Dear Friends,

I invited people to come to the service the Friday night during Pesah with a response to the question: How was this year’s seder different from all other years?  Of course, I was thinking about October 7 and was particularly interested in how Hamas’ massacre and Israel’s response had informed people’s sedarim.  As expected, many people spoke about how they included the hostages at their seder, while others spoke about attendees who though physically refused to participate as they had in previous years.  One person present at the service took the opportunity to remark on the emergence of anti-Israel demonstrations, and how antisemitism had sparked them.  “It’s just like Germany before Krystallnacht,” she opined    Our congregation’s recent trip to Berlin proved this to be wrong.

            One of the most unexpected revelations I experienced on the trip was at Wansee where the extermination of the Jews of Europe was formulated.  Wansee House itself was what one might expect of a gracious home of the period.  The rooms were spacious and carefully appointed, yet ghost-like, but the accompanying photographs populated the meeting room with well-known Nazi criminals gathered.   More gripping was a museum exhibit consisting of many banners listing the hundreds and hundreds of laws from 1933 that restricted Jews from living the life that many of them had lived for centuries in Germany.  This all came to a crescendo in early November 1938 with the pogrom called The Night of Shattered Glass.  The police did nothing to protect German Jewish citizens or their synagogues and businesses.  To the contrary, the police were complicit in the destruction of Jewish property and in the wounding and killing of Jewish men, women, and children.  The fathers of two RSNS members were arrested immediately following the program and taken to Dachau with thousands of others, all of which are documented at the Topography of Terror in Berlin.

            What is happening on college campuses where anti-Zionism has morphed into antisemitism is as frightening as it is terrible.  But unlike the events in Germany in the 1930’s, local state and federal governments are actively and passively protecting Jews everywhere.  Our congregations see it regularly in our synagogue parking lot where neighborhood police frequently station themselves.  Every demonstration and rally that I have attended in support of Israel these past seven months – at local synagogues, at the United Nations Plaza in New York City, and on the National Mall in Washington – has been visibly secured by police there to protect us.  Nor it is unusual to see and hear government officials at these demonstrations.  Such things were unimaginable in pre-war Germany.

            As we have come to learn in our Shabbat Seminar on Jewish Power and Powerlessness, Jewish People in the United States have confidently relied on the protection of the Constitution since March 9, 1789.  What has given Jews power internally has changed over the course of the past 235 years, but the guarantees of the Constitution have assured us that Jews will be protected not because others look kindly on our People, or because we have proven to be of benefit to the country.  No, protection comes from the legal obligation that our government has to its citizens.  That is the source of our power on which Jews have built internally.

            America and Americans are far from perfect, but as long as the Constitution stands, Jews and others – all of us – cannot be denied our basic rights among which is our protection from intolerance and hatred.            

Still with hope, Lee

Shaliyah 5.6.24