin a course of study.
I first encountered this text in rabbinical school. I’ve used this text in classes that I’ve taught to spark discussion about the challenges of conversion. But until this year, I had never found myself actually having this conversation with my students. Don’t you know that we are in pain? Can’t you see how much people hate us? What did you see that made you want to be a Jew?
Over several years (and the past few months in particular) we’ve seen a steady increase in antisemitism and acts of hate, around the world and here in this country. It’s hard to track this troubling trend for a couple reasons. First, there is no national standard for reporting hate crimes and so for many cities and towns we rely on the incidents that make headlines, whether in the news or on social media, rather than any official data. Second, it demands that we define what is and what is not antisemitism at a time when that definition has become dangerously politicized.
Take a report released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that tallied a 360% increase in antisemitic incidents in the three months following October 7. A lot of the data is deeply concerning – 56 reported instances of physical assault, 554 reported incidents of vandalism. We’ve seen it here in Chicago: a swastika drawn on the Hillel Social Room at Loyola University, hateful leaflets with bags of rat poison left on cars in Bucktown and Lincoln Park. But also folded into the ADL’s staggering statistic are rallies that included antisemitic or anti-Zionist rhetoric.
We have to be careful to distinguish between people protesting the actions of Israel and people using the veneer of moral outrage as a veil for their hatred. Anti-Zionism and antisemitism should not be conflated, even if they can overlap. And those of us who are in the work of Palestinian solidarity must be honest about how certain expressions of anti-Zionism push out and alienate Jews, who largely feel connected to Israel in some form or another. Many of these are Jews who have joined in parallel the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been calling for a ceasefire, an end to the occupation, and holding Netanyahu (and his allies) accountable. Being a Zionist can and should include a critical eye toward the State of Israel. And being an anti-Zionist does not have to mean and should not include a denial of Jewish indigeneity. Our history connects us to Eretz Yisrael. This doesn’t mean that the State of Israel needs to look the way it does now. But the fact is seven million Jews, alongside seven million Palestinians, call that land home – just as their ancestors did.
A recent survey out of Brandeis looked at the attitudes of undergraduates who attend universities with a significant number of Jewish students. They found that two thirds harbored no hostility toward Jews or the State of Israel (I couldn’t decide if this number was relieving or concerning, although in the inimitable lyricism of Meat Loaf “two out of three ain’t bad”).
Among the remaining third, it was split in half between those hostile toward Jews but not Israel and those hostile toward Israel but not Jews. Only a small number actually expressed views that could be categorized as both anti-Zionist and antisemitic. Yet the lead researcher warned that these groups sometimes draw upon similar rhetoric, and that the term “Zionist” – unmoored from its original meaning – can become “a different way of expressing the same old hostility, the same old prejudices.” We need to be wary of conspiracy myths, regardless of the label that is being used, and we must understand how slogans and statements are shaped by histories that precede this moment.
All of this proves how hard it can be (but also how necessary it is, especially for people who consider themselves part of these movements) to separate those who are critical of Israel from those who, whether consciously or through their own ignorance, hate Jews.
It’s clear that something has shifted. We have been placed at the center of a national debate that calls our sense of belonging and safety into question – including spaces where we previously felt like we fit in. I think this is particularly true for those of us who have found solidarity and shared purpose with political projects on the left, whether it’s the fight for reproductive freedom or the movement toward racial equality. It can feel like our pain is not being taken seriously by people we had come to think of not only as allies in the fight for justice, but as friends. Stories of young people being assaulted on their way to Shabbat dinner or storefronts being vandalized simply because they belong or cater to Jews belie the narrative of assimilation and success we have found in the Goldene Medina, and are horribly reminiscent of warning signs we should have paid closer attention to in the Old Country. We’ve watched as our grief has become the exception for national sympathy – take the failure of women’s rights organizations to show up for victims of gender based violence on October 7, or worse the interrogation of these stories as propaganda. As Franklin Foer noted in an article published in the Atlantic earlier this year, the Golden Age of American Jews might be coming to an end.
A report released by the American Jewish Committee, which surveyed people in the months following October 7, found that 4 out of 10 Jews have personally experienced antisemitism within the last year. Yet a figure I find even more telling (and more disturbing), is that nearly half have significantly changed their behavior out of fear of becoming a target – including hiding visible symbols of their Jewishness.
I’ve had the thought myself, walking out of services – the guilt of hiding that I am a Jew smaller than the fear that tells me to take off my kippah, folding it into my pocket before getting on the bus home. I know that I should say: be brave. But hiding my kippah is not just about avoiding violence (god forbid), but also pointed stares and awkward conversations. I was recently at a bar with some friends and someone I just met, finding out that I’m Jewish, asks: so where do you stand on Israel? And in a split second I am forced to run through the calculus of what answer this person is looking for, what amount of discomfort I’m willing to tolerate, how much I want to let this conversation disrupt the evening, while holding the frustration that I am the only one there being asked this question just because I’m a Jew.
This is one of the things that is most dispiriting about antisemitism: that it not only manifests as acts of violence or vandalism, but also masquerades behind the seemingly innocuous – a simple question, a casual statement. It makes the work of naming it especially fraught, as we constantly calculate what is borne of ignorance and what is borne of hatred. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once wrote that antisemitism is so hard to define because it presents as a series of contradictions – a virus that mutates to infect the body politic, adapting to any attempt to seek it out and eradicate it. It appears on the right. It appears on the left. It appears in the center. And so we find ourselves trying to draw attention to a thing that, when looked at directly, suddenly disappears or obfuscates itself behind something that isn’t a big deal. It’s just a question, right?
One of the activities that I do with my conversion students is a mapping assignment. I give them about fifty pieces of paper, printed with different moments of antisemitism that have occurred across history – from the Third Council of Toledo in 589 CE, which severely restricted the rights of Jews in Christian Europe, to now. Their job is to place them in the correct century and map patterns they see across time.
One of the purposes of this activity is to show them how antisemitism thrives in close-association with the truth. Let me give you an example. It is true that the Rothschilds were one of the most powerful banking families of the Industrial Age. It is true that they gave loans to European powers and therefore could be a decisive force in the wars between them. But it is also true that the Rothschilds got their start in banking because handling money – understood to be a dirty, sinful profession – was one of the few jobs available to Jews for centuries. And it is certainly not true that they orchestrated wars for their benefit. Nor do they pull the strings of governance, even if you give them new names like Soros or Adelson.
Bari Weiss, in her book How To Fight Antisemitism, writes: “Antisemitism is fueled by the malicious but often feeds on the ignorance of the well-intentioned.” The social structures that allow the wealthy to profit from armed conflict should be dismantled. This is a just cause. But to assign blame to Jews is not only false, but distracts us from the actual sources of injustice and inequality. Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, in their book Safety Through Solidarity, observe that the simplified explanation offered by antisemitic conspiracies of Jewish control “protects the powerful by telling the disempowered an inaccurate story about how to free themselves.”
I am intentionally putting Bari Weiss, Shane Burley, and Ben Lorber in conversation with one another because antisemitism is part of the backdrop for all Jews – no matter where we fall on the political spectrum. Another purpose of the mapping assignment is to help my students understand how this hatred shapes the way Jews walk through the world. It can be odd to think of carrying the weight of antisemitism as a learned behavior, especially for people born into the Jewish community. For so many of us, the posture of vigilance and suspicion required to navigate a hostile world is inherited, perhaps innate; a knee jerk reaction to the lessons of history.
Research has shown that intergenerational trauma is not only taught (although the environment in which we were raised plays a key role in this), but can be passed through our DNA. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, who is a leading researcher on epigenetic responses to trauma, studied the children of Holocaust survivors and found that there were changes to their genetic structure particularly around the production of and response to cortisol, the stress hormone. She notes that “epigenetic influences… represent the body’s attempts to prepare offspring for challenges similar to those encountered by their parents.” Reinforced by observing our relatives’ behavior and internalizing stories of the past, we subconsciously respond to warning signs that our safety is being compromised.
Overall, my experience as a Jew-by-Choice is one of acceptance if not admiration. Yet, the fastest my status as a convert gets used as a means of dismissal or delegitimization by other Jews is in hard conversations around antisemitism (and by extension, the role of the State of Israel as a safeguard against another Holocaust). There is a feeling that it’s something I can’t really understand, that no amount of education or empathy can replicate the epigenetic instinct – inherited and reinforced through a lifetime of experience – to always have an exit plan just in case.
It’s a cheap and hurtful way to win an argument. But in some ways, the people who use my conversion status as a trump card are not entirely incorrect. I walk through the world as a white, cisgender male who has been socialized to navigate the dominant culture of this country with ease. When I take my kippah off, people don’t immediately perceive that I’m a Jew. (And depending on what I’m wearing or how I’m acting, I’m not always read as queer either). Not only do I have the safety of hiding behind the identities given to me at birth, I benefit from their privileges as well.
Now some converts do come to our people with an understanding of what it is like to bear the weight of inequality and injustice. Their other identities – whether gender, sexuality, race, disability or chronic illness – already attune them to the insensitivity and brokenness of the world (in fact, it is this experience of the world’s brokenness that drives so many folks to choose our community, as a people historically conscious of and committed to fixing it). And it is also true that antisemitism is a unique hatred. As Burley and Lorber note, it “scrambles many of the categories [that we] commonly use to understand identity and oppression.” As Jews we stand at the intersection of power and powerlessness, privilege and prejudice, being pulled in and being pushed out in a way that doesn’t sit well with how we conceive of other systemic problems like racism.
Something I tell my students is that we learn about antisemitism to understand it, of course, but also so that we are better at recognizing it and combating it. I’m reminded of the posters for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, you might know the ones I’m talking about. They read: “The next time you witness hatred. The next time you see injustice. The next time you hear about genocide. Think about what you saw.” We as Jews-by-Choice may not have been inculcated with an instinct for identifying antisemitism, but we can (with practice) become more aware of how it continues to manifest around us – and, perhaps more importantly, how it both commands and constrains this community that we have chosen to become a part of.
An epigenetic trauma response is vital for our survival… sometimes. The problem with any behavior pattern is when it becomes activated in a context when it is not needed (my therapist would be very proud of me right now). It doesn’t make them “bad” per se, but these responses can become a barrier to living well. Dr. Dana Baerger describes this like a drowning child who manages to grab a lifejacket and survive. And so when she gets out of the water, she keeps it on just in case. While she is still a kid, no one thinks much about it – kids do a lot of funny things. But as she grows up, the thing that saved her life now bumps into other objects, separates her from people she wants to get close to, and generally gets in the way of living. It’s not that the lifejacket is bad or wrong. It’s just not the tool she needs to make it through her world today.
The trauma response can obscure our ability to see what is in front of us for what it is. It distracts us from everything else, narrowing our vision to only notice warning signs – reinforced by the constant drip of bad news we receive through our phones, or the existential dread conveyed by the latest headlines. When we only look at what we’re running from, it becomes almost impossible to envision what we’re heading toward.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, just a few weeks ago. She spoke about the problem of only seeing the Jew as an object, something that is acted upon, rather than the Jew as a subject. She explained that the only way she is able to do the work of fighting what is being done to Jews, is to remember what we do.
If you have ever joined us for morning minyan (online, weekdays, 8 am central), you’ll know that I like to begin Tuesday by inviting people to share something they are grateful for. This gratitude practice is encoded in our tradition. The rabbis teach that we should start each day with the words: Modeh ani l’fanecha ruach chai v’kayam – Grateful am I, as I sit before you, living spirit of the world. Gratitude is not a practice in naivete, but an act of resistance. We don’t recognize and embrace our blessings to ignore the difficulties we face, but to create space to celebrate the things that we’re overcoming those difficulties for.
There’s a story about a group of rabbis who visit Jerusalem shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple. As they walk among the rubble of the Temple Mount, they see a fox emerge from its ruins. While the other rabbis start weeping, Rabbi Akiva begins to laugh. They ask him, “How can you be laughing right now?” Rabbi Akiva responds, “And why are you weeping?” The rabbis say, “Look around you! This was once the sacred center of our tradition, the gathering place of our people – and now foxes have made their home in its ruins.” Rabbi Akiva explains, “But this is the fulfillment of a prophecy told by Uriah, which reads: Zion will be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become rubble, and the Temple Mount an untamed forest. And if the words of this prophet are true, then the words of the prophet Zecharia must also be true: There shall yet be elderly sitting in the squares of Jerusalem.” Rabbi Akiva’s joyful optimism is not an act of ignorance. He is acutely aware of the ruins around him. Yet he insists that alongside their indescribable grief, he and his companions hold hope as well.
It is clear that the heartbreak of the past year is something that we will carry into this one. For our own health and wellbeing: we need to remember why we’re living, and not simply focus on how we are surviving. This doesn’t mean that we need to get rid of our trauma response entirely, but every now and then we should gently set it aside to create space for something else.
Being a Jew is not just a burden. It is a privilege. This is one of the gifts that converts offer us (among the many gifts they bring to our community): an unapologetic, unfiltered love of Judaism – a desire to learn it, practice it, and not take it for granted. And this year, I believe this to be true more than most. These are people who came to Judaism at a time when it was not only hard to be Jewish, but dangerous. So I asked them: What did you see that made you want to be a Jew?
Here are a few things they told me. Anne said that the heart of Judaism is reflection, questioning, interpretation, and discussion. And Audrey said that because of this, she doesn’t feel deficient if her belief is changing or fluctuating, and she doesn’t feel alone in it either. Nikki said that Judaism calls her to have joy in a broken world, and also at the same time, calls her to repair it. Josh said that our tradition reminds him that there is something that should be honored and kept holy in each person and in aspects of the world itself – places, gatherings, objects, songs. Sloan said marking Shabbat gives them an opportunity to look forward to the end of each week as a chance to recenter themselves in time. After putting a mezuzah on his door, Alex said that touching it is a daily reminder to walk a little more upright, be kind and understanding, and have a good attitude when he’s outside of his home. And Andrew said that even though he might not do every mitzvah, every commandment, this tradition is now part of him – and his practice, whatever it might look like, ensures that our community will continue for another millennia.
Michel Hazanavicius, the French director, in a recent essay in Le Monde wrote that, although he is Jewish, he never thought much about it. But over the past year, with the rise of antisemitism, he has felt “more and more obligated to be a Jew – to react as a Jew, to think as a Jew, in short, to be a Jew above all else.” I sincerely believe that one of the best responses to hate is to be more unapologetically the thing that people hate. It is true that antisemitism is a problem. It’s true that we should be aware of that fact. There may be moments when we need to make decisions out of a need for safety. But we cannot let these facts become the reason for our smallness. We must not let what is done to us make us forget what we do.
There is a trope of the rabbi giving the “get more involved” sermon at the High Holidays. I never thought it would be me. But here we are. I’m doing it now.
I want you to do more Jewish. I don’t care how you do it. But I want you to do it. Sign up for a class. Come to services. Listen to our podcast. Listen to any podcast. Wear a kippah. Wear a Star of David. Say yes to the lovely boys from Chabad who want you to wear tefillin. Buy a mezuzah. Bake challah. Host a Shabbat meal. Learn how to read Torah. Learn how to study Talmud. Learn the stats of every Jewish baseball player who has played for the Cubs (or the White Sox). Have hard conversations about Israel and Palestine, and if you’ve never been, visit in a way that aligns with your Jewish values (we might be planning another trip for next summer). Stand up for what you believe in. But also keep your heart open to learning, for what we call makhloket l’shem shamayim – arguing for the sake of a greater truth rather than to satisfy the need to be right.
This last year, I was given thirty reminders of how Judaism is a life-giving, life-affirming tradition that leaves this world just a little better than we found it. It was the reminder I needed, at a moment that seemed to demand despair. As these brand new Jews stand on the stage at Kol Nidre in just ten days – holding the Torah, wearing white, some of them fasting for the first time – I am grateful for their presence, as examples to all of us: how we can hold the weight of what it means to be a Jew with gratitude, with joy, and with love.