The Exodus, the Shoah, and the Jewish Roundtable of Alameda Unified

Sermon at Temple Israel of Alameda, 6 Shevat 5783

Shabbat Shalom. At the beginning of our service, I said I was going to connect three seemingly disparate ideas tonight: our Torah portion Bo, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the reconvening of the Jewish Roundtable of Alameda School District. 

Last Sunday, I was studying the Shema with our B’nai Mitzvah families and a student asked me: “what does it mean that God brought us out of Egypt to be our God?” I stumbled to answer her. I stumbled because the honesty of her question took my breath away. There are so many ideas layered into Jewish practice and teaching this B’nai Mitzvah family class has forced me to stop and pay attention to how few of those ideas are ever explained. 

You might say leaving Egypt is told in Parashat Bo and at a Passover Seder. You’d be correct – though that’s not the full truth. Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, is the central story for Jews. Our prayer services constantly remind us of the Exodus. Why is this so important to us?

Commentators claim we choose to leave Egypt every day. Every day we leave our narrowest thoughts, our most ill-advised habits, our curmudgeonly way of thinking. When we turn to the path of light and goodness, we leave Egypt. God is the Force that helps us make the leap from the known to the unknown. With God’s help, we cross the Red Sea and wander in the wildnerness towards Revelation. This is why honoring the God who brought us out of Egypt to be our God is so important. The false gods of wealth, doomscrolling, endless loops of streaming video – those will never save us. It is the True God, the Source of Life, the Source of Love, Justice, Truth, and Beauty Whom we must honor. 

And how can we believe in God as we live in the long shadow of the Shoah?

A Holocaust is a sacrifice to God that is thoroughly consumed. An entirely burnt offering. There are different types of sacrifice in our Bible and a holocaust is one of them. I don’t think the victims of the Nazis were sacrificed to God. I think it was a human catastrophe when the eternal simmering rage against the Other murdered six million people. That’s why I try to always refer to it as the Shoah, which means the Catastrophe in Hebrew. 

And usually, I wait to mention the Shoah around Yom HaShoah.

Jews chose a different part of the Shoah as our internal remembrance day. Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah, Day of the Shoah and Heroism Remembrance Day, or as it is better known, Yom HaShoah is observed on the 27th day of Nisan. It is a week after Passover and eight days before Israel Independence Day. This timing acknowledges that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began the day before Passover in 1943. It is a terrible myth to claim we went like lambs to slaughter. Our people resisted as much as possible, though obviously when the entire world ignored our deaths and refused our asylum requests, it was impossible for us to save the ⅓ of our people who were slaughtered. 

But now that I am a community rabbi, I can’t be so pedantic about things. 

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Nazis were something from the distant past – made more distant because all four of my grandparents’ families came over long before World War II. It’s soul crushing that Nazism is making a comeback. 

Make no mistake – internet culture, the rise of alt-right “humor” and politicians who say the quiet part out loud – all of this has drastically increased the number of people generally, and children in particular who believe that Nazi salutes and slurs against Jews have a place in society. Not just in society, but as a way to bully Jews in schools. 

We all know that neo-Nazis exist in the Bay Area, as they do throughout the world. What I didn’t fully realize before this week is that our middle schools don’t have any real program for combating anti-Jewish hate or racism more broadly. We all know that middle school is a time when children start to explore what it means to be individuals. Many kids spend more time with people who look like them: finding ethnic cliques more appealing than integrated ones. And between the so-called humor on the internet and the bias at home, it’s easy to make fun of Jews because who cares? None of them exist in Alameda. Or if you do, you shouldn’t. 

This problem does not exist at just one school or just one level of education. But the fact that most families are afraid of outing themselves as Jewish within our district schools takes my breath away. To explain how shocking this revelation was to me, let me explain my family’s experience. We came from Alhambra, California; a minority-majority city where almost every kid in our public Mandarin Immersion program was Asian and our local schools were roughly half Asian, half Latinx. Our kids were thrilled to meet other Jews at Maya Lin. Our principal is Jewish and our first grade teacher is Jewish. And when I volunteered in our first grader’s classroom for Lunar New Year, I learned that three of his classmates are Jewish. 

This problem of accepting neo-Nazis rhetoric or only having small interventions when issues are brought up, means that the wider community of Alameda does not feel like a safe space to identify as Jewish. High school kids offered to hang out with our elementary and middle school kids at the Jewish Roundtable because they know what it’s like to feel like the only Jew in Alameda. And we just can’t let this continue.

We need to have the courage to welcome people into our community. Whether they’re members or not, using our resources as Temple Israel to support social gatherings of the Jews of Alameda, demanding real education to explain what anti-Jewish bias is, to show it as the base of many conspiracy theories, to challenge the bias that comes from the right and the left. We’ve got to do this together. Because Shoah Remembrance isn’t about one or two days on the annual calendar. It is about having the courage to be publicly Jewish. 

This isn’t just a problem in Alameda. My niece and nephew in Navarre, Florida might be the only Jews in their schools. They’re loud and proud – but only because their non-Jewish friends have their backs. And I know our members in Castro Valley have similar experiences, though perhaps not quite as overtly horrifying as some of the stories I’ve heard. 

I couldn’t spend my time tonight reminding you of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Or the literary importance of defeating multiple Egyptian gods through the plagues. I needed to share my broken heart. Hearing that neither a principal nor teachers directly denounce Nazi salutes in their school overwhelmed me. 

Remember that we are commanded to go forth from this narrow place. Together, we can create a better culture for our community. Just as the Eternal Love of God supports us, our love for our children and for all future generations can nurture us as we continue to fight for our right to live with dignity. The people Israel live! Am Yisrael Chai!