Thread by @GREENESJ333

Roger Froikin @rlefraim wrotw, "The worst things that have happened to the Jewish nation
I bet you will assume I will mention the Shoah, the Holocaust. Wrong. The Jewish nation has experienced worse things than that in the last 3000 years.
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I’m also not pointing to what Rome did, from the destruction of Israel & to the end of the Temple in Jerusalem and the effect of all that on Jewish survival in the early days of the Diaspora in which 2/3rds of our people converted out, leaving the rest of us more vulnerable.
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No, the worst thing that has happened to the Jewish nation was the incessant pressures in the Diaspora that changed Judaism and created a mentality of victimization that has been characterized as “ghetto mentality.”
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And as a result, probably the most harmful, most destructive thing that the Jewish people face, is not from some other nation, nor from some horrible catastrophe, but from the damage, the psychological, social,
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and structural damage done by 2000 years of persecution, fear, and dislocation.

A short story for illustration. The eldest daughter of the Rabbi in a small Ukrainian village was kidnapped by the Lord of the Manor, and over a month was repeatedly raped and
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beaten by the Lord and his friends, and finally at the end of the month she was dumped by the Lord at the entrance to the village. Unconscious, naked, bruises all over her body, and half dead—and the Rabbi, her father, smiled, bowed, and
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thanked the Lord of the Manor for being so kind as to return his daughter. The Rabbi and the Jews in that town did what they had to do to be safe. Challenging the power of those outside their community was realistically seen as futile,
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so they pandered and smiled and some tried to shed their Judaism that they saw as an impediment to being safe. Safety, for 2000 years, meant acting in a manner that did not offend the Gentiles, that did not resist their bigotry that could turn things worse,
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change us to be accommodating, & to adopt their ways, to be more like them, assuming the more like them we would be, the less different we appear to them, the safer we would be.
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Throughout the last 2000 years Jews even converted out for acceptance in the wider world, for safety. In the first 400 years CE, the Jewish nation lost 2/3rds of its number to conversion to various cults and then to Christianity.
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Over the years there were losses. In Iberia, after the Christian Reconquista, more than half the Jews converted—before the Inquisition and the expulsion of those who stayed Jewish. And even as late as the 1920s and 1930s Jews in Europe were converting to Christianity—
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particularly in Germany, France, Hungary and Poland, the last at the rate of 30,000 a year. And in the USA, in the 1920s, the Reform Movement declared (according to their historian Jacob Marcus) that their goal was for Judaism to be just another religion of the land,
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a faith community, not a people. To feel the same as others, as the goal, to be seen as the same, to be safe.

And that brings us to today. Understand, we Jews have survived our homeland being stolen, our belongings being taken from us again and again,
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displacement and forced relocation, massacres and being hunted by those that hate us. Yet, we have survived all that has been imposed on us by others.
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What should concern us is how the psychological damage of being a persecuted subject people for so long may destroy us from the inside.

To what we see as Jewish politicians in the USA and Europe refusing to condemn antisemitism in their own political parties,
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Jewish “leaders” making an issue of demeaning and laughing about Jewish practices and identity in magazine articles. (Senator Schumer bragged how he ignores old Jewish customs to make his favorite meatloaf of 1/2 pork.)
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And in Israel we see some Jews of European background rejecting anything from Jewish culture, rejecting what they have never learned about, as old-fashioned and not Western and modern, as if embarrassed by anything Jewish, as if rejecting Judaism and
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supporting the latest liberal cliché makes them more acceptable to Europeans and to assimilated Jews in the USA.

One Israeli politician who I shall not name, while Prime Minister, removed Jewish education from public schools while being positive about Christian and
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Muslim religiousness (including in his own family). When Moshe led the Hebrews out of Egypt, HaShem provided for a 40-year hiatus in the desert, time for the older generation with their slave mentality to die off for the most part and
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for the next generations to be educated to be a free nation. But, even though the State of Israel exists today, the Jewish People, under constant pressure still, has not yet had its 40 years. And that is the worst tragedy to date."
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