“We are a people who survive.”
We find these words in our prayerbook and where we, as Jews, look back over our tumultuous history. We have survived Babylonia, Romans, and Nazis; the destruction of our Temple, forced conversions, and pogroms; exile, attempted genocide, and forced migration; feudalism, communism, and capitalism. We have been battered and beaten, but never broken, never destroyed.
In this uncertain time, with the world turned inside out, we have the guidance of our people’s life journey on how to survive not just moment to moment, and day to day, but generation to generation, into the future. We have never been a majority people in the world, yet our people and our ideas have influenced the world over. Our humor, our cuisine, and our language are a crucial part of the American zeitgeist. And, even if we reject the term “Judeo-Christian”, concepts that frame our Jewish values are the bedrock of our legal system.
We are well positioned in the modern world. Jews are more often affluent, well-educated, and well connected. While we are not all well off, we still hold on to a sense of communal responsibility that commends to us the care for each other, to create institutions that allow us to share the resources of those who have, with those who do not.
As we finish our weekly reading of the Torah scroll, and place it back in the Ark, we sing, “It is a tree of life, to those that hold fast to it.” “It” is not just the physical Torah scroll, but our tradition, the core of what it means to be Jewish. In this time especially, we must cling to that tree of life, to the traditions of Judaism that have enabled our ancestors to survive generation after generation.
Those traditions are not just about us, but about how we live in the world, and how we treat our neighbors. Now is not the time to only focus on ourselves. As Hillel challenged us, after he said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me”, he followed up with “If I am for myself alone, what am I?” Certainly not Jewish. We are called to understand and to lift the burdens of the oppressed, to love the stranger as ourselves, and to treat those whom we live among as equal citizens. In the world that has seen the horror of children detained in camps on our borders, of Black citizens shot and beaten to death by police, holding fast to Torah and embracing the tree of life means being not only empathetic, not only reaching out, but putting ourselves forward to be part of the solution.
We are a people who survive - and we survive best by working to perfect the world we live in, not just for ourselves, and not just by ourselves, but as an or bagoyim - a light among the nations. Let us work together to survive, to emerge from our quarantines not only hale, but more whole.
