It strikes me that I have been writing a lot lately about the rush to madness all around us. Bakeries fined $150000 for declining to bake a wedding cake with two grooms on top. Leading Western nations eager to resume trade with Iran and grease its acquisition of nuclear weapons even as it reiterates its hope to wipe Israel off the map. That kind of stuff.
This week’s edition comes from the groves of academe. Kirsten Powers has written a new book called The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech. (Powers incidentally is a Democrat.) Much of that book is devoted to an analysis of American universities where left-wing students have sent the message that “anyone [who] strays off the leftist script… might find themselves investigated harassed ostracized even expelled” because their speech has given offense.
Nearly 60 percent of the colleges and universities in America have campus speech codes that dramatically restrict if not obliterate freedom of speech. One for instance bars students from “offending… a member of the University community.” Fordham University prohibits using e-mail to “insult.” Offense and insult are determined by the ones so offended.
A group of Scholars of Color at UCLA for instance recently disrupted a class charging that the tenured professor had committed “micro-aggressions” against them. Example: The professor changed one student’s capitalization of “indigenous” to lower case and thus disrespected her ideological point of view. Were the students punished for disrupting a class? No. The 79-year-old professor was instructed to stay off the graduate campus for a year and UCLA commissioned an Independent Investigative Report on Acts of Bias and Discrimination Involving Faculty.
At Marquette University a Jesuit school Professor John McAdams was stripped of tenure and fired for a blog post in which he criticized by name a graduate teaching assistant who had told a student in her philosophy class that he could not defend the traditional Catholic teaching on same-gender marriage because doing so might offend some other students. McAdams wrote that the teaching assistant had used “a tactic typical among liberals now. Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong and are not to be argued against on their merits but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.” His firing proved how right he was and how effective those tactics have proven.
Some of these incidents would be hilarious if the mindset behind them were not so frightening. After two grand juries declined to indict two white police officers who had killed black men in the line of duty Smith College president Kathleen McCartney was being assiduously politically correct when she wrote “As members of the Smith community we are struggling and we are hurting. We raise our voiced in protest.” She went on to outline campus actions to “heal those in pain ” “to teach learn and share what we know ” and to “work for equity and justice.”
Poor McCartney soon found herself assailed by black students who claimed that her hashtag “All lives matter ” had invalidated the experience of black lives by not singling out for mention that black lives matter and thereby removing the focus “on institutional violence against black people.” McCartney apologized abjectly.
NOT ALL OFFENSE HOWEVER IS EQUAL. Many Jewish students live in a hostile environment which can at times be genuinely frightening on many campuses across America. No one it seems is particularly concerned about aggressions — micro or otherwise — against them. On about 200 campuses there are annual multiday Israel Apartheid Week rallies calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. Many of the events are formally sponsored by academic departments and promoted by professors.
Boston police recently had to protect pro-Israel students over three successive days from pro-Palestinian mobs shouting “Jews back to Birkenau.” One would think that those chants would be deemed at least mildly offensive.
Ruth Wisse in “Anti-Semitism Goes to School” (in the May 4 Mosaic) describes how a group of pro-Palestinian student groups demanded that candidates for student government at UCLA sign a pledge that they will not participate in trips to Israel organized by groups like AIPAC or Aish International’s Hasbara Fellowships. Most of the candidates refused to sign but the elected student government president did.
Though expressing discomfort with the pledge UCLA’s Jewish chancellor declined to punish those involved claiming that promotion of the pledge is a form of sacrosanct free-speech. When it comes to leftist minorities and those otherwise easily offended the subjective hurt of those offended trumps free speech; when it comes to insult and intimidation of Jewish students however the absolute value of campus free inquiry and speech is suddenly rediscovered. As Wisse puts it institutions that enforce “sensitivity training” to insure toleration for minorities “may inadvertently be bringing some of these groups together in common hostility to Jews as the only campus minority against whom hostility is condoned.”
Crossing the Line 2: The New Face of Anti-Semitism on Campus an excellent documentary by Jerusalem U which produces films to bolster the Jewish identity of students intersperses interviews with Jewish students with scenes from campus anti-Israel rallies. In one surreal scene Becky Sebo a student at Ohio University speaking against a student government BDS resolution is dragged away by police in handcuffs. The police were called by the student government president who we see in another scene pouring a bucket of blood on herself in support of BDS. Over 50 percent of Jewish students in one nationwide survey report that they have personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism.
BUT MY PURPOSE AS SHAVUOS APPROACHES is not to detail one more example of collective derangement but rather to inquire as to whether we can use that derangement positively. I have long felt for instance that there is an optimistic side to anti-Semitism the more irrational the better.
Asked by Louis XIV to point to one supernatural phenomenon the great philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal replied “The Jews your majesty the Jews.” And the protean nature of Jew hatred is one aspect of that supernatural phenomenon. The Torah long ago predicted “Among those nations you shall find no respite no rest for your foot…. You will live in constant suspense and stand in dread both by day and night never sure of your existence” (Devarim 28:65–67).  
The world’s obsession with the Jews wrote the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain in 1937 results from the mission of the Jews to bring knowledge of G-d to the world. More recently David Goldman speculated that nations aware of their own mortality experience “eternity envy” of the Jews the eternal people despite their unceasing persecution and small numbers. The nations of the world acknowledge through their hatred that we are Hashem’s Chosen People.
In a similar fashion we can look at a world that has gone off the tracks and see what happens to a world without G-d. What has resulted from the vaunted freedom of the 1960s that promised the end of all human repression and the elixir of happiness? On college campuses relations between men and women have never been so fraught or so litigious. Every decade rates of depression among the young rise. Women approach their 30s and beyond without being able to find a man willing to assume adult responsibilities and marry them or one that they deem worthy of marrying.
Rather than just watching with horror and growing depressed we can use what is happening around us to strengthen our commitment to our island of sanity. Instead of being more connected to and curious about the world around us let us reinforce the boundaries and hold ever faster to the Torah as a swimmer holding onto to a log in a raging river.
Currently I’m most looking forward to starting 15 minutes daily of Ramchal’s Derech Hashem in my morning shiur after three years of going through Mesillas Yesharim twice. I know that those 15 minutes will give me something to think about and work on every day — at least if I don’t get distracted wondering whether this could finally be the Cubs’ year. The more such 15 minutes we can multiply in our day the less we will find ourselves worrying about Iran and its enablers.
As these thoughts were going through my head I heard a derashah last Leil Shabbos that seemed to capture the point I’m trying to make. At the end of parshas Behar the Torah describes the gradual impoverishment of one whose desire for money prevents him from observing shemittah until he is forced to sell himself as a slave to a gentile. Just afterward the parshah concludes “My Sabbaths shall you observe and My Sanctuary shall you revere — I am Hashem.”
What is the connection of Shabbos and the Beis HaMikdash to the Jewish slave? Rashi explains that while living with his gentile master the Jewish slave might look at this master who is so much more successful than he and think “My master engages in licentiousness so will I. My master worships avodah zarah so will I.”
Instead the Torah instructs us to think about their idol worship and realize that it is all self-worship. Each one does what he wants where he wants — this one prostrating himself under this tree and the next one under another tree.
Not so the Jewish People. We have one G-d and He sets the rules. Only in His Temple where His Presence dwells do we prostrate ourselves.
And when we recognize the radical difference of having a G-d Who stands over us and not the opposite we seek more fervently the connection to Him — most powerfully in His Sanctuary and in that sanctuary in time Shabbos a period completely cut off from the world around sanctified to fully experience our relationship with Him.
We have nothing to envy from the world around. But to keep from being ensnared we must take refuge in our world the world of the Torah given to us at Sinai.
I know this is not exactly the attitude my readers are used to hearing from me. But it is nevertheless my reaction to so many recent ventures into the outside world and a feeling I’d like to intensify while preparing for kabbalas haTorah.—