B

ret Stephens seems like a fine person a good writer and astute observer of politics and society. I enjoyed Yonoson Rosenblum’s profile of him some months ago in which he came across as he does in his writing as someone sincere about having Jews’ best interests at heart.

But good intentions will only get one so far. Nothing can entirely compensate for a lack of profound grounding in Torah and when that is missing even a bright well-meaning fellow like him can get things very wrong. And so he does in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece prompted by the incident at the Rio Olympics in which an Egyptian judoka having lost his match with an Israeli Olympian named Or Sasson refused to shake the latter’s hand.

Mr. Stephens uses the snub as a metaphor for the abiding anti-Semitism that has characterized the Arab world. This deep-seated animus has resulted not only in the driving out of its 900000 Jews but also Stephens writes in a “combination of lost human capital ruinously expensive wars misdirected ideological obsessions and an intellectual life perverted by conspiracy theory and the perpetual search for scapegoats.”

He goes on to cite the historian Paul Johnson’s trenchant observation that “wherever anti-Semitism took hold social and political decline almost inevitably followed.” Stephens too sees the Islamic world’s all-consuming hatred of Jews as the chief reason for its lowly economic standing paucity of technological and academic achievement and general societal stagnation and he criticizes the fact that anti-Semitism barely registers as a factor in academic and media discussions of the reasons for Arab decline.

Although there is room to quibble with some of Stephens’s assertions he is in the main correct. But he’s also sorely misguided and his essay is one large albeit unintended diversion from what’s really at issue and important at least for Jews.

From an authentically Jewish perspective it went off the rails just after he recounted the rebuff atRioand began to focus on its perpetrator and the larger world he represents which led into a discussion of the self-inflicted damage this abhorrence of the Jew has caused to the Arab world. But as a Jew that’s all irrelevant. Jew hatred is always about us (and Mr. Stephens is one of us) not about them.

Ironically in an almost Pavlovian reaction hatred directed our way is met by many of us with an attempt to show how irrational hypocritical unfair contradictory self-defeating and futile that hatred is. But that’s not the Jewish response (with “Jewish” being determined by what the Torah has to say about it not by the ethnicity or religion of the responders).

The Jewish response is twofold: First do whatever is necessary and possible in the manner of hishtadlus to protect yourself from the threat made evident by the words and actions of anti-Semites. Then suspend all focus on those speaking those words and doing those actions and instead focus inward.

Without exception Jew hatred is a message intended for us collectively and individually and when we don’t act like it is but instead reflexively jump to blame and retort and look everywhere but to ourselves to search our souls it is wasted. Perhaps there is something inside us that rebels at the thought that the response to another’s Jew hatred must be to take a spiritual accounting of where we’ve fallen short. They spew hate and violence and we’ve got to ponder the message and introspect about our failings?! How’s that for a “blame the victim” mentality?

No matter — it’s the truth. Had it been said by a human being it would be the height of audacity to suggest that this be our response. But it was set forth by G-d — He Who after all is the One Who allows all this to happen to us in the first place — that this is why these things occur.

And He assures us too that He will take care of the perpetrators of the hatred as only He knows how for all eternity. But as in other areas of life we insist on trading roles with Him trying to do His job while delinquently forsaking the one He assigned to us.

Mr. Stephens concludes his piece this way:

So long as an Arab athlete can’t pay his Israeli opposite the courtesy of a handshake the disease of the Arab mind and the misfortunes of its world will continue. ForIsrael this is a pity. For the Arabs it’s a calamity.

I beg to differ. First I’m not all that interested in what all this means for the Arab world because I’m a Jew and Jewish well-being is what interests me. But more importantly if G-d sends a letter to the attention of His beloved Or Sasson along with the rest of his cherished nation but they decline to open it and read it insisting that someone else’s name is on the envelope is that not both a pity and a calamity for us too?