This is one of those sermons that comes with a proverbial warning label - so here goes. If you’ve been struggling with turning off the news or needing to stem the flow of disturbing things that reaches your eyeballs or your ears, if you, like me, wake up and decide that you can’t stomach whatever dubious decision has been unleashed from Washington DC, if you sit at the breakfast table choosing to do NY Times on your phone, but not click over to look at the headlines, you might want to step outside for a few minutes. This dvar torah is about the history of the Jew and University, and the perilous position that Jews in universities feel right now, but it will also mention recent forced immigrant deportations. If you were hoping for something on the lighter side entering passover, I’m sorry to disappoint you. If you want to step outside, I understand. There is only a finite amount of stressful contemplation a person can endure in a day or a week, and maybe you’re not up for more anxiety.
(pause)
There is nothing more important to the Jewish people than learning. In Pirkei Avot we are taught - if nearly all the commandments, 612 of them, were stacked on one side of a scale, and only one mitzvah - Talmud Torah, the mitzvah to learn Torah, was on the other side of the scale, it would equal their weight. In Hebrew the phrase is ‘Talmud Torah knegged Kulam’. And so from Moses to today, our tradition has emphasized the intellect and book learning above all else. And our people were never willing to draw the line at Torah learning. From the geonim in the 9th century learning earth sciences and mathematics, to the physician Maimonides’ studies of the body, in the 13th century to Baruch Spinoza and his exploration of secular philosophy in the mid 17th century, our people have explored intellect and thought. And despite warnings in the Talmud against Greek philosophy and books, Jews have never restricted themselves from learning about the world beyond the yeshiva door. European universities did not actively exclude Jewish students, but the realities of our financial position and our isolated lives within ghettos until the 19th century meant that few Jews could afford to sit and learn secular things. Additionally, even if European universities didn’t exclude Jewish students, they refused to hire Jewish professors until the mid 19th and even the 20th century.
And then we came to America. Most of you know the broad sketches of our peoples story: the vast majority of immigrants to America arrive between 1880 and 1920. They were poor, often illiterate, and thrust from small rural villages in Poland and Ukraine into vast tenements in urban neighborhoods. That first generation worked long hours doing unskilled labor at the sewing machine, in the hopes that their children would have it better than they did. In a letter from the Bintel Brief, the Jewish Daily Forward’s advice column answered by editor Abraham Kahan, a 14 year old girl writes in feeling guilty that her parents can barely feed them on what they earn, but they insist that she continue to get her education instead of dropping out and going to work. Kahan answers in one sentence: she should listen to her parents and stay in school. In a footnote to that story, the scholar Harry Golden tells the story that it was told that immigrant mothers who could not speak English would walk into the new york public library and hold up the fingers on their hand to indicate how many children they had. And the library would issue them that many library cards, and then they would tell their children “Go. Read. Learn.”
So it isn’t any wonder that as soon as the second generation could afford to further their education, they did. So it isn’t any wonder that in his magnum opus on American Jewish History, Howard Sachar records the following.
Famously, the proportion of Jews at elite universities became so high that an anti-semitic quota limiting the number of Jews was established at Harvard by president A. Lawrence Lowell in 1922. It was eventually, under great public pressure, rescinded.
That attitude towards the university as both a place to further the exploration of the mind as well as a catalyst for social mobility for our immigrant grandparents has persisted and stuck. According to a Pew study in 2021, 58% of America Jews hold a college degree. That’s twice the rate of all Americans - 29%. We seek higher education at phenomenal rates. Moving to Pittsburgh seven years ago, I learned that a huge proportion of the Jewish community here today were comprised of meds and eds - doctors and academics. And that means that even if you didn’t go to university, so many of your fellow congregants and Jews here at Beth Shalom derive their livelihoods from universities, and do excellent and groundbreaking scholarship at those universities, and they produce amazing graduates. And those universities and their professors should be a point of pride for each and every person in our community. I’ll be honest: Florida can have this year’s NCAA basketball championship, and Ohio State can have the trophy for football. I wouldn’t trade a hundred NCAA sports trophies for one Jonas Salk, or one Billy Porter, or one Andy Warhol.
So it distresses me to no end that the current White House has decided that rather than laud our incredible American universities, they have instead decided to attack them, to defund them, and to attempt to silence them. Since the new administration took control on January 20, the following has taken place
These efforts are not random. They aren’t part of a thoughtful process of Federal cost cutting meant to balance the budget. This is a war on our universities.
The stated reasons for these cuts and visa cancellations is the really scary, really pernicious part. The claim made by the administration is that the universities that were cut were cut because they didn’t do a good enough job fighting anti-semitism on campus. The claim made about the students whose visas were canceled is that they were present or participated in on campus protests against the war in Gaza. The further claim has been made, without any evidence, that the protestors are supporting Hamas and therefore are terrorists.
I want to be very careful, and I want to be very explicit here: the United States government has every right to deport a terrorist who supports Hamas. Full stop. But let me also say very clearly, this administration is not deporting terrorists in a good-will effort to keep Jews safe. They are attacking free speech and protest and using gestapo tactics to intimidate and terrify anyone who opposes the word of those who are in power. And it is doing it in a way that uses us, the Jews, as the excuse. We’re being used.
Around the same time I was becoming outraged at these actions, political commentators and rabbis alike were also beginning to take notice.
Matt Bai at the Washington Post said this in an op-ed: “Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression. You’ll be looking awhile.” Our colleague Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky at Anshe Hesed in New York said “I think that the Jewish people are the worse for the wear if the foundations of a constitutional order and civil rights and civil liberties and higher education are diminished.” And our colleague Rabbi Sharon Brous said this in a sermon last month: “There is a real antisemitism problem in our time and the universities have become very fertile ground for its normalization. This administration’s attacks do not emerge from a genuine desire to keep Jews safe.”
ICE canceling student visas and abducting and deporting students is the confluence of two historic insecurities for the Jewish people: being excluded from universities because of our national identity, as was done to us in 1938 in Germany, and being rendered stateless and without citizenship or protection, as was the case for the Jewish people in Europe before the emancipation of the late 18th and 19th century.
An attack on American universities is an attack on wisdom, and knowledge, and learning, the intellect, and the intellectual. And an attack on knowledge is an attack on the Jew.
This whole thing to me is illogical and confusing. Destroying our medical research institutions, defunding our scientists, squelching speech on campus, dissuading foreign students from coming here due to the fear that they might end up in an ICE detention center – what does it accomplish? It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. Degrading our nation’s experts in a thousand different fields from mechanical engineering to mathematics to medicine and literature and history makes us as a nation worse at innovating and creating.
I suspect there are other motives at work. Motives of creating false scapegoats and boogeymen to distract some people from complex problems. Motives of getting payback against the liberal elite and their fancy Ivy League colleges. Motives of continuing to set America against itself. Listen, I went to college and I use my hoity toity sub-Ivy League education to do my job of learning and teaching the Jewish tradition to our community. And when an HVAC technician with a high school diploma from Beaver County comes over to my house to install a new boiler, I pay him with the money I make at my job, and maybe he takes some of his money and puts it away for a college education for his kids. But we’re not enemies, and I don’t want to make him my enemy, even if we voted differently in the last election. I don’t understand how animus and division serves us as Americans, but I do know that it’s part of a historical playbook that I really really don’t like.
Tonight we Jews sit down to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, our going out from under the thumb of a tyrant that made us subservient. There is a small matter in the story of our oppression and slavery that escaped my notice until a text study a did a few months ago. Our hassidut class learned the following text: In Exodus 5:7 we learn that Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters no longer longer provide straw for the bricks , but that the Israelites would be required to reach the same quota of bricks while now having to gather both straw and mud to fabricate them.
Rabbi Hanoch Henich HaCohen of Alexander taught that this is a difficulty. Why would Pharoah make it more difficult for Israel by not giving them straw? As such, it would serve as a loss to him (Pharaoh), that they wouldn’t complete their daily requirement of bricks. It would be better for him to give them straw only in order that it should be harder for them to produce double the bricks from what they would normally produce in a day!
Rabbi Hanoch Henich concludes that it is an attempt by Pharaoh to get the Jews to worry constantly about their material state so that they forget their spiritual state. He writes, “For Pharaoh the wicked wanted the Israelites to not have the time to contemplate their purpose - how to get out of their impure spiritual state and towards holiness. Only that they should perpetually ruminate, even when they weren’t working, how to get straw.”
But back to the act of the Pharaoh on the simple level - it’s illogical that rather than squeezing maximum financial benefit from the slaves for the Egyptian empire, they’re simply being punitive and cruel. It is an uncomfortable parallel to today.
I told my friend Natasha Berman about the topic I was going to speak on, mostly as a warning. And she asked me ‘but does it have a hopeful ending?’ Maybe? I don’t know. That’s up to me and you, I think.
I do know that the goal is really to be clear that the university is the home of the American intellect, and the creation of our collective American intellectual home was fashioned in great part by Jews. The intellectual state is a primary component of the spiritual state that Rabbi Hanoch Henech speaks of.
I want to add one more thing, related to the upcoming holiday of passover, and that is in regards to the four children. We know them as chacham, rasha, tam, v’eino yodea lishol – the wise child, the wicked child, the simple child, and the one that does not know how to ask. Whats strange about this formulation is that the four children are arranged illogically. Shouldn’t the four be tzaddik, rasha, tam, v’eino yodea lishol – righteous, wicked, simple, and one that does not know how to ask? But it isn’t.
Our rabbis are trying to tell us here that the path to God in our haggadah is not through simple observance and piety, but rather through a concerted effort of learning and study - which of course ultimately leads us to observance and holiness. The passover ideal is to be learned, and in becoming learned, to know God. And we become learned and knowledgeable of God in all ways and through all paths, both secular and religious.
We must defend the university, and its professors, and its researchers. In the text of the Talmud we learned for the siyyum for the fast of firstborns on Thursday, I was blessed to learn a famous pithy quote that occurs in Talmud Chagigah 9b - one who learns something one hundred times is not comparable to one who learns something one hundred and one times.
We learn and we learn and we learn to push the boundaries of human knowledge and better the world through the power of knowledge. We must rise to the challenge of protecting our universities however we can, and with urgency. We know something better if we learn it 102 times and better if we learn it 103 times, but to do that, we must have teachers to teach it and places to study it. Shabbat Shalom and a Zissen Pesach.
That attitude towards the university as both a place to further the exploration of the mind as well as a catalyst for social mobility for our immigrant grandparents has persisted and stuck. According to a Pew study in 2021, 58% of America Jews hold a college degree. That’s twice the rate of all Americans - 29%. We seek higher education at phenomenal rates. Moving to Pittsburgh seven years ago, I learned that a huge proportion of the Jewish community here today were comprised of meds and eds - doctors and academics. And that means that even if you didn’t go to university, so many of your fellow congregants and Jews here at Beth Shalom derive their livelihoods from universities, and do excellent and groundbreaking scholarship at those universities, and they produce amazing graduates. And those universities and their professors should be a point of pride for each and every person in our community. I’ll be honest: Florida can have this year’s NCAA basketball championship, and Ohio State can have the trophy for football. I wouldn’t trade a hundred NCAA sports trophies for one Jonas Salk, or one Billy Porter, or one Andy Warhol.
So it distresses me to no end that the current White House has decided that rather than laud our incredible American universities, they have instead decided to attack them, to defund them, and to attempt to silence them. Since the new administration took control on January 20, the following has taken place
- Ten major universities have had federal funding slashed or eliminated. Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Penn, Princeton, George Washington, NYU, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, University of Minnesota, and University of Southern California. All told $12 billion dollars have been taken away for academic research, PhD programs, and literally everything that university do from teaching assistants to the athletic programs.
- The administration eliminated the Department of Education, which both administers and oversees all student aid and loans in the country and oversees funding for things like school lunches to all fifty states and special needs education.
- The administration announced that The National Institute of Health would be cut 15%. That money goes to medical research covering literally everything that researchers due. A WESA analysis showed that at just the University of Pittsburgh, that would be a $115 million cut.
- The administration suddenly unilaterally canceled the student visas of over 300 undergraduate and graduate students. Several students, including a 30 year old PhD student named Rumiya Ozturk at Tufts, were grabbed off the street by ICE agents and are currently being held in Federal detention centers without due process or access to an attorney. Other students have gone into hiding. Several have fled rather than be detained.
These efforts are not random. They aren’t part of a thoughtful process of Federal cost cutting meant to balance the budget. This is a war on our universities.
The stated reasons for these cuts and visa cancellations is the really scary, really pernicious part. The claim made by the administration is that the universities that were cut were cut because they didn’t do a good enough job fighting anti-semitism on campus. The claim made about the students whose visas were canceled is that they were present or participated in on campus protests against the war in Gaza. The further claim has been made, without any evidence, that the protestors are supporting Hamas and therefore are terrorists.
I want to be very careful, and I want to be very explicit here: the United States government has every right to deport a terrorist who supports Hamas. Full stop. But let me also say very clearly, this administration is not deporting terrorists in a good-will effort to keep Jews safe. They are attacking free speech and protest and using gestapo tactics to intimidate and terrify anyone who opposes the word of those who are in power. And it is doing it in a way that uses us, the Jews, as the excuse. We’re being used.
Around the same time I was becoming outraged at these actions, political commentators and rabbis alike were also beginning to take notice.
Matt Bai at the Washington Post said this in an op-ed: “Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression. You’ll be looking awhile.” Our colleague Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky at Anshe Hesed in New York said “I think that the Jewish people are the worse for the wear if the foundations of a constitutional order and civil rights and civil liberties and higher education are diminished.” And our colleague Rabbi Sharon Brous said this in a sermon last month: “There is a real antisemitism problem in our time and the universities have become very fertile ground for its normalization. This administration’s attacks do not emerge from a genuine desire to keep Jews safe.”
ICE canceling student visas and abducting and deporting students is the confluence of two historic insecurities for the Jewish people: being excluded from universities because of our national identity, as was done to us in 1938 in Germany, and being rendered stateless and without citizenship or protection, as was the case for the Jewish people in Europe before the emancipation of the late 18th and 19th century.
An attack on American universities is an attack on wisdom, and knowledge, and learning, the intellect, and the intellectual. And an attack on knowledge is an attack on the Jew.
This whole thing to me is illogical and confusing. Destroying our medical research institutions, defunding our scientists, squelching speech on campus, dissuading foreign students from coming here due to the fear that they might end up in an ICE detention center – what does it accomplish? It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. Degrading our nation’s experts in a thousand different fields from mechanical engineering to mathematics to medicine and literature and history makes us as a nation worse at innovating and creating.
I suspect there are other motives at work. Motives of creating false scapegoats and boogeymen to distract some people from complex problems. Motives of getting payback against the liberal elite and their fancy Ivy League colleges. Motives of continuing to set America against itself. Listen, I went to college and I use my hoity toity sub-Ivy League education to do my job of learning and teaching the Jewish tradition to our community. And when an HVAC technician with a high school diploma from Beaver County comes over to my house to install a new boiler, I pay him with the money I make at my job, and maybe he takes some of his money and puts it away for a college education for his kids. But we’re not enemies, and I don’t want to make him my enemy, even if we voted differently in the last election. I don’t understand how animus and division serves us as Americans, but I do know that it’s part of a historical playbook that I really really don’t like.
Tonight we Jews sit down to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, our going out from under the thumb of a tyrant that made us subservient. There is a small matter in the story of our oppression and slavery that escaped my notice until a text study a did a few months ago. Our hassidut class learned the following text: In Exodus 5:7 we learn that Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters no longer longer provide straw for the bricks , but that the Israelites would be required to reach the same quota of bricks while now having to gather both straw and mud to fabricate them.
Rabbi Hanoch Henich HaCohen of Alexander taught that this is a difficulty. Why would Pharoah make it more difficult for Israel by not giving them straw? As such, it would serve as a loss to him (Pharaoh), that they wouldn’t complete their daily requirement of bricks. It would be better for him to give them straw only in order that it should be harder for them to produce double the bricks from what they would normally produce in a day!
Rabbi Hanoch Henich concludes that it is an attempt by Pharaoh to get the Jews to worry constantly about their material state so that they forget their spiritual state. He writes, “For Pharaoh the wicked wanted the Israelites to not have the time to contemplate their purpose - how to get out of their impure spiritual state and towards holiness. Only that they should perpetually ruminate, even when they weren’t working, how to get straw.”
But back to the act of the Pharaoh on the simple level - it’s illogical that rather than squeezing maximum financial benefit from the slaves for the Egyptian empire, they’re simply being punitive and cruel. It is an uncomfortable parallel to today.
I told my friend Natasha Berman about the topic I was going to speak on, mostly as a warning. And she asked me ‘but does it have a hopeful ending?’ Maybe? I don’t know. That’s up to me and you, I think.
I do know that the goal is really to be clear that the university is the home of the American intellect, and the creation of our collective American intellectual home was fashioned in great part by Jews. The intellectual state is a primary component of the spiritual state that Rabbi Hanoch Henech speaks of.
I want to add one more thing, related to the upcoming holiday of passover, and that is in regards to the four children. We know them as chacham, rasha, tam, v’eino yodea lishol – the wise child, the wicked child, the simple child, and the one that does not know how to ask. Whats strange about this formulation is that the four children are arranged illogically. Shouldn’t the four be tzaddik, rasha, tam, v’eino yodea lishol – righteous, wicked, simple, and one that does not know how to ask? But it isn’t.
Our rabbis are trying to tell us here that the path to God in our haggadah is not through simple observance and piety, but rather through a concerted effort of learning and study - which of course ultimately leads us to observance and holiness. The passover ideal is to be learned, and in becoming learned, to know God. And we become learned and knowledgeable of God in all ways and through all paths, both secular and religious.
We must defend the university, and its professors, and its researchers. In the text of the Talmud we learned for the siyyum for the fast of firstborns on Thursday, I was blessed to learn a famous pithy quote that occurs in Talmud Chagigah 9b - one who learns something one hundred times is not comparable to one who learns something one hundred and one times.
We learn and we learn and we learn to push the boundaries of human knowledge and better the world through the power of knowledge. We must rise to the challenge of protecting our universities however we can, and with urgency. We know something better if we learn it 102 times and better if we learn it 103 times, but to do that, we must have teachers to teach it and places to study it. Shabbat Shalom and a Zissen Pesach.
text of R' Hanoch Henich HaCohen regarding Pharaoh and the bricks and straw.
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