I’m beginning to worry. Maybe because I am writing this before Tisha B’Av. And even though it may be read Shabbos Nachamu, I am still in a golus mode.
After another set of antisemitic attacks in Queens and increased acts of blatant antisemitism in areas of New York City where Jews lived in relative peace and harmony, I worry. Those types of acts bring flashbacks to Germany and Europe in the years before the Holocaust.
But if that is not enough, there is more to worry about as well.
I have been thinking lately about the Jews who lived under the Czar in Russia during the years leading up to the revolutions that would eventually topple an empire and change the world. I wonder what went through the minds of ordinary Jewish peasants, not the talmidei chachomim living in the shtetlach, struggling under restrictions that told them where they could live, what opportunities were closed to them, and how little protection they could expect when the winds of a pogrom suddenly blew through town.
When they first began hearing about revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the Czar, did they recoil in fear, or was there perhaps a little ray of hope?
After all, life under the Czar was hardly a golden age for the Jews. There were pogroms, quotas, restrictions, poverty, and blatant discrimination. A Jewish father who watched his children struggle because of a system stacked against them might not have understood Marx or Lenin, and he certainly may not have envisioned a proletarian revolution, but when someone began speaking about equality, breaking down class barriers and creating a society in which the poor would no longer be trampled by the powerful, was he entirely horrified?
Or did part of him wonder whether perhaps something good might finally come out of all the upheaval? Of course, the gedolim were more than wary of the various new “isms” sweeping through Europe. They understood the danger of replacing the Ribbono Shel Olam and the Torah with a new belief system that promised salvation through nationalism, socialism, communism, or any other ideology created by man. But I wonder whether those focused upon the spiritual danger could have imagined the full economic and human tragedy of the evolution of the revolution.
Could a father have imagined that his son, perhaps a boy who had drifted away from Yiddishkeit and become enthralled with promises of equality and justice, might someday become part of the machinery used to close the very cheder in which he had learned? Could a mother lighting Shabbos candles have imagined that the young man who once stood beside his father in shul, but had become inspired by the dream of liberating the downtrodden, might one day grow up to become part of a government that would make the practice of Yiddishkeit nearly impossible?
Could parents who were shomer Shabbos and kashrus, even though they may not have been learned, have imagined their children shutting shuls, preventing milah and sending ehrliche Yidden, cousins and other relatives to the Gulag?
There were Jewish young men and women who became deeply involved in revolutionary movements, and I find myself wondering what exactly drew them there in the first place.
Surely some were angry. Some wanted power. Some had rejected everything their parents represented. But I have to believe that there were others who were moved by something much more innocent. They saw suffering. They saw the hatred of the church toward Yidden, and for some reason joined the antisemites in collectively absconding with spirituality and then punishing anyone who believed in G-d.
They saw peasants living in desperate poverty while aristocrats lived in luxury. They knew what it meant to be discriminated against by a government that treated Jews as an unwanted problem. They had seen families terrorized by pogroms and watched opportunities denied because of birth, religion, and class.
And when someone came along and said that the entire system was rotten and that a new society could be created in which everyone would be equal, perhaps they believed him. It was different than the thug who came to your door screaming that he hates Jews. Obviously, that did not require a great deal of philosophical analysis. Hitler never offered the Jews an attractive vision of their own future. His hatred was eventually unmistakable, even if too many people underestimated how far he would take it. The more complicated movements are the ones that arrive carrying compassion.
The other week, I was with a wise man, a dear friend of my shver zt”l, and I was discussing the wave of decent-minded, and I think good-intentioned, upper-middle-class college-educated youth who are latching on to Mamdani and the Social Democratic Movement as if it were a utopian vision for America. He explained it in three words: “Suicide by Empathy.”
They speak about fairness. They speak about people who cannot afford bread or rent. They speak about workers being exploited, minorities being oppressed, and wealth being concentrated in the hands of a privileged few. They identify real suffering, because there usually is real suffering, and they appeal to something decent inside the human being who is listening.
And somewhere along the way, almost imperceptibly, compassion becomes ideology.
The story of Shimon, or Semen Dimanstein, is almost too extraordinary to invent.
Dimanstein was born into a poor Litvish family. His father, Mordechai, was a tinsmith. From age 12, he studied at the yeshivos of Telz, Slobodka, and Lubavitch. According to my perusing, he received semicha from Rav Eliyohu Chaim Meisels of Lodz, Rav Shlomo Hakohen, and Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzenski of Vilna. He suffered from poverty and homelessness and soon abandoned his religious upbringing in favor of revolutionary activities.
He eventually became one of the leading figures in the Communist effort to reshape Jewish life under the new Soviet order.
Think about that for a moment. A young man who knew the inside of a yeshiva, who knew the language of the bais medrash and understood the world he was helping dismantle, became part of an ideology whose Jewish sections worked aggressively against traditional Jewish institutions.
I wonder what he thought he was doing when he began. I doubt that the first dream was to destroy a shul.
Perhaps it was to destroy oppression. But revolutions have a way of evolving.
First you identify suffering. Then you identify the system causing the suffering. Then you identify the people who benefit from that system. Eventually those people are no longer merely people with whom you disagree. They become the obstacle standing between humanity and justice.
Once that happens, empathy itself can become extraordinarily selective.
It is scary to see this happening in America, particularly among young, educated people who are increasingly attracted to movements that describe themselves openly as Democratic Socialists.
Chazal warn us that someone who becomes merciful toward the cruel will ultimately become cruel toward the merciful. It is a remarkable insight into the danger of misplaced rachmonus. The problem is certainly not rachmonus itself. Klal Yisroel is defined by rachmonus. The problem begins when compassion is separated from judgment, when someone else decides for them who deserves empathy and who has forfeited the right to receive it.
I am not yet equating the Democratic Socialists of America with the Bolsheviks, nor am I suggesting that a young volunteer canvassing for affordable housing is secretly planning the next gulag. But human nature does repeat itself, and sometimes the beginning of an ideological journey is worth examining before we know where the road ends.
What fascinates me is that much of the modern socialist movement is being energized by young people who are hardly the starving proletariat rising from the factories. Many are educated, white, college graduates who have grown up with opportunities that their great-grandparents could barely have imagined. Recent polling shows that younger, white and college-educated Democrats are among those most receptive to politicians who call themselves Democrat Socialists.
Perhaps that is not as strange as it sounds. Their grievance is often not about what happened to them personally. It is about what they have been taught to feel for someone else. Empathy. Falsely perceived and falsely placed.
They see a mother who cannot afford childcare, a family crushed by rent, a worker who cannot afford medical care, an immigrant afraid of deportation, or a Palestinian child suffering in Gaza, and something inside them responds. There is nothing wrong with that response. A person who can look at human suffering without feeling anything is much more frightening than a person whose heart aches for someone he has never met. The problem is, instead of helping, they point a finger and create a class of those responsible. The landlord. The billionaire. The corporation. The police. Capitalism. Colonialism, and of course the Jews and Israel.
Immediately an ideology has assigned the roles of oppressed and oppressor, it becomes increasingly difficult to retain empathy for anyone who has been placed on the wrong side of the ledger.
And once again, the strange phenomenon that happened back in Russia is happening in America. Young Jews who entered movements because they cared passionately about minorities, discrimination, and human rights suddenly find themselves surrounded by people chanting slogans against Israel, and find themselves as targets by those demanding that Jews prove their moral legitimacy by repudiating other Jews.
Maybe it’s not a Shabbos Nachamu essay, but in a way it is. Because the greatest nechomah for a nation that has been suffering assimilation and apathy in a Golden medinah is that the Ribbono Shel Olam wakes us up and reminds us that we are Yidden. And that comes with the golus package. Confusion, disclarity and hate. But we know the solution. And that helps us turn on the jet burners of tefillah and yearning. Maybe the misguided youngsters out there who are being targeted will wake up because of the madness, and come back to their roots. We will be waiting for them with open arms. And so will Moshiach.
Just saying.