Wednesday, January 31, 2018
The almond trees are blooming in Israel, right in time for
Tu B’Shvat, the new year of the trees. I like to bring a flowering branch into
my home where my family can see this visible reminder of the holiday. Out of
doors, it’s fascinating to watch the hillsides break out in spring-like
blossoms in the dead of winter. It’s so cool to live in Israel and watch the
way the seasons unfold according to the Jewish calendar.
I appreciate this blessing even more after having just
returned from a trip to the States. It was lovely to see my hometown. I got a
kick out of seeing this gold filigree reindeer on someone’s lawn:
But I thrilled at seeing the almond trees in bloom on my
return. Here in Israel, the holidays, the seasons, are my own. They’re Jewish. And that’s why I live here. That’s
precisely the reason. And there’s a special happiness, a kind of delight, to
living a Jewish life in Israel.
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| Some of the goodies we had for Tu B'Shvat here in Israel. |
The thing is, I can’t really get it through my head, can’t
really understand why Jews want to live anywhere else. It’s one thing to pray
for rain in your daily prayers. It’s another thing to actually understand the
prayer and what it represents. You could be saying your prayers in Detroit, but
you’re praying for rain in Israel. Why
do that in Detroit?
You pray for something good to happen in your land, but you
don’t live there??? What good is the
land without inhabitants? Why pray for the place where you don't want to live?
By the same token, you can eat some carob on Tu B’Shvat in
Pittsburgh. But it’s not the new year of the trees in Allegheny County. When
you eat that carob you’re celebrating the new year of the trees in Israel. Why take pleasure in the
fruits of Eretz Yisrael? Why mark the season while laying down ever stronger roots
in Cincinnati or Lakewood?
It’s not your country there. It’s a land of filigreed
reindeer.
Here in Israel, where the almonds blossom on Tu B’Shvat, is
where you are supposed to be.
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| Dried fruit on sale at a local health food store in honor of Tu B'Shvat this week (photo credit: Chava Hyman) |
But the cognitive dissonance I experience regarding Jews in
America is kind of minor when compared to what I feel about Jews living in
Europe.
Take, for instance, the comments
by Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, on
antisemitism in Germany, “The very first step is the simple, though painful,
acknowledgment that Germany, in the year 2018, is still facing a massive
problem with hatred toward Jews,” said Schuster.
I found this statement difficult to understand. Germany
rounded up, gassed, and burned over 6 million Jews. Why should it be painful
to acknowledge Germany’s problem regarding the Jews? Why would anyone think
that the antisemitism expressed through the Holocaust is gone from Germany? Why
would Jews attempt to reestablish a Jewish community in Germany? The very name
of Schuster’s organization is an oxymoron, from my purview.
But it gets worse. Schuster cites polls that show some 20-25
percent of Germans have antisemitic attitudes. He says, “It’s high time to
combat this irrational hatred.”
I read Schuster’s words and thought: it’s high time you, Josef
Schuster, realized that Germany is no place for Jews!
Combat hatred? What is the point of combatting Jew-hatred in
Germany? I don’t see this as a noble purpose. A noble purpose is picking up and
moving to Israel and strengthening the Jewish State. A Jew living in Germany,
on the other hand, is the definition of insanity so often misattributed
to Einstein.
But I don’t mean to pin all this on Schuster. Jews like
Schuster are in no short supply in Europe or in other parts of the world. Commenting
on a report showing that antisemitic incidents in Germany had increased
three-fold in 2015, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of
European Rabbis said,
“We are in a new era of antisemitism globally. There is a rejection of
mainstream politics and we need to be aware of the waves of antisemitism
sweeping across Europe. As a society we must take measures to reject
antisemitism and ensure that it does not become a new norm.”
Um, how can antisemitism in Germany become a “new norm”? Is
that because it was the “old norm” in 1938? I really cannot wrap my head around
this statement.
He seems to think something changed in Germany after the
Holocaust. Actually, something did change. They stopped shoving us into gas chambers.
And the sentiment was driven underground just a bit. Because the world was
appalled. Germany had to improve its rep.
But why would anyone delude themselves into thinking that
Germans stopped hating Jews? Tuvia
Tenenbom and NGO Monitor’s Gerald
Steinberg have done an excellent job exposing German state funding of antisemitic
and anti-Israel organizations. German antisemitism cannot only be pinned on
Muslim immigrants, but must be recognized as part and parcel of the German
culture and ethos, no matter how many official denials are issued. No matter
how many big machers speak of “new norms” and “painful acknowledgements.”
It may be that European antisemitism is a kind of industry.
Otherwise, how is one to understand the words
of Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los
Angeles, regarding a court-ruling on the attempted arson of a synagogue in
Wuppertal in 2014 as “criticism of Israel” rather than “antisemitism”? “It sets
a legal cover to extremists and terrorists to ‘express’ their hatred the way
that Hitler and company expressed their hatred of Jews. Left unchallenged, this
outrage could signal open season on German Jewry and their institutions by
those who hate the Jewish state and everything it and the Jewish people stand
for.”
No, no, no. It’s the other way around. Hitler “and company”
offered the precedent the court wished to adopt as law. The Muslim arsonists
knew they could get away with this sort of behavior in Germany precisely
because of German history, in particular with regard to Hitler and the Holocaust.
Open season on German Jewry?? That too, is a holdover from
the Holocaust, which brings us back to the question: Why the heck did the Jews
reestablish the German Jewish community? Why would Jews come back there to
live?
It’s just mindboggling.
And we didn’t even get past Germany. Antisemitism in Europe
is now so rampant that 51 percent of Jews in Europe say
they feel unsafe wearing visibly Jewish symbols.
So I read the stories of antisemitic incidents. The
protestations by the local Jewish councils. And I just shake my head. I don’t
get it.
I don’t know why Jews insist on living in these places or
what it will take to make them leave, what the cost will be.
All I know is that tonight my family made a Tu B’Shvat seder
at a table decorated with the blooming branch of an almond tree.
It was so sweet.
