Prepared remarks: JEWISHcolorado Celebrate Israel Event (May 5, 2024)

As we celebrate the existence of Israel this year, and reflect on a Passover like none other in my lifetime, we have important work to do. As I said at the vigil we held after October 7th, it is hard to find the right analogy to understand this moment. Some said it was Israel’s 9/11; others suggested it was like the Yom Kippur War; unfortunately, I saw this moment as 1948.  October 7th represents—at its core—a challenge to Israel’s right to exist. That’s why hearing chants of “from the river to the Sea” are so painful.

The question for us today is how we best respond to this moment. Let me start with a call we all feel deeply—bring the hostages home. To bring this moral imperative to a personal level, many of us are connected to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents Rachel and Jonathan have kept the focus on this call—bring them home. At our family seders, we had an empty chair for Hersh, who lost an arm on October 7th and is still alive, evidenced by a recent hostage video of him. We join the Goldberg-Polin family and so many others in their pain and in their calls to free the hostages.

The misinformation around Israel and the hateful rhetoric we are seeing is painful to behold. In the past weeks, we have heard calls to “kill all Zionists” and “go back to Poland.” Let me be clear—these chants are not criticisms of Israel’s policies or actions. Rather, they represent hateful antisemitic rhetoric. And in many cases, they are directed at specific individuals in a manner intended to harass and are even sometimes accompanied by physical harm. We had not thought we would see the day when universities closed down classes because it was not safe for Jews to learn on college campuses. And yet that has happened in the last few weeks.

President Biden spoke forcefully to the issue last Thursday, explaining that “there’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.” Antisemitism, he concluded, “has no place” in America.

To meet this moment, we must work to counter hateful rhetoric with speech that is accurate. Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzner had the following to say after speaking on a college campus—“what bothers me most is the sense that students have stopped thinking critically, have stopped challenging assumptions they hold or have been fed, have been too influenced by what they read on slanted platforms . . and have resorted to the awful practice of vicious ad hominem attacks rather than strong argumentation, and have stopped listening all together.” We can work to counter this dynamic by sharing our stories in a way that invites and allows for dialogue with those who are interested to learn more.

For those willing to listen, it is not hard to explain that being a Zionist means you believe that Israel has a right to exist. It does not mean that you necessarily support all of the actions or policies of the current government. It does not mean that Israel has not made mistakes in the war against Hamas. And, most importantly, it does not mean that Jews don’t care about the deaths of Palestinians during this war. At the Passover Seder, we take some of our wine to recognize the deaths of Egyptians during the exodus. At my family seder this year, we recognized the suffering and deaths of Palestinians during this war. God tells us not to harden our hearts, but rather to maintain our humanity and never forget the stranger, for we were strangers in a strange land. That compassion is a core part of who we are as Jews.

As we celebrate Israel today, we celebrate an idea—an idea that, as Theodore Herzl put it, “if you will it, it is no dream.” The dream of a state of Israel requires our support. My grandparents were from Poland, where 3 million of the 3.3 million Jews who lived before World War II were murdered. After their world was destroyed, they were welcomed by the United States and my great uncle was welcomed in Israel. For our family, there is nowhere to go back to.

The dream of Israel as a state where Jews can live safely and securely is one we must stand for at this moment. And the promise of the United States of America is a nation, as George Washington wrote to a Rhode Island synagogue, where we honor the commitment that “everyone can live safely under his own vine and fig tree.”

Let me close by emphasizing that the way we make our stand matters. Rather than respond with hate, we must lead with our love for Israel and the ethos of the United States as a nation where our motto is e pluribus unum, out of many we are one. In doing so, we honor our tradition. And we stand for a basic principle—hate against any of us must be treated as hate against all of us. Thank you all for making this stand.

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