On Tisha B'Av, the Jewish people's time of mourning reaches its peak. This is the most serious fast of the four that mark the destruction of the Temple, and the most important because by today's fast, we mourn many disasters that befell the Jewish people over the course of generations.
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Tragic events led us into exile, where we dreamed of returning to Zion, the ingathering of the exiles, fulfilling Ezekiel's prophecy of the Valley of Dry Bones, without ever forgetting our Jewish purpose. We maintained our longing, our dream, and our vision far from our promised land, scattered across the earth, and all the while managed to preserve the people's continued existence.
We breathed Judaism without sovereignty. That is the wonder of the Jewish people, a unique characteristic that became an asset. A uniqueness that ensures the continuity of future generations. If there is no land in which to gather, there is a synagogue. And if there is no Temple, there is a state. There is no vacuum. We have the privilege of living at our people's highest point, the fulfilment of a dream: the Jewish people living in the Land of Israel, which became the state of Israel. What more could we ask? There's always something. One might say, more sovereignty, someone else – more democracy, a third might want more equality, a fourth more Judaism and a fifth the Temple itself! More is always possible, but we are thankful for what we have.
Seventy-three years ago, the Jewish people founded a sovereign state, and a month ago, a new government. This is a reason to rejoice. Always. Judaism is not afraid of novelty. The strong base and novelty always come from what is good, old, and strong. We also have a new prime minister-designate and foreign minister, Yair Lapid. Lapid means well. But has it gone so far that he is willing to give others what it unique to us? Last week, in the middle of the three-week period between the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av, Lapid spoke at the 7th Global Forum on Antisemitism, explaining that "The antisemites weren't only in the Budapest Ghetto [in the Holocaust]. The antisemites were also slave traders who threw people bound together with chains into the sea. The antisemites were the extremist Hutu in Rwanda who massacred Tutsis. The antisemites are Muslim fanatics who have murdered millions of other Muslims in the past century."
Israel's foreign minister might have hoped that that a speech like that would confront antisemitism by obfuscating the tragedy that was unique to the Jewish people. "Antisemitism is racism, antisemitism is radicalism, antisemitism is xenophobia," he added. But we all know that. The problem is that many peoples throughout history have suffered, but the hatred for Jews is a permanent element of the historical repertoires of the movements that persecute: the Crusaders slaughtered Jews they encountered in Jerusalem, the Inquisitors pursued and tortured them, Jewish holy books were burned outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, there were pogroms in Ukraine and Russia. And the Holocaust, in which entire Jewish communities in Europe and the East were murdered. Over 60 million civilians and soldiers lost their lives in World War II, but 6 million were killed merely because they were Jews. So Mr. Foreign Minister, antisemitism is not "hatred of foreigners," as you said at the conference. Antisemitism is hatred of Jews. It is a lethal weapon.
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Foreign Minister Lapid's speech sent me back a number of years of 2004, to Gorée Island in Senegal. From there, slaves were sent to America. I visited the island as Israel's ambassador to Mauritia. The site director hosted me. A picture of the Auschwitz death camp caught my eye. It was hanging on a wall, between pictures of the slaves. "You suffered five years in the war, we suffered 300," he told me. "300 years of slavery." I didn't answer. True, for many Africans the color of their skin is still a social barrier, or worse – could determine their fate. But to say the Jewish people suffered only five years? In the time of Martin Luther King Jr., Black Americans fought racism using terms from our biblical story. The Black Lives Matter movement adopts antisemitic ideas. So is antisemitism any form of xenophobia?
The foreign minister mentioned the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda by the Hutu. I visited Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, where I encountered a trembling silence in the streets. The place was covered with internal contradictions. The museum of the slaughter they created was inspired by commemorations of the Holocaust. They wrote about their very real suffering using our alphabet. Peoples who experienced tragedies learned from us how to write their future using the ink of the past.
Dear government, don't touch my religion, don't touch my heritage, don't touch my history, and don't desecrate the suffering. What is ours, is ours, including the bad things we have experienced, which have been distilled into the great spirit, the spirit of the Jewish people. The Jewish existential war today is not against COVID or Iran, but the battle for our Jewish identity. The Greeks, the Romans, the Inquisitors – they all tried and failed to attack our identity. And now, in the age of globalism, we are exposed to a new danger. The danger of trivialization, the use of "antisemitism" as "just another" form of hatred, another form of "xenophobia" or "intolerance."
This is the biggest challenge for Judaism in the global era: to preserve its uniqueness and emphasize it in the face of fashions and schools of thought that seek to blur identities, muffle national feeling, compel a world of universal values. There are already some who are marking our insistence on preserving what makes us special as an expression of racism or a view of superiority. There are also some who dream of turning the lessons of the Holocaust into a "universal message" and portray the Holocaust as just another genocide. Each of these trends has a direction, in which antisemitism and the Holocaust are just "reminders" of what human evil can wreak. Every evil, every human. The biggest irony of all is that under the auspices of our greatest achievement, the founding of the state, our Jewish identity was knowingly damaged; that in a government whose leader wears a kippa, we might send the world the message that antisemitism is hatred like any other. Because if antisemitism is just another form of hatred, the Jews are just another ethic group that is hated. This is a radical and dangerous message, and even more painful to hear when it comes from the spokesman of the Israeli government leading up to this holy day.
