Rabbi ARI LEV: "Emerge from your chamber and join me": Constructing a theology of Jewish safety through solidarity
Kol Nidre 5785
Oct 11, 2024
Watch
I would like to dedicate this sermon to the possibility of teshuvah with my brother.[1]
--
I remember clearly the first time I felt unsafe as a Jew.
I was 17 years old and just starting my senior year of High School. My mom and I were in the midwest visiting a few potential colleges. I was being hosted by some students and we were in the dining hall having dinner. I am not sure why or how, but the conversation turned to tattoos we might want to get. And the two people hosting me started joking about getting tattoos of swastikas. Mind you, I was committed to a sleepover with two people who were making jokes about the Nazi Holocaust – and I have never liked sleep overs. Needless to say, I didn’t tell them I was Jewish. I definitely didn’t apply to that school. All I could think was, get me back to the east coast, to the goldinah medina of Great Neck. It was perhaps one of the few times I longed to return to Great Neck, the abundantly Jewish suburb of New York City I grew up in. It gave me insight to what I imagine must be the daily encounters with antisemitism of Jews outside of the east coast.
Just one year earlier I had encountered the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust on a trip called the March of the Living. The March of the Living, a trip to Poland with other teenage Jews, was a very formative experience for me as a young person. 20 years later, I remember clearly that I did the 2 mile walk to Birkenau barefoot. When I allow myself to pause, I can still feel the gravel under my toes. I remember the wrought iron sign at the entrance to Auschwitz that reads, Arbeit Macht Frei - Work will make you free. I remember standing inside the showers that once gassed young women who after surviving Auschwitz thought they had arrived at something better. I remember feeling terror. I remember the butterflies and the sounds of birds chirping. Signs of life in a place where millions of my people had died. I remember wanting to pray but not knowing the words and so I would just sway back and forth.
I remember the year I spent Passover in Istanbul, Turkey. I was on a Quaker study abroad program with 20 other young people. Even though my cohort had enthusiastically volunteered to make a seder with me, I felt lonely. And so I decided to go to services before seder at Neve Shalom Synagogue. After going through the metal detectors there was a pre-flight like set of instructions about how and when to use the hard hats that could be found under each seat. The hard hats were placed there after the synagogue was bombed during services on September 6, 1986. It was a large sanctuary. Attendance was sparse. (Who goes to synagogue on Erev Pesach?!) I remember sitting in the balcony. But I don't remember any of the words, the music, or the prayer book. All I remember are the hard hats.
I have witnessed antisemitism and its aftermath in Ashkenaz and Sefarad, across Eastern Europe, Spain, Greece, Italy and the Ottoman Empire. And certainly here in the U.S., in every place I have ever lived or traveled. As someone who has chosen to wear a kippa for the past twenty years, I have developed my own tentacles, sensing when I am comfortable being visibly Jewish and when I feel safer wearing a hat.
Safety as a concept has a quality like a finger trap. The more you pull on it, the tighter it gets.
In talking about it, we become aware of our vulnerability and fears that we are unsafe.
And that can make us feel less safe.
So take a deep breath with me.
--
In honor of my installation as rabbi at Kol Tzedek, my father gifted me a piece of my own family legacy. It was a copy of the letter that my great uncle, Zio Simone Piperno, wrote on the day Rome was liberated from Nazi occupation. It was then found 49 years later and photocopied by one of my cousins. And then, by way of miracle, 73 years later, my father gifted it to me.:
The top of the page reads:
“Of a letter written on both sides of an onion skin paper by Zio Simone on June 24, 1944”
The letter feels in my hands like a time travel machine. For a moment, I am sitting in my family’s vineyard outside Rome and none of it ever happened. Hayyinu k’cholmim - did we dream it, as if we could have awoken from the nightmare of the Nazi Holocaust.
The letter begins:
“The diary of the last nine months?
It would take more than a hundred pages, so here are just some skimpy notes which will not give you the fullest picture but will at least spotlight the generous people who deserve your and our gratitude…”
The letter details the 9 months that four of my relatives spent in hiding. Where they hid for each air raid; a four week battle with Typhus Fever. Simone offers a firsthand account of the October 16th raid of the Roman Ghetto, the day the Nazis deported the Jews from Rome. It ends with the sweetest reunion between my great grandmother Valentina and one of her sons, Arrigo - which Zio Simone describes as the reward for all their suffering. The letter is full of so much gratitude and resilience. But what strikes me most is that the first thing that my great uncle Simone records are the names of every gentile neighbor who saved my ancestors.
Quoting, “So we obtained the miracle of having our mother saved from the Nazi barbarity, thanks to the divine inspiration of Mrs. Alfonsina [a gentile neighbor who, during the German raid of October 16, 1943, pulled Nonna Rachele into her own apartment], for we, in our simple minds, could never have conceived the mass deportation of innocent women, children, old people, blind and paralyzed ones, with an evil cruelty which has no excuse because it is useless for purposes other than war.”
While my great Uncle expresses gratitude to God, it is clear that he knows his greatest debt of gratitude is actually to Mrs. Alfonsina, Alberto Ragionieri, Amedeo and Michelina and the nuns at a convent. “These are the generous people who deserve my gratitude.”
I shared an excerpt of this same letter seven years ago, just after Trump was inaugurated and a local Jewish cemetery had been desecrated. This is another moment where I need this, we need this wisdom. This is my own ancestral testimony to the emergent strategy of Safety Through Solidarity. Which is an antidote to the way I was taught to understand the Nazi Holocaust and to relate to antisemitism, which is to protect ourselves (and only ourselves) through force.
Even more so, it accounts for the larger truth that the Nazi Holocaust did not just target Jews. Yes it was 6 million Jews. But it was 13 million people, including Roma, and queer people, and people with disabilities -- everyone deemed "other" -- who threatened the Aryan race. This was true during the Spanish Inquisition as well which targeted Jews, Muslims and any non-christian heretics of the state. Historically we are not isolated in our oppression. Why then would we isolate to find safety?
–
Feelings of safety shape us.
It only took one trip to the midwest for me to retreat to my New York Jewish bubble.
I imagine every person in this room has a story about a formative moment of feeling unsafe in the world and in the company of others.
As Black and Brown people, as trans people, as Jews, as Muslims, as people with disabilities, as women, as survivors, as immigrants, as Arabs, as Palestinians, as Israelis.
Unsafety is not evenly distributed. So some of us live it all day every day and are aware of it, others experience it as a transitory "shudder" and move back to safe spaces that exist for them.
And despite these differences – It may yet be the feeling of unsafety that unites us as human beings.
--
As a white Jew in the U.S., I was subconsciously taught that whiteness was my safety back up plan.
A few years ago I bought my parents' old car. I decided to remove all the old bumper stickers. But one sticker was not like the others. It was a small sticker on the back passenger window. I asked my dad about it. It was from the town police union. My parents had made a donation and in exchange they placed this sticker on the window, ostensibly so that should they be pulled over, the cops would know to go easy on us. I removed that sticker and thought about how I had been taught I could be safe as a white Jew in America under the condition that I align myself with the police and the state. I thought about how most Jewish institutions have armed guards and police presence during services.
Many years ago, Katherine Stark, a member and Torah school parent, shared the following gratitude with me in an email after Yom Kippur:
She wrote,
“We went to a bat-mitzvah in Brooklyn last month, walking past armed law enforcement to enter.
An older family friend who lives in the suburbs of Philly was telling me they let go of one of the Rabbis to hire an armed guard.
These moments make me very aware of the different choices available and the different approaches communities have to feeling safe.
It was an awesome feeling to walk in and out of wide open doors [throughout Yom Kippur]. The whole congregation kind of felt like water, constantly in motion, shifting gently in and out of the room, the currents of making space as people entered and taking space as people left, and the fluidness of reentering to a new seat. Seeing familiar faces and unfamiliar faces. No obstacles to entry. No barred doors. No walls. No borders.
Katherine closes,
“You always remind us that it is risking something to open our hearts, to live vulnerably, and it is worth it.”
--
The question of Jewish safety is not a new one.
Neither are our disagreements about how to answer it.
As a child I was taught that Israel is the answer. I have marched in Israel Day parades, planted trees and put spare change in JNF tzedakah boxes. I have sat through so many public conversations and panels where my trusted rabbis and teachers have said something to the effect of, “Without Israel, Jews are not safe anywhere.” And this sentiment was absorbed by the highest power when this past year, President Joe Biden said: “I think without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who’s secure.”
My personal experiences and the atrocities of the past year have led me to deeply question this strategy, to the point of not-believing.
There is deep personal grief in this unlearning.
If Israel isn’t our safety plan then what is? [2]
--
The truest thing I can say is I don’t know.
It is hard to say to all of you, who are beloved to me, that I don’t know what will keep us safe.
I imagine that might be hard to hear.
--
What I do know is that I never feel less safe than when I am in Israel.
It has been hard to put this feeling into words, to justify it.
Was it the fighter jets that flew overhead as I became B’nei Mitzvah on Mt Masada or the armed guards at cafes and the teen soldiers casually slinging semi-automatic rifles.
The times I ran from gunfire at the hands of the IDF directed at crowds of peaceful protestors in the West Bank?
Recently I listened to an amazing conversation with the author Ta-Nehisi Coates. He had just returned from a trip to Israel/Palestine and in discussing Dr. King’s ethic of nonviolence he put into words something I have long felt.
Quoting Coates,
“I went to Yad Vashem… it broke me. … anyone that tells you it wasn't as bad as they say it was, it was bad, it was worse…And then I got to the end, and I walked outside and there was a line of young soldiers outside with guns and I thought: what would it mean for all of the suffering that I have endured…What would it mean to have suffered some 250 years of enslavement…and to derive from that that what we really need is power and what we do with that power really doesn't matter so long as we safeguard ourselves?
I [understand]... how the rage, the anger, the deep felt pain of your own oppression. How you can take the wrong lesson from it. And that's really what King was trying to warn [about]. He was always talking about nonviolence for your soul…
The opportunity to observe Israeli society…It was the most unsafe place I have ever felt in my life. And I don't mean in the occupied territories. I mean in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv. I felt people with power. But I didn't feel a safety…”[3]
There must be another way.
At this point, maybe not knowing is safer than the status quo.
Not knowing opens us all up to a search for what is possible.
--
While Jewish statehood became the consensus response to the horrors of World War 2, it is not the only, nor the oldest or, in my opinion, the obvious pathway to Jewish safety and survival.
And tonight I want to offer another vision. A vision not of safety through Jewish nationalism or whiteness, but safety through solidarity as Cecily so beautifully taught her son and reminded us on Rosh Hashanah. A vision rooted in Torah and requiring great courage. [4]
--
Safety through solidarity is actually a contemporary expression of one of our oldest Jewish values.
The first chapter of Pirkei Avot reads,
אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי.
וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי.
וְאִם לֹא עַכְשָׁיו, אֵימָתַי
If I am not for me, who will be for me?
And when I am for myself alone, what am I?
And if not now, then when? (Mishnah Avot, 1:14)
These words are attributed to Hillel the Elder. Hillel the Elder lived at the turn of the first century of the Common Era in a time of great disruption, dispossession and uncertainty for the Jewish people. These words take us all the way back to the root of rabbinic Judaism.
I taught this text to a class of Kol Tzedek teens last fall. I witnessed the pride and shock as they learned that this phrase was Jewish, was in the mishnah, was thousands of years old and was theirs.
I have returned to these words so many times this year.
In a recent essay, Rabbi Mó gracefully invites us to live into the fullness of Hillel’s teaching[5]. She writes,
“When I am for myself alone, מָה אֲנִי, what am I?
What are we, and what are we becoming, as Jewish communities, if we stand for ourselves alone and do not stand for the lives of Palestinians?
And yet, If I am not for me, who will be for me?
I know that many of us are afraid that no one will stand for us or with us when we are vulnerable and targeted.
Hillel refused to prioritize one of his statements over the other, urging us to hold both values simultaneously and without contradiction: We are capable of both ahavat Yisrael and veahavta lere’akha kamokha -- a love of our own people, and the practice of loving our neighbors as ourselves. We can be fiercely committed to both.
If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when?
We must be for ourselves — love and defend those we consider our own. And we must never fall victim to the belief that our lives matter more than someone else’s; for that is ultimately an expression of the same supremacy that has long dispossessed, marginalized and even enslaved our own people.
In today’s movements for peace, we call this value Solidarity … Solidarity moves us beyond the zero-sum framework we’re too often given for Israel and Palestine — that we can only be on one “side” or the other.”
I am hoping that safety through solidarity is the antidote to the existential danger created when we are only for ourselves.
Hillel’s words are a reminder that our tradition takes seriously Jewish safety and real solidarity, and opens up the possibility that they are inseparable.
--
Please know I am not saying this with reckless naivete.
I spent many many hours of my year working to ensure there would be security film on the many beautiful windows of our new building, lest they shatter.
I take our physical safety very seriously. And I also take our emotional safety very seriously.
On January 17, 2022 in response to the hostage attack in Colleyville, Texas.
Juliette Kayyem wrote an article in The Atlantic entitled, A Synagogue Shouldn't be a Fortress.
Kayyem is an Arab American raising Jewish children, a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Barack Obama and currently serves as the faculty chair of the homeland-security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
From her unique location and with her expertise she asked,
"[What] if the essence of a place is that it is defenseless? What if its ability to welcome others, to be hospitable to strangers, is its identity? What if vulnerability is its unstated mission? That is the challenge I hadn’t considered...for a Jewish congregation to become a fortress would seem too militaristic, too aggressive. To make a soft target harder would more likely change the target than deter the attacker."
This echoes disturbing political ideas suggesting that to make schools safe we need to "harden the target" and put in more metal detectors, thicker windows and bulletproof doors. Who could feel safe to learn in that environment? Is this what we want for our children? For ourselves?
I fear that the efforts to militarize and turn the State of Israel into a fortress have changed what it means to be Jewish more than they have deterred antisemitism. The charge of antisemitism has been used to silence and criminalize critique of Israel and offer the state immunity. For years I have avoided all Holocaust remembrance events, because I have felt their primary educational model has been survival through re-traumatization and safety through isolation and nationalism, neither strategy of which I can authentically relate to.
Just this week, Veronika Cohen, a survivor of the Shoah, celebrated her 80th birthday by protesting at an Israeli prison. She writes,
"The memory of the Holocaust is used and overused, and I remain conflicted about identifying myself as a survivor. Yet we are living through dark times, both in terms of what is done to us, and what we are doing to others. Such times demand that we reflect on evil, on the danger of losing sight of the sanctity of all human lives. The lessons of the Holocaust must inform our activism."[6]
--
I am also not so naive to imagine that it is easy to construct safety through solidarity.
Some years ago after Trump was elected in 2016, the proud boys showed up at a masjid in our neighborhood. In response, a group of Kol Tzedek members decided to stand outside their Friday jummah prayers with signs that said, We love our west philly muslim neighbors. A rotating cast of caring members stood guard during their prayer services for an entire year. We gathered in the heat and the cold. We brought our kids and our sidewalk chalk. It became its own kind of prayer to protect our neighbors while they prayed. It was an embodied practice of safety through solidarity.
But then in 2019, following the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, I was devastated when they didn't reach out to offer us the same support. I didn't feel they owed it to us, but I had hoped they too felt the power of our potential shared allyship. We all have a lot to learn about how and when to show up for one another, to make solidarity a spiritual practice.
We can't just wish safety into being. We have to work for it by building coalitions with allies and holding each other mutually accountable.
It may be that we currently don't have the depth and breadth of relationships the way we need to to feel safe, and we need to prioritize building them. The combination of white flight and zionism has distanced us physically and politically from our natural allies. Kol Tzedek, as a multiracial urban congregation is uniquely positioned to make teshuvah, to repair these harms and root ourselves in relationships of mutual solidarity. The work of the Neighbors and Reparations Committee is a powerful example of how KT is dedicated to building those relationships right here in West Philly.
Safety through solidarity is organizing with parents, students and teachers and speaking up at school board meetings when the district tries to censor teachers from teaching about Palestine.
Safety through solidarity is joining with POWER to organize for affordable housing in Philadelphia.
And in this moment, Safety through solidarity is devoting as much energy as we each have to get out every vote, up and down the ballot, for this consequential election in November that will likely be decided by those of us here in Pennsylvania. Because Jewish safety is on the ballot. Democracy itself is on the ballot. And I strongly believe that while no candidate fully represents my views and beliefs, protecting a multicultural democracy is our best pathway to safety. [7]
I have so much faith in us.
I know we will stand in solidarity because we have and we will.
--
But perhaps our deepest fear is that we won't be on the receiving end.
My family letter is testimony that we have been.
And this year, there have been many moments of feeling deep unshakable solidarity across the ceasefire movement. I felt it deeply on the Pilgrimage for Peace organized by Faith for Black Lives. As we walked from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. eating meals in churches and mosques along the way.
I could feel it after the Tree of Life shooting when our comrades and neighbors volunteered to stand outside our doors at Calvary, paying attention to who entered, having our backs while we gathered to pray. When I had no words, my dear friend Rev. Naomi Leapheart Washington showed up and sang to us. Reminded us that when she has needed us, we have always been there. And she was here for us too.
--
Unfortunately, safety through solidarity cannot fully resolve our real and existential fears.
I am not sure anything fully can.
I think this is the nature of being human-- that we are never fully safe, that we are vulnerable.
But I do know that being here with all of you helps.
That teshuva, tefillah and tzedakah are all practices for building and maintaining trusting relationships, for connecting to community and extending care for each other.
All of our liturgy is designed to fortify us against the fears of our time. Whether it is God or song itself, the community that singing creates or the human will to connect, Jewish prayer and sacred practices make us feel safer. They are themselves a kind of spiritual armor.
Our longing for safety is so reasonable, so relatable, and so ancient.
It is one of the core themes of Avinu Malkeinu.
אָבִֽינוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ …
Our Sovereign, Our Source! rid us of every oppressor and adversary.
אָבִֽינוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ …
Our Sovereign, Our Source! remove pestilence, sword, famine, captivity, destruction, [the burden of] iniquity and religious persecution from the members of Your covenant.
I don't think the unknown long ago authors of these timeless words could ever have imagined that Jews would be the ones in power, perpetrating pestilence, sword, famine, captivity, and destruction on another people.
That said, I do think it was inherent that in asking to be rid of these things, we would also not dare to dream of imposing them on anyone else.
--
I want to share one last teaching, which has called me to reimagine safety through the upcoming festival of Sukkot.
Rabbi Alan Lew, of blessed memory, shares this story:
“The rabbis of the Talmud told a parable:
It is the usual way of human beings to feel secure and unafraid while under the shelter of their own roofs. On emerging from their homes, their sense of security is diminished and they begin to feel fear. The Jewish people, however, are different. While in their homes the whole year, they are apprehensive. But when Sukkot comes and they leave their homes and come under the shadow of the sukkah, their hearts are full of trust, faith and joy...
The matter may be compared to a person who locks herself up at home for fear of robbers. Regardless of how many locks she uses and how strong these locks may be, she remains afraid lest the locks be broken. Once she hears the voice of the King approaching and calling, “Emerge from your chamber and join me,” she is no longer afraid. She immediately opens her doors and emerges joyously to join the King, for wherever the King is, no harm can come to her."
This is a bold invitation to Jews to live in relationship to the world around us; a concept of safety that is based on faith and inter-connectedness. We can learn from the second line parades in New Orleans, which were originally a way of Black musicians using song and choreography to ensure safe passage through dangerous white spaces.
Locked in our homes, our houses of worship, we feel unsafe. No matter how many security systems and armed guards, no matter how big our army and how many nuclear weapons we possess, we will naturally feel unsafe.
It is not until we enter into a relationship with the wider world and place our trust in something beyond ourselves, that we can experience a felt-sense of safety, a deep abiding unshakeable joy.
This midrash is our spiritual inheritance. It is an invitation to heal, to open, to trust, to build relationships, to remember the courage of all the people who kept my family safe, and to try to imagine safety through solidarity.
--
I want to close with the the closing words of my Zio Simone’s letter:
He writes immediately following the emancipation,
“... we were protected until yesterday by the feeling of human solidarity which sprang from the souls of the largest majority of the Italian people, from the Holy Father, down to the last commoner, with so many manifestations of brotherhood and selflessness that gave us strength to resist the ordeals we went through.”
This too is our spiritual inheritance.
May the feeling of human solidarity spring from our souls and give us strength to resist the ordeals of our time.
חזק חזק ונתחזק
Courage, courage, Grant us Courage!
[1] This sermon was written in hevruta with Rabbi Mónica Gomery, Jon Argaman, and Andrew Zitcer. I am indebted to their insights and edits. There are four books that deeply informed my thinking in the writing of this Dvar Torah that I would highly recommend: The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, The Necessity of Exile by Shaul Magid, Safety Through Solidarity by Ben Lorber and Shane Burley, and This is real and you are completely unprepared by Alan Lew.
[2] For those who wonder if early zionists knew the, they did. Ze'ev Jabotinsky was a Revisionist Zionist leader, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa. In 1923 he wrote, “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing so long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.” But what if that story, that the state of Israel keeps Jews safe, told to me by people I trust, turns out to have been a myth, a decoy, a hope, a hypothesis at best? What if the authors of that story, Herzl and Jabotinsky, knew that it was actually a dangerous lie that would enable their colonial dream?
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoCEZhhpl_M&t=156s
[4] https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/379120.6?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
[5] https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/what-are-the-jewish-values-underlying-the-call-for-a-ceasefire-in-gaza/
[6] https://forward.com/opinion/658476/holocaust-survivor-israeli-prison-palestinian-khalida-jarrar/
[7] In a class on the history of national and antisemitism, Dr. Anat Plocker explained that "multicultural" empires, like the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire were generally safer for Jews, but they were not democracies. The term multicultural might be an anachronism, the empires were multilingual, multiethnic and multi-religious. Overall, the pre nation-state era was better for Jews, even if they suffered from some religious discrimination. They lived in very diverse regions where relations were not perfect, yet people tolerated each other. Eastern Europe used to be a creative, interesting and diverse part of the world before it was destroyed by wars, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The United States is not exactly the ideal multicultural society/democracy, but Jews have been safe, for the most part. Same goes for Canada and Australia. Some argue that Jews have been assimilated into "whiteness" in these places because they are settler states and not because they are immigrant societies.