POLISH TRANSLATION HERE
Thoughts on Parashat Vayishlach 5786
Rabbi Menachem Mirski
Let’s set the scene: Yaakov is sitting in a café in Nowy Świat in Warsaw, or perhaps in the Kazimierz district of Kraków. A friend comes over. “Hey Yaakov, jak leci? How’s life?” Yaakov smiles: “Life? It’s wonderful. Good job, kids in excellent schools, Shabbat dinners with friends, holidays in the mountains or by the Baltic… The only thing is, when everything feels this calm and normal, I keep waiting for the antisemitism to flare up again.”
Some of us are wired to count blessings. And there really are many. After the darkness of the 20th century, the last few decades in Poland and across free Europe have been years of almost unimaginable rebirth. Cities that were graves have become homes again. Jewish schools, kindergartens, synagogues, and community centers have reopened from Wrocław to Vilnius, from Berlin to Budapest. Festivals like Kraków’s Jewish Culture Festival or Warsaw’s Singer Festival draw tens of thousands every summer. Young Jews study at universities without quotas, start companies, make films, enter politics. Hebrew and Yiddish echo again in streets that once heard only silence or screams. The European Union, for all its flaws, has given a framework of law and rights that our great-grandparents could not even imagine. Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Germany, Lithuania each in its own way, have officially acknowledged the Shoah, built museums, passed restitution laws, funded restoration of cemeteries and synagogues. Antisemitism exists (no one is naïve), but day-to-day life for most Jews in Warsaw, Prague or Budapest is safer and more “normal” than any European Jew experienced between 1933 and 1989, and for many centuries before that. Our grandparents could only dream of this. Yet even that dream feels fragile, because we know how quickly Europe can change its mind.
And we don’t need to look far for reminders. Hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters still live in Russia and Belarus under regimes that suppress freedom and manipulate history. Further east, in Ukraine, Jews live, study, and rebuild communities in cities literally under missile fire. Here in the West we have challenges too: periodic surges of antisemitism from far-right and far-left, ugly incidents after every escalation in the Middle East, online hatred that spills into graffiti and sometimes into violence. But when we remember the positives, we realise: these decades since 1989–1990 have been a kind of miracle, a narrow window of grace purchased by Jewish stubbornness, European reckoning, and simple good luck.
Yet alongside the gratitude, anxiety is rising, and rising fast. The continent feels fractured again. The political scene is becoming more and more polarized, and we know from history that the extreme political polarization that emerged in late 1920’s and 1930 was among the major phenomena that led to WW2. Social media turns every disagreement into tribal war. Debates about migration, history, identity, and Israel become existential battlegrounds where the first casualty is nuance and the second is relationships. Trust in institutions is eroding exactly when we need it most. October 7 and the war that followed brought the worst wave of European antisemitism since 1945: synagogue attacks in Germany, Jewish schools under police guard in France, “Gas the Jews” chants in Amsterdam, Jewish students afraid to wear a kippah in London or Malmö. Inside our own communities we argue bitterly about Israel, about how to respond, about who is “really” Jewish, about politics left and right. The fear is not imaginary; it’s no surprise people are on edge. Most of this anxiety isn’t irrational—it’s the natural response of thoughtful people trying to navigate a world driven by deception, escalation, and verbal attacks that quickly spiral into something darker.
This anxiety is the same tremor that runs through our parashah. Jacob’s last clear memory of Esau is a brother who wanted him dead. So when the messengers return with the news, “Esau is coming to meet you, and four hundred men with him,” Jacob panics. He splits the camp, he prays in anguish, he prepares for war, because his inner world is still governed by an old, true, but no longer fully accurate reality. He cannot yet see that time has worked on Esau too. His bubble of fear and guilt distorts the present.
We do the same. We read every nasty tweet, every far-right march, every leftist demonstration that crosses the line into antisemitism, through the lens of “Kristallnacht is always one election away.” Sometimes we look at fellow Jews who vote differently, daven differently, speak Hebrew or Polish or Hungarian as their heart language, and we think: traitor, self-hating, fanatic, naïve. Our bubbles keep us safe, but they also keep us blind.
So how do we burst the bubble? Jacob shows us: radical humility. Not weakness, not self-erasure, but a deliberate lowering of the ego. When Jacob finally meets Esau he bows seven times. He calls his brother “my lord” and himself “your servant.” Rashi teaches that he bowed (bechni’a g’dola), with complete submission. Sforno points out that Jacob temporarily treats Esau as the firstborn, reversing roles for the sake of peace. The Hasidic masters see the seven bowings as the nullification of the seven emotional attributes, turning the energy of hate into love.
Of course, humility has limits. Blind submission in the face of real power imbalance can enable evil; Jacob himself still keeps his distance afterward and settles in a different place. The point is not to disappear, but to quiet the ego long enough to actually see the human being across from us.
For us in Europe (and in the fragile Jewish reality of Poland above all), this means approaching our “Esaus”, the neighbour who votes for a party we fear, the cousin who demonstrates a different relationship to Israel, the non-Jewish colleague who says something clumsy but not malicious, with real humility. Not with the arrogance of “I know the real lesson of history,” not with eye-rolling superiority, but with the willingness to listen, to bow inside even if we never bow outside. That is how we keep relationships when everything around us wants to fracture them.
Because anxiety will not burst our bubbles. Outrage will not burst our bubbles. Only humility, and the quiet courage to seek peace and reconciliation while still protecting what is precious, can do that.
Shabbat shalom
Rabbi Mirski
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