5787 Yom Kippur Sermon: Antisemitism and the Burden of Dignity

Earlier this year, I traveled to Atlanta for a summit that brought together Black pastors and rabbis.

We were not there simply to celebrate a partnership that belongs to history. The relationship between Black and Jewish communities in America has been meaningful and complicated, filled with extraordinary partnership and moments of real distance.

And right now, that distance hurts.

Many Jews have watched as parts of the Black community have overwhelmingly embraced the language of “Free Palestine,” sometimes alongside rhetoric that we experience as dismissive of Jewish history, Jewish fear, and the importance of Israel.

That pain is real.

But in Atlanta, we had a hard and frank conversation after building our camaraderie  - many of the pastors shared something else with us. When many of their parishioners hear the word “Zionism,” they don't hear Jewish self-determination. They hear oppressor.

And as painful as that is for me to hear, I cannot shame someone into hearing that word differently.

I can explain. I can disagree. I can tell the Jewish story.

But I also have to ask how we got here.

Because somewhere along the way, we failed at tending this relationship. We failed to make sure that people who once knew our story intimately still understood why a Jewish state existing matters to us.

I say it because blame won't rebuild one.

We weren't in Atlanta to romanticize the past or shame one another for the present.

We were there to figure out what comes next.

How do two communities, each carrying our own wounds and experiences with hatred, show up for one another without pretending those experiences are the same?

How do I ask you to understand why Zionism matters to me while being willing to understand why that same word lands so differently for you?

How do we remain fiercely proud of who we are while making space for the dignity of someone else's story?

One quote from that gathering has stayed with me:

“The tension dignity creates is a burden for humanity.”

We all believe in dignity when dignity costs us nothing.

The real test comes when someone else's dignity requires something from us. When it requires us to give something up. To share space or power we are accustomed to holding. To reconsider an assumption. To hear a story that complicates our own.

I felt that in Atlanta.

It would have been easier to tell my colleagues why they were wrong about Zionism. Harder was hearing why the word had come to mean something so different in their communities, without surrendering what it means to me.

That is the burden.

Dignity does not require me to agree with you.

It requires me to believe that your story is worth hearing even when it complicates mine.

Dignity becomes sacred when it becomes burdensome.

Jews should understand this.

We know what happens when a society decides that the dignity of one group has become negotiable.

Antisemitism is remarkably adaptable. Jews have been blamed for capitalism and communism. For refusing to assimilate and assimilating too successfully. For being powerless parasites and all-powerful conspirators.

The accusation changes. The mechanism remains remarkably consistent.

The world is frightening. The world is complicated. Find someone to blame.

And what frightens me right now isn't only that antisemitism exists.

It is the growing comfort with saying it out loud.

In June, I posted a video because I was so shocked to see the antisemitic slurs directed at Rabbi Zushe of Chabad Palisades.

The video I made, That video received more than a thousand hateful comments of its own.

Every old trope you can imagine. Jews control the world. Jews are fake victims. Zionism is racism, memes of someone holding their “jew card” even Juice-box emojis, which would almost be funny if they weren't so pervasive.

And my experience is hardly unique.

Last year, the ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in America. More than 2,600 of them were in just three states: New York, New Jersey, and California. That is an average of 17 incidents every single day.

This is not in our heads. It is real.

But it CANNOT paralyze us.

Because if fear becomes the defining feature of our Judaism, then the people who hate us have already taken something precious from us.

I want antisemitism gone.

Desperately.

I want our children to wear a Magen David without thinking twice. I want Jewish students to walk across college campuses without being held responsible for a government thousands of miles away.

I am afraid of anti-Israel sentiment in America that so often crosses from criticism of policy into something much darker. I am afraid when Zionism itself is treated as a slur, or when the very idea that Jews might need a state of our own is treated as uniquely illegitimate.

And at the same time, I am deeply troubled by this Israeli government. I am adamantly opposed to settler violence and those who turn a blind eye to it.

I am afraid of a generation abandoning the importance of a Jewish state.

And I am afraid of an undiscerning support for Israel that asks us to abandon our own moral judgment.

In America right now, trying to say all of that can feel like carrying a boulder uphill.

If I criticize this government and don't rush, without taking a breath, to add that I stand by Israel's right to exist, there are people ready to question whether I believe it. And even when I do, there are people within our own community ready to question whether criticizing Israel publicly means I am failing to stand by our homeland.

I disagree.

Voicing my disappointment, voicing my concern, while voicing my love is standing by.

Sometimes love means saying: I am here. I am not leaving. And this is not okay.

And frankly, I am furious about what has happened to the word Zionist. Extreme voices have attached it to ideas and actions I categorically reject, while others use it as an accusation.

I refuse to let either extreme define the boundaries of my love.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught that antisemitism is fundamentally about an inability to make space for difference. “The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”

For antisemitism to thrive, conspiracy, scapegoating, collective blame, and dehumanization have to become acceptable.

Which means we cannot combat antisemitism by simply shuffling the hate to someone else.

We cannot say: stop scapegoating us, scapegoat them.

Stop fearing us, fear them. That is not defeating hatred. It is redirecting it.

I want antisemitism gone.

But not like this.

Not if our safety requires somebody else's humiliation. Not if our dignity depends upon denying somebody else's. Not if we defeat one hatred by feeding another.

Hatred is an ecosystem.

We cannot nourish the conditions that produce hatred and expect antisemitism alone to disappear.

And none of that means LESS Jewish.

Quite the opposite.

There are more than eight billion people walking around this planet and roughly 16 million Jews.

Congratulations. You won the lottery. I mean that.

I love being Jewish. I am immensely proud to be Jewish. And I want my children to feel lucky that they inherited this tradition.

Wear the Magen David. Find ways to make Shabbat relevant. Learn Torah and argue about it. Know our stories. Sing our songs. Celebrate our holidays. Laugh at the jokes nobody else understands.

I want our Jewish pride to be larger than life.

Because a people that knows how to celebrate its own distinctiveness should understand why another people treasures theirs.

We won the lottery. And what we won was an inheritance.

Torah. Ritual. Joy. Argument. Questioning. Responsibility.

And this brings me to tikkun olam. Tikkun olam is necessary.

But tikkun olam cannot be the primary explanation of why we are Jewish.

Pursuing social justice does not replace the deliciousness of challah around a Shabbas table with your family.

It does not replace singing together. Learning Torah. Lighting candles. Telling our stories.

I understand the criticism that in some corners of the Jewish world, tikkun olam became so expansive that Judaism itself seemed to disappear inside it. Especially in Liberal Jewish movements. If tikkun olam simply means taking whatever political position I already hold and attaching a Hebrew phrase to it, then yes, we have diminished Judaism.

But I categorically reject the conclusion that the pursuit of justice and human dignity is some modern liberal corruption of our tradition.

You have to go all the way back to the Bible to find Jews obsessed with justice.

Our prophets were furious when we separated ritual from responsibility.

Isaiah looks at people fasting and asks what the fast means if it does not change how they treat another human being.

Amos demands that justice roll down like waters. Micah asks us to do justice, love goodness, and walk humbly with God.

These weren't liberals. They weren't conservatives. They were our prophets.

Judaism is older than our political binaries. And generations later, Hillel takes that prophetic demand and puts it into three questions:

Im ein ani li, mi li?
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

We have to be for ourselves. We have to protect Jewish life. Fight antisemitism. Defend our community. Pass this tradition to our children. But Hillel doesn't stop there.

U'chshe'ani l'atzmi, mah ani?
If I am only for myself, what am I?

What am I if I demand dignity for my difference but remain indifferent to yours? What am I if I fight antisemitism by simply shuffling the hate to someone else? And then:

V'im lo achshav, eimatai?
If not now, when?

That isn't modern liberal Judaism. That just Judaism. We don't repair the world by becoming less Jewish. We repair the world as Jews. We need the prayer and the justice.

We need the Magen David proudly around our neck while our hands are extended toward someone else.

Our Judaism should not disappear in our pursuit of justice. It should be visible in the way we pursue it.

And this brings me back to Atlanta.

Because for all the difficult conversations we were having, that room was overflowing with joy.

I don't think I have ever said “Amen” or “Hallelujah” as many times in my entire life as I did in those few days in Atlanta.

And I meant every one of them.

Our experiences are different, and we should never flatten them. But there was something powerful about two communities that know what it means for the world to find reasons to hate us simply for existing as ourselves, and that have cultivated extraordinary pride and joy in precisely who we are.

Being there with my colleagues, it was almost as though an ancient muscle of joy was being reawakened in me.

Antisemitism makes us vigilant. But vigilance cannot become our Judaism. The people who hate us do not get to determine what it feels like to be us.

And then we arrive here, on Yom Kippur. Judaism could have given us a confession in the singular. Ashamti. I have sinned. Instead we say: Ashamnu. We have sinned.

We confess things we may not personally have done because Judaism understands that I can be innocent of an act and still bear responsibility for the world in which that act occurs.

I can be innocent of the hatred directed toward me and still be responsible for the world I help build in response to it. Isaiah asked thousands of years ago: what is the point of the fast if it does not change us? And we cannot pretend to care about Ashamnu if we do not care about confronting hatred and uplifting dignity beyond these walls.

Yom Kippur does not ask us to beat their chests. We beat ours.

Maybe this year, one of the sins we should confess is how easily we convince ourselves that hatred becomes acceptable when it is directed at the people we have decided deserve it.

It doesn't.

We cannot demand that the world recognize the dignity of Jewish difference while participating in the degradation of anyone else's dignity.

We cannot spend this day confessing in the plural and then walk into the world caring only in the singular.

Ashamnu is not simply an admission of guilt. It is an acceptance of responsibility. Responsibility for the hatred I tolerate. For the dignity I defend. For the dignity I ignore. For the world I help make possible.

“The tension dignity creates is a burden for humanity.”

Yes.

To be fiercely, ridiculously proud of who we are, and to allow that pride to demand more of us, not less.

When these gates close, that responsibility leaves this room with us.

The question is what we will do with it.