I recently read an interesting article by Shalom Auslander. While focusing mostly on his mother, his piece also touched on one of the most serious challenges facing American Judaism.
“When I was a child, my mother told me that everyone in the world hated me. They hated me, she said, because I was a Jew. So? I asked. So nothing, she replied. So they hate you. Not just the people on our street, who were “classic Jew-haters”; not just everyone in the town nearby, who were “card-carrying anti-Semites”; not just everyone in the world now, but everyone who’d ever lived, ever.
I was sure she was wrong. I was sure they just hated her, which I could very well understand. She told me this when I was 6, when I was 13, when I was 15 and when I was 17. At 18 I went on a trip through Europe with some observant Orthodox friends. It was something of a symbolic trip, because we were at the age when we were getting ready to leave home, to head out into that strange new world outside the narrow religious one in which we were brought up. I was determined to find a new home for myself, something broader, more enlightened, less paranoid, less terrified.
One morning we were on a train headed, I believe, for Paris, when we decided to pray. We had on our yarmulkas, zizit, tefillin, the whole outfit. A US Marine in full camouflage was seated in front of us, and he kept turning around, looking at us and smiling warmly. When we were finished praying, he turned around again, and in a heavy Southern accent, with absolutely no malice or hatred whatsoever — in fact, with an almost endearing, childlike curiosity — asked me if I wouldn’t mind too terribly showing him my “Jew-horns”. Not, he added, if it’s a big deal or something.
My first thought was that he was kidding. My second thought was that he was serious. My third thought was, Oh, no — Mom was right. This was going to be a problem. Not because of anti-Semitism. I could probably make it in a world fouled with ignorance. I could probably get by on a planet poisoned with petty prejudice and institutionalized hatred.
But in a world where my mother was right? That was going to be a problem.”
My response —
Dear Shalom —
Fear not. Your mother was not right at all. That Marine did not hate you — he loved you. And if he was an Evangelical, then he not only loved YOU, he also loved Israel, which has to survive until it is destroyed and the Second Coming occurs.
At times we must all ponder: Which is easier to deal with — the hater or the lover?
B’Shalom
Rabbi Stanley Halpern