Weekly Torah Portion

What began as a horrific physical attack on Jews in Israel has now also become a war of open hate against Jews even here in the United States. In a video watched more than three million times, hundreds of pro-Hamas Columbia University students one evening this week mobilized to form a human chain since, it was announced, “we have a Zionist at the entrance of our encampment” needing to be pushed away. The crime of the intruder? Silently wearing a Star of David necklace.

While these vile demonstrations have not been without opposition from Jewish leaders and some high-ranking politicians, they still give pause to all of us watching.

That the physical conflict in our beloved homeland and antisemitism emerging in so many places is still occurring on Pesach, the festival celebrating our nationhood, invites us to continue pondering what it all means. Maybe such recurring moments of ferment can also be uniquely galvanizing.

Some of our inner turmoil might be calmed by considering the raison d’etre of Israel’s existence altogether: What exactly lies at the core of tradition that has endured for so long and today animates so much of the Jewish state’s culture?

In a 1943 speech, the extraordinary scholar Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993) noted how, in beseeching Pharaoh to free the Jews, Moshe and Aharon first referred to the “G-d of Israel.” But when the Egyptian ruler said he knew no such deity, they then invoked the “G-d of the Hebrews.”

Rabbi Soloveitchik explained that when Jews “turned against the chain of tradition and rejected the notion that we are an eternal people,” G-d appears as but that of the Hebrews. Those are the times of “fire and brimstone, when there are streams of tears and rivers of blood. The G-d of the Hebrews is revealed in a thoroughly profane and confused world, one in which Satan is triumphant and assimilation prevails, when the realm of the sacred has been defiled and the world is filled with rampant materialism and spiritual debasement.”

The “G-d of Israel”, however, is revealed to the Jews as a result of our “love and devotion to Him, derived from the patriarchal tradition passed down to their descendants.” We experience the G-d of Israel when we “safeguard the radiance of the Shabbos queen and the sanctity of Jewish family…[and] live according to the written Torah and its oral tradition.”

The hate of those who wish us harm in so many places should not shape our identity and cannot define what it means to be Jewish, though. Again, Rabbi Soloveitchik:

“Religious life is like a tree that requires the right nourishment and light. When all that it feeds on is raw anxiety, and its branches incline only in the direction of pragmatism, religious life cannot flourish for long. Fear of death cannot give life to spiritual rhythms and ritual sensitivities that require a joyous affirmation of life.”

Being part of a people spanning four millennia does not have to be defined by when we or our homeland is targeted by enemies. Memory and awareness can be channeled in service of a greater purpose. Because our many struggles are actually outstripped by treasures of Jewish wisdom and experience, if we might set out to unearth them.