Font Size

Cpanel

Rabbi's Blog

rabbi 05 smallsf badge lgRabbi Joel Landau  (rabbi@adathisraelsf.org) has been the Rabbi of Adath Israel since May 2013. He was ordained by the Chief Rabbinate in Jerusalem and has served previously as a congregational Rabbi in Charleston, South Carolina and Irvine, California. A full biography of Rabbi Landau is available here.


Recently, following the horrific anti-Semitic attacks on kippah-wearing Jews, the leaders of the Marseille Jewish community have called upon Jews to take off their kippot (or at least wear a hat) for the sake of their personal safety.  

This proposition has faced fierce opposition from world Jewry. Jewish legislators protested by donning kippot in the French Parliament. Within days, the hashtag #TousAvecUneKippa, everyone with a kippah, went viral, calling on Jews and gentiles alike to post kippah selfies. The Chief Rabbi of France, Rabbi Haim Korsia, lent his voice to the opposition, saying, "It means that we are projecting part of the responsibility on the victim. What is the limit? ... Someone who walks in the street on Saturday morning on his way to the synagogue, [is that going to be considered] too visibly Jewish? It doesn't end. And then, some people won't be allowed to wear a (Christian) cross in the street, to wear such or such religious sign? At some point, we have to defend the model of our society and it is a society of secularism and freedom of religious practice."

This is not the first or the last time that Jews have faced adversity for their religious practices. We are all aware of the extreme difficulties Jewish immigrants faced as they moved to America during the Second World War, especially with regards to keeping Shabbat. There were some Jews who chose to keep Shabbat and would be out looking for a new job every Monday. One man made this huge sacrifice, but all three of his sons grew up and did not keep Shabbat. He went to the leading Rabbi of the generation, Rav Moshe Feinstein, of blessed memory, to ask how his sons could abandon their traditions after he sacrificed so much to keep Shabbat. Rav Moshe asked him, “What did you talk about at your Shabbat table?” He answered, “S'iz shver tsu zayn a Yid – It’s hard to be a Jew.”

This story brings up an important question for Jews beyond France’s borders – how do we choose to see our religious practices, as a burden or as a privilege? According to Rav Moshe, if we want to teach ourselves and our children to be strong in our Jewish identity, we must emphasize the beauty of being Jewish. Instead of focusing on the “sacrifices,” focus on the meaning and reward that is encompassed in each and every ritual.

Dr. Yvette Alt Miller explains that when faced with adversity, Jews have two options: “One option is to retreat – to pull back from Jewish practice, to scale down our identity. The other is the opposite: to celebrate our heritage when it’s most threatened, to embrace ever more tightly what some people would have us abandon.”

By focusing on the privileges that we Jews are blessed with, instead of the sacrifices that they may entail, we can raise a generation that is proud to be Jewish and proud to walk around the streets of San Francisco, Paris, or Jerusalem with a kippah on their heads or a Jewish star around their necks.