Re’eh 5777

When I was a student at the Bronx High School of Science, there was a guy in my class who said he was a Nazi. I assumed he was just saying it to try to upset me, so I ignored him.

I figured he was just saying it to annoy me, because why else would he tell me? Wouldn’t he be embarrassed to be a Nazi, and keep it a secret? I also thought he was saying it just to bother me because why would anyone be a Nazi? Why would anyone join the bad guys, especially since they had lost the war, and since they were considered the personification of evil?

But it turns out that there are people today who are Nazis, and who are not ashamed to tell people. We saw some of them last week in Charlottesville, Virginia. They were walking along beside White Nationalists and other racists.

Earlier this week I was speaking to Morgan Greene about right and wrong, and the Holocaust came up. Morgan said that although the Holocaust was terrible, at least we got the State of Israel out of it. I disagreed with her. People had been working to establish the State of Israel since the 1880’s, and I think it would have happened without the Holocaust. But there is one good thing that I think came out of the Holocaust. It gave racism a bad name.

There were a lot of racists and anti-semites in America and around the world before World War Two. They didn’t vanish after the war, they may not have changed, but they learned to keep their mouths shut. Because even if you think that your people are genetically better than other people, you might not want to be associated with a man who viciously murdered millions of innocent people, men, women, and children. 

And there is no doubt that racism in this country is different in degree from the racism of the Nazis, but not in kind. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. compared the situation of Black people in America with the situation of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and said that the tragedy of racism was that “its ultimate logic is genocide. If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him, if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.”

Where I lived, in Louisiana, I didn’t notice many Confederate statues. But I knew they were around. And I saw plenty of Confederate flags. I saw bumper stickers that were meant to be funny that said “Don’t blame me, I voted for Jefferson Davis.” I am sure that if I asked people who approved of those statues, who waved those flags and posted those bumper stickers if they hated Black people, or if they wished that Black people were still slaves, they would have said “Of course not!” 

They would no doubt tell me that they were for states rights, that they were proud to be Southerners and didn’t want Northerners to push them around, and so on. So imagine that you, as a Jew, see a statue of Adolf Hitler, ימך שמו. Or a Nazi flag, or a person wearing an SS uniform. And when you confront him, he says, “I’m not in favor of murdering Jews, but I celebrate Hitler because I am proud to be German, or European, or White. I celebrate him because he was strong and decisive and he made the trains run on time.”

Well, I’m sorry. I cannot separate the Nazis from the murder of Jews, which seems to me their most prominent characteristic. And so I do not ask Black people to separate the Confederacy from the Confederate support of slavery, which is surely the Confederacy’s most prominent characteristic. It is time for those statues to go. I don’t care how pretty they are. I don’t care that they are a part of our history. I am sure there were many lovely people in the Old South, but those who fought for the Confederacy chose to define themselves through the struggle to continue to subjugate other human beings for economic gain. And I will not honor them for that. 

Our Torah portion, Re’eh, tells us that we must not follow the gods of other people, who burn their sons and daughters in the fire. There is a right and there is a wrong. That we can choose to make this world a blessing or a curse. I call upon all members of this congregation to utterly reject all forms of racism and bigotry. To reject White supremacy and all bigotry based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference, or skin color.

Maybe that student at Bronx Science was really a Nazi. I should have told him then that he was wrong. I am telling him now. As our haftarah this week says, “Establish yourself through righteousness and distance yourself from oppression.” The time to choose blessing is right now.