This week, we mark four weeks since the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh. I remember that Shabbat morning so vividly; I can conjure up the image of Geo approaching me during services to tell me there’d been a shooting. I remember seeing a local imam colleague come to our shul that morning - just for support - and sitting in the back row. I don’t know any of the victims personally - though I am only one degree removed from several of them - and yet the pain 4 years later is still profound. For all of us in the Jewish world, the Tree of Life shooting leaves deep wounds.
The pain felt particularly intense this week as I followed the Kanye West drama. I won’t give his incendiary, anti-Semitic remarks more of a platform than they’ve already received, and I don’t follow him as a celebrity in the slightest, but I know that so many others do. West has 18.4 million followers on Instagram, and so many of them are young, impressionable, and still becoming their full selves. There have been so many messages they’ve received as the drama continues to unfold, but at the end of the day, in seeing all the ways this played out, here are the messages that I hope stick with them.
I hope Kanye's followers heard that there are millions of Jews who are extremely proud of their beautiful Jewish identities and won't stand for a celebrity drawing on millenia-old anti-Semitic tropes. I hope they saw, in response, Jews that wear their Magen David necklaces in full view and college students who proudly hang a mezuzah on their dorm-room doors. I hope Kanye’s followers heard that there are law firms, agencies, and corporations that won’t stand for hate, even if motivated in part by financial gain. I hope that all of Kanye’s followers saw that there was an outcry not just from the Jewish community but from people of all faiths who know that anti-Semitism must be called out and stopped. And I hope that the millions that follow Kanye saw that it is not just hate speech that we must eradicate, but hate itself.
I hope that, in time, Kanye can hear these messages as well. A beautiful teaching in the Talmud depicts Rabbi Meir, a prominent rabbi, and his wife Beruria distrubed by some hooligans in their neighborhood. Rabbi Meir prays for their destruction, but his wife corrects him, using a verse from Psalms (104:35): “Let sins be uprooted from earth, and the wicked will be no more.” She teaches her husband that the goal isn’t to destroy the individual who has made a mistake, but to teach them, to eradicate their sin, and then there will be no more wickedness.
Being the world’s teachers is a heavy burden to bear. But this is the way that we move closer towards peace and towards love and acceptance. We can only be the world’s teachers when we act with pride. We can only be the world’s teachers when we show the tremendous beauty in being Jewish. I pray that all hatred will be turned to understanding, that all divisiveness will be turned into love.
