ArcaMax

The only question now is, “What does Oct. 7 mean?”

The prophet Zachariah taught in chapter 4, verse 6, lo b’ chail v'lo b’koah ki im beruchi,“Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” This was the philosophy of Jewish survival for 2,000 years when we had to make due with piety not power. After Oct. 7, piety alone is just not enough to keep the Jewish people safe in a bloody and broken world.

For the rabbis dying as a martyr, al kidush hashem, for the sanctification of God’s name, was the only possible response to oppression. After the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 and the Crusades in 1098; after the Khmelnitsky and Kishinev pogroms in 1688 and 1903; and after Oct. 7, 2023, we have provided the world enough Jewish martyrs. We need to provide the world with more Jewish survivors.

I admit that the wielding of real power in the real world is not a morally simple act, but it is an essential act for the survival of Israel and the Jewish people living in the diaspora. In the aftermath of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I vote for a Judaism that includes both piety and power. I vote for a Jewish state of sometimes morally compromised living Jews rather than a Jewish state filled with the burning piles of the corpses of morally perfect but dead Jews.

After Oct. 7, the myth that America is a safe haven for the Jewish people has been shaken. It was not just the terrifying rise of Hamas-loving students on campuses, but the sudden realization that America is not only filled with those who respect and love the Jewish people (many of them are my readers). America is also filled with those who want us dead. It was not the Germany of 1938 but the America of 2024 that had broken glass on the streets from antisemitic riots.

What we have witnessed this past year has been a fracturing of the American promise to the Jewish people made by George Washington. He was asked by the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, whether Jews would be welcome in the United States. He wrote to them,

“...the Government of the United States... gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. ... May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Well, George, we are afraid. Our vines and fig trees and your promise are no longer providing sufficient shelter for us from the harsh glare of modern Jew hating. I did not see this wave of antisemitism coming and I did not properly gauge its size. It proves that the philosopher George Steiner was correct when he wrote in his book “ Language and Silence”, “Somewhere the determination to kill Jews, to harass them from the earth simply because they are, is always alive.”

When the antisemites accuse Israel of being a colonizing power, not enough Jews and particularly not enough Jewish young people know how to explain to them that, as Bill Maher has said, “The only place Jews have ever colonized is Boca Raton.”

Our children and all of us must be able to loudly call out what the writer James Kirchick has brilliantly identified as,“One of the greatest mass delusions of the 21st century which is the belief that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians. This grotesque moral inversion – in which a genocidal terrorist organization that instigated a war with Israel by committing the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is absolved of responsibility while the victim of Hamas’ attack is charged with perpetrating the worst crime known to man and all this began taking shape before Israel even launched its ground invasion of Gaza.”

I pray that when our kids get bullied or badgered on campus that they are knowledgeable enough and brave enough to defend themselves and to defend the Jewish people and to defend the State of Israel with facts and courage.

I want the dream of 2,000 years to be their dream now.

I want the Jewish people to live in the real world where our Judaism can embrace both power and truth.

I want Oct. 7 next year to find the hostages sleeping peacefully in their own beds; Jewish students walking to classes on campus without fear; and Israel living in peace with all its neighbors; and I want God to shelter us all beneath the shadow of God’s wings.

I want us to remember and I want us to live.

Am Yisrael Chai!

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)

©2024 The God Squad. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

(c) 2024 THE GOD SQUAD DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.