“Five hungry people who have not eaten for a month are at your door, begging for food. They are a Jew, an Indian Muslim, a Rohingya, a Chinese (Buddhist), a black African Christian, and a white-skinned Harvard-educated atheist. You have a simple vegetarian meal, but barely enough for one person. Which one would you feed?”
So why are Jews hated so much?
I would rather split my one plate of food amongst all of us, instead of living with the pain of choosing one person over the next based on their ethnicity. To me it doesn’t make sense to determine whose book is the greatest, whose channel to god holds the highest power. There is no such thing in my heart, so how have the rest of us become so? Where did I learn my value systems that seem to greatly differ from my neighbors? Perhaps it came from my papa, who was a Brahmin in Trinidad & Tobago from Kashmir India. He held ceremonies for every religion in our village; for the Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and Indians who were each celebrated in our small community in the Caribbean. At a very young age, I was exposed to a culture that embraced each other’s differences. How could one possibly believe there is a stronger race of humans amongst the human race? If you really think about this statement alone, there is no sense in it.
Although I am not Jewish, my stepfather is half-Jewish. One never would have known with his strong English accent and British last name. I did not discover he was half-Jewish until recently, close to 21 years into his and my mothers’ marriage. He was a member of the Royal Air Force, spending more than 30 years of his life in service. In this environment, he was so brutally attacked for being Jewish, it became his culture to not mention it.
But he is Jewish.
He never spoke about it.
He never shared his culture with us growing up.
We never once shared a Jewish meal together.
I never had the opportunity to learn how to prepare a traditional Jewish dinner with him.
This saddened me deeply.
I could have grown up learning the beautiful traditions of Judaism including the incredible unique meals in this stunning culture. He was a pilot for the Royal Family in England for some time, I believe this is where the majority of his trauma came from. He wasn’t allowed to sit at the same table as the non-Jewish staff and was constantly attacked for having Jewish roots, forcing this new culture of hiding this part of him from even his family in Canada. Despite his grandfather’s accomplishments of being a musician in the Philharmonic Orchestra, his above-average intellect with his photographic memory and his ability to humbly know how to troubleshoot anything from a motor vehicle to a helicopter engine with such a vast collection of knowledge of the ancients and religious teachings, how could anyone possibly view this great man as anything other than who he was. How could he not see what all of us saw in him?
After countless years of hearing you aren’t good enough, I think it begins to become you. But we must change this, not only for those experiencing rampant hate on a daily basis, we need to come together and understand this divide-and-conquer mentality that was brought about by those in power as a means to ensure we do not unite. This way of thinking and behaving needs to end. We must make a choice to get off the fence, to not just drop antisemitism but also any form of racial segregation in order for us to be successful in this fight against the oppression of all of us outside of the 1%.
All of us are tired of the hate, not just antisemitism, but hatred against every culture including every other living being.
I have seen those with generational wealth cower in front of those who are considered “lower class whites” because of their Indian heritage, despite them being born into enough wealth to take out entire industries. I have listened to professors in my Traditional Chinese Medicine Doctorate program speak of hidden valley, the part of our brain that allegedly feels good after hurting someone who is “not like them”, having claimed to understand why Nazis did what they did because “we have the mechanics in our brain for it”. I fought him fervently on this topic, resulting in our three-hour lecture being cut short, him hanging up our Zoom lesson cursing and me deciding the following week there was no way I was paying this kind of tuition to be “taught” by a clearly racist individual who not only supports this way of thinking but is teaching it in a school of Traditional Chinese medicine. All of us are tired of the hate, not just antisemitism, but hatred against every culture including every other living being.
Even I am guilty of buying a can of RAID to kill a pesky mosquito in my room that can’t seem to get enough of my blood, but then seeing an innocent moth fly out of my closet trying to escape as I foolishly spray poison into the air. What a hypocrite I too have been at times.
What if we each trained ourselves to think with our hearts before reacting to our environment?
What if the time has come to unite with every one of gods creatures and choose to see the beauty in each of our teachings and cultures around the globe, if anything to just live a more peaceful existence and overall have a more positive experience every single day?
To those who are on the fence about this, please choose love instead of hate before this fence burns to the ground with you on it. We must start treating every living being as though they are god in hiding, this must become our new global policy. This must become our new norm.
“Certainly! What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary” (Talmud Shabbat 31a).
