Wait, Genocide of Jews is Wrong?

Sermon Shabbat Mikets 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Hanukkah is over now, which means that we can sit back and just nod our heads at all the crazy rushing around everyone is doing for their own holidays these last couple of weeks of December.  I mean, we did a whole lot of rushing around last week and the week before, so it’s a bit of a relief to relax and watch someone else rush around this week.

Now, I must make one more Hanukkah comment, this one about First Gentleman Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is Jewish.  He posted a picture of himself lighting the Hanukkiah on social media with a remarkable version of the Hanukkah story below the photo.  In his telling, he said Hanukkah commemorated a time when the Jews had to hide from persecution for eight days and nights, and only had enough oil to last for a little while—but the oil lasted all eight days that they had to hide.  

Well… not exactly.  As every five year old Jewish kid knows, we Jews had to fight for our religious freedom, and when we recaptured the Temple in Jerusalem we only found enough oil to light the menorah for one day, but it lasted for eight days and nights instead.  Whether this is the way it really happened or not, that’s what everybody likes to believe about Hanukkah.

Except, perhaps, for the First Gentleman. 

You know, if you are going to screw up a Jewish story, this isn’t the one to mess up.  I mean, this is probably the best known and most told Jewish tale after the Exodus from Egypt.  I wonder where Doug Emhoff went to Hebrew School, and if he flunked out?

In any case, I hope everyone had a great Hanukkah.  Now, if you haven’t yet cleaned your Hanukkah menorahs yet, the best way to do so is to use very hot water to melt the wax, and then to dry them off thoroughly before you put them away.  Oh, and next year, in 2024, Hanukkah begins on December 25th… Only 373 more shopping days to go.

With Hanukkah now in our rear-view mirror, we are approaching the end of 2023, and I’m not sure just what to make of it all.  As a Jew and a rabbi, so much of what happened before October 7th has receded into memory, having been replaced by the sense of intense shock and ongoing crisis ever since that dark day.  Things don’t look at all the same now as they did before Hamas’ horrific attack and the atrocities they perpetrated.  The war that these Palestinian terrorists began that day has brought great destruction, including to the terrorists’ own Palestinian people, and it has catalyzed waves of antisemitic actions and attitudes that we mistakenly believed were no longer possible in 2023. 

Which brings me to this week’s Torah portion of Mikets.  At the beginning of this week’s portion Joseph lies in an Egyptian prison, having experienced a traumatic fall from favor, comfort and privilege into the depths of dark despair.  He is forced more than once to confront dramatically changed circumstances, and must find a way to rise from disaster and fear and find a new way to be.  Ultimately, Joseph does so in a remarkable way here in Mikets.  But the initial situation is so shocking, so intensely different than what he must have been expecting in life that it reminds me a little of our situation as American Jews in the aftermath of October 7th. 

Last week, finally, the president of Penn, Liz Magill, resigned under fire for her inability to condemn calls for Jewish genocide, as did the chair of the board of that Ivy League university.  Magill, along with the presidents of Harvard and MIT, were called to testify before Congress a couple of weeks ago about the tremendous level of Antisemitism on college campuses since the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, particularly antisemitic rallies and public statements by students and professors at those prominent universities.  None of the three presidents would agree that calls for the genocide of Jews was automatically to be considered hate speech. 

So far, only Penn’s Magill has resigned, as the boards and, to some degree, the alumni of the two Boston area elite universities have backed their presidents in spite of the moral blindness that prevents these individuals from seeing that calls for genocide of anyone are ethically indefensible.

If the student groups, and university professors, some of them tenured, who were quoted calling for Jewish genocide had instead demanded the genocide of, say, Greeks or Hutus or Guatemalans or aboriginal Australians or Muslims there is no doubt that university administrations would have fallen all over themselves to condemn them and expel the perpetrators of such hate speech.  Imagine what would have happened if Jewish student groups had called for the genocide of Palestinians! 

No, it is only acceptable in the name of free speech to call for the murder of Jews, and the genocide of Israelis and Jews everywhere in the world.  Otherwise, you can’t do it on American university campuses.  But demand the annihilation and mass murder of Jews?  Oh, that’s protected free speech.

Magill’s performance before Congress was egregiously embarrassing to anyone who believes in the moral standing of American universities as bastions of actual ideas.  But the other presidents called to Congress with her, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay, and Sally Kornbluth, M.I.T.’s president, also had trouble answering forthrightly.  For Kornbluth, who is Jewish, this is particularly ironic, isn’t it?

Harvard’s Gay wasn’t any better, really; when asked in Congress if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct, Gay said it depended on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”  You can see why Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from Harvard’s advisory board on Antisemitism after Gay’s performance.

You know, it takes a lot for me to agree to with anything U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik says, since she is an election denier and a bomb-thrower in Congress, but I am actually forced to agree with her about Harvard and its president.

“There have been absolutely no updates to Harvard’s code of conduct to condemn the calls for genocide of Jews and protect Jewish students on campus,” she said.

Still, Gay is holding onto her job, so far.  But if you think that the codes of conduct at American universities have any connection with morality, you are deeply mistaken.  And US universities and colleges should not be the recipients of the huge donations that people have been giving them in the mistaken belief that they represent something meaningful.  They do not.  Donate to a synagogue instead, where values are actually taught and lived.

We return to a basic statement that simply cannot be lawyered or argued away: calling for genocide, the total annihilation and murder of an entire people, is morally indefensible.  It is wrong in such a profound way that no organization or institution or social media entity or government or court or rational human being can possibly pretend that it isn’t completely wrong. Pure and simple, it is hate speech, and should be banned.  For God’s sake, if you call for the genocide of anyone you should be banned and in many countries you would be arrested and charged with a crime.  Any Jews who call for the genocide of Palestinians should be locked up, in my opinion, either here or in Israel.  But no one is calling for the genocide of Palestinians.  Instead, on campuses all across the country and all across the world, they are calling for genocide of Jews.

To shout for the murder of all Jews in the world less than 80 years after it was attempted by one of the most powerful nations on earth in a campaign of Holocaust horrors during which 6 million people were murdered, a third of all Jews then alive and more than half of all the Jews of Europe—in a post-Holocaust world to call for genocide is a disgusting level of evil that the presidents of some of the most prestigious universities in America cannot recognize. And to pretend that it cannot quickly metastasize from words to violence is to deny all the evidence of history—including the last two months when we have seen antisemitic violence spike in the United States. 

Look, this is a shocking and terrible time.  There have been rallies to boycott Jewish businesses in Philadelphia and New York. There have been physical attacks on Jewish students and on older Jews, too, some fatal, in the name of solidarity with Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists.  But we must expect—indeed, demand—better of our hugely expensive and publicly funded university communities.  This is egregious immorality dressed up as academia.  It needs to change, and the sooner and more dramatically the better.

This requires some re-thinking on our parts.  In Mikets, Joseph rose from personal devastation to great heights indeed.  He did so through talent and intelligence, by remaining true to his ideals, through his faith in God.  But he also did so by growing and changing, maturing, becoming fully aware of the people around him and the situations he lived in. 

We 2023 Jews need to do the same, and we need to respond to the changed circumstances in which we are now living.

As we approach the end of this strange and strained secular year, may we ultimately triumph not only over those who seek our destruction, but over those who allow them to flourish through their own moral blindness.