The Sacredness of Our Democracy • Rising Antisemitism
I have long loved election day. The act of casting one’s vote is a truly sacred one to me. Never mind that in Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania just elected its second Jewish governor in the 21st century (who shares a high school alma mater with my wife, no less: suburban Philadelphia’s pluralistic Jewish secondary day school, Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy, formerly Akiba Hebrew Academy); the act of participating in our democracy feels fundamentally Jewish to me. It feels like an expression of our deepest, most sacredly-held values: that we are all in this together; that our lives are inextricably linked with one another; that it is up to us to create, and carry out, a system of self-governance that embodies fairness, representation, and the sense that each of our voices matter; that we aspire to create a system through which the dignity of everyone is respected and that facilitates the opportunity for each of us to find our way in the world.
I confess that over the last several years my faith in our democracy has been shaken. The system is dependent upon the idea that the voices of the voters matter; that our governance is carried out by the people whom our voters select as most embodying the values and the policy preferences that these voters hold. That decisions governing our country are made by the people whom the voters select. And the voters have the power to decide whether those people have earned a return trip to their positions of power or whether it is time for someone new.
When politicians ignore the will of the voters—when it is more important to them to retain their power, even when the voters have chosen to go in a different direction—and build a lie around the idea that the election was stolen, and a new generation of politicians enters the conversation under this premise, threatening to overturn the results of future elections in order to put their preferred candidates in power, regardless of the will of the voters, the whole system is undermined. The sacredness fades away.
The system becomes an idolatrous one. There is a reason that, in their march to the Promised Land, the Israelites built their camp not around a shrine to any one man—even when that man was Moses—but around a berit: a covenant, a pact. They carried with them the Ark of the Covenant that held the two tablets, broken and whole, upon which the Ten Commandments were inscribed, representative of their sacred covenant with the Holy One, a covenant which suggested life’s fundamental importance was about living out mitzvot, the calls to one’s conscience, reverberating through the soul.
While an election never sends only one message, Tuesday’s results seem to suggest that the voters shared these concerns for the sacredness of our democracy, rebuking candidates, including in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, who suggested a comfort with overturning the results of duly-won elections. As one politician who lost his race Tuesday graciously remarked in his concession speech, “I have a privilege right now. A privilege. I have the privilege to concede this race. The way this country operates is that when you lose an election, you concede. You respect the will of the people. We can’t have a system where if you win it is a legitimate election, and if you lose someone stole it.”
If that ethos can continue to be carried out, if we work to ensure we have a system where the politicians who govern us are truly representative of the voters whom they govern, we can preserve the sacredness of our system.
The work of doing so doesn’t end the day after an election is held. In fact, just as Judaism teaches us the importance of cycles, that the end of one cycle is the beginning of the next one, so, too, with the sacred work of preserving our democracy. The end of one election cycle means the beginning of the next one. Democracy, like Judaism, is a year-round enterprise. Let’s get to work.
As a recent New York Times article put it, “It is a perilous time, and perilous times have never been great for Jews.”
The email we had to send out last week in response to a broad antisemitic threat against New Jersey synagogues identified by the Newark office of the FBI (the perpetrator behind the threat has since been apprehended) was an example of the disturbing episodes of antisemitism we’ve experienced in society in recent weeks, months, and years.
The article cites an ADL report that antisemitic incidents have been increasing and the article further connects a thread of antisemitism to “many of the nation’s recent spasms of political violence: the ‘Jews will not replace us’ chants during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017; the ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt worn to last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol; the Holocaust denial in blog posts that appear to have been written by the man accused of breaking into the residence of the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi” and attacking her husband.
It further identifies antisemitic outbursts by celebrities with broad public influence in the world of music and sports. Rapper Kanye West tweeted to his millions of followers that he was going to go “death con 3 on the Jews,” which led to a group of people hoisting a “Kanye is right about the Jews banner” over an interstate highway in Los Angeles and another similar message being projected at a college football game between the universities of Georgia and Florida. Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving posting a documentary rife with his antisemitic theories to his millions of social media followers, and, when questioned, defending it, before ultimately taking it down and apologizing.
Growing up and learning about antisemitism at Solomon Schechter Day School in the early 1990s, (now Perelman Jewish Day School in Melrose Park, PA), the concern always seemed like a “then” and not a “now” problem. While the atrocities of the Holocaust I learned about were shockingly recent, and while my own grandparents parents had, as I understand it, immigrated to the United States to escape the pogroms around the turn of the twentieth century, my own experience as a child who had never experienced firsthand antisemitism was that it felt like a relic of a bygone era.
Recent events have demonstrated that that is not the case. Social media, too—commenters in discourse around the ever intoxicating subject of celebrity and morality—has shed a light on the fact that there are many out there who do believe Jews nefariously wield inordinate power.
And yet I have been heartened by some of the responses, in the same weeks, months, and years that we’ve noticed the increase in antisemitism.
Two weeks ago was the fourth anniversary of the tragic antisemiitic murder of 11 people at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue. I still remember our sanctuary that following Shabbat, overflowing with neighbors and allies. Pastors have reached out to me to offer support after other violent incidents. Voices from the halls of business and media have leveled meaningful sanctions against those, fully consciously or otherwise, stoking antisemitic sentiment, signalling to the rest of society that such sentiments are not okay.
There will forever be concerns around, “doesn’t this prove their point?” “Do the sanctions prove those who hold antisemitic views’ points that Jews do wield disproportionate power?”
Regardless, we have to work to send the signal that antisemitism is not okay; that it can lead to harm. And we have to create pathways to reconciliation, so that people who genuinely want to learn from their mistakes can move forward with a better understanding of the historical context of antisemitism, and the harm it causes.
We remain vigilant in addressing and combating antisemitism and we feel comfortable and confident asking other communities and society at large for their support in calling out and sanctioning instances of antisemitism. We also learn from our own experience of oppression and marginalization to experience empathy for other communities experiencing other forms of hate. “You shall love [the stranger/the oppressed] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).
It’s one of the fundamental experiences of being Jewish. We expect that support from others, and we offer it in turn. It’s a signal of our shared humanity. We get to expect it and ask for it, and we also offer it ourselves.
