This week’s zoom call will be at A SPECIAL TIME: THURSDAY AT 2 PM Eastern. In light of the Chanukah massacre in Sydney, we’ll talk to Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, and is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice. We’ll talk about the unique history of the Jewish community in Australia, about the rise of antisemitism there and about how to combat it while also opposing bigotry against all people.

Cited in Today’s Video

The Babylonian Talmud’s discussion of the dangers of lighting a Chanukiah in public.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Anne Irfan shows how the Trump plan for Gaza is crowding Palestinians there into even less land.

Dana El Kurd talks to Matan Kaminer and Ben Schuman-Stoler about Gaza and the Abraham Accords.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

See you on Thursday at 2,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

When I woke up on Sunday morning and read the news of this terrible massacre on the first night of Chanukah in Sydney, Australia, a couple of things went through my mind.

The first is about the nature of Jews in Australia, and the second is about the nature of Chanukah. I’ve had the good fortune of spending a fair amount of time in the Jewish community in Sydney and Melbourne, and the Australian Jewish community is one of the most extraordinary that I have ever seen anywhere in the world. It’s a very, very cohesive Jewish community; very, very vibrant; very strong dedication to Jewish education. And it’s different than the American Jewish community in that it is closer to the European experience.

Most American Jews came to the U.S. in the late 19th or early 20th century. Many Australian Jews came later, before or after the Holocaust. And so, you have a much larger percentage of families in Australia that are the direct descendants of people who survived the Holocaust, with many, many families being touched very, very deeply by that experience. It is really a community that is more, I think, affected, more closer to, more traumatized by the experience of the Holocaust than almost any other Jewish community on Earth. And so, for a community that has that deep trauma in so many Australian Jewish families, to now have this new trauma, this terrible, terrible massacre that killed—we now know—15 people on the first night of Chanukah is just horrifying beyond words.

The second thing is about the fact that it happened on Chanukah. When I read the news, I was reminded that there’s not a lot of discussion about Chanukah in the Talmud, but in the relatively brief discussion there is, there’s a discussion in Tractate Shabbat about the nature, about the mitzvah to put the Chanukiah—the Chanukah lamp—in the entrance to one’s house.

And the rabbis say that the mitzvah, the obligation, is to put the Chanukiah, the lamp, in the window, so it is visible to the public. But then, they say that the sages say that in a time of danger, in a time of religious persecution, when Jews are not allowed to perform the mitzvah of lighting the Chanukah lamp, it is permitted to place the Chanukiah on the table instead, so it can’t be seen from outside.

And so, it was very, very poignant to think about this discussion in the Babylonian Talmud against the backdrop of this experience in Sydney, Australia, which did turn out to be extremely dangerous—deadly, actually—to perform the mitzvah of publicizing the miracle of Chanukah, and that the rabbis, you know, the rabbis close to 2,000 years ago, were worried about this very issue. Could Jews safely celebrate Chanukah, publicize the mitzvah of Chanukah, or did we need a special dispensation to say that in times of grave danger, that Jews can perform the Chanukah ritual, the celebration, in private?

And so, to me, that seems to me, in some ways, kind of one way of thinking about what is at stake today, in a world of rising antisemitism. Do we live in a world in which it is safe for Jews to light Chanukiahs in public, as the rabbis prefer to publicize the miracle that happened, that we celebrate on Chanukah, or do we live in a time of such great danger that Jews should have to do so in private because the risk of doing what those Australian Jews did on the first night on Bondi Beach in Sydney is actually too dangerous?

I am sure, I am sure, that the response by Jewish communities around the world will be to double down on the obligation to publicize the miracle, perform the celebration of Chanukah in public, to not be daunted, to not be scared by this. But it is terrible. It is terrible to imagine that there might be some who actually now need to go back to the Talmudic discussion, about whether it’s safe, in fact, to light a Chanukiah, given now that we’ve seen this terrible, terrible massacre in Sydney. It just shows that we still live in a world that is dangerous for Jews, and that some of the ancient, ancient discussions about how to keep Jews safe are still relevant today, and that some of the terrible, terrible horrors that many Australian Jews faced, the antisemitism in their families in Europe, that in a different way, that antisemitism has returned in Australia, and on Chanukah of all holidays.

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