When asked recently by a serious observer of current events to identify the most distressed Jewish communities in the world today, Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky, listed the three that he felt to be in the greatest danger: Ukraine, Greece and the United States. The person to whom Sharansky imparted his views could hardly believe his ears.
He understood Sharansky’s pointing to Ukraine and Greece. The economic, social and political turmoil in those countries today have always been history’s midwife for the dangerous, hate-filled scapegoating of Jews.
But the United States?
Sharansky was dramatizing a point he had made the night before, echoed by Irwin Cotler, in an evening of dialogue and conversation at Beth Tzedec Congregation in Toronto between the two giants of modern Jewish history.
As mentioned in a July 23 CJN article, both Sharansky and Cotler lamented what they described as increasing displays of feelings of embarrassment, shame and even fear among Jewish youths on American campuses that prevent these young adults from advocating on behalf of Israel. They were shocked by what they saw. But more than shocked, they were deeply saddened and alarmed.
When it comes to perceiving and accurately interpreting warning signs from Jewish communities around the world, no one can do so more authoritatively than Sharansky. He understands threats to the Jewish soul. His own attachment to the Jewish People was forged in the oppressive furnace of Soviet totalitarianism. Despite the brutal efforts of the vast machinery of the Soviet state to vanquish and extinguish that attachment in him and indeed, in all of Soviet Jewry, he became one of the most inspiring exemplars of the indomitability of Jewish and human strength. Today, as the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sharansky, perhaps more than anyone else, is familiar with the diverse communities that comprise the Jewish world.
He explained to the rapt audience at Beth Tzedec how Jewish identity and Jewish peoplehood are threatened once the first insidious dominos of shame and embarrassment fall inside the souls of our Jewish youth. “As they start to feel ashamed, they say, ‘I’ll be silent for a couple of years.’ But that’s the beginning of the end. They distance themselves from the Jewish community and disappear.”
But Sharansky did not merely offer his audience a lament. Never one to turn away from the possible “rescue” of fellow Jews, he also challenged the audience. “We have to fight for them [young Jews], and make them feel not ashamed but proud.”
But how? How do we make the young Jews on campus feel proud to be Jews?
The best way – not the only way – is by providing young Jews, from their early days as children, an intense, rewarding Jewish education. Only after our youngsters know who they truly are, once they know the life-affirming values and joyous way of life that have been their individual, communal, ethnic, theological and social inheritance these past 3,500 years, will they be able to cast shame aside and become proud, powerful advocates for Israel, and indeed, for all causes of human rights and social justice.
Rabbi Marc D. Angel at the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals in New York conveys this message elegantly in relation to parshat Dvarim. “Once they [B’nai Yisrael] had a solid and clear sense of their specific context and their specific identity, they could go on to play their spiritual role in the unfolding of human civilization.”
However fierce and wild the winds of challenge, accusation, hypocrisy and affront blow on campus, our children will not be swept aside in embarrassment or shame if they are rooted in their specific Jewish identity acquired through comprehensive Jewish education.
But that education must be affordable. At the moment, for far too many Jewish families, it is not. If this situation continues, if we allow Jewish education to be beyond the reach of future generations, we too may one day be a Jewish community in distress.
