Rabbi's Corner

We read the following in this week's parashah, Parashat Re’eh: "You are the children to HaShem your G-d... For you are a holy nation to HaShem your G-d, and HaShem has chosen you to be a treasured nation from all the people on the face of the earth. (Devarim 14:1-2) From these verses we see that Am Yisrael (the People Israel) have a unique characteristic that no other nation on earth has and that no other nation can replicate.  The problem is that there is a significant number of Am Yisrael, especially here in America, who not only do not appreciate our unique role as Jews that they play in this world, but they deny it altogether.  And it is because of this that they look to other peoples and other cultures for satisfaction and justification of their existence.

Recently, “Tablet” magazine published an article dated June 16^th of this year entitled “The Un-Jews: The Jewish attempt to cancel Israel and Jewish peoplehood.”  It was written by Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy.  Of course, Sharansky was a “refusenik” and Soviet prisoner before being released and emigrating to Israel.  He eventually held ministerial positions in no fewer than four Israeli governments.  Troy is both a presidential historian at McGill University and a Zionist activist.  The article they co-authored addresses the dozens of Jewish Studies and Israel studies scholars and academics who signed a “Statement on Israel/Palestine” in reaction to the “crime” they believed Israel committed in dealing with the May onslaught of missiles from Gaza at the hands of Hamas: “This language (i.e.- the words used in the Statement) effectively denied the need for a Jewish state, thereby declaring war not just on Israel’s existence but on modern Judaism as we know it.  Within American Jewry, this surge in anti-Zionism openly targets the broad Zionist consensus the Jewish world developed after the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel – as well as the post 1990’s Birthright consensus embracing Israel and Israel experiences as central Jewish-identity building tools…We call these critics ‘un-Jews’ because they believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways that most Jews do Jewishness.”  Sharansky and Troy explain that these anti-Zionists join a long history of “un-Jews” pointing out that they are most active when they seek “to join with non-Jews in advancing quintessentially Jewish ideas of brotherly love, equality, and social justice unmoored from their Jewish context and their Jewish delivery systems.”  They point out that the most successful of these un-Jewish movements has historically been Christianity, and Am Yisrael knows only too well what the results of that “pairing” have been.

Sadly, our history is replete with such attempts made in previous eras.  Examples include the Hellenist Jews who embraced everything Greek, the Jews who followed Jesus (including today’s so-called “Messianic Jews” and “Jews for Jesus”) believing him to be the Mashiach (the Messiah), as well as the Jews who fully embraced Socialism/Communism from the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg to those Jews who helped to create and carry out the Bolshevik Revolution to the “Overstay Sekcia” (the Jewish Section of the Communist Party) whose Jewish members did all they could to destroy both Russian Judaism and the Russian Jewish community.  All these “un-Jews” eventually perished at the hands of those whom they sought to embrace in their head-long rush to destroy Judaism.  And, as the late Yogi Berra said: “It’s deja vous all over again!”  The tragedy of this outpouring of Jewish self-hatred is that it has an even greater presence in the American Jewish community than ever before because of the use and availability of social media.  And it is because of this that far too many unlearned and uneducated Jews gravitate to the “un-Jewish” side completely forgetting who they are and why they are here in this world.

We need to remember that we are the earthly representatives of HaShem, and this should cause us to behave accordingly.  As the Torah tells us, we are indeed a "treasured nation!"  Not because we are born a people better than any other people, but because we are born into royalty as the children of the King of Kings.  The Torah has outlined our mission in this world and we must do all we can do to complete it.  May we not fail in this task!