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Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/from-time-immemorial-responding-to-antisemitism
Why Did It Take a Massacre of Jews to Lift the Lid on Anti-Jewish Hostility?
(Tablet) Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch - Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, a leading voice in the U.S. Reform community, is senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan. Here are additional excerpts from his Yom Kippur sermon on Monday: Anti-Jewish hostility is simply part and parcel of our three millennia existence. It is one reason why we are still so tiny - a mere 0.2% of the world's population. What we are seeing today is not new, even in America. Our grandparents and great grandparents lived through worse. I concede that I, too, was shocked, and am still unsettled, by how quickly so many past allies turned against us. Not because they were sensitive to Palestinian pain - I am, too - but because they were so insensitive to Jewish pain. Why was Oct. 7 morally complicated? Even if you are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause - if you are a Palestinian, yourself - why the moral stuttering? What would have been more natural, normal and humane than to express empathy for the loved ones, demand that the hostages be returned immediately, and to condemn the savagery? Then - talk all you want about so-called apartheid, occupation and resistance. I know Hamas. It was not surprising that they murdered Israelis - although their barbaric brutality, proudly filmed by them in their GoPro cameras live and in living color, was still stunning to me. What was shocking to me was Oct. 8. Why did it take a massacre of Jews to lift the lid on all this bile? And don't tell me Israel's response - the poison was released before the sun set on Oct. 7, before Israel could even clear its towns, villages and kibbutzim of murderers. Deep down, we also know that the return of legitimated, tolerated, excused, contextualized, intellectualized and often violent antisemitism is a flashing warning sign of the decay of something uniquely precious about America itself. Some of the best minds of a generation are inflamed by an aggressive form of cultural encephalitis, distorting reason and impairing moral judgment. If a politician or intellectual or journalist tells you that the Land of Israel has nothing to do with the People of Israel, the civilization of Israel, the religion of Israel, the God of Israel, or the State of Israel - why are you listening to them? They know nothing.