Sermons: High Holy Days

Just across the river from here, at the trailhead into Doodletown, a sign warns hikers: Timber Rattlesnake Habitat Ahead!  The sign says that rattlesnakes are a threatened species. If a hiker encounters one, the snake should be left alone.  But I wasn’t worried. I hiked the trails often and I never saw a rattlesnake.

One very hot day I had the trails to myself.  As I made my way through the quiet forest, I heard something rustling over the dry leaves.  There it was, off to the side of the trail: a large rattlesnake slithering directly towards me.  It moved slowly and calmly. I panicked and broke into a run.

I actually thought that the snake would pursue me down the trail!  It was too hot to continue running, so I slowed to a fast walk.  But every time I heard a sudden rustle in the leaves, I took off again.   I thought every sound I heard was a snake: As if all the snake’s buddies lay coiled, waiting to ambush me.

I know that Timber Rattlesnakes are docile creatures.  A snake bites you if you step on it, and could you really blame it for that? So why did I panic and run?

Humans have a long history with snakes.  A snake appears at the very beginning of the Torah[1].  In that story, set in the Garden of Eden, the snake talks the first humans, Adam and Eve, into eating the fruit from the Tree of All Knowledge. God had explicitly warned Adam and Eve not to eat that fruit, telling them that they would immediately die if they did. ^[2]  

The snake says otherwise.  He says: “You most certainly will not die!  On the contrary:  God knows that when you do eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will become like gods, knowing all things.”[3]  

Eve and Adam listen to the snake and eat the fruit. But they don’t die. Instead, when God finds out, God punishes the first humans by ejecting them from the Garden.  Forever banned from Eden’s paradise, humans must live lives of pain and hardship.

God punishes the snake too, saying to it:

Because you did this…I will put enmity (hatred) between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; they shall strike at your head, and you shall strike at their heel.”[4]  

This story offers a mythic explanation for the enduring hatred between humans and snakes.  It explains why most of us will swerve our cars for a squirrel but won’t hesitate to flatten a snake if we see it crossing the road. Some drivers will even back up and try again if they miss the first time.

The Torah’s explanation of this hatred of snakes may have satisfied our ancestors, but it doesn’t satisfy me.  I understand the hatred of snakes as a residue of human evolution.  Our primitive brain has never forgotten the mortal threat that snakes posed when, over 7 million years ago, our primate ancestors lived among the trees.  An ancient fear becomes an enduring hatred.

We Jews are the target of another enduring hatred, a hatred spread viscerally in words and images.  On an election poster from 1920 Austria, a “Jewish snake” crushes the Austrian eagle. This poster from the Christian Socialist Party of Austria conveyed a clear message.  Jews posed a danger. There were too many of them. The party wished to stop the entry of more Jews into their country and forbid them from freely participating in Austrian trades and culture.  Their message worked.  The Christian Socialist Party of Austria won the 1920 election and remained in power until 1928. 

There are many other examples of Jews portrayed as snakes. A propaganda poster from 1936 Germany features a poisonous snake with bared fangs meant to represent Jews.  An image from 1941 German occupied Serbia shows a diabolical Jewish man with snakes for a beard.  A cover from an edition of the antisemitic work called “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” has a “Jewish snake” encircling the globe.  The snake, a creature long-feared, becomes the symbol of an enduring hatred.

“Why do people hate us?” The older students in our religious school regularly ask me this question.  I’ve explained the history of antisemitism to them.  But the question keeps coming up.  I wonder if I should show the students one of these anti-Semitic illustrations of a “Jewish snake” and tell them:  They hate us because they fear us.

Fear is at the heart of hate.  The shooter who attacked Chabad of Poway justified his murder as an act of self-defense.  According to court documents, the gunman dialed 911 from his car and said: “I just shot up a synagogue.” He went on to tell the dispatcher that he did it “because Jewish people are destroying the white race.” Similarly, the Tree of Life Synagogue became a target because its community, like ours, supported immigrants and refugees. 

White supremacists look at the increasing diversity in our country and wonder why people with skin darker than their own seem to be growing in numbers and “taking over” America.  If these people are from “inferior races,” why are they flourishing?  There must be some deeper, malevolent force behind it. It must be the Jews. 

It doesn’t stop with the white supremacists.  As journalist Bari Weiss has pointed out, the communists of the Soviet Union hated the Jews because, to them, Jews represented the ultimate capitalists. To Hitler, Jews were race defilers who sought world domination through the control of finances and – since hate does not require consistency – Jews were also part of the international communist conspiracy.  Today, while white nationalists hate Jews because we support immigrants to our country, those on the extreme left of the political spectrum call Jews “white colonialists” – oppressors – because of Israel’s conflicts with the Palestinians.

Think about this for a moment. We Jews often view ourselves as a small and weak minority, persecuted throughout the centuries. But others don’t necessarily view us that way.  In their minds, we Jews are much more powerful than we think we are.

The perception of Jewish power is widespread.

Last year, a group from our congregation visited the national civil rights museum in Memphis, housed in the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.   

A protester stood on a corner near the museum.  Our tour guide told us that she protests every day because she believes that our country has created too many civil rights museums and monuments. And at the same time, our country has neglected those hurt by pervasive economic injustice. 

Before he was murdered, Dr. King and his allies had turned their attention to economic injustice.  Ironically, the civil rights museum in the Lorraine motel helped to gentrify the neighborhood surrounding it.  Low-income people had to move elsewhere.   The protestor believes that Dr. King would not have approved.   

A member of our group walked over to the protestor.  Attempting to forge a connection to her, our member identified herself as Jewish and said that the Jewish people have a similar dilemma:  should we continue to erect monuments to those murdered in the Holocaust, or should we spend our limited resources elsewhere? 

The protestor rejected this comparison.  “It’s not the same at all.  You Jews have all the money – you have plenty to do whatever you need.  You don’t have to make these choices like we do.”

Her words provoked and challenged us. Back on the bus, our tour leader reminded us that many people outside the Jewish community agree with the protestor: Jews have power.   He explained that, as the son of Holocaust survivors, he knows that we feel like a vulnerable minority. But he also acknowledged that we Jews have power in this country, “power disproportionate to our numbers.”

Jewish power is evident by the success and accomplishments of our people in the arts, in politics, in law, in business, in journalism, in academics, in medicine, and in the sciences.  But our real power is rooted in something deeper than our accomplishments.  

In the Torah’s story of the snake in the Garden of Eden, it is the snake who pushes the first humans towards enlightenment.  The snake tells the humans the truth:  that they had been forbidden from eating from the Tree of All Knowledge not because they would die as soon as they ate of it, but because the gods did not want to share enlightenment with the humans.

Had the humans not eaten from that Tree, they would have remained in in the Garden, living like animals. The humans would not have known that humans are meant to be more than mere animals.  The snake led humanity to open our eyes to the truth.

Over the centuries, others have acted out of their animal instincts and have persecuted the Jewish people.  But throughout these times of persecution, our Jewish people have clung to this truth:  Humanity is meant to be better than that.  We are meant to be more compassionate.  We are meant to treasure the human qualities of knowledge, insight and reflection. We are meant to live as if we believe what our Torah teaches:  that we are all created in the image of God.

Like the snake in the Garden, we must speak this truth.  Our words may anger the racists, the white nationalists, the anti-Zionists and the bigots. Our words may anger those who would rather not open their eyes.  But we cannot let our silence extinguish what must be said.  

We are all created in the image of God, and our actions must reflect this truth.  In those times when hatred and lies choked our world, this truth has sustained the Jewish people.  In this new year, may this truth empower us to bring to our troubled world the gift of goodness, the gift of justice, and the gift of hope.