Essays and viewpoints

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In 1957, at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered words whose wisdom continue to resound today: “For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.”

When a weekend meant to commemorate Dr. King was shattered by the hostagetaking at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, we called upon each other as longtime friends and colleagues to find a better path forward for our respective communities. We feared that hate could disrupt the relationship that we had long shared and held dear.

Because the hostagetaker was a Muslim man apparently intent on freeing a Muslim women convicted on terrorism charges, opportunists are already hard at work exploiting our trauma in order to pit Muslims and Jews against each other.

In the spirit of Dr. King, equally embodied in the tireless bridge-building of Rabbi Charles Cytron-Walker of Congregation Beth Israel, we feel called to explore a new blueprint for how we can resist the temptation to allow hate to beget hate. This is but an initial sketch, no doubt with much input needed from lay leaders and clergy from across the Muslim and Jewish communities.

First, we need to change the story. Extremists are of no faith tradition but their own: extremism. We need to stop framing the conversation as community against community, so much as Muslims and Jews together against a common enemy.

We need to call out and sideline extremists, leaving them isolated in their own camp. To that end, we suggest reflecting on the hostagetaker at Beth Israel as an extremist from the United Kingdom with heinous goals unbefitting any faith.

Second, we need to tirelessly build bridges among the rest of us. We are all feeling isolated after two years of pandemic. We need to go out of our way to call friends, neighbors and relatives across lines of faith just to reaffirm the significance of relationship. Today, in the wake of the Jan. 15 trauma, Muslims should call their Jewish friends. Tomorrow, unfortunately, in a world brimming with hate, it may need to be the other way around. The rest of the time, both should call — and call upon — each other.

Third, we need to develop a knowledge and appreciation of each other’s traditions. It is easy to fear an “other” that you do not understand. We need to visit each other’s houses of worship, read each other’s sacred texts, learn how people live out the tenets of their faith and culture, understand how each tradition inspires Jews and Muslims to serve others, and how we all struggle with challenging concepts and ideas in our respective faiths.

Fourth, we need to expand our existing infrastructure of collaboration. The American Jewish Committee’s MuslimJewish Advisory Council holds the potential to expand its regional reach and engage hundreds more leaders across the country.

Local collaborations, such as that which exists between New York’s Cordoba House and East End Temple, should welcome new partners and look into opportunities for larger-scale programing.

College campuses are ideal spaces for interfaith cooperation, especially through projects that combine service, learning and dialogue.

Fifth, we need to build entirely new paths to connection. We are working with Rabbi Benjamin Spratt of Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan to

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gather a book group for clergy, so that we can study deeply and reflect upon social issues that we can best address together. We need to establish advocacy coalitions to push together for better governmental monitoring of Islamophobia and the overdue confirmation of Dr. Deborah Lipstadt as U.S. Special Envoy to Combat and Monitor Antisemitism.

We need to dream about more Muslim-Jewish community centers and shared spaces for gathering. We need to create a joint fundraising mechanism to seed new ventures and increase resources for grassroots organizations like the Muslim-Jewish Solidarity Committee and the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom. We have countless common causes but have underbuilt mechanisms to act upon them.

In honor of Rabbi Cytron-Walker’s heroism and longstanding commitment to interfaith collaboration; in memory of Dr. King; for the sake of ourselves and our children, we are called to do better.

The American Muslim and Jewish communities are vibrant, empowered and open-minded. In the wake of Colleyville, we need to build as never before. Together, we can.

Eboo Patel is founder and president of the Interfaith Youth Core and author of the forthcoming book, “We Need to Build.” Joshua Stanton is rabbi of East End Temple in Manhattan, Senior Fellow of CLAL – The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and co-author of the forthcoming book, “Awakenings.”

The more opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial moves forward, the more it appears his indictment, in which hundreds of millions of shekels have been invested and which has dragged Israel into a state of political chaos, was in fact aimed at promoting a government revolution.

And it worked. Central witnesses for the prosecution, who are mainly state witnesses, have now become witnesses for the defense. Police investigators on the witness stand say they did not really know what they were supposed to investigate, beyond the expectation they find a few testimonies to incriminate a target marked as corrupt in advance.

The investigative methods have been revealed to be questionable, bolstering the impression that witnesses were improperly pressured and told what to say, among other things. Such methods are reminiscent of those used in dark regimes that combine propaganda, mass psychology and disinformation.

It seems every reasonable citizen has now come to understand that it is not just the opposition leader who is on trial but senior law enforcement officials, who have severely damaged Israeli democracy. We will pay for the damage for many years to come. There cannot be genuine rule of law when the public’s level of trust in the law enforcement system has been reduced to an unprecedented low.

Netanyahu, therefore, did right by the State of Israel when he refused to surrender and decided to fight for his innocence. Had he quit, the cases against him would have likely been closed, and his bitter rivals in the media would have praised his courage. His obstinacy will pay off for all of us and will ultimately lead to the comprehensive and vital repair of the justice system.

In recent days, the question of a plea bargain has been brought to the table. This is a complicated issue, and an agonizing deliberation for Netanyahu. We must, however, differentiate between the private and the public realms.

In the private realm, all reasonable people understand Netanyahu’s chances of receiving a fair trial are slim. A sweeping acquittal on all accounts would be too harsh an indictment of the law enforcement and justice systems to which the court belongs. Under such circumstances, a plea bargain could save a lot of

aggravation and years of litigation that could serve as fuel for the slanderous campaign against the former premier. (Even if he were to decide to sign a plea deal, Netanayahu was right not to have agreed to do so earlier. His willingness to come this far has served to expose much of the State Attorney’s Haim Shine JNS.org Office’s negligence and bias.) Yet out of genuine concern for national values and the future of the state, the trial must go on. The many donors who contributed to Netanyahu’s defense campaign, which managed to raise impressive funds in hours, did so in the belief that the country’s law enforcement system needs to be fixed. This is not about charity for Netanyahu. It’s about the belief that only he can now lead the struggle to reveal the distortion and fix the justice system. Otherwise, every elected official in Israel will be at the mercy of the system. In this manner, Israeli democracy will be handed over to a small and unelected oligarchy whose senior representatives will always find themselves in cushy positions after concluding their public service roles as Israel’s true leaders.

Dr. Haim Shine is a faculty member of Israel’s Academic Center of Law and Science, and a member of the Jewish Agency’s Board of Governors.

January is the month that tries our souls, often bringing the year’s worst weather to Michigan. It turns post-holiday deflation into a sense of lingering dread, a looming despair fueled by bitter winds, interminable lake effect snow and some of the calendar’s shortest days. Each January, the physical cold I feel is accompanied by the harsher and icier winds of history. Sometimes they buffet me as I walk across a frozen parking lot on the Grand Valley State campus or crunch my way through drifting snow between buildings. More often they penetrate a warm classroom or the harbor of my office when I pause to remember the many thousands who once marched through the snows of Poland in 1945.

For a host of reasons, Yom HaShoah, which usually falls in April, has become the day when most Jews mark the Holocaust, but I sometimes think that in our northern clime, Jan. 27, designated by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, may be the more appropriate commemorative choice, marking the moment in 1945 when troops of the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. Liberation, though, is a misnomer. Ten days before the Soviets arrived, the Nazis had evacuated nearly all the camp’s prisoners, some 56,000 men and women, marching them west into the Polish winter.

Elie Wiesel’s Night forever etched this infamous death march in our collective memories, though his account seldom lingers over the cold felt by the malnourished and rag-clad victims. Still, when teaching Night during a Michigan winter, I always try to make this section visceral to my students by asking them to imagine setting out, right then, without their North Face coats and Ugg boots, for Robert Franciosi a march through the snow to Big Rapids, some 73 miles away. With no food or water, with Germans shepherds tearing at their heels and with pistol shots for those who faltered.

For me, such a mental exercise always evokes Dante’s Inferno, where the deepest center of Hell is a vast frozen lake, Cocytus, in which traitors are embedded in the ice. Six hundred years later, what the poet could only imagine had been created by Hitler’s legions on the windswept Silesian plains. Among the many survivor accounts of Auschwitz there are some common observations regarding the seasons: spring was a time of viscous mud that grabbed the prisoners’ wooden-soled clogs; summer was when the camp’s pestilential stench hung over them; but it was the Polish winter that most tormented them, its very approach striking fear in even the most veteran of haftlinge or prisoners.

Primo Levi, writing of the onset of winter in the chapter “October 1944” of Survival in Auschwitz, recalls thinking that it would kill seven out

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of 10 prisoners who were then building Monowitz, the vast synthetic rubber factory whose construction took thousands of lives, yet produced not an ounce of the precious material. Those who did not die that winter would “suffer minute by minute, all day, every day.” In fact, the very word “winter,” Levi argues, seems inadequate to what the prisoners had to endure.

“Just as our hunger is not the feeling of missing a meal,” he writes, “so our way of being cold has need of a new word. If the Lagers had lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperatures below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing near.”

Writing in the wake of his liberation, Levi could not have known that a French woman, who had faced even harsher conditions at Birkenau, was also struggling to find new combinations of words to describe what winter had meant there.

Charlotte Delbo was not a Jew and had been sent to Auschwitz in January 1943 as part of a group of 230 women, nearly all of them political activists. Her account of the first winter she endured comprises most of None of Us Will Return, a searing account she wrote in a single month, January 1946, but declined to publish for two decades.

In one section, Delbo strives to convey the sensations of standing at roll call amidst the frozen Polish landscape. “The sky is blue, hard and glacial. One thinks of plants caught in ice,” she writes. “It must happen in the Arctic region, when the ice even freezes underwater vegetation. We are frozen in a block of hard, cutting ice, transparent like a block of pure crystal. And this crystal is pierced by light, as if the light were frozen within the ice, as though ice were light.”

With more of a poetic sensibility, perhaps, than chemist Primo Levi, she pushes figurative language almost to the breaking-point, as if only such excess could convey what she terms the “deep memory” of Auschwitz. Delbo describes the light as “motionless, wounding,” the “light of a dead planet,” but then settles on evoking the sensations of her comrades as they stand one day for hours in the Polish winter, blinded by the light of the snow-covered plain: “Immobile in the ice wherein we are caught, inert, unfeeling, we have lost all living senses. Not one of us utters, ‘I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I’m cold.’ Ferried over to another world, we are subject to drawing breath in another life, we the living dead caught in ice, light, silence.”

With the mundane title, “The Next Day,” Delbo conveys Birkenau’s perpetual horrors and routine barbarities, a place where in winter SS guards and their dogs are both clad in warm coats, while an officer on horseback “examines the perfect squares of 15,000 women standing on the snow.” And as they shiver on a field of “dazzling snow,” the women are gripped by a shared fear, wondering “What are they going to do with us?”

After hours of standing, of being “turned into statues by the cold,” they finally understand the reason for their interminable assembly: Block 25, the way station to the crematoria, is being emptied, its marked-for-death women prisoners packed into open gravel trucks that drive them to the gas chambers.

“Each face is inscribed with such precision over the icy light, the blue of the sky,” Delbo declares, “that it remains marked there for eternity.” All of the women howl yet make no sound: those on the trucks because they know their fate, though “their vocal cords had snapped in their throats”; those standing on the snowy plain because they were “walled in the ice, the light, the silence.”

Central to Dante’s scheme for his Inferno is the idea that all punishments suffered there are just, are based on sins committed in life. With her stark echo of Dante — a figure central also to Levi’s book — Delbo depicts a Hell built upon sin, not justice, in which the innocent, even those who survive the camp, remain trapped in its frozen center.

As her comrade Mado says in The Measure of Our Days (1971), “At any moment, carried by a smell, a day from over there returns.” The mere fact of a rotten potato in her vegetable bin sends her back to walking past the camp kitchens, so that “everything surfaces again: the mud, the snow, the blows of the truncheons.”

In his poem “Shema,” Primo Levi addresses us directly, we who “live safe” in our “warm houses,” who return each night to “hot food and friendly faces,” entreating us not just to remember those who suffered in the Holocaust, but figuratively to affix reminders of their stories to the doorposts of future generations. “Carve them in your hearts” he entreats, “repeat them to your children.” And so, when late January comes, I gird myself against winter’s harshness and, in my heart, once again join the standing and marching thousands.

SANDRA AHN MODE

Robert Franciosi is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Grand Valley State University.

The Jan. 15 hostage situation at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, has inspired many fears: that there will be more violence directed at synagogues, that this attack will fuel Islamophobia, that increased policing at shuls will harm Jews of color. I think there is yet another danger, less immediate but nonetheless worth discussing.

As Jewish communities talk more about security, safety concerns may encourage the continued migration of services to Zoom and discourage the resumption of in-person collective gatherings.

When the pandemic started, liberal and Modern Orthodox synagogues overwhelmingly canceled in-person services. Such shutdowns saved lives. Many communities began experimenting with online programming. For Purim 2020, I went straight from reading the megillah in-person at an office to reading from it for an online broadcast, when my Chicago congregation canceled its large, in-person reading.

Online services present problems for the traditionally observant, like me: Can one convene a prayer quorum, or minyan, over the internet? Which technologies are permissible or not on Shabbat?

Then again, Zoom services fill important spiritual and social needs for people stuck alone at home. And they even have advantages over in-person gatherings, as remote services are accessible to homebound seniors and people with disabilities who couldn’t attend even before the pandemic. They allow synagogues to reach sympathetic audiences in far-off places. Eventually, communities could save on expensive, large physical buildings. Little by little, a stopgap measure begins to seem appealing as a long-term choice.

Concerns about security will only increase this appeal. Providing security is costly and logistically complicated, requiring additional staffing and training. Moreover, fears about hostile attackers encourage us, as COVID19 does, to imagine public in-person gatherings as dangerous, fraught occasions.

Given the horrible attacks on synagogues in the last five years, what regular synagoguegoer has never felt nervous about security?

Moreover, we worry about a security threat for some of the same reasons we worry about a virus. In-person synagogue services are public; we let everyone in, which means we give up control over whom we encounter.

Reading through an AntiDefamation League guide called “Protecting Your Jewish Institution,” I am struck by how the word “public” is used to signal danger: Avoid providing directions to your institution online because they will be “public.” Do not “publicize” details of a trip too widely. Be wary of the “security concerns created by “going public.’”

The more the “event is open to the public,” the higher the risk. Security protocols, like health protocols, involve managing, controlling and inherently limiting the public. Of course, such management is far easier over Zoom.

But that ease comes at a cost.

One reason I attend religious services in the first place is that they are public. Much of our social life is not: Domestic spaces are usually restricted to the intimate circles of friends and family; workplaces are ruled by private employers; leisure spaces frequently require purchases to enter.

A religious teacher of mine once said that we pray communally to learn to tolerate how obnoxiously other people pray — a suggestion I then found confusing, but which now seems wise. Part of the point of a synagogue is that you do not have control, that you are exposed to others, that you are forced to sit next to those you might otherwise eschew, with whom you would never have thought to share an intimate, spiritual experience.

I treasure in-person prayer for other reasons: Participatory singing does not work online, for instance, and

Zoom services tend to divide communities into “performers” and spectators.

But even if that were solved, what is lost online is precisely what makes synagogues inflexible, difficult to manage, sometimes sensorily unpleasant or even menacing.

I remember how, when I spent a summer abroad in a small European community, two men who had a longrunning personal and financial feud would both wince and smile when they saw each other at Shabbat afternoon services — because each knew he needed the other to make a minyan.

That uncomfortable dependence is a benefit of the rigid inflexibility of placebased Jewish prayer.

A community is defined by association with people who will never be your friends. Many trends in contemporary life reduce such unpleasant experiences: You enjoy the food you like at your dining table, without having to deal with the other diners; you exercise not in a gym, let alone a public park, but at home with an app; you share virtual space with people chosen for you individually by an algorithm.

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We lead increasingly atomized lives, buying in private rather than being in public.

Private spaces are also inherently unequal. Not everyone has a computer, a quiet room and a reliable internet connection to access online services. For all their inclusiveness, online services will likely marginalize unhoused people; they will be most comfortable for those with large, spacious houses and up-to-date technology. A synagogue is supposed to be a space in which one matters just for being a person — regardless of their means, everyone eats the same at kiddush.

Reports that the Colleyville hostage-taker impersonated an unhoused person looking for a shelter are frightening, but we should be proud that our synagogues offer a calm space for people without any other. Houses of worship are vulnerable by design, and when that space is closed off, whether through security or by going online, something is lost.

Obviously, these concerns are secondary when lives are at stake. (And as we return to praying in-person, communities must learn to be more accessible to disabled people.) Nonetheless, the possibility of an active shooter or the dangers of a virus can also easily become alibis for a convenient erosion of public, physical gathering. That does seem to me something worth worrying about.

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A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California and is reprinted with permission via JTA. Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. He earned a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley.

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Iam tired of COVID. I know you are, too. But here we are, dealing with a fourth wave of coronavirus, and beginning to wonder if we’re going to work our way all the way through the Greek alphabet and ultimately get to an Omega variant sometime this year or next.

At least for those of us who are vaccinated and boosted, each new outbreak is somewhat less disruptive than the one before. The fact that Omicron is so transmittable has left hospitals, grocery stores and other employers scrambling for workers, but the impact of this newest strain has been much more of an annoying inconvenience than a dangerous threat.

When COVID first hit, and our knowledge of the virus and our protections from it were so limited, the first priority was to preserve public health, even at immense economic and societal cost. For two years, the crux of the political debate has been about how best to balance those dueling considerations, although the balance has gradually shifted toward reopening.

But as the nation’s public schools begin classes again after the holiday break, students and their parents are finding themselves at the center of what may become a brutal political fight over whether and how schools should be operating in this latest iteration of the pandemic. We are just beginning to understand the extent of the learning loss that occurred when students were limited to online classes over the last two years — and the even greater damage suffered by children from minority and lower-income communities. We have barely any clue as to the long-term psychological harm these young people suffered from their protracted isolation and desocialization while their schools were closed.

The Republicans’ upset victory in the Virginia governor’s race last fall demonstrated the parental dissatisfaction toward prolonged school closures, and Democrats from Joe Biden on down have scrambled to encourage their teachers’ union allies to return to the classroom. But the rapid spread of Omicron over winter break has undermined that strategy, and it now appears that growing union resistance to school reopening will have immense educational and political impact.

One New Jersey labor leader recently cast the familiar health versus economy debate in especially stark terms when he said, “I’d see the entire city of Newark unemployed before I allowed one single teacher’s aide to die needlessly.”

Any death is a tragedy that we should make great effort to avoid, but such an absolute standard would require the criminalization of cars, airplanes, pharmaceuticals (and possibly electricity, ladders and fatty foods). In reality, we make these tradeoffs every day, balancing what we believe to be some level of acceptable risk in exchange for both necessities and conveniences in our daily lives. It wouldn’t be possible to hold in-person classes under such criteria — ever.

A more measured assessment was offered in the Bay Area, where respected Santa Clara County Public Health Director Sara Cody issued a joint statement with the county’s office of education urging schools to stay open.

“We need to find ways to coexist and live with COVID,”

Cody said. “We’ve learned that in-person education is what [students] need and remote learning doesn’t support their mental health, emotional health and academic wellbeing nearly the way that in-person learning does.” To his credit, California Gov. Gavin Newsom successfully pressured Dan Schnur the powerful California

JNS.org Teachers Association into a commitment last month to keep the state’s public schools open. But such agreements are often tenuous, and there is already evidence of teacher sick-outs and other efforts to temporarily suspend classroom instruction. And testing shortages, rising caseloads and lack of qualified substitute teachers make it likely that these trends will spread quickly just as parents are preparing to send their children back to school. Newsom, Biden and other Democratic leaders have benefited tremendously from their relationship with teachers’ unions over the years. But while still protecting the health of their constituents, they will need to find a way to prod their labor allies into a more balanced approach. That balancing act won’t be easy — and it carries extremely high stakes for children and politicians alike.

Dan Schnur teaches political communications at UC Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. He hosts the weekly webinar “Politics in the Time of Coronavirus” for the Los Angeles World Affairs Council & Town Hall. This article first appeared in the Jewish Journal.