Antisemitism

More than 55 year ago, if I recall, our church's confirmation class took a field trip to a synagogue. This had to be in the early 1960s and I was a young teenager just beginning my high school years.

We were living in Bethlehem, PA, a deeply historic Moravian community, and I think the visit to the synagogue was a cooperative venture between the two houses of worship.

We weren't there for a service, but rather for the educational experience. I really don't remember much about that evening. And yet, there are some things that happened that night that have stayed with me all these decades later.

The rabbi gave all of us males yarmulkes to wear on our heads and I remember thinking this was cool. But I don't remember why we wore them. He then went on to give a brief history of Judaism. While he was speaking, I looked around the synagogue and remember thinking how surprisingly similar the interior looked compared to our own Moravian church. Candles. Pews. The difference, of course, was there was no Bible, but there was a Torah.

And not once did the rabbi discuss the Holocaust. Maybe the 1960s were still too close to the horrific history of the 1930s and '40s.

I think I came into the visit expecting to see something strange and exotic. I was probably mixing up Hasidic Judaism with Orthodox Judaism and not knowing the difference. I was probably expecting everybody to converse in Hebrew. And yet Dad had to learn some Hebrew while in seminary to become a Moravian minister.

When the evening was over, I remember coming away thinking there were more similarities among us than I expected. The three great faiths – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – are  tightly entwined, rooted as they are in the same Middle Eastern geography: they all use the first five books of the Old Testament as sacred scripture, they all draw their lineage to Abraham, and they all believe in one God.

In essence, we are pretty much the same. Pretty much the same.

Fast forward to today.

Given our similarities, there is an obvious worldwide rise in antisemitism, which is defined as the hostility or prejudice against Jewish people. The FBI says the rise in hate crimes against Jews in the United States is rising with disturbing frequency.

Which brings the Holocaust into focus. It is estimated there are only 16.1 million Jews in the world, which is an exceptionally small number in a global population of more than 8 billion people. Jews represent just 0.2 percent of the world's population.

The Holocaust murdered six million Jews. If there had been no Holocaust, it is estimated that there would be 32 million Jews on the planet now. Hitler was deadly efficient.

For such a small sect, Judaism draws disproportionate amounts of ire, and has for thousands of years. Illogically, Jews are accused by their persecutors of controlling the world's banks, the world's media, the theater and cinema, and so on and so on. I guess it's just a convenient – and lazy – way to label a people they can't understand.

If nothing else, my evening in the synagogue showed me that Judaism is just a different way to worship God by a people who breathe the same air, bleed the same blood, cry the same tears as we all do. What's so hard to understand about that?