Keeping Up with the Pace

From Rabbi Pete Tobias of the Liberal Synagogue, Elstree:

In the wake of recent attacks and incidents, I’ve been asked lately if I ever personally experienced anti-Semitism. I said that I didn’t think I had. I remembered some school playground incidents, however. The first was when my National Health spectacles had led to me being called four eyes and another, a few years later, came when I was on a French exchange. I can’t recall how it started, but I suddenly found myself, aged about fifteen, in the middle of a circle of around forty French teenagers, all chanting ‘la France, la France!’ It started off quite light-hearted but it did feel rather menacing. It was 1973, and we’d just joined the European Union. So with a smile, I simply said ‘marché commun’ and joined the circle to a round of applause and pats on the back.

I think those two childhood incidents taught me something about human nature. I think there’s something inherent in human nature that prompts us to look for whatever is different in others, to regard that difference as some kind of weakness and then use it as a way of asserting a need to feel superior. We’re really not very good at dealing with people who are other, who are different from what we are taught is ‘normal’. That’s school playground behaviour, but it’s part of the wider world as well. In order to define who we are, it seems, we need something or someone to which or whom we can be opposed, to be ‘anti’.

Of course I know that many Jews today whose attachment to their religious heritage is more openly visible than mine, and millions down the ages, have experienced anti-Semitism. It’s one of humanity’s more enduring prejudices and sometimes, in more fearful moments, I wonder whether it will ever disappear. But other minority groups have experienced racism; women have experienced sexism and so on. The challenge, it seems to me, is not so much about introducing legislation to outlaw these different expressions of hostility to other groups of human beings based on religion, race, ideology or gender but rather to become more tolerant of human diversity. Let’s leave our apparent need to be anti-whatever in the school playground, and learn to celebrate our differences and rejoice in our shared humanity.