Being at the center of an anti-Zionist firestorm wasn’t on my bingo card for the week. Suffice to say, it’s been a strange few days that has been overwhelming in two ways: from hate and from love.
The hate side of this equation is, I suspect, fairly obvious given recent events related to the Queen City United rally. When ultimately I watched video from the rally itself — which seems to have turned into an anti-Israel hatefest — I saw speakers shouting “from the river to the sea,” “long live the student intifada,” “long live all forms of armed resistance,” and I was gutted.
Of course, it was more than that: It is a “special” experience to hear your name angrily screamed in front of a crowd of hundreds, and for them to roar with agreement. It would — and did — take something equally potent to cleanse my palate, as it were.
When I was disinvited from the Queen City United rally last Wednesday, I shared about it online expecting to get a little empathy, but nothing much more than that. Instead, within minutes, hundreds from our Jewish community (locally and across the world) emerged to decry antisemitism.
One friend, Aaron, immediately reached out — he wanted to understand more fully what had transpired and how he could help. A second, a local rebbetzin, corresponded over and over to express her indignation (if not surprise). A third and fourth, Jews who themselves had been similarly targeted in the past, sat with me and my wife over Shabbat lunch to process all that had occurred.
I could fill each and every page of the American Israelite listing examples like this and there still would be insufficient room to describe the acts of support and solidarity this last week. For that overwhelming kindness, to riff on the words of our liturgy, “even were my mouth as filled with praise as the sea is water,” there wouldn’t be gratitude enough.
Having been encircled by antisemitism for days — having been targeted by local socialist groups for the third time in the last year — having received more than my fair share of hate mail from strangers — (and, to boot, still mourning the recent passing of my beloved grandmother, Ida Schwartz, z”l) — I can say that the last days have been exceptionally stressful. Despite it all, the love I have received from Jews and our allies will remain my greater memory of this moment.
These days have been a perfect explanation for why Hillel is quoted to have said al tifros min ha-tzibur, “do not separate yourself from the community.” We need am yisrael at times like this. I wonder: What could we accomplish if we displayed such solidarity even when all is well, in the absence of common threats? What would the Jewish world look like if we more frequently considered our internal differences an asset rather than a risk?
Those are more than mere rhetorical questions. It should be viewed as a strength for the Jewish world that we don’t all live in the same place, that we don’t all speak the same language, that we don’t all believe the same thing, that we don’t all hold the same politics, and that we don’t all demonstrate the same socio-emotional tendencies. Even were our numbers doubled, were we to be homogeneous in such respects, our power would be halved.
The textures and gradients of our religious practices, political ideologies, homelands and ways of being are not just the natural result of our dispersion over the last two thousand years, but also part of what enabled our enduring existence during it. Our differences allow us to be in different spaces simultaneously, and to protect each other better.
This is Torah we would do well to learn and an ethic to integrate into our conception of Jewish community. As the Talmud teaches, our fates are all bound up together (kol yisrael areivin zeh ba-zeh). I got to be a beneficiary of the diverse communal support this teaching represents, and I hope we can maintain such solidarity for many other purposes. The more we lift one another up, no matter our differences, the stronger we’ll be.
Rabbi Ari Jun
Cincinnati, OH
