I hate how it creates a state a mind so relentlessly negative, so embattled, so insecure. I hate how it turns the happiest, calmest people into furious Twitter warriors, into single-issue advocates. I hate the ugliness, the unhappiness, in the Jewish experience that it creates. I hate the paranoia, and how it makes Jews turn on Jews.
I hate how it seems to blot out everything else. How it makes Jewish life, the Jewish conversation, defined by others, not by its own terms. I don’t want to live like this.
It took me a long time to realize this, but I feel I have learned that the key to living with the flu is not to let my Jewish identity be defined by anti-Semitism. A Jewish life defined only by anti-Semitism, even the righteous fight against anti-Semitism, is a curse.
For Jews confronting the disease, the most important thing to remember and to share is the beauty of Judaism. Tweet a recipe, a book, a novel, not just your fury. Attend a Shabbat dinner, host one, light the Sabbath candles. Don’t just sit there seething; slip into the morning prayers, if only to meditate; say a blessing over a glass of water, as a point of mindfulness; or do whatever it is that you most identify with from Jewish culture or tradition. A bagel, an old song, even a joke. It all has healing power.
Don’t let your Jewish identity be defined by those who hate you. Instead make it a source of strength, something they can never touch, what our ancestors wanted Jewish life to be. They saw the rituals, the togetherness, the songs of the Sabbath as a palace in time, not a cage, a way of life whose purpose was to bring the deepest calm.
And the deepest confidence. Because whenever a Jew wanders around the British Museum in London, or the Met in New York and sees the Roman, Egyptian, and Assyrian remains, they can think, I was there. We are the people of forever. Not only the people killed by Hitler.
I think too many Jews have forgotten this. You can only live with anti-Semitism by not living by anti-Semitism. Etz Chaim is not only the name of the synagogue in Pittsburgh where the massacre took place last October. It is also one of the most beautiful phrases in our morning prayers, a description of the vitality of Judaism: “A tree of life”—Etz Chaim—“to those who seize it.”
Europe's Ubiquitous Anti-Semitism
