This week was the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the violent anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out on November 9, 1938 across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Violent mobs, spurred Nazi officials, destroyed hundreds of synagogue and Torah scrolls. Acting on orders from Gestapo headquarters, police officers and firefighters did nothing to prevent the destruction. All told, approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools were plundered, and 91 Jews were murdered. An additional 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Nazi, playing to type, blamed the Jews and made them pay for the damages. 

What a shock it must have been to the Jews of Germany and Austria to suddenly be under a coordinated violent attack all over the country, all at once.   They were already living under Nazi rule, under the Nuremberg Laws that denied them citizenship and legal rights. But just a few years earlier, they had been an important part of German society, citizens, leaders. Most of the Jews impacted on Kristallnacht were not shtetl Jews of cartoons, but business and property owners in urban areas who were highly assimilated into German culture and politics, much as we are highly assimilated into American culture and politics. 

Can you imagine how disorienting it must have been to go from a sense of belonging, a sense of ‘these are my people,” to being stripped of citizenship, legal rights and boycotted?  

But still, I can imagine thinking it had reached its worst, and that it things would turn around soon enough.  After all, it was still a year until the invasion of Poland and four years until the final solution would be conceived of. 

And then, one night to be awakened to see your stores, your homes and your synagogues burning, with the police making mass arrests of Jews while doing nothing as roving mobs attacked and killed us. 

Can you imagine how that must have felt?  The fear, the rage, but also the hurt, hurt at the utter betrayal.   I mean, these were your friends, people you worked with on the same causes two years ago and now there is a chasm between you.  You are standing there while your neighborhood is set on fire, and they are just watching.  Few things are as lonely as betrayal.  That sense of displacement, of disbelief, feeling like you are in a Twilight Zone episode of your life, not your actual life - there is something deeply personal in the ways betrayal attacks our sense of the world and who we are in it.   

Because I’ve been thinking a lot about Dara Horn’s book, People Love Dead Jews,  this year Kristallnacht comes with connections to other moments in Jewish history when in a few years we went from “in” to “out”.    While the Nazis were in a class by themselves, and the shift from acceptance to exile dizzyingly fast, the sad truth is that this sort of shift is not rare in Jewish history; it is a pattern that goes back all the way to Purim and Passover.  It occurs in Harbin, China. It occurs in Stalinist Russia.  It occurs in the 1950’s in Iraq and Syria. In medieval Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, England and Italy.  

Over and over we have experienced acceptance and tolerance only to have it yanked away in the face of antisemitic rhetoric, rhetoric that is most often framed in the language of fairness and social justice.

I think many of us have had experiences in the past few years when we look around and feel like we’re the same but everything has changed around us, that we’ve landed in a Twilight Zone episode and everything we thought we knew and could trust has turned out to be a mirage.   I know that for me, the events at City Hall in August, and the vote this week by the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont to strongly approve three strongly anti-Israel resolutions is another moment of disbelief, of disruption and it brings with it the profound sense of loneliness that comes with betrayal by people who should know better. 

 

This week’s Torah Portion, Vayeitsei, finds Jacob in his own twilight zone.  One day he is at home, a homebody, a mamma’s boy, and the next, he is fleeing for his life from his family members, family who now see him as a traitor for getting what they wanted and didn’t want him to have. 

Our portion opens with Jacob stopping after running all day to get away from Esau.  He is now all alone, in the wilderness, outside any home, vulnerable, walking hundreds of miles to a distant place he has never been, in hopes of meeting a new family and a new tribe. Jacob has lost his brother, his father, and his mother to whom he was so close.  He is reeling, traumatized, shaken. 

There is something so powerful, so mythic in this moment in Jacob’s life. Soon he will lie down and dream of angels, ladders and God’s blessing, but now, he has no assurance.  He is stopped, standing there, staring out at the vast plains of desert in front of him, knowing he could not go back-not knowing if he would survive what is ahead.  

This moment captures something profound about being human, one we all face in different ways at different times in our lives:  The moment of recognition that things have inalterably changed, that we can no longer rely on what we have relied on, and that we must stumble out way to a new home, hoping we will find it, praying to God we will find it. 

Faith and hope, these are powerful sources of strength at such times.  They remind us that things can be good again, and that even in hard times, we are blessed. 

And there is something we have, and the Jews of Germany had, that Jacob didn’t have –  community. 

Jacob was alone.  There wasn’t a people Israel yet – that would come later.  Jacob could not possibly imagine what his progeny would become, that Jews all over the world would be talking this Shabbat about him.  

We are the inheritors of thousands of years of being a people, of shared history, experiences, faith, and traditions.  We’ve been through a great deal together and will likely go through a great deal more.  We have something Jacob didn’t have – a community and a sense of solidarity that is so much more important and powerful than our differences if we embrace it, lean into it.

It is only in these experiences of leaving Egypt and wandering in the desert that we become a people.  As we read a little while ago in the prayer book just before Mi Chamocha: 

Standing on the parted shores of history

We still believe what we were taught

Before ever we stood at Sinai’s foot:

That wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt,

That there is a better place, a promised land, 

That the winding way to that promise

Passes through the wilderness.

That there is no way to get from here to there

Except by joining hands, marching

Together. 

 

Shabbat Shalom.