A week in Egypt England

[A potentially offensive post.  I apologize in advance.  You've been warned]

Every week the table outside my synagogue is cluttered with 'parsha sheets' and other printed material dealing with the Torah portion of the week.  This week has been no exception.

In one of the sheets, a gentleman named Yosef Y. Jacobson makes a fairly obvious point that those who read the Bible in translation miss the multi-dimensional nuances of the meaning-rich Hebrew text.  As an example he draws the reader's attention to a line in this week's parsha (Va'eira) which is typically rendered as follows in English translation:

"Therefore, say to the children of Israel:  I am G-d, and I shall take you out from under the burdens of egypt;  I shall rescue you from their slavery; I shall redeem you."

Mr., or perhaps Rabbi (he wasn't identified with an honorific), Jacobson points out that the Hebrew word 'Sivlot' which is usually translated as 'burdens', can also be translated as the plural of 'tolerance'... as in "I am G-d; and I shall take you out from [having to] tolerate Egypt".  He goes on to say that "burden and tolerance are connected, since tolerance is a form of burden carrying; of accepting a challenging reality."

His point is that while we usually view the story of the Exodus from Egypt as a tale of redemption from physical slavery, it is also very much (maybe more so) a tale of deliverance from psychological bondage. We lived for generations having to tolerate our status as a hated minority in Egypt, having to go through the sort of mental gymnastics known to all hated minorities in order to tolerate our dismal placement at the very bottom of society. 

If you think I'm wrong, then why was it so hard for Moses to convince the Jews to leave Egypt?  If you were in prison and someone opened the door and told you to run, would you ask questions? Would you need to be convinced???  And even after the Israelites were out, why did so many of them rebel against Moses and suggest to him that they had it better when they were in Egypt?

Although I am woefully ill-equipped to offer any original scholarship on religious texts (which is why I seldom do so), I have offered this preamble because it gives a perfect a lead-in to my thoughts after having interacted with a very wide cross-section of the British Jewish community for a week.

First of all, I should point out that I am writing this in full knowledge that this post, like any sweeping generalization, will be fundamentally wrong on a number of levels... and will offend many who read it.  

I freely acknowledge that a week is really insufficient to gain more than an initial impression. But impressions - especially first ones - have value, and are often to be trusted.

I also need to mention that having grown up in the U.S., I have absolutely no idea what it's like to live in a country with a relatively small Jewish community.  Even if you happen to live in a small American Jewish community, the overall American Jewish population is numbered in the millions, and is extremely vocal about political matters... especially where relations with Israel are concerned.

Any time an election rolls around in the US, if there are even a few Jews among the potential constituents, it is incumbent upon the candidate to give a full public accounting of his past voting record and current views vis-a-vis the State of Israel. 

In places where there are large blocks of Jewish votes at stake (think New York, Florida Illinois and California), American candidates actually go to embarrassing lengths to prove their unqualified support for the Jewish State... even to the point of peppering their speeches with Yiddishisms and Borscht-belt humor (picture gray-haired Presbyterians and Quakers trying valiantly to pronounce Chutzpah and Tuches).

In short, being pro-Israel in the U.S. is seen as having political value.

So it came as a bit of a surprise when I found the tiny U.K. Jewish community (less than 300,000 strong as of the last census), to be absolutely absent from public discourse in support of Israel.  In England, there seems to be a political price to pay for being pro-Israel... and if anything, there seems to be value on the side of those who are critical of Israel.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Jews in the U.K. seem to be fairly equally split between being actively critical of the Jewish State, and being apologetically supportive of it (albeit in the safe privacy of their homes and synagogues). 

Those who are apologetically supportive often utter phrases like "Of course I love and support Israel, but...", at which point they will list off Israel's real or imagined human rights abuses and crimes of occupation, all of which, they will tell you, make it extremely difficult for them to defend Israel to their non-Jewish friends and co-workers. 

Those who are openly critical of Israel simply dispense with the preamble about supporting Israel and launch right into a barely controlled rage about the apartheid-like imprisonment of the Palestinian people, and present thinly veiled justifications for all manner of terror against Israel by the Arabs.  This is all the more shocking because it is delivered in extremely cultured, terribly polite, perfectly constructed paragraphs that only well-educated Brits seem able to manage.

For the most part, the British Jewish community seems to keep their collective heads down and try to fit in with their countrymen as best they can.  Sadly, in many cases this means trying to be more British than the Brits.  

Not only is there a serious problem with passive anti-Semitism in the UK, but active anti-Semitic attacks seem also to be quite prevalent and on the rise. 

While I was at Limmud I noticed that security was being handled by an organization called CST.  They were literally everywhere on campus, guarding all the doors, wandering the grounds, checking IDs of everyone going in or out.  On the one hand, it was nice to see them taking security so seriously.  But on the other, we were in the middle of Coventry on a closed university campus during Christmas break.  Did anyone even know/care that there were Jews in the area?!

When I asked someone about this they explained that CST was the organization that guarded the synagogues all over London (and presumably in other places in the UK) and that 'normal' life for British Jews was not something an American or Israeli Jew could easily understand.

I was shocked.  In the US there are occasional hate crimes against JCCs and synagogues... mostly of the spray-painted Swastika sort.  But in England I was seeing a relatively small Jewish community where blanket security was required everywhere that Jews gathered in any numbers.

I was further shocked when I got to London and started wandering around Golders Green.  No, I'm not talking about the Salt Beef Sandwich at Blooms (which was a crime of a different sort... don't get me started!).  No, I'm talking about the fact that in literally every Jewish shop, restaurant, bakery, Judaica store, etc. there was a little display on the counter next to the cash register where customers were encouraged to take one of the following cards:

[Front of Card]

[Back of Card]

This kind of card could only exist in a community that feels threatened and vulnerable. They may not be in imminent physical danger (although the need for cards such as these suggests otherwise), but you'd have a hard time convincing me that the U.K. Jewish community isn't experiencing a social, emotional and psychological threat.  They are clearly tolerating a great deal of anti-Semitism as they go about their daily lives... trying to act as if everything is fine.

I hate to make the comparison to pre-war Germany, because the analogy is patently unfair.  Certainly England is not going to start loading her Jews onto cattle cars anytime soon.  But at the level of anti-Semitism that German Jews were forced to tolerate in the late '20s and early '30s (i.e. well before the really physical threats to their safety materialized), they reacted by keeping their heads down, and managed to convince themselves that they were more German than the Germans... that everything was basically okay.

Which brings us back to Egypt and Mr. (or Rabbi) Jacobson's observation that the difference between a physical and psychological burden hangs on the nuanced translation of a simple Hebrew word.

Personally, I think that much of the left-leaning, knee-jerk anti-Israel rhetoric coming from the UK Jewish community today can trace its source as much to British Jewry's need to fit in (i.e. to be more British than the Brits), as to any of Israel's real or imagined misdeeds.  England's Jews seem (to me) to be captives of anti-Semitism ... forced to tolerate an oppressed status without fully acknowledging it to themselves. 

When I left the U.K. I did so with a profound appreciation for the relative freedom I have experienced throughout my life; both in my American youth, and in my Israeli adulthood.  Once one has tasted such freedom, the barest whiff of oppression can't be mistaken for anything else.

I'm going to stop here because I sense I've probably already said far too much.