I offered this sermon the night before a 19 year-old man entered a Chabad Congregation in Poway, California, killed an Eishet Chayil, Lori Kaye z"l, and injured Rabbi Goldstein and two others.
Dvar Torah on Sri Lanka
Attacks
April 26, 2019
Last weekend, on Easter
morning in Sri Lanka, a series of explosions at Churches and at upscale hotels
sent the overwhelmingly Buddhist country into panic. Over 250 people were
killed in the terrorist attacks carried out by a Muslim Ethno-Nationalist
terrorist group that had affiliated itself with Da’esh, the Caliphatist
Terrorist group often commonly called “ISIS.”
Da’esh claimed that this
attack was carried out in response to the attacks against mosques in
Christchurch, New Zealand. In that attack, of course, a Christian
Ethno-Nationalist attacked worshippers at mosques. Following on the heels of a
Christian Ethno-Nationalist attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,
we have been increasingly concerned about rising violence based in religious
conflict.
Christians generally respond
differently to these kinds of attacks than we Jews do. To an extent, this is
based on collective memory. We know well that when hatred of Jews becomes
violence against Jews, it can spread quickly if we do not assert ourselves and
have allies join us. We cherish our allies. When we have lacked them or they
have failed to stand with us in generations past, our meager number has been
overwhelmed time and again. Jews represent 0.2% of the world’s population. Two-tenths
of one percent.
And we respond as a people,
not as a diverse faith community as Christians do. We connect to members of
Jewish communities everywhere, no matter what kind of Judaism they practice or
if they practice Judaism at all. We feel their joy and their pain. We know the
struggles of persecuted minorities.
It has been our role in many
nations, to lead the fight to defend minority rights, to not only stand at the
forefront of the cause of immigrants, but to walk into the waters of hatred, like
the midrash tells us that Nachshon did when the sea split, demonstrating faith
and courage. We walk into the waters of hatred with faith and courage that we
will make those waters split too. We will part the waters of hatred and march
ever forward toward the promised land in which our house will be the house of
all peoples, welcoming, embracing. Not all of our brethren, of course, are
similarly welcoming, but the vast majority are, around the world.
Others do not share this
vision. Ethno-nationalists who believe that people who are like them are the
only ones who should be able to live among them and who are willing to engage
in violence to make that happen are among the greatest of threats to peace
wherever they are.
There are certainly very fine
people who are devoutly religious Christians, Muslims, and Jews. We know that.
But there are no fine Ethno-Nationalist advocates for violence against anyone
not of their in-group. It is not acceptable to allow political correctness or
concern about harm done to the image of the broader group to avoid both severe
condemnation of and taking action against Ethno-Nationists.
We condemn Kahanists. Those
who preach Meir Kahane’s hatred were banned from the K’nesset for decades. A
party that is somewhat related to it rose up and was again condemned even
though it did not take close to the same position. Israelis and American Jews
alike are concerned to even have one representative of that political party in
the Knesset, as a member of the United Right party, and attention will be paid
not to allow hateful views to impact how Israel treats its minority
populations. Just as we will all pay attention to how confrontational rhetoric
that at times may have crossed the bounds into overt bigotry will or will not
result in changes in policy.
We also perceive the threats
coming against Jewish communities from Christians and from Muslims in different
parts of the world. We cannot understand attacking innocents. The lone example
that people can name, Baruch Goldstein, stands out in glaring uniqueness in our
people’s long history.
Never have we as a people
believed that sacrificing ourselves to harm others will benefit us in the world
to come. We’ve never had a tradition in which Jews would willingly sacrifice
their own lives to harm members of other religious or ethnic communities. It
didn’t even happen before or during the Holocaust when such extreme action
under duress may have made some sense. Instead, our tradition repeatedly
stressed, even then, “Whoever saves a single life, it is as if they saved the
entire world.”
So it is all the more
difficult for us to look at what happened in Sri Lanka and understand, how
wealthy and successful educated people could, based on their religious views,
calmly walk into the midst of innocents and commit atrocities. How a pregnant
mother could do so, ending the lives of her two children as well in order to
harm police officers. In our tradition, there is no question that we would
rather die ourselves. That much has been proven by our history.
We respond to that level of
evil, evil that we have seen in generation after generation, so often affecting
our community—we respond to that evil with a commitment to not follow it with
our own hatred as pained as we have been at many of those times.
Having just come through the
holiday of Passover, we easily recall the story to mind. “Let my people go,” we
said. “We cried out time and again.” “We walked away.” “When horse and chariot
came against us,” we did not turn. “We walked on.” “When Amalek attacked the
weak and vulnerable,” we pledged to remember. Only once from the time we
entered Egypt to the time we left and wandered the wilderness did any Israelite
lift a hand, and Moses fled for having done so. God fought our battles for us.
This Wednesday is Yom
HaShoah, the day on which we remember and mourn. We do not do so with pledges
of retaliation and vengeance, nor with anger and hatred. We remember to remind
ourselves that it is our duty to never let it happen again, to never again allow
that kind of hatred that could result in the slaughter of innocents to occur.
This year, we not only mark the day amid a time of rising Antisemitism, but at
a time when the world mourns the effects of irrational hatred.
It reminds us, as we look
back into the darkness of the past and out into the darkness of the world
around us, that our mission as a people has long been, “To be a light unto the
nations,” a beacon in the darkness. And as Hillel said, “At a time when there
is no humanity around you, be a human being.” That is our challenge. Let us be
lights of caring and love amid the darkness of indifference and hatred.
Shabbat Shalom.
