I am wiling to admit that I really like the giant Chanukkah Menorahs that the Lubavitch movement plants in public spaces all around the globe. They really are amazingly prolific Chanukkiah planters – from Chiang Mai in Thailand to Punta Del Este in Uruagay by way of Holders Hill in Mill Hill and Golders Green, you can find a giant Chanukkiah in countries throughout the world.
Last time that Chanukkah coincided with Christmas my-daughters Alice and Miriam and I were planning on going to our local giant Chanukkiah just outside Golders Green station on Christmas day to join in with the lighting as a gesture of Jewish solidarity among the tinsel. Imagine my horror then when I drove past the regular annual location of a thirty foot tall Chanukkiah to discover that it wasn’t there. It had been replaced with a little seven foot tall Chanukkiah which did not look at all impressive – and certainly unable to help my daughters to cope happily with the images of Christmas all around them in other public spaces. Jewish paranoia set in – was this the work of antisemites?
No – apparently what had happened was that London Transport had that year built a new bus stand on the area where people used to be able to gather around the original 30foot tall Chanukkiah. So the giant Chanukkiah has been moved – to the North end of Golders Green Road, where there used to be a Harvester Restaurant and, at 6.00pm each evening you could go to enjoy the public lighting of the Chanukkiah, just as this Chanukkah every night of the week there is a public Chanukkiah lighting here at EHRS or on Zoom for all to join in.
Over recent years one could be forgiven for seeing anti Antisemitism in all kinds of places. There have been significant rises in the number of racially motivated attacks on Jews, Synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in the UK, especially this year, including the dreadful situation whereby the parents of young people from our Synagogue who go to Jewish schools have been advised that their children should not wear uniform that identified them as Jews on their way to school.
I used every year to take the fifteen year olds of my previous Synagogue to the Communite Juive Liberal De Paris Synagogue which now is situated near to the Bastille district but, when they were located in the Clichy district, never opened the shutters on their windows for fear of vandalism and where, their rabbi, Pauline Bebe told me that before they moved location a few parents had refused to allow their children to attend their religion school or any other Synagogue activity due to fears for their safety – hardly an attitude that the Maccabees would have endorsed – to give up your Jewish practice because potential difficulties, but you can understand their fears.
And something else much closer to home – we are now .so used to the idea that we have to have volunteers from the community standing on security at gates of the Synagogue, and patrolling our part of Stonegrove for the duration of every service and major activity in this Synagogue that we hardly stop to recognise that it is actually very abnormal for a religious community to feel the need to protect itself in such a way in this country. Our local Catholic churches and mosques and Hindu temples don’t need to – why does a Synagogue?
Amos, in our Haftarah portion, asked whether a lion would ever roar if it had no prey, or whether a snare could spring up from the ground if there was nothing for it to catch. Are we not justified in being concerned that there is a rise in fear of anti Semitism?
Some will say that there is no rise in anti-semitism, or to give it its more modern title – Judeaophobia. What there is instead is a rise in anti-Zionism – opposition to the State of Israel.- and that in a Europe where 60% of the population, according to a recent survey think that Israel, is the single most significant threat to world peace – that is hardly surprising – however over the top such a belief might be.
But is anti-Zionism really different to anti-Semitism? The Brussels based Israeli academic Emmanuele Ottolenghi’s asks “ Is the denial of the right to Jews to identify, understand and imagine themselves and consequently behave as a nation not discriminatory to Jews as a whole whether or not they live in Israel? If this right must be granted to Palestinians, Tibetans, South Africans, French and Germans then why not to Jews? Is it because of an opposition to Jewish self identity which must be called anti-semitism?” (Guardian Nov 29th 2004)
Ottolenghi makes an enlightening case for how to know when anti-Zionism is certainly anti-Semitism. He suggests that it is when traditional anti Jewish racial stereotypes are used with respect to Israel that you can know that we are leaving the appropriate grounds of criticism of Israeli government policy and entering the racialist, unacceptable territory of anti Semitism of which all Jews should be suspicious. It is when there are intimations of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, dominate governments, to run world finance that you can dismiss the writer or speakers opinions as anti-Semitism pure and simple.
It is not anti-Zionist to criticise the policies of this or any government of Israel, though we should be wary of what former US representative to the UN, Jeanne Kirkpatrick called the game of “What Israel should do” played in the Diaspora where as she said “any number can play, there are no rules. The best part is that if you lose, you pay no penalty. The Israelis pay the penalty” (Jerusalem report 15/12/03 p2) Our criticism of Israel’s government has got to recognise that there are six million people in the population of Israel under daily threat of rockets from Gaza fired by people who have no regard for their own or anyone else’s life. Yet as Rabbi John Rayner z’’l pointed out quoting from the prophet Isaiah – “for Zion’s sake we cannot be silent.” (Isaiah 62).
World Jewish pride in Israel will always demand that she is an exemplar of Jewish values of justice and mercy towards the homebred and the stranger alike. Whatever is happening in Israel this must be where we are headed – a Jewish state to be proud of for the excellence of its values not only of its army.
Julie Burchill is noted as a controversialist – but just before she left the Guardian newspaper she wrote a series of articles questioning what she sees as a rise in anti-Semitism in the guise of anti Zionism. One of these articles she began with a quotation from a letter written by the civil rights leader Martin Luther King where he wrote “Anti-Zionism is inherently Anti Semitic and ever will be. What is anti-Zionism. It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord to all other nations of the globe. It ‘is discrimination against Jews because they are Jews.”
We should not accept it or collude with it – which I believe we do if we accept that anti Zionism is any less serious than full blown Judeophobic racism. The story of Chanukkah comes each year to teach us that our Jewish identity is not to be given up for the sake of fear. Whether that Jewish identity be our attachment to Israel as a wellspring of Judaism, whether it be the freedom to wear a Cippah in the street or school (and obviously the equivalent freedom to wear a headscarf if your religious identity so demands it), whether it be the freedom to light a giant Chanukkiah in Golders Green or just the freedom to stand in safety in your Synagogue and read a Torah portion at your Bar or Bat Mitzvah or any other time in your life Chanukkah says we must stand up for each and everyone of these rights.
In today’s portion we heard about Joseph in jail at little over age seventeen. This was a boy whose Jewish identity might have been completely subsumed into the Egyptian identity granted him by Pharaoh – indeed Pharaoh gives him a name when he becomes viceroy of Egypt Zaphnath-Paaneah and Joseph becomes married to Asenath, the daughter of an priest of the Egyptian religion of the time. But no – Joseph holds his Jewish identity and his place in the Jewish people so dear that his children Eprhaim and Manasseh spawn two whole tribes out of he twelve tribes of Israel. Those tribes keep their Jewish identity both through the good times in Egypt and the hard times of slavery. That is why we bless our sons by saying “may you be like Ephraim and Manasseh.
There are for all of us times when it may be inconvenient to be a Jew and to stand up for who you are, what you believe in and what your people hold dear. I hope that it will never be unsafe for you to do so but if it does then we have to be inspired by the story of the Maccabees who said this far and no further.
Tomorrow at EHRS we are holding four learning sessions from 10:30-12:00 called Israel at our Heart. They are: Rabbi Steven Katz on the men and women who created Israel Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers and Reverend Ray Gaston on ‘Journeying together, A Priest and a Rabbi and the challenging and changing dialogue around Israel and Palestine over a decade’. Rabbi Mark Goldsmith on talking about Israel with your non-Jewish friends. Rabbi Tanya Sakhnovich and Lisa Morris on self-care when Israel is under threat. Do come to join us if you want to add to your thinking on these issues.
May we be among those who stand up for Judaism and the right of our people and all peoples to value their identity and teachings and practices and their homeland and to have them valued by others in any decent society and never denied to them.
