(RNS) — As someone who looks the part of the Orthodox Jew I am — dark suit, white dress shirt, black fedora — I’ve experienced my share of hatred directed at me as a symbol of the Jewish people.
But, despite the “Heil Hitlers!” and assorted insults shouted from windows and cars, I have never thought of my country as harboring any substantial streams of antisemitism.
There was, of course, the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom (worth some Googling, if you’re too young to remember). But it was, I assumed, an aberration.
Making that assumption harder to cling to were subsequent events, like the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shooting, the 1999 Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooting, the 2002 one at Los Angeles International Airport, the 2006 Jewish Federation of Seattle one and the 2009 one at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. And, more recently, the 2017 “Jews will not replace us!” chant in Charlottesville, Virginia; the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh and those in Poway, California, and Jersey City, New Jersey; and the Monsey, New York, Hanukkah stabbing attack, all the following year. And scores of less deadly assaults over those years perpetrated on Jews simply for being Jews.
A personal punctuation of the plague happened in May of last year, when a fellow sat down opposite me on the Staten Island Ferry and, entirely unprovoked, began shouting insults and curses at me at the top of his considerable lungs, to the point where bystanders felt compelled to summon police.
But even all those things didn’t prepare me for the truly surreal sight and sound of American citizens tearing down posters of civilian hostages kidnapped and held by vicious terror groups — while shouting praises for those pledged-to-Jew-murder groups.
As Bari Weiss recently put it: “We expected Hamas to try to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate when they did.”
Were the demonstrations clearly limited to protesting Israel’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of men, women and children, I would take issue with the demonstrators but at least understand their feelings. But too many of the actions and slogans of what purport to be “pro-Palestinian” activism are barely disguised, if at all disguised, Jew-hatred.
The Anti-Defamation League reports that there have been more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. since Oct. 7, when Hamas gleefully butchered more than 1,200 men, women and children in Israel.
According to the Jewish religious tradition, until the Jewish messiah arrives, there will always be those who hate Jews. Their hatred may take any number of forms and manifest itself in an assortment of ways. If one “reason” for hating Jews eludes the haters, they will find another. The excuses for the hatred will test the limits of preposterousness. And so it has been.
If they haven’t appeared already, temporary structures of varied materials, shapes and sizes will soon be sprouting like post-rain mushrooms across Israel and throughout Jewish neighborhoods in American cities and around the world.
Ultra-orthodox Jews build a Sukkah, a temporary structure built for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood, Sept. 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
The holiday of Sukkot (“tabernacles” or “huts”) takes its name from those structures, which Jews are enjoined by the Torah to inhabit for a week each year. The walls of sukkot can be made of any material. But in fulfillment of Jewish tradition’s insistence that the dwellings be “temporary” in nature, their roofs must consist of pieces of unprocessed wood or vegetation, and the material may not be fastened in place.
At first glance, living in sukkot — by definition vulnerable to wind, rain and pests — would seem only to compound any innate Jewish proclivity to worry. And yet, at least for Jews who appreciate the holiday’s import, the very opposite is true.
For Jewish tradition considers the sukkah symbolic of the divine “clouds of glory” that the Torah recounts and that protected the ancestors of today’s Jews as they wandered in the desert after leaving Egypt. The miraculous clouds destroyed whatever obstacles or noxious creatures stood in the people’s path.
Thus, the sukkah represents a deep Jewish truth: Security is not a function of fortresses; it is a gift granted, ultimately, from above.
There is a Yiddish poem by poet and writer Avraham Reisen (1876-1953) that is sung in countless sukkot. The words, and a melody to which they were long ago put, are both stirring.
The poem/song paints the picture of a Jewish father sitting in his sukkah, as a storm rages. His anguished daughter tries to convince him that the sukkah is about to fall. He responds (rendered, keeping the poem’s meter and rhyme scheme, from the Yiddish):
Dear daughter, don’t fret;
It hasn’t fallen yet.
The sukkah’s fine; no need for fright.
There have been many such fears,
For nigh two thousand years;
Yet the little sukkah remains standing upright.
Many a sukkah, of course, has in fact succumbed to a storm. And many, many a Jew has been murdered, in antiquity through recent times.
But as Reisen’s metaphor poignantly reminds us, there is timeless meaning in the fact that the Jewish people, as a people, has survived.
The sukkah’s fragility teaches that true security, in the end, comes from only One Place.
So, all the world’s craziness and evil, all the unreason and hatred and plotting and violence, cannot shake the serenity of the sukkah. We have, if only we merit it, an impenetrable shelter.
And so, no matter how loudly the winds may howl, no matter how vulnerable our physical fortresses may be, we give harbor to neither despair nor insecurity. Instead, we redouble our recognition that, in the end, God is in charge, that all is in his hands.
And that the sukkah, as it has for millennia, continues to stand.
(Rabbi Avi Shafran writes widely in Jewish and general media and blogs at rabbishafran.com. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
