“There cannot be a greater chillul Hashem than the fact that the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews know little or nothing of Hashem’s Torah”

AS

my rav was introducing each kinnah and expanding on the various tragedies that gave rise to each one — e.g., the destruction of both Temples, the slaughter of the Rhineland communities by the Crusaders, the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242 — it suddenly hit me what a privilege it is to have been born into such a people, one that has survived so much for so long and continued to forge ahead.

And that thought led to another reflection on how rich is the life that my wife and I chose at the outset of our marriage, and how grateful I am to be another link in the long chain of transmission of Torah and to have given rise to new generations of such links.

As often happens when my mind starts to wander, an element of sadness soon entered where there had only been gratitude. My thoughts turned to the suburban Jews with whom I grew up and how few of them mark Tishah B’Av in any way or feel any connection to the events commemorated, if they even know of them at all. They know little of the beliefs and practices that made it possible for Jews over the millennia to endure so much while holding fast to their connection to HaKadosh Baruch Hu and one another.

Rav Noach Weinberg used to say that there cannot be a greater chillul Hashem than the fact that the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews know little or nothing of Hashem’s Torah. And so is it a tragedy for modern Jews to have no sense of what a miracle it is to have been born a member of a people who can trace their civilization back millennia, and who maintained their identity separated from their Land for 2,000 years. (Someone once asked Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l how old he was. He replied, “Three thousand five hundred years old.”)

And it is sad that so few of the friends of my youth have any idea of what I mean by the “richness” of my life as a Torah Jew. Of a life that constantly calls upon us to think deeply and to delve into yet another facet of the Torah. Of a calendar that is ever renewing, and of experiencing the excitement of that renewal together with a community of fellow Jews. Of cryptic Midrashic comments of the Sages first recorded two thousand years ago, the multiple layers of which continuously bear precious new fruit.

TISHAH B’AV AFTERNOON brought another reminder of what a remarkable people we are, though it also brought home to me how far we are from the level of previous generations, even those just passed. I listened to Rav Aaron Lopiansky’s explication of the Kinnos, in particular “Arzei HaLevanon.” His topic this year was the Hebron Massacre of 1929, which in its polymorphous savagery was in some ways a trial run for October 7, albeit with only a fraction of the casualties.

I will not quote from the remarkable correspondence of both those murdered and some of the survivors in the period prior to the massacre. Rather I will content myself with a few observations. The first is that that correspondence often reached the level of poetry, as the writers contemplated the changes in themselves and their view of the world around them as a consequence of their learning.

Their only means of communication with their families far away was through letters and postcards. They had to craft sentences to make their experience real to those to whom they were writing. And in the process of doing so, their thoughts and feelings were deepened. Our quicker communications today come with a heavy price in terms of depth.

Second, yeshivah students of those days were almost invariably bucking the trends and making sacrifices to pursue their Torah learning. There was no well-worn path from cheder to yeshivah to long-term learning in kollel, which has become the societal norm. And that process of going against the trends and often resisting familial pressures added intensity to the learning. Shlomo Yogel, the son of the rav of Slonim, Rav Shabsai Yogel, for instance, left home at 15 to cross the border surreptitiously into Lithuania, and did not see his family again for nine years, until his father’s visit to Eretz Yisrael, just a few months prior to the massacre.

The effect of their sacrifices on their learning was reflected not only in their hasmadah, but also in the transformative effect of their learning on every aspect of their being. When Rav Avraham Grodzinski, the mashgiach in Slabodka, heard of how fatally wounded bochurim nevertheless had the presence of mind to throw themselves on comrades so that the Arab mob would see the gore on the latter and conclude that they were already dead, he commented that only one deeply ingrained with mussar could have shown such presence of mind in the face of death.

Jews for Mamdani

If one seeks any further proof of the radical disconnect of so many contemporary Jews from Jewish history and from any sense of Jewish peoplehood, consider a headline from last week’s Ha’aretz reporting a new poll that Zohran Mamdani holds a 17-point lead among Jewish voters in the New York mayoral race.

Mamdani has made no secret of his wish for a world free of Israel. At his college he founded a chapter of an organization that celebrated Hamas and their charter to obliterate Israel. And he has consistently supported the BDS movement to delegitimize Israel entirely.

Yet, I would guess, New York City Jews support him not despite these positions, but because of them. What better way for a young Jew to prove his progressive bona fides, while demonstrating a total absence of fellow feeling for seven million Jews in Israel.

So, New York’s hip, progressive Jews are down with a Judenrein Middle East, with the only Jewish majority state on the planet gone, and with the deaths of seven million Jews in Israel (Yahya Sinwar’s goal). Nor, it would seem, does the mainstreaming of Jew hatred trouble them.

No doubt they have convinced themselves that Israel is committing genocide, without bothering to look too deeply into the substance of that claim. Just before the Nine Days, my wife and I were in Prague, and visited Theresienstadt, about two hours away. Theresienstadt was not an extermination camp, despite having crematoria to dispose of the bodies of approximately 35,000 Jews who died there of starvation.

Indeed, the Nazis used Theresienstadt as a propaganda vehicle to disprove accusations about its treatment of Jews. A Nazi propaganda film portrayed a soccer game and a symphony performance, involving Jewish musicians from some of the leading orchestras in Europe. And numerous examples of paintings and drawings by children internees are displayed.

Yet of the 150,000 or so Jews who passed through Theresienstadt, only around 15 percent survived the war — dying either there or after being transported to Auschwitz or other extermination camps. All part of the Nazis’ systematic campaign to wipe out world Jewry — a goal that led them to prioritize the use of rail lines to transport Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz over crucial military needs toward the end of the war.

Even if we were to accept the accuracy of Hamas Health Ministry casualty figures, despite conclusive evidence that those figures are jiggered, and subtract the minimum number of Hamas casualties (around 20,000), we would be left with a total of 40,000 civilian casualties. That’s a lot of human life lost. But it is only around two percent of the prewar Gazan population. That simply does not demonstrate a desire to kill all the Palestinian population of Gaza, especially in light of Israel’s overwhelming firepower.

If those progressive Jews were not cut off from any connection to Jewish history, they would recognize the accusation of genocide for what it is: a blood libel of the type that Jews were constantly subject to throughout European history. Accusations of poisoning the water supply during outbreaks of the plague or of using the blood of Christian children to make matzos for Pesach — a charge recently revived by the lunatic Candace Owens — were commonplace.

And if our progressive fifth column were more alert to their past, they might ask the question: Why do Israel’s alleged genocidal actions and war crimes inevitably lead to worldwide demonstrations, while killing on a vastly greater scale and aimed directly at civilians pass without a peep from the self-righteous mobs? Did you ever hear of a campus demonstration against Russia for repeatedly targeting hospitals in Ukraine? Or against Chinese concentration camps for Uighurs? Did the recent slaughter of 1,000 Druze in Syria — a clear attempt to wipe out a religious group in whole or in part, the textbook definition of genocide — attract any media attention at all? Ask yourself what you have read about the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of black Muslim farmers in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Why are the Jews of Israel treated differently? Two answers. First, the worldwide outcries against Israel are just a continuation of millennia of efforts to define Jews as the locus of all evil. And today, there is yet another reason: the desire of the West to absolve itself for its long history of lethal obsession with the Jews, up until and including the Holocaust, and for having stood by as six million were slaughtered. As one allied British spokesman said at the Bermuda Conference to discuss the plight of refugees, in 1942: The great fear is not that Hitler won’t let Jews go free from his domains, but that he might.

The accusation of genocide against Israel today is absolution for Western guilt, an effort to say the Jews are no better than the West was in its treatment of them.

As Michael Oren brilliantly lays out in his essay “The Wisdom of Yahya Sinwar” at his Substack, Sinwar bet that no matter how heinous the Hamas attack on Israel was, as soon as Israel responded to eliminate the threat, the world would immediately forget what Hamas had done and focus solely on the damage of Israel’s necessary response.

After every unprovoked attack on Israel from Gaza from the time of Hamas’s takeover in 2007, Israel’s response was inevitably met with calls for a ceasefire, with the initial casus belli soon forgotten. In each case, Israel’s growing status as a pariah state forced premature ceasefires, with Hamas left to fight another day. The international community remained resolutely silent on how Israel might eliminate the ongoing threats to its civilian population without incurring opprobrium.

And Sinwar bet — correctly, it seems — that even the savagery of October 7 would soon be forgotten amid a hail of condemnations of Israel.

That so many Jews are lending a hand to the success of that bet is to our shame.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1074. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)