Oasis Songs: Musings from Rav D
Friday, May 30, 2025 / 3 Sivan 5785
Summary: I hope this will be my final major commentary on antisemitism during my tenure at CNS. Still, if history is any guide, the recent murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky are grim portents of a deeper wave yet to come. That should not lead us to despair, for we are not without recourse. In what follows, I offer historical context for why I believe we are only in the early stages of this resurgence, as well as how we might begin to address both its immediate threats and structural roots.
Reading Time: Nine minutes
The recent attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., claimed the lives of two young people, Sarah Lynn Milgrim, a Jewish educator and activist, and Yaron Lischinsky, a German-born ally of the Jewish people and Israeli citizen. This antisemitic double murder joins a decade of violent attacks against Jews that began at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Jews, regardless of where we reside, mourn their lives, their commitments, and the loss of the countless ways that Yaron and Sarah would have continued to contribute to the Jewish people.
The significance of this attack is, of course, horrifying for its violence. It also reveals a more disturbing truth: antisemitism, far from being relegated to history, remains a clear and present danger. This is not an isolated event. It is part of a growing pattern. Like all such patterns, it risks becoming invisible, relegated to background noise precisely because it becomes something we expect, something we begin to live with.
I want to put forward a dismal argument that we are merely at the beginning of a massive sea change, one in which both Jews and non-Jews will be swept beneath the rising tide of antisemitism. Yet because this is only the beginning phase, we want to resist the notion that we might come to accept such hatred as normal. Because of that, it is common to hear many Jews declare that they won’t hide their Jewish identities, that they are proudly wearing their Jewish stars in public, and they are otherwise refusing to disappear. This is praiseworthy and probably an important part of keeping us collectively safe, but we need to be intellectually honest and acknowledge that we can only speak and act this way because antisemitism remains at a historically low level. Jewish history provides us with sobering reminders of how easy it is for antisemitism to become normalized, and how historically many Jews have sought safety by attempting to become invisible.
They were not always permitted to do so. In Medieval Europe, for instance, Jews were required to wear identifying badges, live in segregated quarters, and accept exclusion from many professions. These conditions endured not for years but centuries, and while there were occasional petitions or responses, many Jewish communities learned to adapt rather than resist, focusing inward to maintain tradition and survive. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 is one of the clearest examples, mandating Jewish badges and legal restrictions that were widely adopted across Christian Europe. Contemporary Jewish communal records from France and the Rhineland document both protest and resignation in response to these decrees.
In 19th-century France and England, even after civil rights were granted, Jews faced pervasive social antisemitism that quietly limited their participation in elite society. For many, the invisibility of assimilation became a survival strategy rather than confrontation. The Dreyfus Affair eventually shattered that illusion, but for years prior, the strategy was to endure. As Michael Marrus has shown in his study, The Politics of Assimilation, many French Jews believed that full integration would eventually erase prejudice—an assumption that proved tragically optimistic.
Perhaps most haunting of all: in the early 1930s in Germany, many Jews believed that Nazism was a passing storm. Even as rights were stripped and threats increased, many remained committed to civic engagement and legal appeals—unwilling or unable to believe the severity of the threat until it was too late. Historians such as Saul Friedländer and Marion Kaplan have documented how many Jews, particularly those integrated into German civic life, clung to their belief in the state and in rational discourse long after it became clear that Nazi antisemitism was existential. Their works reveal the tragic slowness with which the reality of the threat was acknowledged, as well as the heartbreaking costs of that delay.
Normalization is not a moral failing; it is a human adaptation. But it becomes a spiritual danger when it blinds us to what must be resisted.
Historically, antisemitism has rarely emerged from calm, stable societies. It flares during moments of upheaval—moments of crisis. During the Black Death, Jews were blamed for poisoning wells. The Spanish Inquisition arose amid forced conversions and imperial consolidation. Pogroms erupted in Russia following economic crises and political instability. Nazi Germany’s genocidal antisemitism followed the devastation of war, economic depression, and national humiliation.
Antisemitism, in other words, is not a quirk of history. It is a reactive force, a way that broken societies displace their fears. It is a scapegoating mechanism, a conspiracy theory, and a false promise of unity for those who feel unmoored. The more broken the structures around us, the more tempting it becomes to blame a perceived outsider.
Today, this mechanism has taken on a particularly modern and insidious form: stochastic terrorism. This term refers to the way that public demonization and inflammatory rhetoric, often spread through social media and mass communication, can increase the statistical likelihood of violence, even when no one explicitly calls for it. In a world of viral narratives and algorithmic amplification, language that casts Jews and Israelis as malevolent or manipulative doesn’t just live in the abstract: it primes minds, it stokes fear, and, eventually, spills into bloodshed.
Lone actors who commit violent antisemitic acts are therefore not truly alone. They are often reacting to a climate saturated with signals from political figures, media outlets, and online spaces that have subtly or overtly dehumanized Jews. It is this convergence of modern communication technology with ancient hate that makes today’s antisemitism uniquely dangerous.
Given that we are entering an era of global antisemitism that arises from forms of institutional instability and inequality, we must view antisemitism as both a non-Jewish problem and a Jewish problem.
In the conclusion of the book of Leviticus, Behar-Bechukotai, we find an approach that addresses the non-Jewish aspects of antisemitism by offering a model of how to build a society that resists breaking. It introduces the radical idea of the Yovel, or the Jubilee Year, when debts are forgiven, land is returned, and liberty is proclaimed throughout the land. Every fifty years, a total reset.
When I was in rabbinical school, scholars were unsure if this was ever really practiced. Was it aspirational or actual policy? But we now know, through the more recent research of Eric Toussaint and Michael Hudson (The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations and The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and Their Repudiation, respectively), that ancient societies, including those in Mesopotamia, did regularly cancel debts and restore land. These policies weren’t idealistic so much as they were pragmatic. Leaders knew that without structural reset, inequality would deepen, unrest would grow, and their rule would crumble.
Phrased differently, these debt cancellations weren’t designed to create modern ideals of equity, but they acknowledged that a minimum standard of fairness was essential. They recognized the social danger of permanent disenfranchisement.
What makes contemporary antisemitism so disheartening is that it is no longer local, confined to a small region, state, or even nation. It is global. Attacks ripple from one continent to another. Language and hate migrate through screens. It’s not just the dissemination of hatred that is global: it’s the underlying causes of global debt, global poverty, and global instability. The same conditions that once destabilized city-states now destabilize entire regions. Just as in the past, those on the margins, particularly Jews, are at risk.
So what are we to do?
First, we must resist normalization. We cannot accept chronic antisemitism as the price of Jewish identity. We must also affirm that Jews have the right and the responsibility to protect ourselves and our communities. If anyone doubted that there was a clear line running from the so-called free speech protests on college campuses to real-world antisemitism and terror, that is a much harder argument to make today. We are witnessing, in real time, the power and danger of Jewish demonization.
But ultimately, taking protective action is insufficient. It may help mitigate violence, but it will not root it out. Because the truth is, as history painfully affirms, that Jews have often served as the barometer of an era’s moral and structural decay. We do not volunteer for that role. We do not seek it. Yet, time and again, we find ourselves forced into it.
If we want this current flare-up of antisemitism to recede, we must do more than protect ourselves. We must become powerful advocates for profound structural change. That means engaging not only with antisemitism as a social toxin, but with the economic and political conditions that nourish it. The global systems of debt, disenfranchisement, inequity, and precarity are the fuels for hatred. Addressing them will require moral imagination and political courage far beyond what any American political party currently dares to propose. The antisemitism of today is a symptom of the breakdown of the world order established after the Second World War.
We must also draw on our tradition’s deep wisdom that justice is not reactive but structural. Torah teaches that a healthy society is not one that waits until collapse. It is one that builds in resets, redistributions, and releases—mechanisms that prevent, or at least minimize, fractures before they begin.
As Pirkei Avot teaches, “Pray for the welfare of the government, for without the fear it inspires, people would swallow each other alive” (Avot 3:2). This is not an endorsement of authoritarianism; rather it is a recognition that without just and effective structure, social cohesion dissolves.
Maimonides, in his Mishneh Torah (Laws of Gifts to the Poor 10:7), writes that the highest form of tzedakah is empowering a person so they no longer need charity, providing them with the means to live with dignity and independence. This is structural justice in action.
As political theorist Judith Shklar noted in her 1990 work, The Faces of Injustice, “Injustices that are experienced as petty humiliations can be among the most demoralizing… and yet, they are often dismissed by institutions that only recognize overt violence.” Her warning reminds us that beneath every eruption of violence lies a deeper architecture of neglect and exclusion.
We must honor and remember Sarah and Yaron, as well as all the new victims of contemporary antisemitism, not only with tears, but with two sets of actions. We must do all we can to advocate for ourselves. If we do not, no one else will. Yet antisemitism, as the French philosopher Sartre noted, is not a Jewish problem, even though we are the ones left footing the bill. That means that we must become powerful voices who argue that real justice requires a deep structural rethinking of our institutions. Only by doing so will the world achieve a more durable justice. Only then will history’s coal mine canaries, the Jews, be able to breathe safely again.
Finally, we must never neglect spiritual resistance because we need to gird ourselves for a long period of instability. Building global institutions takes time; the reset they offer also takes time to disseminate. That means in the spiritual realm, we must do all we can to resist fear. Rabbi Jacob Pressman used to say, “Love your enemies; it drives them crazy.” More importantly, when we dedicate ourselves to nurturing the spiritual values of chen, v’chesed, v’rachamim—of grace, kindness, and compassion—we ensure that antisemitism remains a non-Jewish problem.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rav D
If you’d like to continue this discussion, follow this link to CNS’s Facebook page to share your own perspectives on the topics raised in this week’s Oasis Songs. Comments will be moderated as necessary.
