Our Haters Along the Horseshoe
Delivered at KI Synagogue Second Day Rosh Hashanah 5786
1. The Political Horseshoe
An American pilot lands a commercial Delta flight in Tel Aviv and is taxiing on the runway.
“Thank you for flying with our airline. For your safety, please remain seated with seatbelts fastened until the aircraft has fully stopped at the gate and the seatbelt sign is turned off”. With a weary voice, he then says: “And for those who have already gotten up, opened the overhead compartment, brought down your luggage, and are standing in the aisles yelling and smoking, to you I say: welcome home to Israel!”
I feel a bit guilty mocking Israelis, at a time when we need to be supporting them. But sometimes some gentle mockery is the highest form of affection. Yes, Israelis are known to be blunt and to the point. That’s probably because they don’t have as much patience for false niceties as we do in the comfortable West. Their lives are too real for that. What accounts for this realness? Facing constant existential threats to your existence certainly helps to focus the mind on what’s real and what’s important. But that alone isn’t enough. In order to understand our brothers and sisters in Israel, and to understand ourselves as Jews, we first need to understand the nature of those who hate us.
In the two years since October 7th, I have come to reflect heavily on what is referred to as the Horseshoe Theory of politics. This theory states that the far right and far left end up sharing more in common with each other than with those reasonable, moderate people in the center of the Horseshoe.
Imagine the following image of a man in your mind: he has long hair and a long beard, he lives in a commune in the woods with a lot of guns, and he rails about how the government and the corporations are all evil. Is this guy a left wing Marxist revolutionary or a far-right wing Fascist? It could go either way! And that is the Horseshoe theory of politics in a nutshell.
The Horseshoe Theory is nowhere more pronounced than when it comes to how someone relates to the Jews, or to the State of Israel. On the far right, you have the isolationist wing of MAGA, exemplified by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green. They speak about Israel in the same demonizing and conspiratorial language as Zohran Mamdani and Jeremy Corbyn on the far left! It’s uncanny how similar, in fact.
So why does each side of the Horseshoe hate us? Let’s start with the Far Right. I’ve spent some time surfing white nationalist websites. I like to know how our enemies think. Do you know what their number one trope to criticize Jews has become? The Jews are hypocrites. They support an ethnic state of Jews in Israel, but they oppose the building of a white ethnostate in America. I’ll give you about ten seconds to think of why that argument is so dumb. The word Jewish is not analogous to the word white, because it doesn’t relate to an identity marker as superficial as race.
In Israel, there are Jews of all races and colors. And so, we Jews are actually consistent. We support Israel remaining a Jewish state, and we want America to remain an American country. It’s just that you don’t need to be white to be American. And therein lies the rub. Antisemitism is really, at its core, about envy. By admitting jealousy of the State of Israel for being a Jewish State, while they can’t achieve a white ethnostate here, they’re actually just tacitly admitting that Jewish identity is so much richer and deeper and more timelessly meaningful than a sense of identity based on skin tone. It exposes their own sense of identity as being shallow and transient. And that is the core of all antisemitic envy and hatred.
2. Zion and World Peace
Moving from the Right to the Left: There’s a verse from the Bible that those on the Left are fond of quoting, and rightfully so. Isaiah 2:4 “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore”.
That verse is written above the door of the Exhibit Hall at the national World War One Museum here in Kansas City. I pointed that out when I gave the invocation at the WW1 museum this past Memorial Day, and I said “I’d like to now read that verse in the original Hebrew”. That verse is also written on the Isaiah Wall at the United Nations in New York. This is the same UN that regularly accuses Israelis of being modern day colonists. That verse from Isaiah, though, was uttered by a Jewish prophet in the Land of Israel almost 3,000 years ago, and in a Hebrew that any Israeli today can understand.
But the irony goes much deeper than that. We need to look at all three verses before that one:
1 The word that Isaiah, son of Amoz, prophesied concerning Judea and Jerusalem.
2 And it shall be at the end of the days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be firmly established at the top of the mountains, and it shall be raised above the hills, and all the nations shall stream to it.
3 And many peoples shall go, and they shall say, “Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mount, to the house of the God of Jacob, and let Him teach us of His ways, and we will go in His paths”; For out of Zion shall the Torah come forth, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4 And he shall judge between the nations and reprove many peoples; And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift the sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
You can’t get to verse four without the context of the first three verses. And what context do the first three verses add? I reflected on how best to articulate that for a good long while, and I came up with the following: It’s the notion that both personal and group identity have to be based on something timeless and Divine, and consistent with our Torah. Ki MiTzion Teitzei Torah…
I have the most liberal, ecumenical interpretation of how this principle should manifest: I believe that the majority of Christians and Muslims possess this timeless and divine basis for their identity. I even believe that most Buddhists and Hindus do as well. The first ever Hindu US Army Chaplain was in my class at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And he wasn’t from India. He was a white guy with a southern accent! He explained to me that while Hindus do have a whole pantheon of gods, they still believe that underlying the whole pantheon is an overall unity of the Divine, which should qualify them as being monotheists as well. And I take his word for it.
So, if even eastern polytheists nowadays aren’t idolaters in my book, then who is? My answer: the adherents of the modern day “ism’s” of the Horseshoe extremes. The white nationalist Fascists, and the college campus neo-Marxists, who all hate the State of Israel with an equal passion. Because none of these groups have an identity based in the timeless or the divine, but only in modern day grievances.
Why does the Far Left support Hamas? Their reductive worldview teaches that anything considered white and European is bad, and anything third world and dark skinned is virtuous. Israelis are the European colonizers and Hamas are the dark skinned noble savages.
But Zionism isn’t like any European colonial movements. Jews are indigenous to Judea, and were never accepted as white Europeans within Europe itself. Half the Jews in Israel are Mizrachi. Explaining these facts to them only enrages them more. Ideologues can’t handle nuance, because it only disproves their shallow narrative of the world.
3. The Jews as the Control Group of History
My main thesis for antisemitism is that, to borrow from the language of laboratory experiments: The Jews are the control group of history.
From Google:
“A ‘controlgroup’ refers to a group in a scientific experiment that does not receive the treatment being tested, serving as a benchmark for comparison to measure the treatment’s effects. The primary purpose of a control group is to provide a baseline for comparison”
When a group comes along and says this is our conception of what human identity should be based on, and based on such and such modern day, transient ideas. We come along to testify, and to say: we are timeless, and your notions of identity are wrong.
The Hellenist Greeks were so tolerant that they allowed every People they conquered to worship their own gods. Because all the gods are valid, they believed. To each their own. But the Jews didn’t share their pluralism. We believed in only one God, and insisted that the Greek pantheon was false. This enraged them. That’s the story of Chanukah.
The Medieval Catholic Church believed that the Church replaces and supplants the Jews. So, why are the Jews themselves still around, and still observing the Old Testament? Our very existence disproved their theology. This only enraged them. They declared that the Church is Verus Israel (True Israel), whereas the Jews of today are only Carnal Israel (Israel in the flesh). They declared that God’s rejection of us is evidenced by our continued exile from our Homeland. This is why, R. Joseph Solovetichik pointed out, the Vatican was rabidly opposed to modern day Zionism at its outset, and is still quite cold about the State of Israel today. Because the State of Israel’s very existence disproves centuries of their theology.
The Muslims came along after the Christians and declared themselves to have the newest revelation from the God of Israel, the true update to the old Jewish Torah. They also had to deal with the problem of why, then, are the Jews still around, and why are they not accepting Islam as the true continuity of Judaism? They also became enraged by this. They said it must be that the Jews have falsified their own Scriptures, because they’re uniquely devious and evil.
The ultimate expression of Jews as contrarian control group:
“And Haman said to King Aḥashverosh: There is one nation, scattered and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom; and their laws are different from every people’s, and they do not keep the king’s laws; it is therefore not worthwhile for the king to tolerate them” (Esther 3:8).
The Midrash in Esther Rabbah 7:12 comments –
“There is one People – he [Haman] said: ‘Their teeth are big, as they eat and drink and say: Delight in Shabbat, delight in the festivals. They cause a decrease in the assets of the world; once every seven days – Shabbat! Once every thirty days – the New Moon! In Nisan – Passover! In Sivan – Shavuot! In Tishrei – Rosh Hashana and the great fast [Yom Kippur], and the festival of Sukkot!’…’And they do not follow the king’s laws – ‘as they observe neither (of our own holidays) Kalends or Saturnalia.’”
Haman summarizes what many Jews themselves feel: the Jews have too many holidays!! It’s ridiculous! These people are crazy. The Midrash goes on to note with irony:
“The Holy One blessed be He said to him: ‘Wicked one, you are casting aspersions on their festivals, I will bring you down before them and they will add another festival over your downfall.’!! These are the days of Purim; that is what is written: ‘A fool’s mouth is ruin for him’ (Proverbs 18:7).”
And after Purim, of course, we would also come to add Channukah. To say nothing of Yom Haatzmaut and Yom Yerushalayim. The abundance of our festivals testifies to our eternal outlasting of our temporal enemies, in every generation.
4. Modern Day Jew Hatred
The Fascists came along and said that identity is based in race and nationalism. We didn’t go along with that. The Marxists claimed that identity is based not on race, but on class. Workers of the World Unite. But that was too simplistic for us as well. Today’s Marxists assert that all of those who have been oppressed should rise up together in revolt to overthrow the Liberal Western order. But Jews are the most oppressed people in history, and we rather like the Liberal Western Order, and we have actually done quite well within it, thereby disproving their entire ideology. Of course this is all met with rage.
Today’s Far Left tries to tell us that Jews are a religion, and so we should not have a State, because all nationalism is bad. We try to explain back that the Jews have always felt like both a religion and a nation, and that we have always remained connected to our national Homeland and longed to return to it, and that Zionism isn’t the same as most other nationalist movements in many key and crucial ways. The Jews predate and transcend these modern day conceptions of identity. But they can’t handle that.
In this new year let’s embrace our own timeless identity by better understanding why our enemies hate us. Let’s eschew the extremes on either end of the horseshoe and choose instead the timeless, nuanced values of our Torah, the support of Israel, and the love of America, with our heads held high as American Jews.
