Parshat Ki Tavo: Anti Semitism Then & Now

Let’s talk a little about the well-known phenomenon of anti-Semitism.

When you think about the reasons for the general hatred of our people, you inevitably conclude that anti-Semitism is an absolutely irrational phenomenon—remember, we were amazed at how suddenly and unjustifiably the attitude of Egyptians towards Jews changed (Parashas Shemos).

If in some countries we are hated because we are poor and miserable, in others it’s because we are rich, bourgeois and exploiters.

If on one end of the earth we evoke hatred with our strong faith and “religious fanaticism,” then on the other we are considered the disseminators of dangerous freethinking (this was how the Jews of Russia were treated under Tsar Nicholas).

In some places we are hated for indifference to the fate of the country in which we live, for political passivity (for example, in medieval Germany), in others—when we actively participated in public life (as, for example, in medieval Spain and in Germany before Hitler came to power), we are hated precisely for this…

There is no looking for logic in anti-Semitism.

This illogicality is explained extremely simply: an anti-Semite is an instrument in the hand of the Almighty, a scourge with which the L-rd punishes us for our sins.

Let us note an interesting fact: Most often, the Creator has punished us with the hands of those peoples whose worldviews we embraced.

The Prophets compare the departure of the Jews from faith in one G-d and His Torah with the betrayal of a wife of her husband. This is what awaits those who have entered a depraved relationship with foreign religions: “…I raise up your lovers against you… and I will turn my jealousy on you, and [lovers] will deal with you cruelly” (Yechezkel 23:22, 25).

There is a variety of insect, the praying mantis, whose females kill the males immediately after mating. Something similar happened to us: as soon as the Jews became infatuated with and impregnated someone else’s ideology, it launched its poisonous sting into them.

In the first book of Talks on the Torah we already said that the Egyptians hated the Jews as soon as the Jews began to imitate them and stopped their practice of circumcision.

When the Jews in the era of the Judges began to worship Dagon, the Philistine G-d, the Philistines attacked the country. They oppressed Israel and imposed an unbearable tribute on it. And the people groaned until they removed the alien G-ds from their midst and began to serve the L-rd (see Shoftim 10:6-16).

During the time of the First Temple, the Jews began to worship the idols of Assyria and Babylon (see Melachim II 16:10 and Yechezkel 23:9-17). And in this case, the object of their passion became the instrument of punishment of the Jews: as we already know, the Assyrians expelled ten tribes of Israel from Eretz Yisrael, and the Babylonians expelled the two remaining tribes of Yehudah and Binyamin.

Infatuation with Hellenism led our people to a massive departure from their religion, and the Greeks, almost unhindered, eradicated Judaism in Eretz Yisrael, and annihilated the recalcitrant.

The same thing happened during the emergence of Christianity: the new religion created by the apostate Jews contributed, at first, to their rejection by the people of Israel and, later, brought innumerable calamities to the world Jewry, amidst which it gained popularity.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the heyday of German humanistic philosophy, as a result of their gratitude for receiving civil rights, Jews began to worship “cultured” Germany. It was in this country that the reformist movement was born, intending to “modernize” Judaism. The reformists built their synagogues on the model of German churches, prayed to the accompaniment of an organ, included the singing of a female choir in the service…

The most “progressive” of them moved the day of the commanded rest from Saturday to Sunday; they threw out from the prayer the words “…and bring us to Zion, Your city, with songs, and to Jerusalem, the place of Your Temple, with eternal joy,” for they adopted a new ethic proclaimed by the ideologists of this movement: “One cannot be cunning when addressing the Almighty. We are grateful to Him that we have the happiness of living in a cultured, enlightened Germany, and not in dark, backward Asia. Are we really going to ask to come back?!”

It was in Germany that the process of mass assimilation of Jews began, it was there that voluntary baptism became commonplace, and it was from there that the national disaster of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries spread to all Western Europe, Poland and Russia: the departure of the Jews from the Torah. And it is no coincidence that it was Germany that inflicted a terrible blow on the Jewish people.

founder of “scientific” Communism, Karl Marx, was the son of Jewish parents who were baptized when the boy was three years old. This false messiah succeeded in capturing many of those about whom his associate Engels wrote: “The Jew is revolutionary by nature. He was brought up on the ideals of the prophets about the equality and brotherhood of all people.”

A significant percentage of the Communist Parties of all countries of the world were, and still are, Jews. Jews were at the forefront of the Russian Revolution and, for a quarter of a century, were among the most implacable enemies of their fathers’ religion. It was they who were to blame for the mass assimilation of Soviet Jewry, it was with their hands that Lenin and Stalin destroyed our ancient culture, it was they who persecuted their brothers who studied the Torah and Hebrew, and it was they who accused believing Jews of being counterrevolutionaries and sent them to camps.

We are aware of the fate of these former members of the Central Committee, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, workers of punitive organs—revolutionaries of Jewish origin: almost all of them died in the very dungeons where their blood brothers, who remained faithful to their G-d and their people, were sent. Those who miraculously survived, as a rule, regretted what they had done, and some, having been released, repented and returned to Judaism.

The terrible warnings of the L-rd came true exactly here: “…what untruth did your fathers find in Me, that they separated themselves from Me, and followed the empty one, and [themselves became] empty… Your evil will punish you, and your willfulness will expose you, and you will recognize and see how bad and bitter [it will be for you] that you left the L-rd, your G-d, and you were not afraid of Me…” (Yirmiyahu 2:5, 19).

The Prophets called out to the people: “Return, O Israel, to the L-rd, your G-d, for you have stumbled because of your sin” (Hoshea 14:2); “The one who knows, let him return...” (Yoel 2:14)—that is, let him correct what he can.

The only way of salvation for the Jewish people is to return to life according to the Torah. And then— “I will be like dew to Israel, [it] will bloom like a rose, and take root like [the cedar] of Lebanon” (Hoshea 14:6).