Not the sermon I was planning on giving
Sermon, May 30, 2008
Rabbi Bruce Kadden

A funny thing happened on the way to my preparing this sermon.

Last week, I was reading through the Forward, which I do when it arrives at the Temple, and was stunned by a headline.  It read:  “When Survival of the Jewish People Is at Stake, There’s No Place for Morals.”

“That can’t be right,” I thought.  No one would make an argument like that.  The headline writer surely misrepresented the article.  But as I read through the article I discovered that the headline was accurate; the author, Yehezkel Dror, a professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University and recipient of the Israel Prize, one of the country’s greatest honors, was basically saying just that.  He writes, “Physical existence…must come first.  No matter how moral a society aspires to be, physical existence must take precedent… When the requirements of existence conflict with other values…realpolitik should be given priority.”

Maybe I just wasn’t getting it, I thought.  I wanted to see if others reacted as I had.  So, I went to the internet to see if there had already been responses to the article on The Forward’s website and sure enough there were.

And then, I thought, perhaps others had read the article and written about it elsewhere.  So I googled the headline to see what I would find.  It was not a pretty picture.  The first two hits were from the Forward’s web site.  But many of the next 20 were from extremist, mostly right-wing sites such as libertyform.org.  The article or in some cases a link to the article was usually followed by many anti-Semitic comments, most of which I could not repeat here. 

Now, I have been aware that if you google the word Talmud, for example, you get a number of anti-Semitic sites [currently the fifth hit is the site www.davidduke.com; another one is www.talmudunmasked.com which claims to reveal “the secret & diabolical Rabbinical teachings concerning Christians.”] and know that extremists of both the left and right make use of the web to spread their messages of hate and prejudice.  But I did not realize that some of these individuals monitor Jewish on-line publications on a regular basis and are quick to spread those that play into their world view. 

For example, the article was posted in full on the website ziopedia.org (obviously a take-off on Wikipedia).  The site claims to include “all there is to know about Zionism.”  In reality it is a clearinghouse for viciously anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic articles with titles such as “Elie Wiesel and the Big Lie,”  “Israel:  A History of Hate Crimes,” and “9-11 and the Jewish Gatekeepers.”

Reading some of these articles, I felt somewhat like the man in the joke about two Jews in Russia traveling together.  One pulls out an anti-Semitic newspaper and begins reading it.  His friend asks him how he can read that rubbish.  He replies, “In the Jewish press all you read about is anti-Semitism and how powerless we are.  This says that we are powerful and control the world!”

Now, I don’t think that we should make too much of these sites.  First of all, they are carefully monitored by the ADL.  For the most part they attract like-minded fringe groups and individuals who want to share their warped ideas with others.  In other words, they are preaching to the choir.

However, as I found out when I was teaching my Judaism course at PLU this fall, it is easy for a non-suspecting student to stumble onto one of these sites when doing research for a paper and not always easy to determine the veracity of the material on the site.  While most of us can quickly spot an anti-Semitic site or a messianic Jewish site, for the average non-Jew it is not so easy.  Indeed, even our teenagers sometimes have a hard time determining appropriate sites to research Jewish topics. 

If you have not already done so, I encourage you to use your favorite search engine and type in “Talmud” or “Zionism” or even “Jews” for that matter.  It will be a depressingly educational experience. 

Many people who discover this phenomenon immediately contact the search engine, protesting its apparent bias.  But google nor yahoo nor any other major search engine is biased.  Rather the postings are the result of the alogarithms used and the reality of the world wide web. 

Like many other tools of technology it is amoral, but can easily be exploited for immoral purposes.  Given the nature of the internet as well as the protection of freedom of speech in the first amendment, we can do little to prevent hatemongers from spewing their hateful messages in cyberspace.  What we can do is educate ourselves and others as to the realities of the internet world. 

In particular we need to teach our children to discriminate in their use of websites so that they can identify those that are anti-Semitic or that express hatred toward any group.  In doing so we should neither overemphasize the threat from these sites nor ignore or trivialize them. 

The ADL has prepared a publication called “Poisoning the Web:  Hatred Online: An ADL Report on Internet Bigotry, Extremism, and Violence,” which might be of some help.  There are also a number of books for parents to help them teach their children how to appropriately use the internet. 

So this was not the sermon I was going to give.  My thoughts on the article on morals and the survival of the Jewish people will have to another time.  But it is vitally important that we are aware of the internet and sites that promote anti-Semitism and bigotry, not to scare us, but to assure that we and those we care about are aware of the reality of the internet and know how to appropriately use this important resource.

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