If you pass my synagogue today, you will see:
Our banner, which reads: Open Doors, Open Hearts, Open Minds.
A flag for the Canadiens and a flag for Victoire, Montreal’s men’s and women’s hockey teams, both in the playoffs this year.
A sign for the blood drive that we are hosting.
And yes, you will see a security guard. But the guard is not the whole story.
Our synagogue has a legacy of building bridges. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke here in 1962. We welcomed Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s, and ten years ago, we sponsored two Syrian families, and helped them make homes in Montreal. We have a strong and proud history of interfaith dialogue with Christians and Muslims, and have stood together with other minorities against religious discrimination.
Since October 7, 2023, some of the bridges that we worked for years to build have grown dusty from disuse. Others have been burned to the ground. Some neighbours and friends have made the effort to show up, and for this we cherish them. Too many others have not.
What is a Jew to do?
I may once have worn rose-coloured glasses about antisemitism in Montreal. I don’t anymore. We need to think creatively and work determinedly against the hate that has surfaced in our midst, whether in the form of someone spray-painting a swastika on our synagogue, or slurs yelled at our congregants after services, or the obstacles faced by our kids on campus, where they should be free to explore their identity without fear.
It is entirely understandable that in this setting, we might want to close our doors, our hearts, and our minds. To give up on our commitment to the society around us. To raise the drawbridge, and let the bridges of connection crumble.
But the threat we face is not just to our physical security. It is also a threat to our sense of belonging, as proud Canadians and proud Jews. I am not willing to give that up.
In a few weeks, our synagogue will celebrate twelve adult bnei mitzvah being called to the Torah. Men and women, anglophones, francophones, and allophones, they range in age from 34 to 82. Some became Jewish later in life; others were raised in times and places when they weren’t free to be open as Jews; still others are women, who weren’t raised with the opportunity to read from the Torah. Our parsha is Shelach, where the Israelites scout out the Promised Land. “We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes,” ten of the scouts recount, when they describe seeing the people of the land, “and so we must have been in theirs” (Numbers 13:33).
The commentators chastise the scouts for not trusting that God could have made them look like giants in others’ eyes. But I am more focused on how we looked to ourselves. We are made in the image of the divine – how dare we see ourselves as small? No matter what forces we face, how dare we shrink ourselves in our own eyes?
I am proud of this community we have built. Our synagogue was founded in 1882, which is a blink of an eye in terms of Jewish history, but not insignificant in Canadian terms. Have other Jewish communities lived places longer, and been integrated fully, and still been dehumanized and destroyed? Yes. We would be foolish not to be aware of that. But I refuse to accept it as a foregone conclusion, as the story’s inevitable end. I refuse to make every decision with the worst-case scenario front of mind.
Among the many things Zionism has taught us, it is not to be defined by victimhood; not to live on bended knee. We will not disavow our Jewish identity, our love of Israel, or our solidarity with our people. I will not degrade myself or my community by begging for others to walk across the bridges we build. But we will keep looking for partners. We will keep our open doors, and open hearts, and open minds. Because the moment we become entirely reactive, the moment we act primarily out of fear, is the moment we lose what we love.
We don’t have those hockey flags up because we want our neighbours to like us. We do it because we are fans in the shared secular religion of Montreal. We don’t host the blood drive to show we are good citizens. We do it because we have a Jewish mandate to save lives.
In a time defined by reactivity, we insist on being proactive. In a time full of hate, we hold on to love. And in a time when the ground seems to be moving beneath us, we dig in our heels.
Rabbi Lisa Grushcow was educated at McGill University, Oxford University, and Hebrew Union College. She has a doctorate in rabbinics, and is a Rhodes Scholar. She has served Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, the Reform synagogue of Montreal, for fourteen years.