Lessons Learned From Our Firebombing - Rosh Hashanah - 5784

It was supposed to be a light morning. In fact, when the text came in from Rabbi Sharon Litwin that she had arrived to the synagogue that morning to broken glass, burnt fabric, and the smell of gasoline, Ayelet and I were waiting for a local teen to come by the house to watch the kids so we could get some housework done before a baby naming that I was supposed to do later that day.

But that text changed everything.

They don’t have a class in Rabbinical school for what to do when your congregation is attacked. From past crises that unfortunately happened to others, I’ve had to learn on my feet what messages will resonate, which will comfort, which will energize and when to use them.

Yet, even with the practice, the firebombing stretched and tested me in ways I wouldn’t expect.

How to talk to FBI agents.

How to run a press conference.

How to say yes when our many interfaith partners offered help.

How to cut off elected officials during a rally when they are going on way too long.

How to lie to my four-year-old when he asks why I’m on TV so he won’t be scared to go to school.

Of course, I wasn’t alone in that effort. We have amazing staff and lay leaders, and partners like the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ, who did much of the heavy lifting, and who are still doing so much to keep us safe.

There is no question that we did a lot right in those weeks after the firebombing.

Foremost there were the gatherings.

On that Monday, five hundred of you came the next day, despite the perpetrator still at large, for a healing service and a briefing on our ongoing efforts to stay safe.

The next day, the governor came, surrounded by an entourage of supporters, to meet with our leadership and calm our nerves.

We spent time on Wednesday processing the attack with our students, especially our teens, who had insightful things to share and who opened up about the antisemitism they were facing in their schools.

Thursday found 1200 people, many of whom spilled into the front lawn, who gathered for an interfaith rally against hate. We heard from elected officials, community activists, and religious leaders, who all spoke about how hate has impacted their own communities. We took a light that was briefly shining on our community and reflected it onto theirs.

Then, we greeted Shabbat together. Senator Cory Booker preached for forty-five minutes and I, along with all of you were riveted. It was the best sermon I had ever heard and was a capstone to the week.

By the end of that week, we were all exhausted. But we were energized, engaged, and more than anything had coalesced. I felt closer to you and to our wider community than anytime in my five years here.

But we weren’t perfect. And this morning, I want to take some time to reflect on a few lessons that I’ve learned since that whirlwind of a week.

The first is that I’ve come to appreciate that safety and security are not the same thing.

Security is the apparatus we use to ensure that no one is bodily harmed. It’s the guards out front, it’s the shatter-proof film on our windows, it’s the locks on our doors. We are on the cutting edge of security. We can never get our risk down to zero, and we will always imagine scenarios where we could use more protection, more training, better relations with law enforcement, more personal, but on the balance, we are doing an incredible job.

Safety, however, is the feeling that no harm will come to us, body or soul. When people came to me, afraid in the aftermath of the attack, I often greeted their fears with logical explanations about security steps we were taking. But I was answering the wrong questions. What they actually needed was an ear to hear their ill-ease.

It’s not always helpful to pick apart the data about antisemitism, that most of the rising numbers involve defacement of property or name calling, not attacks on people’s lives. What matters is how that data makes people feel. And in our efforts to deal with the antisemitism around us, we can’t forget this pastoral aspect.

This summer I found myself, one of only a few Jewish voices represented in a debate surround whether the city of Clifton would adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Since it touches on anti-Israel rhetoric as a form of antisemitism, a controversial notion, this vote brought with it scores of protesters. Although I was there in the spirit of compromise and pragmatism, I knew that the hundreds of detractors who were there to defeat the resolution would not know that from my appearance. There in an official capacity as a representative of Temple Ner Tamid, I almost hid my kippah in my pocket as I walked through the wall of protesters. I almost didn’t get up to speak. At no point was I afraid for my security; the protesters were peaceful. But I certainly did not feel that it was a safe space for me. I worried about being shouted at or shouted down.

If we are honest with ourselves, we often let conversations of security get in the way of the harder conversation about safety. It’s so much easier to harden a building, than to figure out how to help a parent who worries their child will encounter insensitive comments on the playground, the person who feels they need to tuck in their Star of David necklace while walking down the city street, the teen who can’t concentrate on services because they keep wondering about the panic buttons near the door of the sanctuary.

In fact, sometimes, our security measures can actually complicate our quest for safety, since they remind us constantly that threats exist.

We need to treat safety and security as two separate entities.

The second lesson I learned in the aftermath of the firebombing is that there are helpful and harmful ways to discuss antisemitism. And most of the time, we choose wrong.

This is because metaphors matter and can shape how we think.

Earlier this summer I was introduced to a working paper by Sharon Rose Goldtzvik, from Uprise communication, who did extensive research on this very topic. According to her, modern discourse around antisemitism employs two metaphors: viruses and water.

Antisemitism is like a virus when it “spreads,” “mutates,” “invades.” We describe it as “virulent.” We search for a “cure.”

Antisemitism looks like water when we describe it as “rising tide,” or a “wave.” We talk about its “crests” and “peaks.”

I admit that throughout our crisis I used these metaphors at every turn.

But the problem with these metaphors is that they take away agency and stifle hope all while failing to describe what’s actually happening when people employ antisemitic tropes and dog-whistles.

Imagining antisemitism as a virus makes antisemitism a living entity. Virus’ finds their way into an unwitting population, slowly killing them from the inside. If antisemitism is a virus then antisemitism itself problem, not the people that espouse them who are simply unwitting hosts. And without a vaccine, we are simply waiting for the next outbreak.

Water metaphors send an equally wrong message.

“Rising tides” come and go on their own. They were here long before us and will be here long after us. The goal is not to fight a storm, but to wait it out, hoping that it when it appears it does less damage than we fear it will.

What we need then, more than anything else, is a new way to talk about antisemitism, and that way, according to Uprise’s Sharon Rose Goldtzvik, is to begin talking about antisemitism as a machine or tool...

The thing about antisemitism is that its ideology only exists if someone perpetuates it. As strange as it sounds, antisemitism persists because it’s useful. It’s helpful to have a group of people to blame. Hating Jews gives easy answers to much more complex problems. It can also gain you followers, hits, money and attention.

Antisemtism is part of the white supremacists machine. They believe in the great replacement theory, that someone is secretly helping minorities gain more power in an effort to threaten white hegemony. That secret cabel is the Jews. And like a machine, they need antisemitism in order to make the whole theory work. You remove the part, the machine stops working

The same is true on the left. You may not know this, but most of the most unfair analogies leveled on Israel – that they are genocidal, colonialists, committing aparthaid – were first penned in Soviet Russia as a tool to delegitimate the Jewish community. It was Russian propaganda, done in the hopes of turning society away from the Jews and in turn alienating the Jews from their Judaism.

Eventually those analogies caught wind in leftist circles in the West, as people unknowingly used propaganda from the USSR to describe a nuanced conflict.

Antisemitism doesn’t just happen. It’s used, exploited, milked, pumped out to the benefit of those who have the most to gain.

That being the case, antisemitism is a lot less scary. You can’t stop a tide. You can’t stop a virus. But you can gum up a machine. You can turn it off by:

Forcing social media to take antisemitism more seriously.

Prosecuting antisemitic incidents to the fullest extent of the law.

Calling out biases in the media.

Auditing school policy so kids understand the consequences of speaking disparaging about Jews.

Educating the public on why speaking out matters so much.

What happens when you think this way, when you attack antisemitism in this way, all races and creeds benefit. Since the machine that spits out antisemitism also sometimes engages in racism, homophobia, anti-immigrant hatred, Islamaphobia, and anti-Asian hate (among others), if you turn off the machine, all forces of hate will be silenced.

So we are much more effective when we do this together.

Which brings me to my final piece of learning from the fire-bombing. While levels of antisemitism might be unprecedented in my lifetime, so too is the love the Jewish community feels from our allies.

I can’t tell you how much support I felt in the aftermath of the attack. Every pastor, every elected official, dozens of community leaders reached out and offered support.

One of the key texts about antisemitism, which I shared with the Governor during his visit surrounds a scene in the Torah when a wicked prophet named Balaam is sent to curse the people. Before God changes his mind and he gives us a blessing, he stands atop a mountain, overlooking the Israelite camp and makes an apt observation:

From the rocky peaks I see them,

from the heights I view them.

I see a people who live alone

and do not consider themselves one of the nations.

(Numbers 23:9)

There are few images as lonely as a people who live apart. And that’s exactly how antisemitism makes us feel. Hate creates islands. But in the aftermath of the attack, we were not a people alone. We were more held, more supported, more loved than I had ever seen us.

I could give fifty anecdotes from that week about how.

But I want to share just one.

After the rally, as 1,200 people were streaming out, a man clad in Eastern Orthodox, Christian garb, came up to me, flanked by two women from his church. He introduced himself as Frier Peter Souritzidis, from St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Clifton and identified himself as the Pastor to Nicholas Malindretos, the perpetrator of the firebombing.

Freir Souritzidis came to us simply to show his support and to tell us that his community stood with us, that his Christianity could not abide violence against another house of worship. That although he had to pick up the pieces of Nicholas Malindretos’ shattered family, he could still make the effort help us pick up the pieces of our own broken hearts?

A month or so after that rally, I was invited into the Glen Ridge schools, to talk to every 8th grader in anticipation of their reading the Holocaust memoir, Night by Elle Weisel. My job was to put a modern Jewish face to the book and talk about how some of the themes of hate are still salient today.

During one of my presentations, one student raised their hand and asked me if I was worried that what happened in Germany might happen here. It was a surprisingly easy question to answer: NO!

In WWII Europe, the Jews were really a “people alone.” But after we were attacked we found we had more allies than we could count. This includes, especially, law enforcement and elected officials. Where the Holocaust produced state sponsored terror, our fire-bombing showed us the power of state sponsored love. We met one person’s hate with over 1000 acts of compassion and support.

I have hope. Hope that even amidst the whirlwind of fear, we can find shelter and security in one another’s arms. Hope that we have agency, that together, all groups who are equally afraid can come together to turn off the machinery of hate. Hope that when we need it, our community will continue to show up for us, and we them.

Hope, knowing that united, this assembled congregation is stronger together than we are apart.