Rabbi Wasserman’s Message on Rosh Hashanah
[This drashah was given on October 3, 2024]
This past year, 5784, has been a difficult year for the Jewish people, to put it mildly. The events of the past year have shaken our collective sense of self. They have forced us to question some of our most basic assumptions about who we are, where we stand in the world.
Just under 12 months ago was October 7 2023, the day of the worst massacre of Jews since 1945. In the months that followed, in this country, we listened with forboding as hateful voices broadcast anti-semitic tropes, more loudly than at any time in living memory.
Those hateful tropes, which reveal the deepest fears and darkest fantasies of those who give voice to them, are unmistakable to our ears – though today they re-emerge in new, repackaged forms. Some anti-semites say that Jews are white colonialists who brutally oppress indigenous people of color. Some say that we are exactly the opposite: enemies of the white race, who conspire to undermine white civilization from within. To some, we are communists. To others – or sometimes to the same people – we are rapacious capitalists, who control the banks. To some, we are rootless internationalists. To others – or again, sometimes to the same people – we are clannish tribalists. To some, we are hidden, invisible infiltrators, dangerously undetectable. To others, we are unmistakable because of our grotesque features. To those who project their darkest fantasies onto us, we are everything and its opposite – whatever they happen to fear most. It has always been that way.
For awhile, beginning in the decades after the second world war, anti-semitism had become largely taboo in this country – largely though not entirely. It had been driven underground. It had become socially unacceptable. Today, as it reemerges with a vengeance, we cannot help but feel shaken.
And with the re-emergence of those hateful fantasies about us, we feel some of our own darkest fears, which also had been long submerged, re-emerging as well. We look around at a society where we have long felt at home, accepted, and we wonder: Could all the progress of the post-war years be coming undone? Was it all just a fragile façade? Is it possible that we are returning to the time when we felt most alone, that we are heading back to the1930s?
This past year, you have probably heard important voices in the Jewish world suggesting that in fact we are, that the cultural landscape today ought to remind us of the pre-war world. Some go even farther, into even darker territory. They wonder: Could the worst happen? Could this country cease to be a safe place for us altogether?
From an inner point of view, it is completely understandable that we entertain those fears. Eight decades after the holocaust, we are still a traumatized community. We are still haunted by the ghosts of Auschwitz and Treblinka. How could we not be? And, as a traumatized community, we naturally flash back to the darkest of times.
Communities are like individuals in that sense. Think of combat veterans suffering from PTSD, who, when they are intensely stressed, flash back to Viet Nam or Iraq or Afghanistan. Traumatized communities do the same thing. In times of deep stress, they flash back to the scene of their collective trauma – in our case, that means the time that led up to the holocaust, when the civilized world abandoned us. Even though very few of us were actually alive then, we relive it anyway. Collective, communal traumas last much longer than individual traumas, because they stretch beyond an individual lifetime. They take generations to heal.
But, as natural as it is for us to flash back to that earlier era, when we felt abandoned by the world, we ought to try our best to resist doing that. When we feel that deep sense of forboding coming over us, when we question whether the last several generations of progress were just an illusion, we ought to take a few steps back, breathe, and reality-check our fears. We should to try not to allow those fears to distort our vision of the world.
Why is that important? First of all, we have a duty to ourselves, I think, to engage with reality as it is. God gave us eyes to see and minds to think. For the sake of our own integrity, we have an obligation to make use of them as best we can, to see and understand reality as it is, not as we fear it might be. That means not surrendering to our nightmares, not letting the past distort our vision of the present. In the name of living honestly, we have an obligation to look squarely at what is right now, right in front of us.
And the truth is that, as scary as this present moment is, it is nothing like the 1930s.
90 years ago, we Jews were a vulnerable, and largely powerless minority in this country. Anti-semitism was pervasive and mainstream. We were socially isolated, certainly not welcome in polite society. But that was actually the least of our problems. Discrimination against Jews was systemic and structural. There were hard barriers to Jewish advancement – in the professions, in the business world, in academia, in government. We were barred from living in certain neighborhoods – and often whole towns – due to housing discrimination. We were barred from working at many firms and corporations due to employment discrimination. We were barred from the clubs and fraternal associations where much of the business of America was done. We were admitted only very grudgingly to the best universities, and our numbers were strictly limited by educational discrimination. We were largely locked out of political power. There were few Jews in political office, outside a few very Jewish enclaves. And we had few allies or friends.
In the 1930s, anti-semities did not feel the need to hide behind euphemisms and code words as they do today. They didn’t talk about “George Soros” and the “internationalists,” and then pretend to take offense when anyone suggested that they really meant the Jews. They just came out and said it. They condemned world Jewry as a threat to western civilization, without any fear of repercussions. There were anti-semitic newspapers and radio programs with large audiences. National heroes such Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were openly and rabidly anti-semitic, and they faced no consequences for it. That was the reality of the 1930s. And I’m not talking about Europe. I am talking about the United States.
America today, even after October 7, is nothing like that. There are no longer any structural barriers that keep us down and isolated. We can live where we want, and study where we want, and work where we want. We are part of the American mainstream today. In fact, for a group of our small size, we have extraordinary power – political, economic and cultural power. We are over-represented in Congress and the courts, in Federal agencies and local and state government, in academia, in the professions, in the corporate world, the media, the arts. And we have friends and allies in all of those sectors as well.
Our reality today is radically different from what it was 90 years ago because America as a whole is much more open and pluralistic than it was then. Power is much more distributed today. We Jews are mainstream because all kinds of other groups have become mainstream as well. America is a very different place, much more inclusive than it was then.
Am I saying that the old reality can never return, that our progress in this country can never be rolled back? I would never say that something can’t happen. But I see no evidence that it is happening, that America is reverting back to the way it was before the Second World War. For that to happen, it would take a lot more than the hateful words and hateful acts that we are witnessing today. The whole structure of American society would have to change. The systemic barriers that kept us down, the organized exclusion and discrimination that kept us vulnerable and alone, would have to come back. And I can’t see any sign that that is happening. In fact, it seems to me that the opposite is happening. America is becoming more open, more inclusive. The resurgence of anti-semitism today is (to some extent at least) part of a broader backlash against the openness and inclusivity that characterize American society today. As part of the same backlash, all kinds of other bigotries are re-emerging with a vengeance too. But the fury of the backlash tells us that the thing that it is lashing back against – the opening up of American society – has not stopped. The process is continuing. That is why the backlash is occurring.
So yes, it is deeply jarring to hear loud voices spewing anti-semitic hatred in the twenty-first century, and yes, we have to take the danger seriously. But there is a dramatic difference in that, today, we have the power to fight back – and we do.
And it’s not just we who push back, but our many allies as well, allies that we didn’t have 90 years ago. Even as anti-semitism reasserts itself today, there is a dramatic and broad reaction against it, in mainstream politics, in the media, in American culture as a whole. And we ought to pay attention to that too. Hating Jews is not as easy today as it was 90 years ago. Anti-semites face much more resistance today, more condemnation, not only from us but from decent people across our whole society.
It is natural and understandable that the bubbling up of anti-semitism today conjures up our deepest nightmares. We are a traumatized community, with a deep sense of collective memory. When we feel threatened, it’s almost inevitable that we flash back to the worst of times.
But it is important to recognize that our nightmare is just that, a nightmare. It no longer corresponds to our reality. For the sake of our integrity, for the sake of living honestly, we have to try to see the world as it is now, not as it was then.
And it’s not just for the sake of our own inner integrity that we need to do that. There is a moral issue at stake too. We have a responsibility to live in the present rather than the past, not only for our own sake, but for the sake of what we owe the larger world.
When powerless people on the margins of society are targeted by bigots, you cannot fault them for turning inward, nursing their wounds, walling themselves off emotionally from the larger world, finding solace in each other and their shared sense of grievance. You can’t blame them for turning inward because, really, what else are they supposed to do?
But power brings with it responsibility to others. When you have power, you become accountable for how you use it. People with power can also be victims, as we know very well. But they are never just victims. They have agency. They have the ability to act. And therefore they don’t have the moral luxury of turning inward. Even when they are wronged, they have an obligation to think of others as well as themselves. That is the responsibility that comes with power.
Of course we ought to use our power to fight back against anti-semitism. To paraphrase Hillel, “If we are not for ourselves, who will be for for us?” But we are also obligated to do more than that, because today we can. We have an obligation to stand up for other groups that are more vulnerable than we are, groups that live on the margins of society – as we once did – and have few friends and little power to defend themselves. We have to stand up for people like the Haitian immigrants in Ohio, and so many others who are slandered and scapegoated today, and have little power to fight back. We should empathize with people who are vulnerable and powerless because it was not very long ago that we stood where they do now. And we should defend them because, today, we have the means to do so. To paraphrase Hillel again, “If we are only for ourselves, what are we?”
At one level, it is a matter of self-interest for us to stand up for others and not only for ourselves. We Jews will never be entirely at home in this country until everyone is at home. It is true that anti-semitism is different from other forms of bigotry, but it is not essentially different. All bigotries come from the same dark corners of the human psyche. So, to fight one, you really have to fight them all. Only when America is safe for everyone, when it more fully lives up to its own ideals of openness and pluralism, will America be entirely safe for us.
But even if it weren’t in our own self-interest, it would still be a mitzvah for us to do that, to take the side of those who are more vulnerable than we are, people in whose shoes we used to stand. And that is why it is a moral imperative for us to try to see our present situation as it actually is. To empathize with them, it helps to remember how it used to be for us. But to actually fulfill the mitzvah, we have to recognize that we are not standing in their shoes today, that our present is different from our past. Today, as opposed to 90 years ago, we have the power to speak and act. That is why we are obligated to do so.
Thousands of years ago, in connection with exactly this mitzvah, The Torah taught the moral imperative of standing in the present moment. Deuteronomy chapter 10, verse19 teaches: “V’ahavta et hager, ki geirim h’yiytem b’eretz Mitzrayim. You shall love the stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The word “were” in that verse (“you were strangers in the land of Egypt”) does a lot of work. It operates at two levels at the same time. Yes, it challenges us to remember our past, because our memories of being strangers can awaken empathy in us for those who are strangers today. But at the same time, the word “were” compels us to acknowledge that the past is past. “We were strangers” means that we aren’t any more. We are at home now. And it is that recognition that awakens our sense of responsibility. It reminds us why the mitzvah applies to us. If we were still in Egypt, if we were still vulnerable and powerless, not much could be expected from us. How could we be asked to help make others feel at home if we were still homeless ourselves? But because we’re not in Egypt any more, because we were strangers but no longer are, we have the power to help. And therefore we have the responsibility to help. We are required to help the stranger because now we can.
So the Torah’s message to us is, “Yes, remember that you were once vulnerable and powerless so that you will empathize with those who vulnerable and powerless today. But don’t allow your painful memories to drag you back into the past. Don’t let yourselves imagine that you’re still where you once were. You were strangers in the Land of Egypt, but don’t let yourself imagine that you still are, because if you let bitter memories drag you back into the past, you will fail to recognize your responsibilities here and now. You will fail to see what you now have the power to do, and therefore what you are required to do.
We are a people blessed with deep historical memory. But to make the best use of our memories, to draw the proper lessons from them, we have to learn from them and distance ourselves from them at the same. Even as we draw deep wisdom from the past, we must not allow ourselves to live there. And that is often a hard thing to do. In the final words of his novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the human tendency to fall back in time, to be pulled backward even when we think we’re going forward. He wrote: “We beat on, boats against the tide, borne ceaselessly into the past.” People who are deeply conscious of their history are especially prone to that. Our memories are a blessing. They make us who we are. But we must not let our memories cloud our vision of the present, of what this moment, where we stand right now, demands of us.
Rosh Hashanah means “the head of the year.” The word “shanah, year,” comes from the Hebrew root that means “to change,” because to measure time means to recognize change. To acknowledge that time passes means to distinguish between the present and the past. So, at the most basic level, the mitzvah of observing Rosh Hashanah is to recognize the simple fact that things change. This year is not the same as last year, or the year before. Time passes, and we cannot allow ourselves to fall behind, to get stuck in the past. If we do, we won’t be able to meet the moment, to know what is required of us here and now.
In the book of Exodus, in the story of the revelation at Mount Sinai, God says to Moshe: “Aleh eilai ha-harah v’heyeh sham. Come up the mountain to me, and be there.” Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk asked, isn’t the last phrase –“and be there” – redundant? Why does God add: “and be there,” after telling Moshe to climb Mount Sinai. Assuming that Moshe climbs the mountain as God says, won’t he obviously “be there?”
The Kotzker rebbe’s answer was that, often when we’re standing in a place that might be our Mount Sinai, our place of revelation and new insight, it turns out that we miss the revelation, we miss the insight, because we are not really there. Our minds and hearts are someplace else, and so we miss God’s call. God is the ever-present one. God is always here, right now, wherever here might be. The problem is that, often, we are not. And when we’re not here – for instance, when our minds and hearts are trapped in the past – we cannot hear what God is asking us to do.
That is the message of Rosh Hashanah. Things change. We have to be here, right now, in this moment, if we are to understand our obligations. Yes, our memories are precious. They bind us together. They make us who we are. They are our source of empathy. But if we give our memories too much power over us, if we let them pull us back into the past, they will deafen us to what is being asked of us right now.
In the coming year, may we be blessed with open hearts, and with the gift of presence, so that we can hear what God is asking of us at this moment.