My renewed hope for a changing South Africa

There’s nothing quite like coming back to your hometown. The place that shaped your childhood, wove its way through your adolescence, and guided you into adulthood.

I have now lived more of my life outside Southern Africa than in it. While I have Aussified (and hopefully not ossified), I still feel like I am caught between continents. 

My wife and I left a South Africa torn by racism and riven by the injustices of apartheid. Poverty and suffering were endemic. 

Yet this was the country that gave my parents refuge from the horrendous hostility and devastation of the Holocaust. This was the land that allowed the Litvaks, Lithuanian Jews, to recreate the tight-knit communities they had left behind. In time, they not only celebrated it with their cuisine and Yiddish culture, but also by renewing its proud and demanding intellectual tradition at the southern tip of Africa. It was here that I learned the Torah from singular scholars, some from the old country itself. 

I have returned many times over the years to visit my family and speak to local Jewish congregations. Most often, I was seen as the 'visitor' from thriving and creative Australia, sharing stories of our proud achievements in this accepting and lucky land.

Australia was seen as a place of refuge for many Shoah survivors and a proud example of multicultural achievement and multi-faith harmony: a peaceful and accepting nation in contrast to the volatile and violent reality of post-apartheid South Africa. 
 
On my most recent visit this year, nothing was quite the same. I had changed, Australia had changed, South Africa had changed. The world shifted on October 7, 2023. There was a tectonic transformation in Jewish consciousness and the very identity of so many of us suddenly felt alien. What we had assumed about our lives and the future no longer held. We were, in the Talmudic phrase, in an upside-down world.