Why anti-Semitism is surging across the political spectrum

Rabbi Romiel Daniel felt something particularly poignant this Hanukkah season as he and his congregation sang the words of “Ma’oz Tsur,” a 13th-century Hebrew poem that is sung each night during the ceremonial lighting of the menorah’s candles.

“It is a song about the victory of the weak over the strong, a victory of good over evil, a victory of the holy over the unholy, as such,” says Rabbi Daniel, head of the Rego Park Jewish Center, a synagogue in Queens. “It’s about the fact that all this was possible, not because of man’s strength at all, but because God was on our side.”

But Ma’oz Tsur, which recounts the history of God’s saving acts and is often translated as “Rock of Ages,” also carries a lamentation: “Our salvation takes too long, and there is no end to the bad days,” worshippers sing in the final stanza.

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