A year of anxiety and anguish for the Jewish people

(RNS) — Often the prelude to a cataclysm is a single moment — a shot is fired at Fort Sumter or in Sarajevo. At other times the cataclysm itself unleashes waves of consequence, and it is impossible to know where they might lead. The Jewish world is living both in the moment of Oct. 7, 2023, and in everything that has transpired since then.

We are whiplashed by the explosions of animosity, by the vitriol, by the internal divisions and by the unending grief. Never in my nearly 40 years as a rabbi have I heard so many expressions of despair from the Jewish community. Never in my 40 years as a rabbi have I come so close to it myself.

For years, there were intimations that the world was stockpiling tinder before the Oct. 7 massacre came along and lit the fuse. There were antisemitic outbursts in Europe, in the United States and, yes, on college campuses long before Oct. 7.  Who now speaks of the attack on a synagogue in Lyon in 2002, the riots in Oslo in 2008-9 or the 2018 Berlin attacks? Do we still speak of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi, kidnapped, tortured and killed in France in 2006 or the subsequent torture of 19-year-old Mathieu Roumi? These incidents could easily be multiplied many times over, and all were long before 10/7.

In America before 10/7, there were assaults, attacks on synagogues and mass murders in synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway. On college campuses, more than a quarter of students identifying as Jewish reported being the target of antisemitic remarks — before Oct. 7. The fuel was ready for the spark.

Now, a year later, we live amid a stunning increase in antisemitism. It hardly matters how finely you slice the divide, if divide there be, between Zionism and antisemitism. Repeatedly the overlap has proven itself: in chants to push the Jews into the sea, in attacks on American Jews and American Jewish institutions. It has shown itself in rhetoric that reminds us how protean is antisemitism: If you hate capitalists you can hate Jews; if you hate communists you can hate Jews; if you hate religious fidelity you can hate Jews; if you hate assimilation you can hate Jews. Jews are the universal resort for conspiracy theorists and presumptive liberationists, a people both beneath contempt and yet somehow capable of controlling the world.

And now less than a century after a third of all the Jews on earth were murdered (a pretty sound argument against Jews controlling that world), the one nation on God’s earth that is singled out for unique obloquy, repeatedly condemned and anathematized and targeted for destruction, is the single nation that houses that people. 

So there is anger and outrage and a willingness to be combative, to be sure. But I can tell you, both as a rabbi and as someone who works daily with the Anti-Defamation League, the prevailing emotion is grief. Parents write asking me what to tell their children. How do you say you are hated for what you are, and there is barely a corner on earth where you can escape that taint? 

There is antisemitism in countries that have no Jews. There are statistics for antisemitism in places like Japan, which is surely not due to the negligible number of Jews who live there. Ayaan Hirsi Ali once said of growing up in Somalia: “I didn’t know any Jews, and I didn’t know anyone who knew any Jews. But I knew that Jews were evil.” Where or how does one tell one’s children — you are safe and loved? 

I have visited and traveled through Israel twice in the past year. And if we in America feel grief, it is nothing to the stunned pain of Israelis. One of my friends, the writer and translator Evan Fallenberg, told me that many parents who have children in the army have signs on their door: “Do not knock.” They know what a knock can mean. Each day they live in mortal fear of that knock.

The Israelis I spoke to are not unaware of the devastation of Gaza and the pain it is causing. Many of the people in Gaza worked in Israel, were treated in Israel’s hospitals and were close to Israelis. One of the many leitmotifs of agony is that the kibbutzim were so effectively raided because Gazans who had worked there, in some cases for years, supplied the terrorists with maps and other information to more effectively attack. The lines of agony run across the Middle East and across the faces of everyone I met there. 

A year later, is there hope? Of course, there is always hope. Wars may end, peace may come and hatreds may ease. We have seen this happen, almost miraculously, in human history.  But right now we are consumed by the anxiety and anguish of this year. Having just passed Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, we pray fervently for a New Year of healing and of peace. 

(David Wolpe is a Rabbinic Fellow of ADL, the Anti-Defamation League.)