antisemitism – Experience Has Made Me Rich

Dear Z: Thank You

A friend’s reaction after October 7 forced me to abandon comforting illusions about morality, progress, and Jewish identity. What looked like betrayal became clarity: civilization is thinner than I believed, old hatreds return under new moral language, and my atheism does not make my Jewishness any less real at all.

Dear Z,

I am writing to you today to express my gratitude. I will not use your name, because this is not really about your identity. It is about what you came to represent. You have been and continue to be a clear representative of the black fog that is consuming the left and right from the edges. I did not expect to thank you for this. But you have played a role in my evolution as a human being. As an atheist. As a Jew.

Your delusional rage, so righteously expressed, emerging from someone who had previously seemed well-grounded, shattered perceptions I would have deemed unassailable: The idea that morality could be absolute. The idea that civilization could evolve. The idea that Judaism is just a religion.

There is no sarcasm in my gratitude. Living under false perceptions is not something I will ever choose. Reality might suck, but delusion leaves one vulnerable to a kind of narrative-shear, where the fabric of your understanding can be violently rent by the force of truth bearing down on your fantasy. It is always better to know the truth. It is better to know you have cancer so that you can treat it, rather than to live as if you don’t as it kills you.

Here are some of the truths you, and the mob you embody, have helped me discover.

There may be something like absolute morality, but we are nowhere near orienting practical morality toward it.

I always believed that there is a Platonic ideal morality. Just as we can never actually see a perfect circle, yet can still recognize what prevents actual circles from being perfect, I believed we could also tell when something or someone was objectively immoral by comparing it to an ideal – which is to say an absolute – morality. In this way, I believed if we were being precisely and accurately honest, we could all agree when something is immoral. You have helped me see that this is not true. You have shown me in real time how morality is actually defined post hoc in order to justify a more basic instinct that may have been previously suppressed under a different moral framework. I see now that while the need to belong to the mob trumps any notion of an absolute morality, the need to feel moral must still be met. Therefore instinct precedes morality, and not the other way around, as I had believed. In other words, people will decide what they hate, and then assemble a moral framework that decrees that hate to be righteous.

Antisemitism sits squarely in the centre of this phenomenon. For reasons I can’t begin to claim to understand, Jew hatred appears to be one of the most durable cultural reflexes in human history. It is not biological, but it is culturally deep enough that, under the right conditions, it returns with astonishing speed. Since we can also be taught to suppress immoral instincts, there are times when Jew hatred is suppressed because it is deemed immoral. I thought that suppression was something else – I thought it was erasure. A progression toward a morality where hating Jews simply for being Jews was a relic of a less evolved humanity.

You have shown me how easy it is to transition from those times into the opposite. I have watched, through you, the mob simply reconstruct a morality that now requires that in order to be moral, you must dehumanize and then vilify Jews. All while you still claim not to be antisemitic, by redefining words like antisemitism, and even redefining the word Jew. It is fascinating to me that you don’t see the contradiction: I am not a Real Jew unless I agree with your vilification of Jews; and because I am not a Real Jew, hating me is, by your logic, not antisemitism. It is an interesting, and admittedly frightening, workaround: your new morality creates the loophole it needs to avoid looking like a betrayal of the one it replaced.

I thought humanity was on a progression toward absolute morality. I was incorrect. You helped me see that baser instincts are not erased by morality; they are temporarily suppressed by moral frameworks. Like dormant volcanoes, they remain quiet for a time, only to erupt when too much tension has built beneath the surface. When they erupt, new moral frameworks are constructed to make the eruption seem ethical. That is why you and so many like you seem to me to be behaving so poorly while believing yourselves righteous. I am still operating on the moral framework of my youth. You are not. And what is objectively most jarring is that you think you are, not noticing the diametric path you are now on.

Civilization does not evolve. It cycles.

History is not a story about the past. It’s a user’s manual for the future. The saying “history always repeats itself” tries to encapsulate that, but it’s not accurate enough. And for those of us lucky enough to be born at certain parts of the cycle, we can maybe be forgiven for thinking of history as something that happened before we evolved into something better. I certainly thought so. I was taught about pogroms. I was taught about Kristallnacht. I was taught about the Holocaust. I was taught “never forget.” But the lesson I did not take in was that these are not stories about terrible times we grew past. They are demonstrations of what humans can and will do. And they happen again and again and again. The point is not to learn from them because knowledge guarantees prevention. We are meant to learn from them so we can recognize the pattern when it returns, even if recognition does not grant us the power to stop it. I didn’t understand that.

If someone had told me when I was 12 that in my lifetime I would see people in Canada and the U.S. openly and publicly rejoice at the rape and murder of Jews in 2023, and be celebrated as righteous for rejoicing, I would have been certain they were wrong. If they had told me that the fringes of the political left and right would unite on any idea, let alone that Jews are the world’s most significant problem, I would have been certain they were insane. If they had said that people would blatantly and remorselessly rewrite history to the point of claiming that the Holocaust was fabricated, or that Jesus was Palestinian, I would have been certain that there was no way the society we live in would tolerate that level of absurdity. We had advanced past that, right? Past intolerance, past witch trials. Past pogroms.

Nope. You have taught me that we don’t get past anything. We just cycle.

Being an atheist Jew is not a contradiction.

This is the thing for which I am most warmly grateful to you. I am an atheist, but I did not grow up that way. It’s something I came to realize as I aged and studied and gave thought to things like God and religion. And I thought my atheism separated me from Judaism. That I had stepped away from my roots. Your behaviour has helped me see that my being an atheist does nothing whatsoever to alter my status as a Jew, or my belonging with Jews.

See, I was born to a Jewish mother. Therefore I am Jewish. That’s it. I can’t turn it off any more than you can turn off being born a person with brown hair. A brown-haired person who dyes their hair blond has not changed what grows from the root – they are just living in a way that the world can’t see that part of them … until the roots start to show. To be sure, some Jews dye their metaphorical hair so well and so often that nobody knows they are Jewish. In some cases, even they have forgotten. The hair-dyeing has become so much a part of their life that they have forgotten that it’s not something natural blondes have to do. But it doesn’t matter. If you are born Jewish then you are Jewish. You can opt in by converting, but you can’t opt out. History has shown us that even when some of us have believed we could opt out (or were forced to), we couldn’t. Judaism is immutable.

So how is it that you helped with this? When, after October 7, I found myself reflecting on, and sometimes explaining to you, Jewish ties to the land of Israel, I at first felt like I needed to qualify that I am not religious in any way, and am in fact an atheist, so as to distance myself from a religious viewpoint, as if that somehow coloured my perspective one way or another. Thanks to you, I was compelled to examine that deeply, and thus discover something profound. Jews are not bound together by a religion. Jews are a people. We don’t choose who is a Jew and who isn’t. We don’t proselytize, and we do not treat being (or not being) Jewish as a measure of human worth. Of course, there are religious Jews who follow their sect’s interpretation of the laws of the Torah – and there are many sects! But that’s only a subset of the Jewish people. A Jew can be religious, secular, atheist, observant, non-observant, culturally Jewish, historically Jewish, or some complicated mixture of all of these. None of that makes Jewishness less real. It makes it more obviously a peoplehood. Because it’s an immutable characteristic, you can layer whatever you like on top of it without changing it.

Because of you, dear Z, I feel secure again owning my Judaism, and no longer struggle with any inherent contradiction in the fact that I am also an atheist. I love my people. I love being with them. I love the traditions, the history, the unrelenting emphasis on learning and questioning and challenging and then learning more. I love our ties to Israel. I love Israel.

This has been your gift to me, even though you didn’t think you were giving me one.

Z, I am sincerely thankful. Your real-time metamorphosis, likely driven by the hope that somehow I would be shamed, remorseful, or even outraged, has instead brought me to a place of greater peace and acceptance. You did not shame me. You clarified me. You helped me understand that civilization is thinner than I believed, and that Jewishness cannot be explained simply as religion. I can see now that the world is not as I thought, and that is sad.

But continuing to believe otherwise would be sadder.

Sincerely yours,
Rich

Jewish Identity and Excellence: The Challenge of Impossible Standards

On the first two nights of Passover (or just the first night in Israel) Jewish people gather for a ceremonial dinner called a Seder, where the story of Exodus is retold. The centerpiece of the Seder table is a special plate, on which is placed six symbolic foods, each meant to represent an aspect of the Jewish people’s suffering as slaves in Egypt, and the way they gained their freedom. One of the items on the plate is an egg, and oddly, the egg is not a formal part of the dinner, so the symbolism of it is not directly addressed as part of the stages of the Seder. As a child, I always wondered what the egg was about, and asked a teacher of mine about it. Even though I learned later that his answer is not the official explanation, it resonated with me.

What he said is that the egg is not like other foods. When you heat an egg, it gets harder, and stronger. He said that this represents the Jewish people who were slaves in Egypt. I see now that his explanation was a variation of the saying “The same boiling water than softens the potato hardens the egg.” Pharaoh thought to soften the potato by working the Jewish slaves harder, and subjecting them to increasingly more cruel and harsh conditions. It didn’t soften them though. Like the egg, it made them stronger.

Another fixture on the Seder table is a bowl of saltwater, and in many families the egg is dipped in it prior to eating. The saltwater symbolism is pretty direct, representing tears. The symbolism, my teacher explained, is that the oppression-hardened egg is not the final lesson. Enduring slavery and Pharaoh’s hell would not be anyone’s choice as a way to become strong. Under the weight of this misery, the tears of suffering are the salt that layers over all aspects of life.

The metaphor applies just as well today as it did in biblical times. It has been said that many in the world apply impossible standards to the modern state of Israel, and that this is by design. It’s meant to trap Israel into an unwinnable game with eradication as the price of losing, said eradication being the clearly stated endgame of those who have opposed her existence since the beginning. It’s not hard to see the parallel to Pharaoh’s strategy here. Apply increasing pressure on Israel – pressure not applied to any other country – and eventually, she must break. We are seeing it in real time, right now.

As a consequence, by extension this increasingly impossible standard is then applied to all Jewish people across the globe. All 0.2% of us. This is not a new phenomenon. Jewish people have been subjected to impossible standards for thousands of years. With respect to anti-Jewish sentiment, the current situation in the middle east is the latest excuse. But what the people who do this don’t understand is the actual impact that has on people who are born Jewish. They don’t understand why that forces us to excel, which must certainly be maddening to those that wish to see Jewish people suffer. Before I explain my thoughts on why this happens, I want to make clear that I don’t think it’s Judaism as religion that does this, per se, although it is difficult to measure and potentially unweave from Jewish culture the effects of being held to impossible standards over millennia. Rather this drive to excel is the effect on a group of human beings born into a world that continually ups the ante on what will be tolerated. A world that from the outset seems to never afford them the same tolerance for humanity afforded to others. For context, let me give you some personal background.

I have been a high school math teacher for almost 25 years, with the exception of two years I spent on secondment, lecturing mathematics at The University of Waterloo. At the start of my career I worked in three different public schools in in the Greater Toronto Area, in neighborhoods with very different demographics from each other. Then I transitioned to teaching at a Jewish high school. As part of my ongoing work with Waterloo, I also have had the pleasure of working with thousands of students across Canada, as well as internationally in India, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Ghana. These days I do a great deal of tutoring and mentoring, so I have the opportunity to work one-on-one with hundreds of high school and university students. As a result of these experiences, I’ve encountered students from a wide spectrum of countries, cultures, races, religions, and financial backgrounds. And there is one comforting and beautiful lesson I’ve learned:

Teenagers are fundamentally awesome people.

Despite cultural, geopolitical, and socioeconomic differences, the brilliance, goofiness, and awkwardness is universal. So too are occasional bouts of acting like an idiot. And the ability to be able to turn these characteristics on and off when the situation really warrants it is also universal. They’re ultra cool adults-in-training who still have the little kid in them but are learning how to manifest the grown-ups they will become. All while learning about and exercising their inevitable independence from older generations. They score huge victories. They make huge mistakes. If the child is the raw material, then the adolescent is the forge from which the ultimate adult emerges, tempered into that special alloy of perfection and flaws that we experienced adults all know we are. Witnessing this blossoming is an honour, and is what makes me so grateful to be an educator. For a teacher, students are like your kids, and when I witness them just being teens, I feel legitimate happiness. Even when they’re acting like idiots.

Take for example, school excursions like field trips and sporting events. Any teacher will tell you what a mixed blessing it is to supervise these, especially overnight trips. Those overnighters! There’s nothing quite as stressful as being responsible for dozens or even hundred of other people’s children out in the wild. Responsible for their safety, and also for their behaviour. The blessing is to be there to watch them experience and interact with the world outside the classroom. You see them behave respectfully to strangers. You see their curiosity. You see their enjoyment of each other. You also sometimes see them act like fools, and these are the times when you have to intervene. I have supervised more excursions than I can count, and many of them were multi-day trips to a different country. It’s stressful, but it is incredibly worth it.

So when I prepare a group of teens for an excursion I always tell them that I want them to have the best experience. I tell them how much I love that I get to be a part of it. And I make sure they understand the behaviours we expect, even while knowing that they often have slightly different plans of their own. But when I’m preparing a group of Jewish students, my presentation always has an extra request:

Hold yourselves to a higher standard.

See, if a stranger sees a large group of teens outside of school, they often have certain ideas about what they can expect, and some of that is negative. For example, if a large group of teens was eating lunch in a public space, and left a lot of litter, many people would disgustedly react with a thought more or less like damn teenagers – don’t their parents teach them to pick up after themselves? If the teens are being overly boisterous, you will often see strangers shaking their heads or looking at them angrily. In these situations, you will even sometimes see strangers intervene and try to modify the behaviour. Hopefully it doesn’t get to that stage, and as a chaperone you always do your best to make sure you are the one intervening, but people will be people. This is all normal.

It all changes though, if the group of teens is identifiably Jewish, say, because the boys are wearing kippot (aka yarmulkes or skullcaps). When it’s Jewish kids, the perception is no longer that it’s a group of annoying teenagers. It’s now a group of annoying Jews. The mutterings change from damn teenagers to damn Jews. Their Jewishness trumps their adolescence as the attributable factor for their unwelcome – albeit normal – behaviour. It’s not fair, but it is true.

That’s why I always tell my Jewish students that they must hold themselves to a higher standard. Not because of me, or because of arbitrary rules, and certainly not because it’s fair, but because whether they like it or not, they are ambassadors for all Jewish people. So be extra respectful, extra courteous, and keep that adult switch flicked to the on position. Because the world might cut you some slack knowing that you’re a teenager, but that slack gets gathered right up if you’re a Jewish teenager. And you know what? The kids always do it. They do hold themselves to a higher standard. We inevitably get comments from bus drivers, tour guides, other coaches, and even just regular people interacting with the group that the kids are so polite and respectful, and so nice to deal with – much more so than most groups of teens. This ability to live up to impossibly high standards has nothing to do with being Jewish, but the need to tap into that ability – and thus discover that you can – has everything to do with it.

Being judged more harshly than other teens because you’re Jewish isn’t fair. It’s not a choice anyone would make or a preferred strategy to learn how to rise above. It’s just reality. The reality that says to the sports teams from Jewish high schools that when you are playing at non-Jewish schools, kids will throw pennies at you. And if one of your basketball players commits a foul, the spectators will shout about dirty jews and their dirty play, so keep the fouls to the barest minimum. It’s an impossible standard.

The lesson in this runs deep and lasts a lifetime. First, it teaches the kids that they have the inherent power to be better – better than they even need to be. It teaches them that to be Jewish often means not giving bigotry and hatred an excuse, even and especially when that means behaving better than others. It teaches them that as much as we might wish otherwise, the world is not a fair place, and never will be, so play the hand you’ve been dealt instead of the one you wish you had. It teaches them that the best way to fight antisemitism is to act with honour, grace, and excellence. It also teaches them that you can let down that guard and be “normal”, but only when you’re amongst your own, and that breeds a strong sense of community. Ultimately, this lesson remains with the kids as they grow in to adults. They learn that they have the power to hold themselves to impossibly high standards. They achieve greatness as a result.

It’s ironic really. That impossible standards can make you impossibly great. But there it is.

Thanks for reading,

Rich