Message From The Rabbi
by
Senior Rabbi, Alan Green (00-Present)
Published in the Shaarey Zedek Shofar in July 2006
“It was the best of
times, it was the worst of times,” is the way Charles Dickens
famously begins his novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens
gives a perfect introduction to the complex currents of late 18th-century
Europe. It also happens to be a perfect description of our own era.
First, the good
news. At the beginning of the first century CE, the Jewish people
had reached an apex of power and influence. There were probably
close to ten million Jews in the Roman Empire at that time, and this
number represented about ten percent of the total population of the
Roman Empire.
In a generation
that was experiencing “the twilight of the gods”—when the old
Hellenistic religion was being called into question, and when there
was a nearly universal search for truth—Judaism was a powerfully
attractive body of spiritual teaching, with many non-Jews actively
seeking conversion, or else engaging in study about the God of the
Jewish people.
However, in the
year 70 CE, and then again in 135, the Romans brutally crushed two
revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of
thousands of Jews, and sending hundreds of thousands more into
slavery and exile. For the next nineteen centuries, we wandered the
world, victims of oppression, persecution, and expulsion wherever we
went.
But now, in 2006,
for the first time in nearly two millennia, there are more Jews
living in Israel—the successor state to Judea—than any other place
on Earth. Israel’s Jewish population now stands at 5.6 million.
North America’s Jewish population—5.5 million in 1990—dropped to 5.2
million in 2002, and now finds itself in steep decline. Low
fertility rates combined with high levels of assimilation will, in
all likelihood, further reduce the Jewish population of North
America to about 2.6 million by the end of the century.
After six million
Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis in
Europe, two main centres of Jewish life remained: North America and
Israel. This binary system remains in place today, but a critical
tipping point has just been reached. As the Jewish population
continues to rise in Israel and fall in North America (and the rest
of the Diaspora), Israel increasingly becomes the centre of the
Jewish world.
That Israel should
regain its status as the spiritual capital of Jewish life is clearly
part of the unfolding mega-history of this generation. That is the
good news. Now, for the bad: there is a price to be paid for this
radical transformation, because it critically alters future
prospects for Jewish survival.
For the past 2,000
years, we Jews found protection in our dispersion—protection not for
individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and
massacred—but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated
here, we could survive there. We could be persecuted in Spain, but
find refuge in Constantinople. We could be massacred in the
Rhineland during the Crusades or in the Ukraine during the
Khmelnytsky Insurrection of 1648-49, yet survive in other parts of
Europe.
However, Hitler put
an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism
wedded to modern technology, with its railroads, bureaucracies, and
industrial strength gas chambers, could take a scattered people and
“concentrate” them for the purpose of annihilation.
The founding of the
State of Israel in 1948 was a Jewish declaration to a world that had
allowed the Holocaust to occur that the Jewish people would
henceforth depend on no one else for their self-defense. Over the
last 58 years, Israel has become “Fortress Judaica,” with a Jewish
army, navy, and air force that prevailed in three great wars of
survival (1948-49, 1967 and 1973).
But in a cruel
historical irony, constructing Fortress Judaica has required a high
concentration of Jews in one place—putting all the eggs of Jewish
survival, as it were, in one small basket: a tiny territory, only
eight miles wide at its waist. Because of its relatively small size,
Israel represents a tantalizing target for those who would seek to
finish Hitler’s work.
And Hitler’s
ideological successors are now alive and well in Tehran. The world
has paid ample attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s
declaration that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” However, much
less attention has been paid to the pronouncements of other Iranian
leaders about exactly how Israel would be “eliminated by one
storm,” as Ahmadinejad has promised.
Former Iranian
president Hashemi Rafsanjani has explained that “the use of a
nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it
will only damage the world of Islam.” This perverse logic is
impeccable, and the intention is clear: a nuclear attack would
effectively destroy tiny Israel, while any retaliation would have
little effect on a Muslim civilization that stretches all the way
from Mauritania to Indonesia.
As it races to
acquire nuclear weapons, Iran has made it clear that if there is to
be an attack on its nuclear facilities, Jews will be the first to
suffer. “We have announced that wherever [in Iran] America does make
any mischief, the first place we target will be Israel,” says
Iranian General Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani. Hitler was only slightly
more direct when, seven months before invading Poland, he announced
that if there was another war, “the result will be … the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
Last week Professor
Bernard Lewis, the grand old man of Islamic studies, confessed that
for the first time he feels it is 1938 again. Professor Lewis didn’t
need to mention that in 1938, in the face of that gathering storm—an
increasingly aggressive enemy of the West, and of the Jews—the world
did nothing until it was too late. How quickly we forget. How
difficult for us to learn the lessons of history.
Ironically, when
Iran’s mullahs acquire nuclear capability in the next few years, the
Jewish population of Israel will just be reaching 6 million. For
years, “Never Again” has been the mantra of those who have sworn
never to allow a recurrence of the Holocaust. But our experience
indicates that one genocide makes other genocides even more likely.
Since 1945, the
world has been witness to numerous episodes of “ethnic cleansing”:
in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in Rwanda and, as I write, in Darfur. How
likely is it that we will learn the lessons of the 1930’s in time to
prevent a Third World War, or a new Holocaust? The next few years
will tell.
Here is wishing
everyone a beautiful summer, and a High Holy Day season of
spiritual, emotional, and intellectual renewal.
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