Presented at Temple Beth El in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday, November 8, 2024.
Shabbat shalom. I am delighted to join you for this weekend of community learning in honor and memory of Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky, the first rabbi of Temple Beth El. When I learned that I would be expected to offer a d’var Torah on Friday night, I admit it made me nervous. After all, I’m just a sociologist, a secular scholar. What insight can I offer when others in this community are more learned in Torah study than me? Pirkei Avot (5:22) tells us to turn the Torah over and over, “for all is therein.” And indeed, fortunately for me, it seems that this week’s Torah portion anticipates the topic of my Sunday keynote lecture, antisemitism, and points to some key sources of the longest hatred—both its manifest sources and what Sigmund Freud called its “secret sources.” I’ll try to persuade you tonight of that reading.
Let me begin with the mysterious Covenant Between the Parts. According to the portion, Abraham succeeds in rescuing his nephew Lot (לוֹט) from the four kings who captured him—a redemption from captivity that cannot fail to resonate with us when so many hostages remain captive in Gaza tonight. Afterward, the Lord speaks to Abraham in a vision: “Your reward shall be very great” (Gen. 15:1). A son will be born to him, his descendants will become as numerous as the stars, and they will inherit the Land of Canaan. But Abraham is a doubter: “Lord, how shall I know that I shall inherit?” (Gen. 15:8). The Lord assuages Abraham’s doubt with a formal pact which involves taking five animals—a heifer, a female goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon—and cleaving the first three animals through the middle. The ritual seems bizarre to us, but the Hebrew professor and Bible translator Robert Alter notes that it was not uncommon in this time and place: “Covenants in which the two parties step between cloven animal parts are attested in various places in the ancient Near East as well as in Greece.” Next, the Torah tells us, “as the sun was about to set, a deep slumber fell upon Abram and now a dread, even a great darkness fell upon him. And [the Lord] said to Abram, ‘Know well that your seed shall be strangers in a land not theirs and they shall be enslaved and afflicted four hundred years’” (Gen. 15:13).
If we understand the prophecy literally, it might refer to the migration of Jacob and his descendants to Egypt to escape famine in Canaan, and the subsequent enslavement and affliction described in שמות (Exodus). But some Jewish commentators have interpreted the prophecy in a figurative or allegorical way. According to the 13th-century Spanish rabbi Nachmanides, the terms used to describe what happens to Abraham—“dread,” darkness,” “great,” and “fell upon him”—correspond to the four epochs or kingdoms into which the rabbis divided human history: Babylon, Persia (or Medea), Greece (the kingdom of Antiochus), and Edom (Rome). In his view, all the vicissitudes of Jewish history in these four epochs are contained in this vision to Abraham (Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, p. 149). Likewise, the 13th-century French rabbi David Kimḥi (RaDaK) wrote that “in every generation the nations attempt to exterminate us but the Holy One, blessed be He, delivers us from their hands by the merit of Abraham.”
Why do others oppress and curse the Jewish nation that originates from Abraham? The many answers that scholars have given to this question can be divided into two broad categories. On the one hand, some scholars have traced antisemitism to conflicting group interests, intergroup competition or rivalry over scarce resources, and the threat that equality for Jews has posed to the advantages of dominant groups. The German-born Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias made this kind of argument in 1929, on the eve of the Nazi rise to power. German antisemitism, he wrote, sprang from the “social position of the German Jews” and “the conflicting economic, intellectual and social interests that, in correspondence to this social positioning, arise between the people of the Jewish community and the members of the other social strata of the German people.” As the German economy contracted and competition increased, he argued, the Christian middle class grew preoccupied with protecting its position in the prevailing order. “Through their anti-Semitism,” Elias argued, “they are conducting a fight against Jewish competitors … whose interests are in conflict with their own…. And they conduct this struggle as a socially and ideologically based conflict of interests in exactly the same sense in which they conduct their struggle against the socially rising stratum of the proletariat.” From this perspective, antisemitism appears as a “rational” phenomenon in the sense that it stems from the rational pursuit of self-interest.
On the other hand, an alternative approach emphasizes the nonrational foundations of antisemitism. According to this view, antisemitism is independent of actual group interests. For example, in the 1950s, the American sociologist Gordon Allport described antisemitism as a form of prejudice, defined as faulty and inflexible generalizations. Others, like the French-born Jewish sociologist Émile Durkheim and later the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, suggested that antisemites used Jews as scapegoats, displacing frustration and aggression from the real sources of their distress to a more easily identified and punished minority group. Sigmund Freud, the Jewish founder of psychoanalysis, also emphasized the nonrational foundations of antisemitism. Of the reasons for “the popular hatred of Jews,” he observed in 1939 under the growing shadow of Nazi persecution, some “arise from obvious considerations” that “need no interpretation,” but “others lie deeper and spring from secret sources,” which is to say, from unconscious motives. “The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion,” Freud explained; “Christianity became a Son religion.” This results in the unconscious identification of Jews with the father, whom the child simultaneously loves and fears, and the transference of this ambivalent attitude to the Jews. As the father-surrogate, the Jew is unconsciously the one whom the antisemite fears and the one against whom he would like to rebel. At the same time, the Jew unconsciously represents the antisemite’s own sexual and aggressive drives, which the antisemite learns to repress by internalizing the father’s authority and then (unable to acknowledge those drives in himself) projects onto the Jew.
This week’s Torah portion, Lech L’cha (Gen. 12:1–17:27), alludes to both kinds of reasons for animosity toward Jews—those that “arise from obvious considerations,” and those that “spring from secret sources.” The implication is that these reasons may not be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, consider how intergroup competition or rivalry over valued persons and goods generates strife for Abraham and his kinsfolk. We see this early in the portion. When Abraham is driven by famine to go down and sojourn in Egypt, he worries that the Egyptians will kill him to take possession of his beautiful wife, Sarah (Gen. 12:12). After Pharaoh drives Abraham out of Egypt, Abraham and his nephew Lot part ways. Just before their separation, the portion declares, “the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelt then in the land” (Gen. 13:7). “Since both Abraham and Lot were strangers in the country,” Nachmanides comments, “the former was afraid that the Canaanites and the Perizzite, natives of the country, would hear of the large numbers of cattle that were being pastured and would drive them out or smite them with the sword and take away their property and livestock” (Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, p. 123). After Abraham redeems Lot from his captors, the Lord tells Abraham, “Fear not ... I am your shield” (Gen. 15:1). What did Abraham have to fear at this point? After all, he had just defeated four mighty kings. According to one interpretation given in the Talmud, Abraham said: “Perhaps the sons of those kings I slew will gather together an army and make war against me” (Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, p. 137). Abraham feared, in other words, that the victory itself might contain the germs of the next war. In all these examples from Lech L’cha, the obvious and manifest source of hostility to Abraham and his family is envy. Animosity arises from group conflict over the possession of valued persons and things: Abraham’s wife, his wealth and possessions, and the Promised Land itself.
At this point, it might seem that the Torah sides with rationalist, even materialist explanations of antisemitism that trace it to conflicting group interests. But turn the Torah again, and Freud’s deeper, “secret sources” of antisemitism also become apparent. Freud identified three such sources. First, he suggested that people are jealous of the Jews being the chosen people: “I venture to assert,” he writes, “that jealousy of the people which declared itself the first-born, favorite child of God the Father, has not yet been surmounted among other peoples, even today.” The theme of chosenness is, of course, central to this week’s portion. Abraham and his descendants are singled out for divine blessing, reward, and protection from the beginning. Is this unfair favoritism? “Would it not have been better,” asks the king of the Kazars in Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari, “had God given His approval to all men alike?” A midrash on a verse in Jeremiah (51:9) suggests that God tried to do just this and only turned to Abraham after all other peoples had failed God. The midrash explains the necessity for selecting one people, but it doesn’t explain why Abraham was selected. Nachmanides suggests that “the Chaldeans had persecuted Abraham for his faith in God,” and it was Abraham’s iconoclasm and even martyrdom that justified his election (Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, pp. 116–119).
A second unconscious motive for antisemitism, Freud suggests, is castration fear. In this week’s portion, Abraham is commanded to circumcise himself and his descendants as a sign of his covenant with God (Genesis 17:10–11). “Among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate,” Freud writes, “that of circumcision has made a disagreeable, uncanny impression on others. The explanation probably is that it reminds them of the dreaded castration idea.” Lest we be too skeptical to take Freud’s suggestion seriously, we should recall the words of the historian Norman Cohn, author of Warrant for Genocide: “One has only to look at any medieval picture illustrating a ritual murder story,” he wrote, “to recognize the unconscious content of the fantasy. A small boy—it is, significantly, always a boy, never a girl—is surrounded by a group of elderly men with long beards, who are torturing and castrating him and drawing off and collecting his blood.”
Third, Freud asserts that because Christianity, which derives from Judaism, was historically often imposed on people against their will, antisemitism is, in reality, hostility toward Christianity—a hostility then displaced onto Jews. “We must not forget,” Freud writes, “that all the peoples who now excel in the practice of anti-Semitism became Christians only in relatively recent times, sometimes forced to it by bloody compulsion…. They have not yet overcome their grudge against the new religion which was forced on them, and they have projected it on to the source from which Christianity came to them.” He concludes that “the hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity.” But what explains this hatred? Judaism is a religion of law that represents the ethical regulation of the instinctual drives—regulation that then spreads to other peoples through Judaism’s religious offshoots, Christianity and Islam. Freud suggests that the repression and sublimation of instinctual drives makes the blessings of civilization possible. As God tells Abraham, “all the families of the earth” are in this way “blessed in you” (Genesis 12:3). But the repression of instinctual drives is also a painful process that necessarily generates discontent. Just ask anyone who has fasted all day during Yom Kippur! We might conclude, then, that the repression which makes the blessings of civilization possible is also what engenders the curses directed at the Jewish people.
How, you may ask, does the Lord’s grim prophecy of exile, enslavement, and affliction assuage Abraham’s doubt that his descendants shall inherit the Land of Canaan? God tells him it won’t last forever. “Weeping may tarry for the night,” as the Psalmist (30:6) says, “but joy cometh in the morning.” When the Lord instructs Abraham at the beginning of the portion to go forth (לֶךְ־לְךָ֛) from the land of his birth to the Land of Canaan, the instruction comes with a promise: “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you” (Genesis 12:1–3). In Abraham’s vision during the Covenant Between the Parts, God promises that judgment will be brought upon the oppressors, and Abraham’s descendants will “come forth with great substance” and return to the Promised Land (Gen. 15:14–16). This hope of redemption, for ourselves and all the families of the earth, has sustained the Jewish people for many long centuries. Does the portion give us any guidance for how to respond to the curses of antisemitism in the meantime? For an exploration of that question, I encourage you to come to the Saturday morning Torah study.
