In 1478, the rulers of Spain sought to consolidate their power and establish a society free of undesirable elements. Under the flag of the Catholic Church, the Spanish kingdom sought out “heretics,” principally Jews, as well as Muslims and Protestants. They used inquisitors who questioned people’s beliefs, giving them a choice of converting to Catholicism, expulsion or death. Over 200,000 Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, tens of thousands were killed and thousands more converted from Judaism. Portugal followed a similar course in 1497, and both countries enforced the Inquisition in their colonies in the Americas well into the 19th century.

Universities are using a similar tactic against Jewish Zionists today in the Campus Inquisition.

Jews are being singled out by student groups and governments to understand their positions about Israel. At McGill University in Canada, people called for a Jewish student to resign if she traveled to Israel. A Jewish student applying to a Student Council Judicial Board at UCLA was rejected after being asked “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community, how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?” The Jewish student government president at USC was harassed with a campaign to “impeach [my] Zionist a**” after people found out she was a Zionist. San Francisco State excluded the Jewish group Hillel from a school information fair.

These same schools do not ask Chinese students if they support the Chinese persecution of Uyghurs. They do not ask Iranian students if they support hanging gays. They do not ask Saudi students if they support killing minors or bombing Yemenis. They don’t even think of asking Turkish students how they feel about Turkey jailing journalists, nor do they demand that Sudanese students be expelled from groups if they don’t condemn female genital mutilation prevalent in Sudan.

But they pursue Israel, the most liberal country in the entire Middle East and North Africa region.

Campus groups only demand that Jewish students state their position about Israel, not the tens of thousands of non-Jewish Zionist students. It is blatant anti-Semitism in targeting only Jews and only the Jewish State for inquiry.

The university system has adopted an outrageous false narrative as a tenet of the new woke religion, that Israel engages in “apartheid, genocide and war crimes” (City University of New York) in promoting “white supremacy Jewry” (University of Illinois-Urbana) based on colonialism, stating “Israel in its inception is not a Jewish idea but a European one” (University of Wisconsin). This extremist progressive-socialist-BlackLivesMatter-Muslim cancel Jewish culture on campus has inverted the Jewish victims of white supremacy, to be the evil architects of racism in a re-launch of the debunked “Zionism is racism” campaign of the 1970’s. They are demanding that Jews be purged from their safe havens on campuses and in their homeland in the Middle East.

In the Campus Inquisition, heresy is defined as believing Jews are a people, indigenous to the land of Israel, who have a natural right to live free of persecution, with self-determination in their homeland. The new inquisitors demand that Jews either denounce such belief and become “good Jews” like those in the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace, or be banned from society.

Approximately 550 years after the Catholic church ethnically cleansed the Jewish community from the Iberian Peninsula, universities are unleashing a new Inquisition to root out Jewish Zionists. And just like the anti-Semitic tormentors of yesteryear, today’s inquisitors wrap themselves in the shroud of a perceived higher calling, ridding society of the small and most persecuted ancient people.

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As Passover, Easter and Ramadan all fell at the same time this year, the religious tensions and harmony in Israel came into sharper focus.

Muslims have a history of keeping sites it considers holy intact, even if holy – let alone holier – to non-Islamic faiths. In contrast, they have shown complete disregard for non-Islamic sites that are sacred and important to other faiths.

On April 10, 2022, Palestinian Arabs vandalized the Tomb of Joseph, one of the principle ancestors of the Jews. They smashed the Jewish tomb and set fires to a few rooms in what Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said was a “frenzy of destruction” as Palestinian rioters “simply vandalised a holy place for us, the Jews.”

Meanwhile, Palestinian leadership from Fatah and Hamas were claiming that Jews were invading the Jewish Temple Mount (which they refer to as the Al Aqsa Compound) which they view as sacred. Arabs attacked Jews walking to the site, stoned Israeli buses bringing Jews to the Old City of Jerusalem, and hurled stones at Israeli worshippers at the western retaining wall of the Mount.

But the Islamists kept the site intact as they considered the site sacred.

The government of Israel had given religious control of the Jewish Temple Mount to the Jordanian Waqf after it reunited Jerusalem in 1967. The Waqf has banned Jewish prayer at Judaism’s holiest site, it blatant disregard of Jews’ basic human rights.

But the Islamists kept the site intact as they considered the site sacred.

In Hebron, Muslims appropriated the Cave of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs which houses six of the seven forebears of the Jewish people. Muslims call the site the “Ibrahami Mosque,” as they venerate Abraham as the father of Ishmael, the forefather of Arabs. When Muslims controlled the site, they banned Jews from entering the building or even climbing above the seventh step to Judaism’s second holiest site. Israel took control of the site in 1967 after Jordan attacked Israel, and has since divided the holy site into times and sections for both Islamic and Jewish prayer, to the chagrin of Arabs.

But at least the Islamists kept the site intact while they controlled it, as they considered the site sacred.

Jewish history and sacred sites in their holy land has often been destroyed if the location held no religious value to the non-Jews. Last year, the Palestinian Authority demolished part of Joshua’s alter on Mount Ebal in Area B under Palestinian Authority control. On the Jewish Temple Mount, the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement conducted illegal renovations and disposed of over 9,000 tons of dirt mixed with invaluable archaeological artifacts which the Temple Mount Sifting Project has been painstakingly sorting even though the objects are no longer in situ.

The Kotel may only be in existence today because Islamists considered it the “al-Buraq Wall.”

The Jewish State has done its utmost to respect the history and sanctity of Jewish and non-Jewish locations throughout the holy land. However, Islamists destroyed and vandalized sites significant to other faiths that they do not value, while seeking exclusive control and rights of the religious sites that they appropriated from Jews.

The Islamist scars in the holy land have left Jewish sites destroyed where viewed as un-Islamic, or appropriated within their Islamic religion, and banned for Jewish prayer.

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History, Unmoored and Tethered

A young Abraham Lincoln wrote his first significant speech in January 1838, which has been called the Lyceum Address. In it, he bemoaned the mayhem that had taken over American society and offered thoughts on how it came to be that people had turned on each other in lynching mobs. The words ring out as true today:

“the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.“

When Lincoln penned his speech, he considered the fact that the generation of the American Revolutionary War was dying out. Those patriots which had fought against the British to obtain the nation’s freedom had almost disappeared. That multi-year war touched every family with dead or injured fathers, sons and brothers, with each carrying their scars into that present moment. But as “the silent artillery of time” was cutting down the survivors, and whittling the “forest of mighty oaks” of history, people lost their connection to that particular shared past. The new generation took the blessings of freedom lightly and asserted the desires of self over the shared responsibilities and common wounds of collective society. Passions born of a common history had served the nation well but those days have come to an end. “Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy.”

A breakdown of societal order and bond between people ensued, leading to chaos.

Lincoln’s approach to the dire situation of the infighting between Americans was to abandon passion for “Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason…. and a reverence for the constitution and laws.” Without the immediate link to the past, society’s passions would run wild, and therefore required an adherence to laws under which everyone was bound to maintain the peace.

Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik admired the Lyceum Address but believed Lincoln reached the wrong conclusion. While abiding by laws is indeed required for social order, the historic connection to the past should never be abandoned, and passion, well-placed, is an important human trait and good. 

The Passover Haggadah highlights the Jewish approach to maintaining the connection to the past, recognizing the birth of a nation finding freedom, and fostering a people’s passion into the future.

The Bible instructs Jews repeatedly to “tell their children and grandchildren” (Exodus 10:2, 12:26; 13:8; 13:14; Deuteronomy 11:19; Joshua 4:6; Joel 1:3) about the night of freedom, when God took the Children of Israel out of bondage on a path to the land of their inheritance. 

Lord Jonathan Sachs expanded on this biblical directive and how it manifests itself in the Haggadah used at the Passover seder, that the method of recounting that story does not use the Bible as its immediate source sheet. Instead, the Haggadah is a text assembled over centuries, and includes “Hillel in the days of the Second Temple, the second-century sages at their seder in Benei Brak, the teachings of the Amora’im of the third and later centuries, poems by Yannai and Kalir from the post-Talmudic period, an addition from Ashkenaz provoked by the terrible sufferings of the First Crusade, and children’s songs from medieval Germany. Every word we say has a history.” Each generation reflected on the  Passover story, giving a link through time to that midnight of disembarkation 3,300 years ago.

Time has muted the voices of a hundred generations past, but today we can imagine ourselves walking the desert sands while simultaneously instilling in our children that WE are critical links in and to that common history.

Laws of The Freedom Fighters

The story of the American Revolution is not the same as the Passover story. America’s story was forged with the vision and blood of American patriots who broke with the British monarchy to establish a democracy with new laws for its citizens to both protect it from the new government and establish a system to maintain a civil society. In contrast, on Passover, it was God who saved the Jews from the hands of the Egyptians and gave them new laws to live by.

Rabbi Shmuel Greenberg notes that the matzoh that we eat on Passover is the bread of slaves. Eating it together with bitter herbs is a reminder of being slaves to Egyptians, while eating it with the pascal lamb reminds us that the new lord is a benevolent one, the God who took people out of bondage and gave them commandments to live by. 

A Modern Breakdown In Common History and Law

As in the days of Lincoln, we are living in a society that feels broken, with mobs angrily fighting each other, mass shootings, and people with whom we disagree run out of careers and society. Swaths of the country do not trust the government or the media, so bind themselves into small fiefdoms. Perhaps it is from years suffering from the human losses from COVID, the emotional tolls of lockdowns, and the evaporation of savings as inflation robs people of security. 

But it may also be from the loss (abandonment?) of our common history. The ‘1619 Project’ and ‘Critical Race Theory’ advance a proposition that while “all men are created equal”, they do not share a common history. America was birthed with Black slavery with Africans dragged to the new world in chains. The makeup of society today includes immigrants and their descendants from around the world, not just the descendants from Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

To account for these facts, pubic school boards have started to require new curricula to teach about various ethnicities and countries around the world. Tragically, in some cases, the remarkable birth of America is being watered down, eliminated and/or vilified as poison at inception, a product of a racist White patriarchy advancing imperialism and capitalism. Not only do some schools advance that narrative of history, but argue that those systems continue to exist today and require new laws of “restorative justice” for certain groups. Not only does this approach break with celebrating a common past, but it argues we must have different laws for different groups today, including a seizure and redistribution of wealth from old White European colonizers to newer, darker colonizers.

The efforts deliberately pit members of society against each other.

America and Judaism on History and Law

To Lincoln nearly 200 years ago, the loss of the connection and appreciation of the nation’s founding may have been the beginning of the end. Unmoored from a common past, he believed society became vulnerable as a collection of competing strangers living in close proximity. His belief that history was a story of discrete generations left nothing but law to bind a nation.

The Passover Haggadah takes a different approach. History is taught as a continuous chain that must be strengthened at least once a year. The anchor of nationhood is the birth of freedom, and the seder is for remembering that fateful night AND how our parents, grandparents and ancestors also recounted that momentous day, and how that freedom came together with common laws.

Freedom, law and history are both tools and criteria to connect society in peace and harmony. The Passover Haggadah is such touchstone that encapsulates each of these principles separately and collectively, as millions of people sit at tables – apart but together – around the world.

Hopefully it will bring all of us a renewed sense of brotherhood and peace.

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