What Will We Remember When the Pressure Ratchets Up?

This talk was originally given at One Beacon: Light in the Darkness of Racism and AntiSemitism at Salem Tabernacle Church on November 1, 2018. A recording of the talk is available here. Photos are courtesy of Frank Ritter at www.ritterphoto.com.

First, I want to thank my friends Pastor Ben Larson Wolbrink for that warm introduction and Pastor Bill Deandreano for hosting and feeding this crowd and thank you to everyone here - I know for many of us, it is a stretch beyond our comfort zones to be at this gathering in this moment.

I don’t know all of you, so I want to tell you a little more about where I come from. I’ve lived in Beacon for nearly ten years; blessed to see the city grow and develop. Both sides of my family have older connections to this area.

My grandfather, Abraham Weichselbaum who spent his life as a NYC cop, went to summer camp at Surprise Lake, up in the Highlands; I treasure a letter he wrote to his mother in 1934, describing hiking from Surprise Lake down over Mt Beacon and into town on trails I’m on almost every week.

The other side of my family comes from the other side of the river. My wife’s grandfather, Henry Naftali Keimowitz, for whom my daughter is named, settled in Middletown after coming to America as an undocumented refugee in the early 1930s. He snuck into this country as a stowaway, fleeing violence and persecution in Hungary, where he was born.

I really want to tell you about my wife’s mother’s family. They come from Rexingen, a small village at the edge of the Black Forest that before the war, had about 700 Catholics and 300 Jews. Our earliest documents record family births in that town in 1680. The recorded family roots in that town go back more than 350 years - from 100 years before America was founded to the middle of the last century, when most of the family was murdered.

In her later years, my wife’s grandmother, Irene Kahn, described her experiences as a German Jew in 1938 for the book Good Neighbors, Bad Times:

I was working ...near Stuttgart and staying at a rooming house when the landlord – he was a Jew, we could only live with Jews by then – rushed in.  “Did you hear? The synagogues are burning!” He closed all the shades. We began hearing shouts outside, someone yelled “Hang the Jews!” and we huddled together, hearing objects smash, glass shatter, but no one stormed the house, thank God.  

The next morning Helmut [her boyfriend and future husband] called, saying I should [meet him] at the [train station] in Stuttgart and we’d go to our mothers. I said, “But you don’t know what is happening there. If you have black hair and look halfway Jewish, you can’t walk down the street. Come here to my apartment ...  and we’ll see what we can do.”

He made it unmolested, thank God, and then we called the man who ran the taxi company in Rexingen, where our mothers were. We knew his family, and he was no Nazi. “Can you pick us up when the train gets in?” we asked.

He said he was terribly sorry but he’d already been in trouble for driving Jews.  We took the train anyway, hoping for the best. When we got off the train, we couldn't get a taxi, so went to the pharmacy – we knew the people well, they had always been friendly, even though they were Christian – and we asked if we could stay with them. Hitler Youth and SA gangs were roaming around; it was very dangerous.

The pharmacist let us in, but after a while, apologizing profusely, he said that we had to go.  He could do nothing more for us. Helmut was furious, but I could see how deep the man’s fear was.  So we walked to Rexingen, with no incident, thank God. Our mothers were okay. A few Jewish windows, not theirs, had been smashed and the synagogue had been only partly [burned].  They had heard rumors of arrests, but no one had bothered them at home. We decided to stay in Rexingen and make immediate plans to leave for America. I had an uncle in [New York] who had offered to help me, and Helmut had some cousins. We contacted them right away.

Grandma Irene and Grandpa Harry made it to the US, but they were the only ones in their family who did so. Irene’s mother committed suicide rather than be taken by the Nazis. Everyone else was murdered. My family is a small one - there are no second or third cousins because the ancestors who would have had those cousins were murdered by a fascist government.

But this country - America - gave the descendants of these families opportunities they never had in Europe - to become police officers, doctors, professors, school teachers and more.

But it’s not the descendants of those families I want to focus on - it’s the others. The cab driver and the pharmacist who, like millions of others throughout Europe, knew the right thing to do, but could only go so far - they could drive some Jews, but not too many, lest they be caught. They could give Jews shelter, but only for a moment, lest they be in danger themselves. They weren’t evil people - they were average, everyday people, just like us.

I wonder, though, if you think that they did what God asked of them in that moment?

We here now are at a perilous moment in this country. There are not bands of Hitler Youth roaming the streets, but storm clouds are gathering.

These murders in Pittsburgh were not a random aberration, the unfortunate actions of a lone psychopath. The climate is changing, and fast. Last year, the Anti-Defamation League logged a 57 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States — including bomb threats, assaults, vandalism, and anti-Semitic posters and literature.

What’s changed is that conspiracy theories and “dog whistles” that resonate with anti-Semites and white supremacists are being circulated by respected establishment sources, including the highest levels of government. Bizarre claims about Jews have moved from the margins to the establishment.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust history at Emory University in Atlanta and the subject of the 2016 movie “Denial,” said yesterday “I’ve been studying the Holocaust my entire life. I’m not Chicken Little, always yelling, ‘It’s worse than it’s ever been!’ But now, I think it’s worse than it’s ever been in this country.”

These issues are not far away; some of America’s largest and most influential white nationalist media organizations, including the The Right Stuff website and the Daily Shoah are run just down the road in Wappingers. I couldn't sleep last night, fearing - knowing - that there are people not very far away at all who would like to see me and my children and my congregants dead.

This event tonight was planned in response to a neo-Nazi flyering attack on this church and others, up and down the Hudson Valley just a few weeks ago. Then, of course, came the murders in Kentucky and the massacre in Pittsburgh and just yesterday, one of my congregants called to tell me that his home in Cold Spring had been covered with swastikas.

In these dark times, there are moments of beauty and grace. This past Sunday before the dead of Pittsburgh had even been buried, the families in my synagogue walked into Hebrew school greeted by Lt. Frost of the Beacon PD and the clergy of this town who gave them smiles and hugs and songs. Pastor Ben Larson Wolbrink of First Presbyterian, Pastor Bill Deandreano of Salem Tabernacle, Pastor Ron Perry of Springfield Baptist, Pastor Ed Benson of New Vision Church of Deliverance, Pastor Tony Oliver of Upper Room Ministries and Pastor Ray Banks of In the Faith Ministries were there as God’s love in action. The kids didn’t totally understand why all these new adults were there, but the adults sure did. I did. And the adults wept to know that in this moment of fear, we were not alone.

Yet still, I worry. Less than a week a go, eleven of my Jewish brothers and sisters were gunned down in a synagogue a lot like our little shul, just a few blocks from here. I don’t want to bury my congregants and I don't want to be murdered for being a Jew, no matter how beautiful the ecumenical presence at our funerals might be.

So I wonder: Will we stand together when the pressure ratchets up?

I wonder: we will remember the teaching of the Hebrew Bible, לא תעמד על־דם רעך, to not stand idly by the blood of our friends when white supremacists come for the Jews and the Blacks?

From the national level down to local town council races, there are more than 400 white supremacists running for office across the country in the current election cycle, more than ever before. Some of them lost their primaries but I have no doubt that come this Tuesday, some of them will win their races.

I wonder: when they come for our gay brothers and sisters, will we remember the teaching of Jesus, who said ‘Truly I tell you, whatsoever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Then he continued, ‘Depart from me,you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

I wonder, when they come for those fleeing persecution, as my ancestors did not so long ago, will we remember the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, “Whoever among you sees an evil action, let him change it with his hand by taking action; if he cannot, let him change it with his tongue by speaking out against it; and if he cannot, then with his heart by feeling that it is wrong – though that is the weakest of faith”

When push comes to shove, when jokes about jewing down a merchant to get a better price become swastikas become massacres and lynchings, will we remember to serve the God of all of Heaven and Earth, or will we find reasons and rationalisations to serve only the God who looks like us?

I pray and meditate every day in the hope that I will one day be the man my tradition asks me to be. My tradition guides me in my faltering attempts to be God’s hands in the world, trying to embody God’s justice and mercy.

I believe that all of us - whether we draw on Judaism or Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or no specific faith tradition - want to be the best of what humanity can offer

I believe we are in this room, now, because we are one beacon, one city, united against anti-semitism, racism and white supremacy.

I believe that we will respond to the better angels of our nature.

I believe in love and I believe in this community and I believe in us.

I pray that my faith is not misguided.

May God bless the souls of those who were martyred by white supremacists and may God bless us all.