How Can I Fight Anti-semitism?

 "I never thought that in 2018 I would still have to speak about antisemitism", says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

What happened to these decades where there was so much conversation about inclusion and social justice for everyone? What happened to the laws against hate crimes? I thought we had progressed beyond anti-semitism.

In March of this year an 85 year old Holocaust survivor in Paris was murdered because she was a Jew.

In May of 2017, the Globe and Mail reported "B'nai Brith Canada, which has been tracking anti-Semitic incidents for 35 years, said 1,728 anti-Semitic incidents were reported across the country last year — a 26 per cent increase from 2015 and the highest number the group has ever recorded." 

I had believed that Muslims were more at risk, however, in 2014, the FBI reported 609 incidents of hate crimes against Jews and 154 against Muslims.   Even Snopes reports more attacks against Jews than Muslims. 

Like bullying everywhere, a division is created and the majority beats up the minority by words or by silence. The after dinner conversation in what I think of as a civilized home is not about how to fix any given social problem. It's about who can be blamed without making anyone in the room feel uncomfortable. It was only much later in my life that I could see this as an acquiescence to prejudice. As one of my relatives said when I expressed concern about racism - well that's life I'm afraid.

Now we talk about injustice on social media which also allows anonymous commenters to harass, abuse and threaten minorities, and women who tackle these issues.

Writing about the recent attack in Toronto where a young man ran down pedestrians in a rented white van - Nora Loreto warns we must not overlook misogyny and social conditions as part of the cause. "We live in a society where our collectivity has been undermined in every way possible, and the Greater Toronto Area is ground zero for how we have been ravaged by forces that seek to drive average people into the ground."

The connection between the different groups who are targeted is the young white man. The previously privileged majority whose future has bottomed out.

But the question remains how can I (a white woman) fight anti-semitism without diminishing the dignity of the Jews who are vastly more educated and engaged in civil society than I am? Can I help or should I let the experts deal with this?   

 Self interrogation is a start but doesn't keep thugs from defacing synagogues and cemeteries.  I can listen  to the souls who are homeless and jobless, who can't find a place to belong but that won't help the unarmed women and men who are murdered as they walk home. 

I can examine the use and abuse of power to link antisemitism with our systemic habits of expressing contempt for life by glorifying hegemony and war. I can argue respectfully with white supremacists on facebook. I can look strangers in the eye and know they have a right be here just like me. I can support environmental and socially progressive groups with funds. I can eschew those who promote privilege by association and creating class divides. 

There is a border that I must defend and it's not against people from different countries but against beliefs that make life a resource to be exploited.

People who cannot earn a living wage, who can't access health services, who have nowhere to live, who are treated like objects, who cannot get justice when they have been harmed, who are marginalized by their sexual orientation, who are judged by their religion or skin colour, are victims of a system which diminishes humanity and although no-one can fix this within one lifetime it is the vigilance we are obliged to keep. It is the duty of all within the human race to fight antisemitism and all the other bigotries.

What Does Life Want From Me?

 Reading Rabbi Jonathan Sacks "Judaism's Life Changing Ideas" I was inspired to ask a question that he posed, through the work of Viktor Frankl who survived Auschwitz and who turned his experiences there to create a new form of psychotherapy based on man's search for meaning.

"His view was that we should never ask, “What do I want from life?” but always, “What does life want from me?”"

Woman's and Man's search for meaning  is upstaged by family needs. The task of caring for one another is really what life most wants from us all even though it is not mentioned in the main cultural arguments.

The shallow commerce of our hyped up consumer society is best revealed in Chris Hedges article "Faces of Pain, Faces of Hope.

"Popular culture celebrates those who wallow in power, wealth and self-obsession and perpetuates the lie that if you work hard and are clever you too can become a “success,” perhaps landing on “American Idol” or “Shark Tank.” ... The vast disparity between the glittering world that people watch and the bleak world they inhabit creates a collective schizophrenia that manifests itself in our diseases of despair—suicides, addictions, mass shootings, hate crimes and depression. Our oppressors have skillfully acculturated us to blame ourselves for our oppression."

What would this world want from me? Hope for a better world?

Hedges writes "Hope means walking away from the illusion that you will be the next Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian." 

Most of us who are older than 40 have already learned this. So I know that life does not want  another self-absorbed  "famous" ego. I know the celebrity cult is as man made as Halloween Candy. I have learned that "the maniacal creation of a persona" is more than just irrelevant - it is toxic. Like all the other devices that tell us we are powerless and that meaning can only come through a certain kind of power.

Reading Hedges reveals to me the despotic power of capitalism gives no value to your life or mine.

Reading Sacks reminds me that I have work to do for the sake of life and that loving life, nurturing the wounded, listening to the lost, expressing gratitude for those who have cared for me - is the only thing worth living for. 

Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" reminds me that the only power I have is one flight.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Social Currencies

The business of keeping people alive, supporting one another, emergency and  crisis response, food banks, community libraries, child-raising, education, language development, storytelling in all its forms, transport, food production, water, electricity, communication, safe shelter - these are just a few of the capacities that have enabled our species to survive and thrive.  We take these things for granted in first world countries, until they are no longer there.

The people of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and some Eastern European nations have lost their support systems. Refugees don't give their money away to pirates for a shaky sail in dinghies by choice. When societies are destroyed people become homeless.

No matter how established, cultured, intelligent or wealthy we are today, we are all refugees when the meaning of our life is translated into a single obsession - money.  Salaries, real estate, stocks, markets, jobs, economics, screeching media and weapons of mass destruction.

"The experience of oppression does not grant supremacy, in the same way that being a powerful colonizer does not. Justice will never look like supremacy. I wish for a new societal order that does not revolve around relations of power and domination." Frances Lee, Kin Aesthetics, Excommunicate Me From the Church of Social Justice.

The currency that supports life and gives it meaning is the power of influence. "Influence is like lighting one candle with another. Sharing your influence with someone else does not mean you have less; you have more. When we use the flame of a candle to light another candle, the first is not diminished. There is now, simply, more light." Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

More light, more warmth, more knowledge that builds homes and community.

Forward Civilizations

Just because those who promise to single-handedly save the world turn out to be fascist dictators, does not mean the goal of social justice is not worthy, nor that we are absolved of the responsibility to work for the greater good.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his book "Not in God's Name" looks into the phenomena of killing for the sake of religion and religious extremism.  While some believe that we have to get rid of religion because of this Sacks puts the blame not in religious tradition but in the human heart - which he points out, is the most deadly weapon of mass destruction.

While I haven't read the book I did listen to the whole hour of  Tapestry when Sacks was interviewed. I was taken by his expressed reverence for life, by his tolerance of different view points including atheism.

As a scholar he is able to articulate the ages where humanity left God and pursued "the will to power". He pointed out that although we live in nature we have evolved to a consciousness of our effect on nature. Therefore power cannot be separated from responsibility without us losing our humanity?  Is this what Sacks means by our relationship to God? It's probably deeper than my interpretation.

I tend to see religion as having been misused to preach the supremacy of an institution, a race, a gender. When a religion becomes a mass movement the ruling elite re-interpret the doctrine in favour of consolidating their own power and their position. In listening to Sacks I understood that this misrepresentation is mostly due to our human tendency to put our selves into the centre of all things.

All stories are about how the narrator views him or herself as the interlocutor of meaning, and the many ways in which they are tripped up, thrown off their path of righteousness.  However, it is too late to interview Abraham, Jesus or Muhammad, so we have to find the wisdom in our doubts and experiences, to retrieve meaning.  The thing is we are so often wrong, we are limited, and our views must be fed with new information and examined. And what about God? 

I think the key point in Rabbi Sacks' interview is that we are in relationship to a higher power. God does not control me because I have free will, therefore anything I choose to do can be for the good of this planet and my community but I cannot claim to know what God thinks.

A way in which we might move beyond our own obsession with power is to understand that life and truth is beyond the time and place our small lives inhabit.  The clamor of extremism and a shallow fundamentalism is due to the arrogance of our species to think we have the hotline to the universe.

Religions who preach chauvinism of any kind pander to the vanity and fears of its congregation and so remove us from the whole story. Ideology that demands obedience to a certain doctrine cuts off our dialogue with the unfolding universe.

Our task is to be human, to think, to feel, to speak, to listen, and to love life, even though we don't know the outcome or the ending. Does this mean we can't help but create stories on the beginning and the end as all religions do?