"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
