Dear Shalom,
Like my dear friend and colleague Rabbi Jeffrey Kobrin, I am troubled by recent events in Charlottesville, although the questions they raise for me are different from his. Instead of looking to last week’s parshah about tearing down monuments, I look to this week’s, which opens with the verse, “Appoint judges and officers in every town the Lord your God has given you.†Clearly, appointing officers who enforce the law is necessary to ensure that chaos does not overrun society. One of the questions that concern me in the aftermath of Charlottesville is, how could the police stand by and allow an illegal counter-protest to walk into and physically confront a legal march, no matter how vile and detestable the organizers of the march were? There seems to be no consensus as to who threw the first punch, but wouldn’t the vile murders have been avoided if the police had enforced the law and kept the groups separate? As a Jew who grew up in America I wonder, is the rule of law eroding there? Of course the neo-Nazi marchers were morally wrong, but the appetite of the counter-protestors for disrupting legal gatherings and illegally tearing down statues [
www.nytimes.com] is not likely to be satiated with targets we all agree are morally odious. In this context I highly recommend seeing the commentary of the Torah Temimah on Exodus 23:6, who cites a Rabbinic teaching that when the Torah says “Do not subvert the rights of the poor in their disputesâ€, it is referring to the wicked, who are “poor†spiritually. This teaching prohibits failing to enforce the law when the wicked benefit from it.
Another question that disturbs me as a Jew is, is America losing its resolve to support free speech? What kind of backlash can we expect if hate speech is outlawed? On college campuses today there are twisted but loud voices that equate Zionism with racism and even Nazism. Is it hard to imagine that a revision to the first amendment could galvanize Israel’s opponents to seek to ban Zionist talk as well? And what will happen to those who publicly teach traditional Torah values on sexual mores and gender categories that go against politically correct memes? I for one – and I know I am not alone – am more frightened by the shift in American society against free speech than I am of a march by a few hundred racists to save a statue.
I am also growing concerned about hysteria in our media, which sometimes seems to touch even some of our Jewish leadership. My breath was almost taken away as I watched the following exchange from the New York press conference:
President Trump: “You had people - and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists; they should be condemned totally. You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. The press has treated them absolutely unfairly…â€
Reporter: “You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?â€
Isn’t it obvious that the president was not defending neo-Nazis, and that this reporter heard what she wanted to hear instead of what was said? Yet I keep seeing articles in the New York Times and other publications that insist the president defended neo-Nazis. Could there not be people who marched to oppose the removal of a historical statue without personally identifying with the worldview of the figure depicted in the statue or with the organizers? For a parallel on the side of the left, consider the 1995 Million Man March on behalf of black Americans [
en.wikipedia.org]. The event was organized by Louis Farrakhan, widely known as a virulent anti-white racist and anti-Semite. Yet it would be difficult to label all participants with such views, most notably the iconic defender of human rights Rosa Parks who spoke at the event. More recently, in “The Women’s March†female protesters against president Trump rallied in an event led by four women with checkered resumes who proudly endorse cop murderers and anti-Semites [
www.nytimes.com]. Should all participants suffer the same categorization? And so why are we crying foul over the president’s remark that there were good people on both sides? Or over his remark that there is blame to cast on both sides, when he was clearly talking about the brawls in the street that resulted from the illegal counter-protesters confronting the legal march, and not the ramming murder? I agree with the RCA that words have consequences, but my concern is much more with the words of the media than with the president. The media’s hysterical drive to paint president Trump as some kind of Nazi supporter has consequences too. Did we forget that only recently a man of the left opened fire on a group of men playing baseball when he confirmed they were republican congressmen? I wish the ADL and other Jewish groups would condemn the inappropriate Nazi and Hitler comparisons we keep hearing about president Trump from pundits and entertainers – comparisons which cheapen the meanings of those words and threaten to erode the memory of what real Nazis and the real Hitler were – as vociferously as they’ve condemned the president for things he never meant to say.
In conclusion, I know that as Jews we must be constantly vigilant about anti-Semitism. As a youngster I was taught there were two kinds of anti-Semites. The Esav-type seeks our physical destruction. The Lavan-type seeks to destroy our spiritual and ideological identity. The two types are represented by our enemies in the stories surrounding the holidays of Purim and Chanukah, respectively. Due to recent historical events, previously unimaginable, we have rightfully become extremely sensitive to the first type, perhaps overly sensitive, but understandably so. But we must not lose our vigilance about the second type. Breakdown of the law, erosion of free speech, and public hysteria are not good things for the Jewish people, especially when groups responsible for these developments tend to have negative views about aspects of our core identity, be they the state of Israel or certain traditional Jewish values and norms. I want to echo Rabbi Kobrin’s conclusion that we need to stick together, to be vigilant together against all kinds of dangers, and to support one another in our efforts to nurture and cultivate strong Jewish commitment, identity, and faith.
Warm Regards,
Mark Smilowitz
Beit Shemesh
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/25/2017 03:44AM by mlb.
