We Will Not Hide

Again! I found myself staring at the news alerts yesterday, feeling that familiar, heavy tightening in my chest. Another attack. This time, a knife on the streets of Golders Green. The shock is instinctive, but if I am brutally honest with myself, the surprise is fading. And that fading surprise is perhaps the most terrifying part of all.

In the wake of such violence, the immediate instinct is to build higher fences. As several of my rabbinic colleagues and the Board of Deputies rightly highlighted today, securing our buildings is vital for our immediate physical safety. Yet, we must recognise a painful truth. If our only response to antisemitism is to retreat behind fortified walls, we are slowly yielding to our own erasure from public life.

At the end of this week's Torah portion, Emor, there is a striking and difficult story. A man, in the heat of a fight, curses using the Divine name. The Torah's response is not to suppress speech through fear, nor to build walls between communities. The response is law, applied without exception to everyone. "You shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike" (Leviticus 24:22). Equal accountability, without favour, without distinction. Hatred is confronted. It is not accommodated.

A principle like that is exactly what we need now. Not more concrete and cameras, but the full force of the law applied to those who seek to terrorise Jews on the streets of London and the UK. We need a serious, funded, sustained national plan to educate young people before hatred takes root, to counter radicalisation happening in closed online spaces and offline communities alike, and to establish clearly that freedom of speech does not include the freedom to dehumanise. We also need an honest conversation in this country about integration and social cohesion policies that, with the best of intentions, have sometimes created separate worlds running in parallel rather than a shared civic life. Misunderstood tolerance is not tolerance at all. Mostly, it is the avoidance of honest engagement.

Certain movements from the political Left and Right, extremist groups, and now violent proxies acting on behalf of a foreign regime are each, in their different ways, trying to raise the cost of being Jewish in Britain, to use a formulation from the BOD statement. Every layer of hostile pressure, from boycott campaigns to a knife on Golders Green Road, points in the same direction: First, make Jews feel unsafe in the street; then, push them behind barriers; then make those barriers so high that Jewish life retreats from public view, from shared spaces, from British civic life entirely. What appears as a series of attacks on individuals is, in reality, a sustained attempt to make Jewish existence invisible in this country. The end point of that logic is not security, but erasure.

 Our answer cannot only be defensive. A society that takes antisemitism seriously must make the cost of antisemitism far higher than it currently is, through education, through law, through political will, and through the moral clarity of a country that says, without equivocation: not here, and not to our neighbours.

I want to end with a notion of hope. Our Torah portion outlines the many communal festivals we celebrate in our Jewish calendar. All of them, from Shabbat to Pesach and the High Holy Days, have in common that we are coming together as one community, one people.  That togetherness is our greatest strength. When we light our candles this Shabbat, let us not do so in hiding. Let us light them as an act of spiritual defiance and a statement of enduring presence. May we find comfort in our shared community this Shabbat, and the resolve to demand the safe, open future we deserve.

See you in Shul this Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Adrian

Emor = Speak!