We Built a Home Here

Yom Kippur morning, 5787

In September of 1654, twenty-three Jewish refugees came ashore in New Amsterdam off a ship called the St. Catherine, having fled the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil. They arrived with almost nothing. The colonial governor, Peter Stuyvesant, immediately wrote to his superiors in Amsterdam asking permission to throw them out. He called them "blasphemers." He said they would "infect and trouble the new colony," and that letting them stay would turn the settlement into a "babble of confusion." He was overruled, partly, it should be said, because Jewish shareholders in the Dutch West India Company lobbied on their behalf. The first American Jewish political victory was won by people who wrote letters.

In those early years there was another Jewish man named Asser Levy. Stuyvesant had barred Jews from serving in the citizen militia, from standing guard at the town's wooden palisade, and imposed a special tax on them instead: a fee for the privilege of not defending this place that didn't want them. Levy refused to pay it. Not because he wanted to save the money. Because he wanted to stand guard. Think about what that took. This was a town whose governor had already tried to keep Jews out entirely. And when Levy was told to pay for the privilege of not defending it, his answer was to demand the obligation instead. He wanted the night watch. He wanted his turn on the wall. Told that if he didn't like the ruling he was free to leave, he petitioned the authorities in Holland instead, and won.

Asser Levy got guard duty, and went on to become the first Jewish burgher of New Amsterdam. Levy asked for more than permission to stay – he asked for a share of the burden. He understood something that took the rest of us four centuries to articulate: belonging is not "being allowed to stay." Belonging is being responsible for the place.

That idea is older than New Amsterdam. Twenty-six hundred years ago the prophet Jeremiah wrote a letter to Jews who had been dragged into exile in Babylon. They had every reason to withdraw and wait it out, to treat the place as a waiting room. Instead, Jeremiah tells them to build houses and plant gardens, to marry and raise children. Dirshu et shlom ha'ir: seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you, and pray for it, for in its welfare you shall find your own. Jeremiah doesn't wait for the city to earn it. Instead he says, your fate is tied to this place, so take responsibility for it.

I think the oldest Jewish political instinct is not "how do we protect ourselves from the city." It is "how do we help hold the city together?" Levy was living Jeremiah 29:7, at what we now call the tip of Manhattan. And for the next three hundred and seventy years, we kept on seeking the wellbeing of our cities.

Jews opened shops and started schools, founded synagogues and burial societies, organized unions, argued cases, served in the military, ran for office, raised children, buried parents, prayed, and disagreed with each other constantly. We took a strange country and built a home in it. And that home changed us while we did it. Because one of the things this country built into American Judaism was democracy itself.

For most of Jewish history our communities were governed by a web of tradition: the rabbis, the wealthy, the learned. In America, Jews started writing governing documents. Synagogue by-laws. Electing officers. Holding votes. Keeping minutes. Arguing by the rules and then abiding by the outcome.

Our tradition is not a democracy in any simple sense. But something in us and something in this country met, and each shaped the other. We built a home here. And it built us. America was never perfect. But it was home.

The same country that made room for Jewish flourishing has also carried antisemitism alongside its promise, the whole time. University quotas. Henry Ford publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Father Coughlin's radio show. Pittsburgh. Poway. Michigan. The list goes on. But I don't think the list is what we need. I want to tell you one story.

In December of 1862, Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11. It expelled Jews, the order says, "as a class," from the entire military district under his command. Parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi. Families were given twenty-four hours. The conditions were intense. We were a country at war and people were frightened. There was smuggling and profiteering through the cotton trade, and there was real corruption. It was complicated and diffuse and nobody could seem to fix it. And then, suddenly, there was an explanation. The Jews. That is what scapegoating does. It does not invent fear. The fear is real. Scapegoating takes fear that is already there and gives it a face, so that we no longer have to wrestle with something complicated. There is the problem. There are the people responsible. The world becomes simple.

A merchant in Paducah named Cesar Kaskel took a train to Washington, and Lincoln revoked the order within weeks. But that is not why I am telling you this story on Yom Kippur. I am telling you because of what Grant did afterward. The order followed him for the rest of his life. It was used against him in the 1868 campaign. He could have defended it. Instead he disavowed it, in writing, and said he wished it had never been issued. And then, as president, he did something about it. He appointed more Jews to federal office than any president before him, intervened on behalf of Jews being persecuted in Romania, and in 1876 walked into the dedication of Congregation Adas Israel in Washington and sat through the entire service. He was the first sitting president to do such a thing. His motives were probably mixed, as ours usually are. But Maimonides describes teshuvah as a process: you name the wrong, you feel regret, you stop, you make amends, and when the same moment comes again, you act differently.

The man who signed the most notorious antisemitic order in American history to that point walked through nearly all of those steps, publicly, over years. I don't know a better story for this morning than that one. Not because it lets Grant off. But because it insists on something we say we believe and rarely behave as though we believe: that a person who has done real harm can turn. That what has been does not determine what comes next. That is not a metaphor for teshuvah. That is teshuvah.

Now let me bring it home. Grant's America was afraid. Afraid of war, of corruption, of a world that had stopped making sense. And here in our America of 5787, we're afraid too. We are afraid of what it means to watch people seized from their homes or their place of work, and to wonder what kind of country we are becoming. We are afraid that our children are growing up in a world we don't know how to protect them from — a world of algorithms and AI, where the machines are getting better at knowing them even as we are still trying to understand what all of this is doing to them. We are afraid of the next shooting. Of the next act of terrorism. Of the possibility that the places where we gather, learn, pray, and send our children might not be safe. We are afraid that the Berkshires we love will become a place where working people simply cannot afford to live. That the people who teach here, care for our elders, wait our tables, build our houses, and help raise our children will have to leave. And some of us are afraid for people we love who are transgender — afraid that this country will become a place where they are not free to live openly and fully, where the people they love and the lives they are building are treated as something to be debated, restricted, or taken away.

And underneath all of this is another fear, one that is harder to name. What if the country we thought we lived in is not the country we are living in anymore? What if the rules don't hold? What if the institutions don't hold? What if democracy itself turns out to be more fragile than we thought? These fears are real. And that is when the scapegoat becomes so powerful. The scapegoat does not invent fear. It takes the fear that is already there and gives it a face. The scapegoat is that "pointing finger" that says 'here': This is why your life feels so uncertain. It's this person. That family. Those people.

And suddenly, something complicated becomes simple. The immigrant becomes the reason you cannot afford your life. The transgender person becomes the reason the culture feels unfamiliar. The Jew becomes the reason for someone else's anger. The person who is different from us becomes the explanation for everything we cannot control. That is the oldest trick in the book. And we should recognize it. Because we are Jews. We have been given faces before.

And our fear of antisemitism is not theoretical. This year, a man drove an armed vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a Reform synagogue where 140 children were in the building. This year, a synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, was set on fire. A synagogue and the JCC in Albuquerque were attacked minutes apart. And in August, during Shabbat services in Manhattan, a congregant and a security guard were attacked inside a synagogue. These are not statistics to us. They are children in a synagogue. They are a Torah scroll in a building that has been set on fire. They are the moment when you walk into shul and look around the room to see where your children are. They are the question some of us now ask, almost without thinking: Are we safe here? That question is real.

And it is coming from more than one direction, which is what Dara Horn's understanding of antisemitism as "the big lie" predicts. Horn writes that underneath antisemitism is the claim that Jews are destroying whatever a given society values most. If you value religion, then Jews are godless. Value secularism? Then Jews are fanatics. The accusation is infinitely adaptable because the accusation was never the point. So it comes from the far right, the old libel that Jews secretly pull the strings, the one Henry Ford printed, now in memes and podcasts and on the lips of people with very large audiences. And it comes from parts of the left, where anger at the Israeli government, which many of us share, curdles into holding every Jew, anywhere, responsible for it. The far right and the far left disagree about almost everything, but where they have near consensus is that someone is behind it all, and that it is us.

From 1654 to 1862 to this morning, the content changes and the structure holds. Something is wrong. Someone must be responsible. The Jews are the explanation. So I want to say something plainly, from this bimah, on this day. We cannot ask the country to see the scapegoating of Jews while we look away from the scapegoating of everyone else. That is not solidarity. That is a request for an exemption. And we cannot let anyone tell us that the fight against antisemitism belongs to one party. It doesn't. It belongs to anyone who has ever believed that a complicated world is not made simpler by a villain. The moment we stop seeing a person and start seeing a symbol, we have entered the scapegoat's world.

For seventy years our answer to all of this has been education, and specifically Holocaust education. If only people knew what happened, we imagine, they would care. We wrote the curricula, built the museums, hosted the school assemblies. Dara Horn recounted speaking with a docent at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum and asking the docent what students usually asked after walking through the exhibits. The docent replied that students frequently asked: "Are there still Jews alive today?" Curriculum does not stop eighth graders leading a chant of "Sieg Heil" on the bus, or playing what they call "The Dirty Jew" game, right here, in our own little town. Those children are not short on information. Those children are practicing the oldest human habit there is, turning a group of people into a symbol.

What answers a symbol is a neighbor. We have taught America how Jews died. Have we taught America how Jews live? Our music, our arguments, our holidays, our doubt, our food, our joy. Our particularity, in public, unapologetically, and not only when we are hurt but when we serve. That is not a consolation prize for failing to stop antisemitism. I have come to think it is the more serious response.

Which brings me to the officer standing outside our doors this morning. Officer Brandon, thank you. We have a line in the budget for it. We have a protocol. Most of us nodded on the way in and didn't think about it again. But think about what it means. Asser Levy fought for the right to stand the watch, and three hundred and seventy-one years later someone else is standing it for us. I am grateful. I am also aware of the inversion. The fear that puts a guard at our door is real, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the guard at our door cannot be the whole of our answer. If all we know how to do is be guarded, if we retreat into the sanctuary and let the wall do the work, we have stopped doing what Jeremiah told us to do. He never said to seek the welfare of the city once it is safe. He said seek it from inside the exile, from inside the fear. The officer stands watch for us, so that we are free to stand watch for others.

Now I want to say something that will sound obvious and that I believe is radical. Democracy is Jewish. Not because we invented it, and not because Judaism tells you how to vote, but because the habits democracy runs on are habits we have been practicing for two thousand years, and we are so used to them that we no longer see them as remarkable. We are a people built out of argument. The Talmud preserves the minority opinion even after it loses. It writes down the reasoning of the person who turned out to be wrong, and keeps it, on the page, forever, next to the law. Hillel and Shammai argue for generations, and the rabbis teach that both speak the words of the living God. Disagreement is not evidence that someone has stopped belonging. That is the whole thing. That is what we have to offer this country right now, and it fits on one line: You can believe that I am wrong without believing that I am your enemy. That is the exact opposite of the logic of the scapegoat.

And it means the Jewish response to this moment cannot only be "don't do that to us." It has to be "we will not do that to anyone." Not because every idea is equally good. But because we know, in our bones and in our family histories, what happens when human beings get turned into symbols. The Torah doesn't only tell us to take care of Jews. Over and over it tells us to take care of the stranger, and it gives a reason. Because you were strangers. Remember what it felt like not to belong, and then do something with that memory. That may be the most remarkable move in all of Jewish ethics: memory converted into obligation.

Which brings us to what is arguably the most political text in our Yom Kippur machzor: this morning's haftarah, from the book of Isaiah. The people are fasting. They are doing everything right, religiously, and they want to know why it isn't working. Why, when we fasted, did You not see? And the answer comes back: because you have misunderstood what the fast is for. You fast, and you fight with each other. You fast, and you exploit your workers. You fast, and you look away. Is this the fast I desire? Unlock the fetters of wickedness. Let the oppressed go free. Share your bread with the hungry. Take the wretched poor into your home. Don't confuse religious practice with religious responsibility. The test of Yom Kippur is not what happens in this room. It is what happens when we walk out of it.

So let me ask Isaiah's question in a different way.

Is this the democracy we desire?

One where we participate when it benefits us?

Where our rights are sacred and someone else's are negotiable?

Where we defend pluralism only when the plural people are people we happen to like? Or do we actually mean it?

So here is the ask, because a sermon that ends with a feeling and no task has not finished its work

Asser Levy said: "I'll take a turn."

So I am asking each of us to take one this year — and to make it one that costs you something. Not everything. Just something. Show up for a community that isn't ours, and stand with them the way we would want someone to stand with us. Go to the school committee meeting. Volunteer at the food pantry. Run for the town board. Get involved with Social Justice in Action. Be the person who makes sure someone gets to the polls — or who reminds a friend that voting is still something we do. And the next time you hear a whole group of people being blamed for something in a conversation you're part of, don't let it pass. You don't have to give a speech. You can simply say, "It's more complicated than that." It is a very small act of resistance to scapegoating. And, as small as it is, almost no one does it.

Because we don't know what the next test will be. We don't know what the next moment of fear will look like, or who will be blamed for it. We don't know which institution will be tested, or which rule we will suddenly discover we thought everyone else believed in. We don't know. But we can decide, before we know, what kind of people we intend to be when the moment comes. You don't prepare people for a difficult moment when the difficult moment arrives. You prepare them before. That is what a community like this is for.

And that may be the most hopeful thing we have to say on Yom Kippur. Not that we have gotten it right. We haven't. Not that America has gotten it right or that our democracy is safe. It hasn't, and it's not. But people can turn. Communities can turn. Countries can turn. We can look honestly at what we have done and still believe that something different is possible. That is not everything. But it is not nothing.

We have spent generations asking whether America would make room for us. It did, and it didn't. It welcomed us, and it excluded us. It gave us extraordinary freedom, and it allowed for extraordinary antisemitism. Both things are true. And so maybe the question now is not simply whether America will make room for us. Maybe the question is whether we are willing to take our turn being responsible for the place. For the room. For the table. For the argument. For the stranger. For the fragile thing that we inherited.

We don't know what will be asked of us. But we can know this: when the moment comes, someone will have to stand watch. Asser Levy said, essentially: I'll take a turn. Maybe that is our work too. Not to be tolerated. Not to be spectators. To take a turn.

G'mar chatimah tovah.