A Confession
In his Rosh Hashanah sermon at Temple Israel in Natick, Mass., best-selling author Rabbi Harold Kushner made this candid confession:
“This past year [of endless terrorism and anti-Semitism] has compelled me to come to conclusions I didn’t want to come to. For all of my years as a rabbi, I have believed and I have taught that Jews were no different from other people, that Judaism was different from Christianity and Islam, but Jews had the same feelings, the same strengths and weaknesses, the same fears and dreams that Christians and Muslims have. I took issue with the Chabad rabbis who argued that Jewish souls are essentially different than gentile souls.
“I opposed and discouraged interfaith marriage, not because I believed that Jews were better than non-Jews but because a family with two religions was likely to raise children with no religion to avoid arguments.
“But this year has persuaded me that Jews are in fact different. I find myself compelled to face the fact that the Jew plays the role for the world that the canary used to play for the coal miners. You’ve read about how the miners would take canaries with them into the mines because the canaries were extremely sensitive to dangerous gases. They responded to danger before the humans did. So if the miners saw the canaries get sick and pass out, they knew that the air was bad and they would escape as fast as they could.
“That’s what we Jews do for the world. We are the world’s early warning system. Where there is evil, where there is hatred, it affects us first. If there is hatred anywhere in the world, it will find us. If there is evil somewhere in the world, we will become its target. People overflowing with hatred for whatever reason, including self-hatred, make us the objects of their hatred.
“This is the role we play in the world, not by choice but imposed on us by others, to be the miner’s canary, to smoke out the bigots, the haters, the people who will be a menace to their communities if someone doesn’t stop them, and we identify them early on by their hatred of us.
“Hitler attacked Jews before he attacked western civilization, and that should have alerted the world to what kind of person he was, but the world misread the signal. Muslim fanatics practiced their terrorist skills on Israelis before turning those skills on the rest of the world, but the world never understood the warning….
“Our job is to live as Jews were summoned to live, because we can’t escape the fate of being a Jew. Generations before us have tried and failed. We can claim the destiny of being a Jew; because when we do that, we discover how satisfying a truly human life can be.”
Rabbi Kushner did not explain why the Jews were the canaries of the world or what exactly placed the Jewish people into this ‘position.’ This was well articulated by Professor Eliezer Berkovitz in his powerful book Faith After the Holocaust:
“The fear that so many different civilizations have of the Jew, the suspicion with which he is met, is utterly irrational, yet it has its justification. It is utterly irrational, because it has no basis in the behavior in the Jew or in his character. It is a form of international madness when it is founded on a belief in Jewish power and Jewish intention to hurt, to harm, or to rule.
“Yet it has its justification as a metaphysical fear of the staying power of Jewish powerlessness. The very existence of the Jewish people is suggestive of another dimension of reality and meaning in which the main preoccupation of the man of ‘power history’ are adjudged futile and futureless in the long run….As long as the Jew is around, he is a witness that G-d is around. He is the witness, whether he knows it or not, whether he consciously testifies or refuses to testify. His very existence, his survival, his impact, testifies to G-d’s existence. That he is here, that he is present, bears witness to G-d’s presence in history. There lies the origin of the satanic idea of the Final Solution. If the witness were destroyed, G-d Himself would be dead.”
