My news feed like everyone else's has no shortage of snipes at Jews, essentially ethnically profiled as supporters of the modern nation of Israel. The linkage is true, the propriety of exclusion from activities of groups with overlapping interests, let alone physical attacks, is probably not justified. While I read about this most days and think about it often, my own experience has not included any personal aspersions or threats. Not that they aren't there. I knew the doctor slain at Tree of Life on shabbos morning from college. That attack had no publi support, no rationalization. More personally, though, my weekly Saturday morning now has me waving to a hired police officer in the synagogue parking lot and passing through a reinforced heavy entrance door, monitored by a congregant who must sit next to it as people seek to enter. Other places, mostly larger, with doors leading to open space that must be crossed to reach the sanctuary, are often guarded by a uniformed officer, pistol in holster. Some places will not let visitors past the entrance without a reservation obtained through the synagogue office during the previous week.
I miss the spontaneity. Over sixty years, I've visited many congregations unannounced. My classmates' and cousins' Bnai Mitzvah as a teen. Travels for vacation or professional activities that spanned a shabbos. Seeing a prominent Rabbi on TV and wanting to visit his shul if within reasonable driving range. Getting irritated with my home shul and wanting a different shabbos experience. I just went. And as much as I've enjoyed the variations of worship and community, people have dropped in to my synagogue for a variety of reasons, always greeted as honored guests. Our need to screen threatening people has burdened those whose entry would enhance the shabbos of the places they visit.
We serve as a useful target. The people inside not only sustain these places of worship but maintain Jewish social organizations, stable businesses that depend on Jewish patrons, campus organizations from classrooms to Hillel Foundations, all now fair game for those seeking a statement of antagonism to Israel and to those who attach to it. Interestingly, there also seems a curious element of sparing, though not entirely so, as the tragic shooting of a rising young philanthropist at Blackstone headquarters attests. I've not seen Jewish summer camps, often set in remote areas, targeted for protest, even though these institutions invariably do their best to form a Zionist commitment to their impressionable children. The medical centers with Jewish names also seem not to attract protesters toting anti-Israel placards. Many of these places exist because that city's premier university-affiliated hospitals would not offer staff appointments to Jewish physicians. Many of these places of Jewish origin now serve as desired residency destinations for top medical school graduates. And Jewish people often drive wealth-creating businesses, from financial to high tech to communications. Our financial upper crust. The donors who make the Jewish organizational system thrive, who support Israel through donations and bond purchases, who sustain the budgets of the synagogues that now have enhanced security. These businesses, even law firms with Jewish names on their entrances and letterhead, do not often have protesters nagging them. Boycott Dell? Avoid Home Depot? Hasn't happened. The targets must be perceived as vulnerable in some way. Or maybe not useful to the protesters. Who is not targeted may be an important clue to reducing the threats to those Jewish organizations and individuals that are.
Approaching three years since a vicious attack on innocent individuals, complete with child abduction, hostages for barter or butchering while defenseless, displacement of people through the initial attack and warfare that followed, virtue has largely disappeared from the conversation. We Jews have an opportunity to restore that lost element. When Stephen Covey published his immensely popular work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989, he opened his book by assessing two measures of success. We can let superior tactics lead us to what we seek or we can let foundational principles guide us. Both forms exist to antiquity, both forms have achieved successful and disappointing results. How to attack and use vulnerable people as leverage is a technique. It has also become meshed in principle, expressed as these people deserved it for how they treated us. That has become the public narrative, the one that dominates social media feeds. One that repackages repugnant as virtue, or at least the illusion of honor. For Jews, whether individually or through our advocacy organizations, to attack this directly has not worked out well.
We have succeeded as a people from the times of Exodus when our tradition establishes our Peoplehood, by a much different narrative. Our arc of success, with its fluctuations, moves ahead because we stay loyal to both our basic needs and our most noble aspirations. The Jewish subset, whether small communities in isolation or now our sovereign nation to which we identify irrespective of where our house sits, has three basic elements. We need a measure of safety, those basic survival needs that assure a tomorrow. Jews historically have thrived and uplifted those around them when granted sufficient autonomy. And once economic resources have been secured, the generosity embedded in our culture has enabled our very top talent to excel. Jewish autonomy advances the world. Those who snipe, those who attack do not fare as well. That's the narrative that should dominate the modern global forum. And it is one that we could control with some common ground rules.
Survival forms the base of Maslow's pyramid of basic needs. The security measures of our synagogues and Jewish institutions appeared before the Hamas massacre. October 7, 2023 served more as an inflection point. It removed taboos, changed the attackers from fringe loners at the social margins to a more mainstream group of people with a future. Students of selective colleges must have had something attractive about them to impress the Admissions Office. Their professors who teach them the historical and social justifications for what they now promote have PhDs and have gone through Search Committees to get hired. The Never Events of massacre get transposed to a historical timeline. Our perceived victimhood justifies shifting who the victims are. That's never a favorable narrative. It also may be one that the Jewish community cannot effectively repel. So we put our own masks on first. Guard our gathering places, become less visible, buy pistols for our homes and cars. And turn inward by inviting unengaged Jews to seek refuge, and maybe advancement, within our established institutions. That requires no public presence. We also have our measure of overt advocacy. Enforce laws that already exist when an attack occurs. Create new laws to discourage hostile mobs from harassing Jews or anyone else. Exposing wrongdoers creates either celebrities or martyrs. "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" our sage Hillel asked. Protect ourselves..
The more neglected narrative may be our internal success. Those with their fists in the air, the sign carriers, the trolls on the internet don't achieve what we have and don't prioritize the dignity of people the way we Jews have. Our hospital wings have Jewish names, not Islamic ones. Civil rights legislation in the 1960s served as a branch point for Jews along with people of color. We moved ahead without the special compensatory or remedial program. That's where our opponents are, people who could have done better than they did over those decades but pursued getting even. The Jewish narrative does not exploit victimhood. Certainly public support for a Jewish state gelled after an attempt at genocide, the real thing, not the usurped canard we see on our news feeds now. But the nationalism that gives Jews our place was embedded with national movements before that, whether the breakup of the Ottoman Empire or dismantling of colonial domination of Asia and Africa. Our narrative needs to be a common one. And we know who opposed this. The same Islamic populations that used terror as a deterrent, engaged in their own inept warfare multiple times, had alliances between totalitarians, including within their own caliphates. That's what they are. That's not what Jews are or what enabled our communities to forge ahead with commerce, science, and agriculture. We are the world's winners. We earn what we amass. That's our story. That's our contribution. It may or may not be our attraction.
In order to fulfil this vision, I think our internal institutions need to be more welcoming in an unconditional way. That is not what I've found over the years. People point to titles, whether the organizations, their officers, or their benefactors. While boundaries are an integral part of Judaism, leaving people on the sidelines or ignored is not. Too many slights to too many people. Invitations to engagement too restricted. Easy to understand why touting institutional success sells less than it could when the sensitivity promoted by Dale Carnegie and other success-by-technique advocates has not become part of the foundation. We've all encountered folks sitting alone in a crowded room with nobody approaching them. And then we have people not even in the room. If we hope to promote community and success, our best public face, we need to start by being fully welcoming to each other.
And at the apex of our internoal growth we need to allocate for a veneer of excellence. Innovations on a scale that our detractors cannot duplicate. We've accomplished this in the financial realm. Our talent writes books and essays that will survive them. Perhaps we as a Jewish civilization have tolerated misuse of that excellence more than we should. The IDF is effective, for sure, but not always functioning beyond public reproach. The Israelis we support create for themselves decent places to live, without taking ownership of public and private damage that the expansion has caused. Within American Jewish institutions we don't always value those of unique talent.
Multiple elements: safety, widespread achievement, sensitivity, boundaries, value of excellence beyond our own interests. That's a lot we could sell. In recent years we may have gotten too defensive, letting our critics control the public face of Israel and the global Jews who see the sovereign Jewish state as an extension of the autonomy in other settings that have uplifted not only ourselves but other cultures in our midst. Sometimes the best defense is an offense, a proactive expression of our story that our critics cannot control.
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