Why I walked out on the Rosh Hashanah sermon this year
And what I learned about what we really need to do
When the rabbi started his sermon, he began by saying he wanted to talk about tshuva, about repentance, about “the deep spiritual stuff” — but simply couldn’t because there was something more pressing he must address. My family knows this rabbi’s politics: every high holiday service is a coin flip between these sermon genres. Will he wax poetic on the spiritual thread between the week’s Torah portion and his mundane, relatable human experience OR will he describe why we need to pray for missile defense systems and carpet bomb all of Iran? We often like the former; we always suffer through the latter.
Every other year, when the earthly is in question, I’ve made it through his remarks. The AIPAC talking points on Israel were aggravating, but ignorable: a perpetual cost of participating in Jewish institutional life that we’d (sadly) become accustomed to. This year, of course, the rabbi said he needed to talk about antisemitism. I thought I knew where this was going.
As public, violent antisemitism has surged under the Trump administration, I should have had plenty of time to prepare for what came next. Every few months, there’s another reason for an all-consuming Jewish communal “debate” about the origins and threats of antisemitism today. I say “debate” because our current reality is not dependent on any amount of persuasion. While there may be difference of opinion, there is no difference of fact: the reason American rabbis spoke about antisemitism for Rosh Hashanah, the reason American Jews now feel a fear they have not in decades, is because of resurgent, violent white supremacist antisemitism.
And that violent white supremacist antisemitism — that killed Jews in Pittsburgh and in Poway — is resurgent because of a sympathetic right-wing politics that has changed in the last decade. Only in the reaction to these events — or to the spectacle of neo-Nazis and white supremacists rallying — has the antisemitism present in the left been excavated and held up. Those that do so are occasionally identifying instances of real conspiratorial antisemitism among otherwise progressive people, are mostly conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism, and are pretty much always raising Louis Farrakhan as reason to refocus the Jewish community’s attention towards the left. Although these “counter-arguments” aren’t philosophically connected to today’s violence and are chronologically nonsensical, the vogue position emerging from the discourse is to accept them as just as valid. Thus, a thousand statements and op-eds blame “both sides,” Bari Weiss writes an extremely popular book, and my rabbi (and perhaps yours) opens by condemning “the right and the left” as they start to preach to their congregations about antisemitism.
Like I said, the angle should not have been a surprise. Nor should it have been a surprise to hear the balance of the exposition.
Although the rabbi had mentioned the new armed security and a team of lay people patrolling the synagogue as preface to his talk, he spent all of two minutes describing the antisemitism of the right which that very security is meant to thwart. He talked about the antisemitic replacement conspiracy theory that suggests Jews are coordinating immigration to “replace” white people in the US. He did not mention the name of the President Donald Trump, nor the publicly antisemitic elected officials (King, Brooks) of his party in power, nor his antisemitic advisors in the White House (Bannon, Gorka), nor, of course, the right’s anti-immigrant obsession that platforms and encourages the replacement conspiracy. He did not care to investigate how any of the official endorsement of white nationalism in the highest halls of power, made official in November 2016, might have something to do with a popularization of antisemitism.
Instead, he had to move on to what he said, word-for-word, was the “the more dangerous antisemitism” of the left. For the next twenty or so minutes, we heard plenty of specific threats hiding under a “veil of progressivism,” although they could all have been verbalized as “people of color”. There was the obligatory Farrakhan quote, criticism for the Women’s March, and instances of anti-Zionism on college campuses. The largest segment was reserved for the Jewish people’s greatest contemporary threat, I suppose: a professor at Oberlin (who was fired for social media posts in 2016). This catalog naturally led into the more familiar territory of how anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and segued into the crescendo, the High Holiday call to action. What we must do to fight antisemitism? Don’t try to persuade antisemites, he said, call it out. Rally our allies, he said. Support Israel. “Join AIPAC.”
I walked out.
If in other years, I could deflect the insinuation I was a self-hating Jew for being critical of Israel — for the sake of the rest of the service — in 2019, it was the last nail. In a hall full of hundreds of Jews experiencing a new generation of antisemitic violence and fear of it, I could not sit in my synagogue and hear the rabbi who bar mitzvah’d me tell me that I was the one at fault for it. I had to leave, as a proud Jew and proud leftist, clearly unwelcome in his analysis. More importantly, I walked out during the sermon yesterday because his analysis, spread far and wide this High Holidays, is historically irresponsible, morally repugnant, and it will prevail unless we do something about it.
I’m under no illusion my departure from the sanctuary was productive to that end. But my exposure to the narrative and reach of this sermon — and the immediate helplessness to counteract it — clarified for me the immensity of the task ahead of us in the coming year.
If this insidious, harmful narrative is being pumped into hundreds of families at a time at just this synagogue — thousands upon thousands of people on a single day of the year — we have to figure out an antidote that can reach that scale. It’s not enough for me to walk out of the sermon, or to boo or interrupt him, or to write the rabbi a letter (although sometimes, these may help). It is not enough for us to continue to refine our analyses of antisemitism in our own lovely, lefty, but insulated systems (although, yes, this work is worthwhile). If we don’t figure out how to contest ideology in public, the leaders of Jewish institutions will continue to mislead our families and communities en masse, preventing them from identifying the real threats in front of us and the real allies beside us.
Luckily, I’m heartened to know there are plenty of Jews who already get it, many of whom are dedicated to exactly this work for the coming year. I’m grateful to be able to feel solidarity with many others who experienced the same alienation and outrage at what they heard when they looked for spiritual renewal this Rosh Hashanah in their Jewish communities. There are enough of us to get our people on track to actually confront the antisemitism we face and to recognize it is a part of the white nationalism victimizing far more people than just us. Never mind my (former) rabbi’s delineation. Taking up this fight is political and it’s spiritual. That’s the deepest stuff there is.
