The Yellow Hat

These days, with good reason, much has been made about antisemitism, the perennial hatred of Jews. Twenty years ago, I could never have anticipated that Jews and synagogues in America would be attacked and that Israel, the Jewish state would be so demonized. These are perilous times for Jews, and by extension, as history teaches, these will be perilous times for Western Civilization.

Smarter people than I have examined the hatred of Jews from an historical, social and political perspective. I am not going to analyze this startling rise in antisemitism, its root causes and its poisonous flowering in 2023. Instead I will share with you a message I delivered almost twenty years ago about the spiritually destructive nature of this virulent hatred.

In 2004, I was honored to be the featured speaker at the Birmingham Cathedral of the Advent. The sanctuary was packed as Christians celebrated Holy Week, their prelude to Easter. The day that I spoke was also during the Jewish festival of Passover. I delivered this message (abridged below) and received a resounding affirmation. This read is a little long, but it will be worth your while. Promise.

My message from 2004:

I began by saying to you that I am honored to be here, and I am grateful to Dean Zahl and the Church of the Advent for this invitation. But I misspoke. I am not honored. I am astounded. There is no other way to put it. Were I to tell my father of blessed memory, who was himself, a rabbi, that his son is preaching on Holy Week to Christians in Birmingham, he would be surprised. Were I to tell my grandparents or their grandparents or their grandparents that someday in their not-too-distant future, they would produce a man who would live in a time when Christians would come to hear a spiritual message at their holiest time of the year, on the pulpit of the Cathedral from a rabbi, they would be shocked. This would have been inconceivable to them, as real a possibility as a winged horse.

I am very sensitive to the fact of Jewish suffering. But, my dear friends, I do not want to be your victim. I tell my congregation that today in Birmingham, we are nobody’s victims. I don’t relish the pain or suffering of victimhood. I don’t believe that pain or suffering is redemptive. I do believe that pain and suffering hurt, and that is probably about the end of it. I hope that we will never again be history’s victims. I hope and pray that history will never again need to assign victimhood to people who suffer. And neither do I grant the foolish assumption that victimhood grants one a moral pass. We are each responsible for our actions. As a Jew, I refuse to be your victim, and by my presence here today, you refuse to be my tormenter. Maybe God is on His way.

I took some of my sabbatical this summer in Europe with my family. I want to share with you the most haunting thing that I saw in Europe. It wasn’t the dungeons and torture chambers. It wasn’t the memorials to the battles and the victims. It wasn’t the bombed out deserted villages of the ethnically cleansed in the Balkans. It wasn’t even our visit to Auschwitz. These were all horrible, indeed. But the most horrible thing that I saw was behind a showcase in the Jewish museum in Prague.

It was a yellow hat.

Jews in Prague were forced to live behind ghettoed walls. And whenever they went out of the ghetto to do business, to shop, to travel, to take a stroll by the river, whenever they went out, the Jewish men were forced to wear this goofy yellow hat. This hat looked like a jester’s hat and a dunce cap all rolled up into one. It had bells on the sides and stuck up into the air. And Jewish men were forced to wear this yellow hat to shame them. Maybe it was amusing to their tormentors. Maybe it was a symbol of their power against us, the powerless. And Jewish women when they turned twelve years old were forced to shave their heads. But they were mandated to keep two long strands of hair on the front corners above their forehead to emulate their reputed horns.

My friends, I cannot imagine the shame a father must have felt when he had to give his son the yellow hat. I cannot imagine the shame a mother must have felt when she had to shear her daughter’s hair. Unfortunately, this cruelty and shame were not unique to this place and time period, and I could regale you with instances of cruelty throughout the ages. I did not come here to speak about them back then. Instead, I came here to speak about us today. And in some real way, the portrait of yellow hat wearing men and bald headed young women is the starkest picture of what I could paint of the dark side of people.

There is a gratuitous nature to this hatred and shame. Whenever people shame others and hate them without cause, it is gratuitous. Certainly, this yellow hat offered the Bohemians and Moravians no security or financial reward. Neither was it some religious mandate. Nowhere does it say anywhere in Scripture that people should be ridiculed. There is something horrible within us that causes us to separate from others, to demean others, to ridicule others. I am not sure what all that is, but I want to explore this ugly phenomenon with you.

We live with tremendous fears. We are frightened that we will suffer, or that we will die, or that somebody stronger than us will come along and take away our possessions or our freedom. Life is tenuous, even when everything is in its place. So we band together tight into little groups. We crave security. And in our own minds we become most secure when we can define the world around us. We define those people who make us feel safe, and distinguish them from those people who make us feel insecure.

That is why we make distinctions among people, all of whom are God’s creatures. That is why we distinguish between those who are Jews and those who are gentiles, between those who are Moslems and those who are infidels, between those who are saved and those who hell bound, between those who are white and those who are black, between those who are Yankees and those who are southerners, between those who are from the city and those who are from Over-the-Mountain, between those who are straight and those who are gay, between those who are Hutus and those who are Tutsis, between those who are true believers and those who are renegades, between those who are Alabama and those who are Auburn. We make distinctions among people. As long as we are human, we will forever make distinctions among people. We have a need to create a comfort zone. The world is just too big and too scary for it to all be a zone for our comfort. So we make it smaller and smaller by excluding and excluding, and the humanness that God created in every person soon disappears from sight. And once that is gone, we can do horrible things to people. Once that humanness is gone, we can make people wear goofy hats, sit in the back of the bus, degrade them with jokes or jeers, deprive them of the rights we enjoy, or paint them as the devil. Then their humanness disappears. But in so doing, so too does ours.

Let me leave you with a redemptive note, upon which I began my sermon. It is my understanding that Christians believe that Jesus came to the world and taught and suffered and died and was resurrected for every person. I cannot imagine Jesus teaching that we should be creating boundaries between people, and then demean those on the other side of our comfort zone, belittle them and make them suffer. That was never the teaching of Jesus, and that should never be the teaching of Christian faith. Didn’t he teach that we are all Samaritans?  That all people are our brothers and sisters?

In our redemption from Egypt, which Jews celebrate today, the Torah tells us that only those who anticipated their redemption, only those who put the blood of the lamb on their doorposts were saved. I will guarantee you that not every Israelite left Egypt. I will guarantee you that not every Israelite crossed the sea of reeds. Some stayed back and lived with darkness and death. I am sure that there were some who would not cross that sea. And the Torah tells us something else profound, that a mixed multitude escaped with those children of Israel. There were the other slaves and the disenfranchised and the belittled and the set apart. The least of Egypt fled with Israel. It was the people who were once forced to the back of the bus, who were denied their civil rights, who were set apart because they were different, who were isolated and segregated and belittled, who lived in the Egypt of the small minded and the cruel. These were the people who were saved. These were the people who left Egypt and heard God speak at Sinai. After all, everyone else was so filled with themselves, that God would speak, but they could not listen. These were the people led through the desert and who arrived in the Promised Land. God loves these people. They are all our brothers and sisters.

At this time of Easter and Pesach, God beckons us to learn to love them, to see His image within them, beyond our boundaries and our comfort zones. God knows how easy it is to love our neighbor. But the real challenge for us is to love the strangers. God commands us only once to love our neighbor. But the stranger! - God tells us over and over and over again to love and protect and advocate for the stranger. Golly, ain’t it the truth. The stranger to us is so unlovable because he and she are so, well strange to us. But to God, the stranger needs some special attention, some extra caring, and that is why our Bible reminds us time and time again, that we are measured by how we treat the strangers within our midst. As a Jew in the Cathedral on Holy Week, I have been made to feel at home. Maybe I am the first rabbi to have felt such a welcome. Maybe this is part of God’s plan. Maybe, if we can build on this energy and extend God’s love to neighbor and stranger alike; if we can do this, this might well be the last Easter and the last Passover that the world will ever need. Maybe, if we can love and respect the strangers in our midst, then we might yet see, this year, the coming of the Lord.

Let’s wait impatiently and let’s work together.

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 Back to Brookhill, Mississippi, my fictional town where crazy looms large. When it comes to the chapters on my beloved small town, I have included this refrain:

Every town hides its secrets. Every secret has its cost. Every debt is eventually paid. That is how the world works.

Friends, one of the things I realized living in the south is that every town has secrets. While many southerners glorify the past—southerners are big on tradition, bless their hearts—hospitable and gracious and ugly and violent. Not always, of course, but often enough that southerners keep their secrets. Nobody talks about the ugly times, and those who do? Well, they shouldn’t. Secrets are part of the fabric of southern culture. This makes the South so inscrutably delicious.

Please enjoy and stay tuned. Backwards and Forwards will appear, again, magically in your inbox in a few weeks. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note at backwardsforwards.newsletter@gmail.com.

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Whether we are going backwards or forwards, none of us is standing still. And successful people can move both forwards and backwards at the same time. 

Until next time, shalom,

Jonathan