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“Is Jewish Survival Enough?” Several years ago, I traveled with my family to Louisville, Kentucky to help my mother-in-law move out of the home she’d lived in for forty years. As we neared the end of our week there, I realized that, though I’d gone to synagogue in Louisville many times, I’d never been to church. I knew that Louisville was the home of several so-called mega-churches; I decided it would be interesting to visit one of them. So on Sunday morning, I opened up the phone book, found a church, and drove there. My son, Jeremy, came along to keep me company. There were lots of empty parking spaces in the parking lot. That didn’t surprise me. It was, after all, July 4th weekend. But looks can be deceiving. When we entered, I realized that, yes, attendance was off, but not as much as I might have thought. Instead of their customary attendance, only about two thousand people were there that morning. We were greeted warmly. We were held back at the entrance as a particularly energetic musical number, performed by eighty or ninety singers and a dozen or so musicians, came to a close. At that point, we slipped unobtrusively into the back of the sanctuary. And then I looked around. We weren’t quite as inconspicuous as one might think. After all, everyone else was African American! As I began to reflect on that, the minister began his sermon. “I’m going to speak to you this morning,” he thundered, “about the topic that we’ve been talking about for the past several weeks: (pause) The Jews.” At this point, I turned and looked at Jeremy, and Jeremy looked at me. “Thanks, Dad!” his eyes said. There we were, as far as I could tell, the only Jews in the auditorium. At first, I admit, I was a bit worried. What was he going to say about the Jews? What was going to be his message to his flock? The minister began by saying that he admired the Jews. And so I began to relax. But then my question was: what is it about Judaism, about our way of life, that has evoked his respect? As he continued, it became clear. The main message he was trying to convey is that the people in his parish, and in general, black people throughout the country, could learn a lot from the Jews because, as he put it, their motto is “Never Again.” “I admire the Jews,” he said, “because they have survived, and they’re not going to take it anymore.” “That’s what,” he went on to say, “we can learn from them.” Well, I thought to myself, that’s a nice message. Better to survive than not to survive. But, on the other hand, is that all there is? Among all the things that I might point to about Judaism, is that its essence? At a certain point in the service, my son and I got up and tiptoed out of the room. I had arranged to be someplace at a certain hour, and the service was just going on much longer than I had anticipated. I think I left somewhere in the middle of their version of Musaf. To this day, I regret that! I would have wanted to greet the minister after the service. During the rest of that day, I thought about what I would have wanted to say to him, had I had the opportunity. First, of course, I would have wanted to thank him for his congregation’s warm welcome. The ushers were very menschlich. They made Jeremy and me feel very comfortable visiting that church. I would love to go back there one day. There was an infectious spirit of joy and devotion to God in that place. But I would also have wanted to follow up on that sermon. I would have wanted to share with the minister what I personally find most admirable about the Jewish people. Yes, we have survived, and that’s no mean feat. But for me, at least, there’s always been more to Judaism than that. Much more. Concerns about Jewish survival have, of course, always been with us. We’ve been called (by the distinguished Jewish historian, Simon Rawidowicz), the “ever-dying people” because we’re always worried that we might disappear. Just last month, Professor Jack Wertheimer of the Jewish Theological Seminary wrote an article in Commentary expressing concern over, among other things, the low Jewish birthrate in America. I share those concerns, but for me different questions animate me: Survive for what? Could survival alone possibly be sufficient? What is it that provides meaning to the life of the Jew? What does the Bible have to say about this? If you take a look at the Book of Exodus, you find your answer. The most dramatic part of that book is, of course, the crossing of the Red Sea. There’s anxiety and suspense beforehand: Will the Children of Israel make it across? Will their enemies also make it across? And there’s relief and thanksgiving afterwards, when the people make it across safely. If survival were enough, the Book could just as well end there. But it doesn’t. Instead, as we know, the Children of Israel head toward another rendezvous with God—this one at Mount Sinai, where they receive the laws and rules and practices to guide them for the rest of their days. The Book of Exodus without Sinai would be incomplete, as would be the Jewish people, if all we had unifying us was the memory that we had survived. The Book of Exodus is telling us that our relationship with God cannot just be one of gratitude for our survival, it has to be a partnership in which we bear responsibility for behaving in certain ways. Being Jewish has always meant more than being a Jew. It has meant being part of a people pursuing a unique way of life. The preservation of the Jewish people is important because we stand for something. We stand for the pursuit of justice and righteousness and kindness and holiness—not just in general, but in our own unique way. These values may sound fairly universal, and we might think that this quest can be fulfilled fairly universally, but every people has developed its own ways of pursuing them. There are Christian ways, there are Moslem ways, and, of course, there are Jewish ways. The Jewish ways are what we call the mitzvot. They are our ways of doing the right thing and striving for holiness, developed over the past two thousand years. The mitzvot comprise a system to provide meaning to our lives. The mitzvot help us create a holy community; they keep us focused on what Jewish people has deemed most important. As Jews, we have a shared language, we have foods we eat and those we don’t, we have special days set aside for certain acts; we have unique traditions and celebrations, that bind us to our history and to each other. We even have unique ways of acting ethically in the world: tsedakah, after all, is not identical to charity. Now, any individual could pursue any of these goals as an individual. But then he or she would not be pursuing them as a Jew. For not everything that every individual Jew chooses to do is a Jewish choice. To be a Jew means to be a part of a holy people committed not just to our individual goals, but to our people’s ways of pursuing these ultimate values. This past summer, I visited the new museum at Yad VaShem. It’s rather amazing, and I urge everyone to go. Designed by Moshe Safdie, it is a building whose structure mirrors the message it wishes to convey. There is so much to see, that one visit is really insufficient. And so I came back again. As I wandered through my second time around, I came upon a small exhibit of pictures. Beneath the exhibit was a set of drawers. In the drawers were information, letters and artifacts that told the stories of the photographs. There was a story in every drawer. One story spoke to my heart. I couldn’t forget it. It was the story of Father Hubert and Louis Celis, two Protestant priests in a small town in occupied Belgium. The Jews were on the run in the town. One couple, Tina and Moszek Rotenberg, refugees in Brussels, decided to put their four children, two boys and two girls, in the care of the two ministers. The ministers decided to split the children up: the boys stayed with Father Hubert Celis, and the girls were farmed out to another family. We know how some of those stories ended up. So many children in these situations, if they indeed survived, were raised in homes where they were forced or, at the very least, encouraged to lose their Jewish identity. But not here. These two Belgian clerics felt that that would be wrong. After the parents of the two boys had been arrested and deported, Father Celis found, in their personal effects, a set of tefillin. When the older of the two boys became 13, Father Celis insisted that he put on tefillin every day. The boy complied. This continued until Saturday came along. At that point, the boy said to him, “It’s our practice not to put on tefillin on Shabbat.” The minister said, “Well, I’m going to check on that, and if that’s correct, I won’t insist. But I’m not going to take your word on that.” (Father Celis apparently knew a thing or two about teenagers.) What was going on in Father Celis’s head? Why was he so insistent that the boy preserve not only his identification as a Jew, but a strong connection to Jewish practice? It’s because he understood the importance of Jewish observance. He certainly understood that there are Christian ways of striving for the sacred and thus there must also be Jewish ways of doing so, and that they’re not necessarily the same. Yes, he was going to do all he could to help this child survive. He was going to hide him and feed him and clothe him. But he knew, also, that if this child survived the war, unless he learned not only that he was a Jew but also how, as a Jew, he could aspire to holiness, he would not be giving this child his fair due. In one of the first chapters in the Talmud that young children learn, Eilu Mitziot, chapter two of Bava Metzia, we’re taught the basic law that, if at all possible, we must strive to return lost property, such as wandering oxen. At the end of the chapter comes what might seem like a riddle: What if we find something belonging to one of our parents and also something belonging to our teacher? Which one do we return first? The answer is that we first return our teacher’s lost property and then our parent’s. Why is that? Because, as the Talmud puts it, though our parents bring us into this world, our teachers bring us into the world to come. Our parents may give us life in this world, but our teachers give life meaning. In the language of the Talmud, Father Celis brought that Jewish boy into the world to come. I would have wanted to introduce that minister in Louisville to Father Celis. I would have wanted him to meet someone who understood as well as any of us, how important it is for Jews to be Jews, in the fullest sense of the word. Yes, we must strive to survive, but the challenge for us is to create Jewish families and Jewish communities where Judaism is lived and loved. Values cannot be passed on in the abstract. Values must be lived—lived out as part of a community, a people. Let’s live up to our promise as members of this great people. Let’s commit ourselves to doing God’s work here on earth, and let’s do that in the best way that we as Jews can, namely, in the Jewish way. Amen. |
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