Letter to My Non-Jewish Friends

Dear Ones,

I’ve known you a long time. We attended grade school and high school together, remained close through college, attended each other’s weddings, shared each other’s child raising, and continue to speak weekly. 

I realize that in many ways our lives look the same, and are. But recent events have also highlighted that there’s a big difference between our worlds. I’m a Jew. 

You’ve always been with me, always supportive and encouraging. But now I feel an existential divide, and I know you’d be open to hearing about it. 

The last few weeks have been utterly devastating for me and other Jews. When Hamas violated Israel’s borders, murdering more than 1400 of our brethren, raping women, kidnapping children, murdering grandparents, beheading children, I know you were horrified too. You were kind enough to reach out to express your solidarity, which means the world to me. 

Israel mobilized to defend itself and that conflict has now returned to Gaza and the task of containing Hamas, but at the cost of the suffering of enormous numbers of Palestinian civilians. The anguish and the pain is unbelievable. In this time, I know that I’m not the only Jew who has felt existentially cut off from humanity. Too many friends and allies were silent, offering no consolation, no condemnation of terrorist assault on civilians. We’ve watched as other people post the same cheerful pictures of vacations, books read, and meals eaten while we are grieving, in shock, mourning, and terrified. It feels as though there are two separate worlds and I’ve been consigned to one of them, while you, dear friends, are still living large. 

So let me share a bit about this world to which I find myself consigned. 

• Going to work, you park your car, enter a building, walk in, and you do your job. No checkpoint. No metal detector. No armed guard opening your bag. I, on the other hand, work in a Jewish institution. When I show up for work, I drive up to a gated campus that now has only one point of entrance. There’s an armed guard at that gate (Manny) who checks everyone before letting them proceed. Apparently I work in a cage. 

• On weekends when I pray with my congregation, I approach a building that is also protected by a gate with a single entrance and armed guards at the front. They check every bag of every person who enters, the bag that contains my prayer book and my prayer shawl. I’ve been with you to your houses of worship. When you congregate, you just park and walk into the building. Nobody checks your bags. (By the way, I’m aware that in this regard my Muslim friends and I are in the same boat. We both pray in a cage.) 

• Some years ago, my Jewish institution was vandalized by an antisemite who spray-painted physical threats against us on an exterior wall. Another time, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed our campus, chanting that God hates us. Before that, a shooter scouted our campus but decided we were too secure so he drove to a Jewish Community Center and shot people. 

• When I flew to Europe to launch the semester at our rabbinical school in Germany, I shuttled to the airport, passed security, and then waited in an open gate. But if I fly to Israel, when I get to the airport, I pass through regular security, and then I get placed in a sealed room, which I’m not allowed to leave without having to go through all of the security all over again, because there are people who want us dead. 

• When I got to Europe, I exchanged my kippah (head covering) for a hat. I dare not risk seeming Jewish in public.

I am aware that, even with this ugly reality, I live a blessed, even privileged, life. But the privilege is provisional.

I am aware that, even with this ugly reality, I live a blessed, even privileged, life. But the privilege is provisional. While I benefit from many people perceiving me to be white, I know I’m not, and am reminded of that all the time. My Twitter feed daily features somebody who blames me, a California Jew, for some Israeli policy. I am called a murderer and a killer. A week doesn’t go by that I’m not told on Twitter, Facebook, text or email, that Hitler was right and should have finished the task, and that I deserve to die. Sometimes I’m told in person on the street. Often I get a text from someone telling me I will burn in hell. Because I’m a Jew.

I hadn’t really let myself notice this drumbeat of hate until recently. But I see it now, living in a cage, receiving unanticipated, hateful letters because of the policy of a country with which I identify, but am neither resident nor citizen. 

At every wedding, people cry. I know that you cry at your weddings too, but I realize your reasons for doing so are different than when a Jewish parent cries. At our weddings, we dance to a song featuring the ancient words of the Prophet Jeremiah. Assuring us that “one day, yet again, there will be heard the jubilant voices of bride and groom dancing in the hills of Judah” (what is now the West Bank). We Jews dance because that unlikely prophecy was given while our people marched into the Babylonian exile in chains. It sure didn’t look like there would ever be Jewish dancing in the hills of Judah again. 

Every Jewish wedding is a surprised celebration that Jeremiah, against all odds, was right: They didn’t kill us, we have continued, we survive. I know this sounds histrionic, but this is what we’re crying about: having made it. I know that you cry at your children’s wedding too, but because it’s beautiful, or because you love your new in-law, or because it’s a happy moment. We have those feelings too, overlaid by surprise that they haven’t succeeded in exterminating us. We’re still here.

I want to write this to you because it occurred to me that I now know that there’s a part of me in a secured shelter that is sealed off from the comfortable world in which you get to live.

What do I need from you, friends? Nothing more than what you’ve given me my whole life: Love, support, curiosity. I’m so grateful to share this journey with you. We share so much culture in common, a love of democracy, a passion for justice and inclusion, a love for art and thought and history and, of course, our shared childhood. I want to write this to you because it occurred to me that I now know that there’s a part of me in an secured shelter that is sealed off from the comfortable world in which you get to live. 

Not that you don’t have your own struggles, you certainly do. Your existential worries are about life as a whole: Climate change, aging, illness, kids. But they are not about whether your people will be obliterated. They’re not about whether some random stranger’s hate will intrude into your community simply because they are part of an ancient beleaguered people. They’re not about the possibility that you’ll find out that those you love have been kidnapped, murdered, raped, tortured or that the country that is the only one in the world where your people are a majority is the only one that people want obliterated from the face of the earth, or paradoxically that there are people who claim to be the real Jews and claim that you’re a fraud, which I don’t think pertains to any other people in the world. 

I just want you to know that. My loneliness will be mitigated, as it has been so often, by your love and care, but also by your understanding and by your seeing. 

I am a person and I am a Jew.

Love, 

Brad

Rabbi Dr Bradley Shavit Artson (www.bradartson.com) holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and is Vice President of American Jewish University in Los Angeles.