69-Year Old Warning

While living through the horrors of the Holocaust, Rabbi Issachar Shlomo Teichtal warned us of a possible future one.
 
Rabbi Issachar Shlomo Teichtal was the saintly rav of Pishtian, Czechoslovakia who frequented the courts of the greatest chassidic masters of the early 20^th century. He was also the head of the city’s beit din (rabbinical court), a prominent rosh yeshiva and brilliant author of numerous halachic works. Having twice escaped capture by the Nazis, he and his family fled to Hungary in 1943.
 
It was in Budapest, while in hiding, where Rabbi Teichtal completed Eim HaBanim Semeichah, his book that passionately, urgently tries to awaken his fellow Jews to an unpopular truth: all our toil in foreign soil is in vain and only in Eretz Yisrael do we have a home and a future.
 
In Eim HaBanim Semeichah, Rabbi Teichtal laments that we lost “hundreds and thousands” of years in exile, investing all our “silver and gold” to expand exile-lands with the intention of dwelling there forever. And he observes, first hand, just how these countries expressed their gratitude to us: “they beat us with cruelty and without mercy; they banished us, they robbed us of our money and possessions; they forced us to leave naked and destitute; and they caused us to die unnatural deaths.”
 
And he warns all this would likely to happen again in just a few decades if we continue to put our faith in the lands of exile.
 
It is now a few decades from when he wrote this in 1943. Nearly seven to be exact. And antisemitism is well on the rise in “the lands of exile.”
 
Just take a small glimpse of what’s occurring throughout the world over the past several weeks (2012). Jewish graves in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, and New Zealand were desecrated. A kosher restaurant was firebombed in Montreal and a Jewish center was bombed in Sweden. In Australia, the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement posted ‘We Must Exterminate the Jews’ on their rally Facebook page. Greece’s Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, which is now in Parliament, is enjoying an even greater surge in popularity. Violent anti-Semitic attacks in France have skyrocketed. And in England, a math professor declared “it’s no longer tenable to be a Jew” in British academics.
 
Then there’s the United States where the majority of diaspora Jews live. According to a recent Anti-Defamation League poll, 15 percent of Americans are “unquestionably anti-Semitic” (those who actually admit it). Digging deeper into demographics, the poll also showed that 42 percent of foreign-born Hispanics are antisemitic, while 29 percent of African-Americans expressed “strongly antisemitic views”.

The headlines, though, tell a more dramatic story. Just a small sample of recent headlines from Israel National News illustrates the rising antisemitism in the United States:

• • Huge Swastikas Burned into Grass of California Golf Course
  • ‘A Dead Jew’ Replaces ‘A Good Jew’ in Twitter Hate Surge
  • New York City Sued Over Circumcision Laws
  • Full-Page Ad in NYT Warns of New Antisemitic Blood Libels
  • In Crown Heights: ‘World Better Off If All Jews Were Lampshades’
  • Swastikas Found Spray-Painted on Florida Middle School
  • Antisemitism at Northeastern University
  • Swastikas Found Painted on Two Bangor Synagogues

 
We’re now seeing a level of antisemitism we haven’t seen since before World War Two. Meaning: we’ve seen this movie before.
 
And though we have no idea how it will end this time, we know how it ended for Jewish communities throughout our current 2,000 year exile – the terror, the pogroms, the exiles and worse. Jews throughout the centuries painfully discovered they had no future in their host countries. So what makes us think we’re immune to Jewish history and we have an indefinite future in ours?
 
What’s more, if the many economists are right and our economy plunges into a deep recession far worse than the last one, then today’s antisemitic climate could spell big trouble for the Jews. It’s always the Jews who are blamed and bullied when financial times get tough. Perhaps last year’s Occupy Wall Street movement was just a small dress rehearsal: protesters took the streets to blame the Jews for America’s economic woes with their anti-Jewish signs and their hostile antisemitic views.
 
So it seems that in our generation, Rabbi Teichtal’s 69-year old warning is getting stronger.
 
And so is his urgent plea: come home to Eretz Yisrael.
 
Rabbi Teichtal never lived to fulfill his dream of living in Eretz Yisrael and drawing closer to G-d in the Land’s holiness. He was brutally murdered in Auschwitz just days before the notorious death camp was liberated in 1945. But his main dream was for the entire Jewish people to unite and return to the Land G-d gave us, which he firmly believed would then bring about the ultimate and complete redemption.
 
Today, for the first time in our 2,000 year exile, more Jews live in Israel than anywhere else. Nearly six million Jews live in Israel, while 5.46 million Jews live in the United States and 1.43 million live in Europe. We can see the prophecy of the in-gathering of the exiles occur before our very eyes. And with the wake-up calls of antisemitism and natural disasters getting louder every year, it certainly seems like it’s time to come home.
 
But what about those who aren’t yet ready or able to pick up and leave?
 
Rebbe Nachman of Breslev offers practical advice: “Pray to G-d to give you desire and yearning for the Land of Israel. Then you will succeed in reaching there” (Advice, p. 29).