Yesterday morning, as synagogues around the world were preparing to read one of the most enigmatic scenes in the Torah, a bush aflame yet unconsumed, a synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi was set on fire. The library and administrative offices of Beth Israel were reduced to charred ruins. Two Torah scrolls were destroyed. Five were damaged. One Torah, rescued from Europe after the Holocaust, remained intact. On the very morning Jews everywhere were turning toward a story about fire as revelation, fire was being used as a weapon of erasure. [Read more about the fire here.]
The Torah does not treat fire as a neutral symbol. Fire can purify. Fire can consume. Fire can reveal. Fire can erase. The rabbis ask a deceptively simple question about the burning bush. Why a thornbush? Why not a mountain, a cedar, a palace? They offer a theological response. Divine presence does not hover above history. It dwells within it. It discloses itself through exposure. The lowly becomes luminous. The fragile becomes the site of encounter. In other words, the sacred does not appear where power is already secure. It appears where vulnerability is most easily ignored.
That is why the bush burns. And that is why it is not consumed. Moses “turns aside to see.” That small movement of attention becomes the beginning of liberation. Emmanuel Levinas once wrote that “ethics is an optics.” Responsibility begins not with principles, but with interruption, with the moment the face of the other breaks into our self-contained world and demands presence. The bush functions like a face. It arrests Moses. It refuses to be background. It summons response.
That, too, is what antisemitism seeks to destroy. Not only bodies or buildings, but visibility, continuity, presence, and the right to be more than provisional. The arson of a synagogue is never only a crime against property. It is a philosophical claim enacted through violence, that this life, this memory, this people are removable. The Torahs that burned yesterday were carriers of time. They were the accumulated listening of generations. To destroy a Torah is to try to sever the future from the past.
And yet, one of the Beth Israel Torahs that survived was one that had already passed through the furnaces of Europe. A Torah that had already known what it meant to be hunted. A Torah that had already refused erasure. Once again, a Torah that, like the bush, was not consumed. There is no metaphor large enough to contain that, and I am not sure there should be.
The history of Beth Israel itself bears this out. In September 1967, local members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the synagogue’s building in response to its leadership’s support for civil-rights activism, damaging offices and property. Though no one was killed, this attack reminded the city that bigotry often lashes out where moral witness is strongest. The congregation’s resilience in the face of that terror became part of its identity and its witness, a testament to enduring presence.
Hannah Arendt insisted on a sharp distinction between power and violence. Power, she wrote, “springs up between people when they act together.” It is collective, relational, and world-building. Violence, by contrast, is what appears when power has failed. It can destroy power, she argued, but it can never create it. Where violence rules absolutely, power disappears. The fire that attacks a synagogue is not power. It is its opposite. It is the language of impotence. It can only negate. It cannot build a world in which anyone could actually live.
This distinction matters, because in our time we have become dangerously casual about flame. We have watched destruction framed as justice, erasure framed as liberation, annihilation framed as moral clarity. The past years have taught us that not every uprising is ethical, and not every resistance is righteous. Some fires do not seek dignity. Some seek disappearance. So we must be precise. Fire is not automatically sacred. It depends on what it asks of us.
Levinas taught that responsibility is asymmetrical. We are obligated before we choose. We are summoned before we consent. The bush does not ask Moses what he thinks. It tells him, You will go. That is what makes this moment both unbearable and clarifying. A synagogue was burned yesterday on the morning Jews were preparing to read about a fire that summons human beings into moral life. Not all fires are the same. Some erase. Some expose. Some silence. Some summon.
Antisemitism is not simply hatred. It is a metaphysics. It tries to turn Jews into a problem rather than a presence. It tries to make Jewish life conditional, revocable, temporary. A synagogue stands for the opposite: rootedness, memory, continuity, stubborn belonging. That is why it is targeted.
The burning bush teaches that fragility and holiness often share the same address. It teaches that endurance is not the absence of threat. It is the capacity to remain standing inside it. It teaches that survival can itself become a moral act.
It is easier to destroy than to sustain, easier to burn than to tend, easier to terrorize than to build. Judaism is a civilization of builders. We plant trees whose shade we will never sit under. We teach texts whose meanings we will never finish. We light flames meant to illumine, not to consume.
Every generation stands before fire. Every generation must decide what kind it is witnessing. And every generation must decide whether it will turn aside, notice, and respond.
Rabbi Ben Spratt is the senior rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Sholom.
