"But despite all this, while they will be in the land of their enemies, I will not be revolted by them nor will I reject them to obliterate them, to annul My covenant with them -- for I am Hashem, their G-d." (26:44)
"If I were a Jew, the question that would interest me is not who pulled the trigger but why does it keep on happening again and again, and why does nobody investigate this phenomenon of where does anti-Semitism come from." (David Irving during the trial at which he was convicted of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism)
It seems almost incredible that the mass murder of millions of our people could be called into doubt and that the full might of the English judicial process be needed to substantiate those horrible truths.
But for all of the ignominy of his defeat, how many of us can answer Irving's taunt totally comfortably? Why have the Jewish People been disliked and despised throughout history?
The hatred of Jews shows no historical consistency. The Jews have been vilified as both rootless cosmopolitans and merciless captains of capitalism. They are both filthy rich and filthy poor. They are communists and capitalists. They are both dangerous idealists and cynical opportunists. They are both stuck in the rigidity of an all encompassing legalistic way of life, and queue-jumping corner-cutters.
In fact, the only thing that unites all these prejudices is their total disparity. There is no common recognizable claim against the Jewish People. What emerges from this is that Jew-hatred is not because of a reason. Jew-hatred seeks reasons to make its irrationality seem reasonable.
In this week's Torah portion, we read the tochacha. The tochacha is a chilling description of what will happen to the Jewish People if they forget that they are chosen by G-d to be the nation that testifies to His Existence.
A hundred years ago, there was a great rabbi named Rabbi Meir Simcha, the Ohr Somayach, who lived in Dvinsk, Latvia. With chilling foresight, almost an echo of prophecy, he wrote the following words in his commentary on the Torah in the early years of the century:
"He who thinks that Berlin is Jerusalem...there will come a thunderous and violent wind that will uproot him from his source."
When Rabbi Meir Simcha wrote these words, nobody had even heard the name Hitler.
Rabbi Meir Simcha was writing to a world of German Jews who believed themselves more German than the Germans. They avowed that Berlin was their Jerusalem. They "observed" the "Sabbath" on Sunday to the accompaniment of organ music. They disavowed any connection to the Land of Israel. They disliked being called Jews, preferring to be known as "Germans of the Mosaic persuasion." How ironic that, of all places, it should be Germany who turned around and reminded these "Germans of the Mosaic persuasion" that they were indeed Jews, and they would massacre them in their millions because of it.
But was it really ironic?
From the moment that G-d made an irreversible covenant with Abraham that his seed would be G-d's chosen people, the survival of the Jewish People becomes a natural imperative written into the physics and chemistry of the universe, no less than the rising of the sun or the flowing and ebbing of the tides.
The Jews have to be. All other nations rise and fall and vanish. But from the moment that G-d made Israel the instruments of His Will, their existence is as immutable as His existence.
So why should anti-Semitism exist?
Anti-Semitism is placed into the world solely to prevent the Jewish People from disappearing into the melting pot amongst the nations and "annulling" G-d's irreversible covenant with Abraham. Assimilation is like a nuclear chain reaction. When a certain critical mass is reached, then the atom bomb of anti-Semitism explodes.
In Hebrew, the word kadosh, which means "holy" also means separated. Holiness can only exist when it is separated from that which is not holy. If everything is holy, nothing is holy. When the Jewish People forget that their purpose is to be a holy nation, separated from the other nations, then the non-Jewish world turns around and reminds us of our purpose.