Hilchos Anti-Semitism
Now, included in that eternal principle of וימאן and לא ינוח שבט הרשע על גורל הצדיקים is the very misunderstood subject of anti-Semitism. It has to be explained and so we’ll start with an important observation that our Sages made: את הלכה עשו שונא יעקב - It’s a halachah that the gentile hates the Jews. Halachah? What does that mean? It means that it's one of the ways of Hashem in the world. Hashem made it that Eisav should hate Yaakov.
Don’t you see in the world that all the nations are hostile, are enemies of the Jews? Wherever we go, we have enemies. Not merely because of the Christians or Mohammedans; long before Christianity the Greeks were bitter enemies of the Jews. Josephus – he was before Christianity – wrote a book called Contra Apionem and he speaks about the hostility of the Greeks against us, the lies they invented against us. There hasn’t been a literature of hatred, of animosity, since the world began, as is the great literature of anti-Semitism. More has been said and written against the Jewish people than against any other people in the world.
What About Them?
Now why should that be? There was nobody else to hate in the ancient world? After all, there were actually wicked nations. There were Indians in India that used to have human sacrifices. In Central America also, human sacrifices. Recently, the Chinese used to kill girl babies down to 1910. All over the world there was wickedness going on and yet there was no other nation that suffered from such a huge torrent of vituperation; nowhere near the tremendous outpour of writing against the Am Yisroel, why?
And the answer is, it’s a kindliness. It's for our benefit. The primary purpose of anti-Semitism is to keep us separate from the goyim. When Hakadosh Baruch Hu sees that the Jewish people are in danger of being influenced by the gentiles, let's say because they are fraternizing too much with them, so He causes anti-Semitism to increase. After all we’re human beings and if we’ll marinate in an atmosphere of tolerance from the gentiles, who knows what might happen? And so Hakadosh Baruch Hu creates a wall of separation, a wall of refusal to mix with the Jewish nation. Throughout all of our history it’ll be that way – it won’t help what the ADL will do; there will always be an undercurrent of anti-Semitism.
The Secret of Strife
Now I learned this from a Gemara. The Gemara in Kiddushin (71b) says like this: אם ראית שתי משפחות בזו המתגרות זו – If you see two families that are always fighting with each other there’s a good reason for that. Sometimes you see such a thing. I was once in a small town in Lithuania and there was a family that was fighting for years and years against the rav. The great grandfathers were fighting and the grandfathers were fighting and the fathers too. I knew three generations that were fighting with the rav.
Why? What’s the reason for that? So the Gemara says there’s a secret reason, a reason min haShomayim: יש באחת מהם שמץ פסול – One of these two families is possul; they're mamzeirim or something else, and Hakadosh Baruch Hu is protecting the other family from intermarrying with them. He’s protecting the kosher ones. And how does he protect them? By making them fight. If they don’t get along they'll never marry.
You hear that chiddush? Hakadosh Baruch Hu sends a sinah not because of any other reason except to prevent contact and intermarriage between the two families because He doesn't want the righteous family of good lineage to defile its yichus by intermarrying with the bad family.
From this I learned that one of the reasons for anti-Semitism is כי לא ינוח שבט הרשע על גורל הצדיקים; so that the righteous and the wicked shouldn't mix. Hashem makes hostility to protect the kosher ones.
Dirty Jews Forever
That’s the story of our history. The nations will never love us because Hashem wants to keep us apart from them. And that’s why there’s so much anti-Semitism. It's a very big matanah.
And so, when you pass down the street and somebody says, “Dirty Jew,” you have to know it’s a chessed made to order for you. He doesn’t say, “Dirty black man,” or “Dirty Chinese,” or “Dirty Puerto Rican.” No. It’s always the ‘dirty Jews’ because it’s a halachah – it must be so. Just like you must keep Shabbos, and you must wash your hands before bread and you must fast on Yom Kippur; without that there’s no Jewish people. Without this halachah too, there can’t be a Jewish people.
Chessed in the Ghetto
And now we begin to realize, at least a little bit, what a great chessed Hakadosh Baruch Hu did for us in our history. The expulsions, and the hatred, the vitriol. The libels and accusations and all names we were called. The pogroms and the rocks thrown at our heads. The ghettos! Yes, the ghettos. How much of a kindness Hashem did for us by keeping us in the ghettos in Europe!
Everybody knows that for a very long time the Jews were allowed only in a certain part of the town, a small area set apart by a wall from the gentiles. וימאן – the gentiles refused to let us live anyplace else. We couldn't come in or out unless with permission. There were guards outside, gentile policemen, and every night they locked the gates like a prison. All over Europe; in Italy, in Germany, in Poland, everywhere.
Now everybody bemoans that period of our history. It was crowded in the ghetto and sometimes it was unsanitary too and so we pity our forefathers. “Ooh, what terrible times, the Middle Ages! How much we suffered from the ghetto.” There was no moving out of the ghetto to the suburbs. Even if you wanted to, the gentiles said ‘Nothing doing’. You couldn't move away to Long Island and live in a house on a nice street, with nice trees and nice grass and nice gentiles.
The Flatbush Ghetto
I was once talking to a woman who lives in the suburbs. She was telling me about some trouble she was having with her children and I said to her, “Why don't you move back to Flatbush?”
She said, “I should go back to the ghetto?!”
“Well”, I told her, “Hakadosh Baruch Hu made the ghetto on purpose.”
She didn’t understand that it was min haShomayim; people think that the goyim made the wall to keep the Jews penned in, locked up, but it’s not so. Hashem made that wall to keep the goyim out. That watchman there who didn't let the Jews out didn't let the goy in either. You hear that? He didn’t let the goy in! And because of that wall we flourished in the ghetto.
Inconvenient Truths
Now, I understand that you balk at such a statement but that’s because today you measure things only by convenience. And it’s true that it wasn’t convenient. No question; the ghetto had very narrow streets. There was no place to build; you couldn't build new homes. When they got married, they had a problem finding a dirah. It was inconvenient, no question about it.
But convenience, that’s not the true measure of life. We're in this world to become better, to become more and more perfect, and the more we are separated from the gentile world, the more we can succeed. And they succeeded very much in the ghetto. In the ghetto you did whatever you wanted. You were a frum Jew. You lived a Jewish life. You had no embarrassment from goyim. You had no connection.
Benefits of Isolation
Of course, you couldn't go out and make a good living. You couldn't have a farm. You couldn't do whatever you wanted. But still it was a brachah min haShomayim because they were blessed with the brachah of isolation. They lived their own lives. They had no contact with the goyim around them. There was no influence of the umos haolam in the streets.
What influence was there? Only the ruach haTorah. All you could see was frum Jews. All you could see was people doing the minhagei Yisroel, dressed like Jews. They were stewing in their own juice for hundreds of years and it helped them maintain the original spirit. The ghetto became a makom kadosh; the streets were actually holy streets.
In the holiness of the crowded and isolated ghetto, Jewish families stayed together. No child was lost from a Jewish family. The parents had all the sons and daughters, the grandsons and granddaughters, the great grandsons and granddaughters. All frum, all holy. All nachas!
A Ruined Nation
Today we left the ghetto; it’s a rachmanus. I met an old Orthodox Jew whom I had known sixty years ago, fifty five years ago. He told me with great glee, “You know, Rabbi Miller,” he said, “I have two grandchildren!” He’s my age! He was proud of his accomplishment. A simchah, a nachas; two grandchildren!
One is in Long Island. He’s not married yet. He’s forty years old. The girl, she has her own apartment in Manhattan. What does she do? He doesn’t want to talk about it. Ah yay yay. Isn’t that a ruined nation?
And where did we get that downfall, that catastrophe, that an old frum man has only two grandchildren, both unmarried? Because he was in America all these years and his wife acquired the American spirit – N.O.W. and spacing and other gentile ideals – and they were ruined.
Locked Up In Greatness
But in the olden days when Jews were locked up in ghettos, they increased and they multiplied. They didn’t have any gentile ideas. סביב לעמו 'ה – Hakadosh Baruch Hu was protecting them. We were excluded, closed off, from gentile society and it was a blessing.
And that’s the answer for all of the forms of anti-Semitism that we encounter in our history; it’s a fulfillment of the principle of וימאן. It’s other things too, absolutely; Hakadosh Baruch Hu has various intentions with His ways in the world but there’s no question that this is the primary function of anti- Semitism. הרשע על גורל הצדיקים כי לא ינוח שבט – So that the tribe of the wicked should not encamp near the lot of the righteous, למען לא ישלחו הצדיקים בעולתה ידיהם – in order that the righteous should not stretch out their hand to do wickedness.
