✡️ Let’s go there. Why do people hate the Jews? I’ve done a lot of media appearances this year in support of my movie Guns & Moses and my book Let My People Laugh, and because I’m an Orthodox Jew, many hosts have asked for my take on the massive spike in antisemitic rhetoric, rallies and violent attacks. Some even come right out and say, Jews have been persecuted around the world for thousands of years - is it possible there’s something wrong with you? Yes, it’s possible there’s something wrong with us, because we’re human and there’s something wrong with everybody, but the reason Jew hatred is the oldest and least successful hatred is because of what’s right with us. Our very existence after all those persecutions testifies to our role in the world, as the prophet Isaiah says, to be a light unto the nations. The world is made of light - God said so in the first line of the Bible, and Einstein eventually proved it. The problem with a world made of God’s light is that it comes with boundaries. We’re not free to do whatever we want. There are eternal laws, and eternal truths, and therefore some behaviors are not permitted. Hitler specifically blamed the Jews for acting as a conscience of the world, and he was not the first to imagine killing every single one of us - see the Book of Esther and the story of Purim. Every persecution was ultimately about the same issue. There is a God, and he launched commandments into the world at Mount Sinai that apply to everyone, including don’t murder, keep marital relations within marriage, don’t steal, know that there is a God, and don’t commit idolatry. The reason idolatry is a sin is not that God is “jealous” of people consorting with make-believe deities. Rather, idolatry allows people to pursue their wildest fantasies and live in a world of moral relativism where might makes right. But because God is real, and the Bible is true, those behaviors are prohibited, and deep down everybody knows it. Even we Jews resisted this truth. When we received the Torah at Mount Sinai, Rav Avdimi bar Chama says God held the mountain over our heads and forced us to accept the covenant. Rava says, yes but even so, we accepted the Torah willingly in the time of the Purim story, when Haman sought to kill us all and God saved us. After that, we willingly embraced the law as a unified people. (Shabbos 88a, B. Talmud) Jew hatred exists because we remind the world that all people are subject to God’s eternal laws. Tragically, many Jews have forgotten that, and times like these always come to remind us. But the Jew-haters themselves never benefit from their hate in the long run. Look at Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Rome, Spain and Germany to name a few - they’re all gone or eviscerated as world powers. The oldest hatred may never go away, and it may do tremendous harm in the short term, but it will never win. As God told Abraham, the father of all God-loving people, God will bless those who bless the Jews, and curse those who curse us. And let us say Amen. - @salvadorlitvak