In Jewish tradition, we mark the anniversary of a loved one’s death, a yarzheit (from the word for “to remember”) by lighting a candle. Let these words be as a light, spreading some of the warmth with which Nana blessed me.
Some people knew her as “Emma,” some as “Ma,” some as “Nana.” Many people here called her “little Nana on the hill”: a tiny woman living on a steep hill in a house surrounded by carefully tended flowers and brimming with objects, food, cats and dogs, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – even great-great-grandchildren.
But to call Nana “little” tells only of her physical stature. With her four-feet and some-odd inches, Nana moved through the world with love, determination, and strength. Growing up in an era when women made few choices, she very much forged ahead, making at times tough calls. She created a wonderful life for herself of which we were each privileged to be a part.
At the age of twenty, already working in a factory and caring for her four younger siblings since her mother died, Nana was eager to start a new life. She told the story with humor, saying she called a relative in Boston to inform her that she would go to Massachusetts and get married. “At that time, I didn’t know who,” Nana laughed, “but I was going!” “Who” turned out to be Leo DeBlosi, my grandfather. They met, chaperoned of course, at a train station in Boston on a Friday. The following Sunday, they were married. Nana described her first husband as “very easygoing and very respectful,” and she recalled with a broad smile how he helped around the house and with their five children. The early days of their marriage were marred by a house fire that left them living in what Nana vividly described as a “bare” apartment that they filled slowly. She joked that, by the time she left Somerville, she had “fifteen truckloads” of things to fill her home—and she wouldn’t venture to estimate how many truckloads she amassed in Townsend with Eddie, her second husband, and their two children.
Many of us have told colorful stories about Nana’s house: the souvenir spoons displayed on wooden racks, the magnets covering the surface of the refrigerator, the collection of wooden shoes in ascending sizes, the ever-multiplying lawn ornaments, the untouched sets of crystal dishes and the table set with mismatched flea market finds. Of course, the objects Nana collected held meaning for her: they are the result of much hard work and determination on her part. And they collectively help to tell a story about the woman who collected them, her tastes and her values. But they cannot compare to the real things of value Nana contributed to the world and to our lives: the children she raised, both biological and foster; the people she nurtured at all stages of life; the strong (at times stubborn) will she modeled to each of us, undoubtedly making us each stronger in turn; even the religious conviction she was willing to follow despite the fact that her family followed another path. “Little” Nana has made an immeasurable impression on each of our lives.
Each of us knew Nana in a different way, by a different name. But each of us is thankful for having known a woman of great humor, generosity, love, compassion, and conviction. Nana lived a long and complex life. She knew hard work, deep loss, tough times, and great love. She made two homes and two families that have remained intertwined, and she taught each of us lessons large and small—from how to make bone soup to how to express our honest opinions.
I have been keenly aware, for the past couple of months, that our loved ones cannot live forever. But I do believe in the importance of sharing our stories about those who have died, passing on their memories. I intend to share what I know of Nana with my own family in the future: her affection for her grandchildren and for her animals; her honesty, witty tongue, and humor; her strength and determination in leaving her home more than once to start a new phase in her life; her generosity and warmth, extending not only from the full spread laid out on the table and the wood-burning stove but from Nana’s heart, certainly huge in proportion to her small body. In Jewish tradition, we pray that the memories of those righteous people we have loved and lost will be a blessing to future generations. For Nana, zichrona livracha, may her memory be a blessing.
When we were little, the DeBlosi and Wojcuilewicz grandchildren considered it a milestone to become finally “taller than Nana.” We would each be blessed to be even half as strong, as loving, as amazing, as big a presence as “little Nana.”
For Nana, Emma Rose Sacoccia DeBlosi Wojcuilewicz, 6 June 1913 – 24 November 2007
By granddaughter Nicole Lyn DeBlosi
November 29, 2007
Friday, November 19, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
BaMakom HaZeh
[The following was a sermon given at Temple Beth Am in Monessen, PA and adapted from a sermon given at Shir Tikva in Winchester, MA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the congregation I am privileged to serve.]
I used to go out to the promenade across the valley from the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem just before sunset, my favorite time in Jerusalem, Yerushalaim shel zahav time—Jerusalem-of-gold time. The time when the slanted rays of the sun hit the sand-colored stones and the entire city shines gold.
Anyone who’s been to Jerusalem knows that it’s just not like anywhere else.
In the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, the narrow alleyways criss-cross sudden courtyards, winding up and down stairs, built upon layers and layers of stones attesting to the special place this hilltop city has held in Jewish history for centuries upon centuries. Suddenly, the city opens up and you’re standing at the Western Wall plaza. Thousands of people stuff notes into the crevices between the stones, carved and set in place during the time of King Herod. But around the corner, at the Southern Wall—that’s the spot I loved best.
The Southern Wall plaza contains a set of stairs leading to arches long since filled in with massive stone blocks. Pilgrims to the ancient Temple climbed these stairs and entered those arches to make sacrifices to God. Before them stood what must have been the largest human-built structure they had ever seen: the Temple of Solomon, and within it, the Holy of Holies. Unlike other sanctuaries of the Ancient Near East, the Temple in Jerusalem contained no statue. Instead, it held the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets on which the finger of God wrote the commandments.
It also held something else: a stone.
Jewish tradition says that the Holy of Holies stood upon the precise peak of Mount Moriah, the very spot where Abraham willingly offered his son Isaac as proof of his loyalty to God. But Abraham wasn’t the only Jewish patriarch to come into contact with that stone. The peak of Mount Moriah served not only as an altar but as a pillow. According to the rabbis, when Jacob camps out in the wilderness, the stone on which he rests his head is indeed the very same stone Abraham used for an altar.
From the Torah: Jacob leaves home to escape his brother Esau’s anger about the stolen birthright. Along his route, Jacob stops to rest, taking a stone for a pillow. In his sleep, “He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached the sky, and angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (28:12).
But Jacob’s experience on that night involved not only a vision of angels and a stairway and a realm beyond human experience.
As Jacob lay on the hard ground, his head upon the stone, he experienced a physical presence. “[Hinei ADONAI] And here is the Eternal [nitzav alaiv] standing beside him.” The God of his father Isaac and of his grandfather Abraham stood, a physical act, with Jacob, promising to give land, prosperity, and blessing to his descendants.
Jacob’s nearness to God motivates and changes him. When he wakes, he wonders aloud at his blindness to the significance of this place:
[Vayikatz Yaakov mishnato vayomer:] And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati”] “Aha! The Eternal was in this place and I did not know it!” [vayirah vayomar:] and he was shaken/awed/afraid, and he said: [“Mah-nora hamakom hazeh! ] “How awesome is this place! [ein zeh ki im beit elohim v’zeh sha’ar hashamayim”] This is none other than a house of God, and that is the gateway of heaven.” (28:16-18)
Jacob immediately erects a pillar and makes a vow to honor Adonai as his God.
While we tend to think of the presence of God as spiritual, we are strongly encouraged in this Torah portion to imagine the presence of God as physical—as upon us, aleinu. Jacob experienced the presence of God as an overwhelming, physical, bodily sensation. There was the Eternal in this place, here, at that very moment.
We might lament that we have no such opportunity. God simply doesn’t do that anymore. Or we might think, perhaps God appears in Jerusalem, at the peak of Mount Moriah, but not in the Monongahela Valley!
Jacob’s reply can guide us: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh] “Aha! There was the Eternal in this place [v’anochi lo yadati] and I did not know it!” (28:16). In Hebrew, personal pronouns are not necessary; verbs tell us all we need to know about both actor and action. Here, however, we read “v’anochi”—and I—“lo yadati”—I did not know. “There was the Eternal in this place and I, I did not know.”
In other words, how could I not have known? How could I not have seen? How could I not have felt? What was it about me that prevented me from recognizing the presence of God bamakom hazeh, in this place?
Torah commentators pore over the exact, earthly location of Jacob’s dream site. Rashi infers from this passage a remarkable reshaping of the physical world that brings Jacob close to important sites in the history of the covenant between God and Israel: “God folded the entire Land of Israel beneath [Jacob]” (Genesis Rabbah). Jacob’s pillow represents layer upon layer of sacred spots: Hamakom hazeh, “this place,” is at once the site of Abraham’s prayer and worship; Mt. Moriah, the place of the near-sacrifice of Isaac; and the field where Isaac prayed after his ordeal. Rashi argues that “this place” is extraordinary, linked to the Jewish past and deeply significant to the covenant between God and Israel.
We can wait for a dream of our own—one in which we are seamlessly folded into the Jewish past—but this is not the only way our Torah portion imagines the potential for humans to encounter the Divine.
Perhaps the key is that God was indeed bamakom hazeh, in this place—not at the top of the stairway, not behind the gate of heaven, but standing over Jacob, who slept on the hard ground with a rock for a pillow. What if that rock was “just” a rock?
Standing on the stairs by the Southern Wall in Jerusalem, it’s all too easy to think, “Achein! ” The rise is steep; you are truly climbing, the closed arches before you, behind you, the rocky hills of Jerusalem and beyond, the expanse of the desert and the looming mountains of Morav. Awesome.
In arguing that God provided a very special pillow for Jacob, the rabbis imply that certain places offer unique access to the divine.
When we pray in this sanctuary, do we have a special access to God? Do you feel differently in this room than you do in your living room? I do. But I am not sure that what is different about this place is the presence of the sefer Torah or the smooth stone surrounding the ark or the lovingly-tended and beautiful mantles covering the scrools. I am not sure it is the physical structure, this building with its ritual objects and works of art, its Talmud volumes and schooldesks. Rather, what makes this place sacred, what makes this place a Beit Elohim is you, is us, is the community we form each month when we gather to hear the words of our tradition, the community that continues to nurture one another in very real ways throughout the year, throughout the lives of each of its members. What makes this space sacred are the memories of b’nei mitzvah celebrated on this bima, offers of food and sympathy carried to a mourner’s house, the names of this community’s ancestors displayed on the memorial plaques, holiday dinners shared down in the social hall, lively arguments at Torah study. This Beth Am, a house of the people, is indeed a Beit Elohim, a House of God. Like Jacob’s dream-place, like hamakom hazeh, this place offers us a vision of a stairway to the divine.
Jerusalem is special. And being in this sanctuary helps many of us to differently focus our attention toward Jewish ideals, our own Jewish memories, and the Divine. But we learn in this week’s Torah portion that we can connect to our Jewish tradition in any and every place. God manifested in an ordinary place, a physical spot in the real, tangible world. The fact that Jacob, upon waking, builds not a temple or a palace but a pillar, a marker for the next passerby, suggests not that bamakom hazeh is the lone, particular, special dwelling-place of the God of our ancestors, but that we, if we are open to it, can experience the presence of God in the places where we find ourselves.
So, despite the rabbis’ confidence that Jacob’s makom hazeh marks an actual location in Israel, we need not conclude that we can find God in only a finite number of places. Rather, our tradition tells us that God loves the Jewish people enough to transform any place—even a bed on the ground and a stone pillow—into a space in which we experience God’s nearness. If we are open to the surprise (Achein! ), we too might find God bamakom hazeh, in this place. As Lawrence Kushner writes, “There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006: 25). We can open our hearts and minds to the surprise that, unbeknownst to us, God has been bamakom hazeh, in this place, all along.
I used to go out to the promenade across the valley from the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem just before sunset, my favorite time in Jerusalem, Yerushalaim shel zahav time—Jerusalem-of-gold time. The time when the slanted rays of the sun hit the sand-colored stones and the entire city shines gold.
Anyone who’s been to Jerusalem knows that it’s just not like anywhere else.
In the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, the narrow alleyways criss-cross sudden courtyards, winding up and down stairs, built upon layers and layers of stones attesting to the special place this hilltop city has held in Jewish history for centuries upon centuries. Suddenly, the city opens up and you’re standing at the Western Wall plaza. Thousands of people stuff notes into the crevices between the stones, carved and set in place during the time of King Herod. But around the corner, at the Southern Wall—that’s the spot I loved best.
The Southern Wall plaza contains a set of stairs leading to arches long since filled in with massive stone blocks. Pilgrims to the ancient Temple climbed these stairs and entered those arches to make sacrifices to God. Before them stood what must have been the largest human-built structure they had ever seen: the Temple of Solomon, and within it, the Holy of Holies. Unlike other sanctuaries of the Ancient Near East, the Temple in Jerusalem contained no statue. Instead, it held the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets on which the finger of God wrote the commandments.
It also held something else: a stone.
Jewish tradition says that the Holy of Holies stood upon the precise peak of Mount Moriah, the very spot where Abraham willingly offered his son Isaac as proof of his loyalty to God. But Abraham wasn’t the only Jewish patriarch to come into contact with that stone. The peak of Mount Moriah served not only as an altar but as a pillow. According to the rabbis, when Jacob camps out in the wilderness, the stone on which he rests his head is indeed the very same stone Abraham used for an altar.
From the Torah: Jacob leaves home to escape his brother Esau’s anger about the stolen birthright. Along his route, Jacob stops to rest, taking a stone for a pillow. In his sleep, “He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached the sky, and angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (28:12).
But Jacob’s experience on that night involved not only a vision of angels and a stairway and a realm beyond human experience.
As Jacob lay on the hard ground, his head upon the stone, he experienced a physical presence. “[Hinei ADONAI] And here is the Eternal [nitzav alaiv] standing beside him.” The God of his father Isaac and of his grandfather Abraham stood, a physical act, with Jacob, promising to give land, prosperity, and blessing to his descendants.
Jacob’s nearness to God motivates and changes him. When he wakes, he wonders aloud at his blindness to the significance of this place:
[Vayikatz Yaakov mishnato vayomer:] And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati”] “Aha! The Eternal was in this place and I did not know it!” [vayirah vayomar:] and he was shaken/awed/afraid, and he said: [“Mah-nora hamakom hazeh! ] “How awesome is this place! [ein zeh ki im beit elohim v’zeh sha’ar hashamayim”] This is none other than a house of God, and that is the gateway of heaven.” (28:16-18)
Jacob immediately erects a pillar and makes a vow to honor Adonai as his God.
While we tend to think of the presence of God as spiritual, we are strongly encouraged in this Torah portion to imagine the presence of God as physical—as upon us, aleinu. Jacob experienced the presence of God as an overwhelming, physical, bodily sensation. There was the Eternal in this place, here, at that very moment.
We might lament that we have no such opportunity. God simply doesn’t do that anymore. Or we might think, perhaps God appears in Jerusalem, at the peak of Mount Moriah, but not in the Monongahela Valley!
Jacob’s reply can guide us: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh] “Aha! There was the Eternal in this place [v’anochi lo yadati] and I did not know it!” (28:16). In Hebrew, personal pronouns are not necessary; verbs tell us all we need to know about both actor and action. Here, however, we read “v’anochi”—and I—“lo yadati”—I did not know. “There was the Eternal in this place and I, I did not know.”
In other words, how could I not have known? How could I not have seen? How could I not have felt? What was it about me that prevented me from recognizing the presence of God bamakom hazeh, in this place?
Torah commentators pore over the exact, earthly location of Jacob’s dream site. Rashi infers from this passage a remarkable reshaping of the physical world that brings Jacob close to important sites in the history of the covenant between God and Israel: “God folded the entire Land of Israel beneath [Jacob]” (Genesis Rabbah). Jacob’s pillow represents layer upon layer of sacred spots: Hamakom hazeh, “this place,” is at once the site of Abraham’s prayer and worship; Mt. Moriah, the place of the near-sacrifice of Isaac; and the field where Isaac prayed after his ordeal. Rashi argues that “this place” is extraordinary, linked to the Jewish past and deeply significant to the covenant between God and Israel.
We can wait for a dream of our own—one in which we are seamlessly folded into the Jewish past—but this is not the only way our Torah portion imagines the potential for humans to encounter the Divine.
Perhaps the key is that God was indeed bamakom hazeh, in this place—not at the top of the stairway, not behind the gate of heaven, but standing over Jacob, who slept on the hard ground with a rock for a pillow. What if that rock was “just” a rock?
Standing on the stairs by the Southern Wall in Jerusalem, it’s all too easy to think, “Achein! ” The rise is steep; you are truly climbing, the closed arches before you, behind you, the rocky hills of Jerusalem and beyond, the expanse of the desert and the looming mountains of Morav. Awesome.
In arguing that God provided a very special pillow for Jacob, the rabbis imply that certain places offer unique access to the divine.
When we pray in this sanctuary, do we have a special access to God? Do you feel differently in this room than you do in your living room? I do. But I am not sure that what is different about this place is the presence of the sefer Torah or the smooth stone surrounding the ark or the lovingly-tended and beautiful mantles covering the scrools. I am not sure it is the physical structure, this building with its ritual objects and works of art, its Talmud volumes and schooldesks. Rather, what makes this place sacred, what makes this place a Beit Elohim is you, is us, is the community we form each month when we gather to hear the words of our tradition, the community that continues to nurture one another in very real ways throughout the year, throughout the lives of each of its members. What makes this space sacred are the memories of b’nei mitzvah celebrated on this bima, offers of food and sympathy carried to a mourner’s house, the names of this community’s ancestors displayed on the memorial plaques, holiday dinners shared down in the social hall, lively arguments at Torah study. This Beth Am, a house of the people, is indeed a Beit Elohim, a House of God. Like Jacob’s dream-place, like hamakom hazeh, this place offers us a vision of a stairway to the divine.
Jerusalem is special. And being in this sanctuary helps many of us to differently focus our attention toward Jewish ideals, our own Jewish memories, and the Divine. But we learn in this week’s Torah portion that we can connect to our Jewish tradition in any and every place. God manifested in an ordinary place, a physical spot in the real, tangible world. The fact that Jacob, upon waking, builds not a temple or a palace but a pillar, a marker for the next passerby, suggests not that bamakom hazeh is the lone, particular, special dwelling-place of the God of our ancestors, but that we, if we are open to it, can experience the presence of God in the places where we find ourselves.
So, despite the rabbis’ confidence that Jacob’s makom hazeh marks an actual location in Israel, we need not conclude that we can find God in only a finite number of places. Rather, our tradition tells us that God loves the Jewish people enough to transform any place—even a bed on the ground and a stone pillow—into a space in which we experience God’s nearness. If we are open to the surprise (Achein! ), we too might find God bamakom hazeh, in this place. As Lawrence Kushner writes, “There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006: 25). We can open our hearts and minds to the surprise that, unbeknownst to us, God has been bamakom hazeh, in this place, all along.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Generation Ger
Somewhere in the back of my mind I always remember writing these papers for Mrs. Steinberg’s English class: a book review of Elie Wiesel’s Night, a reaction paper about the documentary Shoah, and a term paper on the Holocaust. I can recall the emotion more than the content: the shock, the disbelief, the sick emptiness in the pit of my stomach, the indignant anger, the tears welling up from a deep, deep place.
Until eighth grade world history class, I had remained utterly ignorant of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II). And then at age fourteen, I read obsessively—angry and weeping—about the cattle cars and the starvation, the selections and the gas chambers. The sheer information overwhelmed me. How could that have happened, then? But it was in Mrs. Steinberg’s class that I first saw the haunting images and started thinking about the Shoah in broader terms. Why? I asked, and the deeper question, How? How could human beings come to despise other human beings so, to ignore their humanity? There is no doubt that Mrs. Steinberg’s classes on the Holocaust left their mark on me, confirmed some things I knew about myself and my values and changed me, too, changed me down to my soul.
I’ve been thinking about those classes and those papers lately, reading an essay by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweiss called “The Stranger in our Mirror” and some other materials I read in preparation for a rabbinical school retreat on conversion and “outreach” (a term usually applied to Jewish efforts to include interfaith families in community and religious life). I read the materials alongside that week’s Torah portion, Toledot, a section that highlights the conflict between twin brothers Jacob and Esau. Rabbi Schulweiss notes that the Holocaust no longer unites the Jewish people as it had in the past; indeed, we spoke about this in our rabbinical school history class last year—the increasing personal distance from the Shoah, the aging and death of survivors, and the dilemma that seems to present for Hebrew School curricula. What happens to Jewish identity and Jewish memory when there is no longer a biological, generational connection to the formative events of the Jewish past?
So it was strange to have these ideas floating around in my head when I climbed up to my parents’ attic to clear out some of my childhood mementoes. Among the stuffed animals and the She-Ra action figures I found a box stuffed with writings—fraught, overworked, terrible poetry and essays on Steinbeck… and my paper on Night. So strange, to see my own concerns about the dehumanization of the Shoah laid out in prose upon paper, when I know the panic and the disgust I felt in even considering that slow and insidious process of transforming human beings into vermin. More surprising still were Mrs. Steinberg’s comments at the end of the paper, in red pen: “I’m reading [this essay] in the cafeteria of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where my father was given new life by the opposite of the monsters who could supply only death. […] How joyful I feel to read an essay like this from someone who will be on the side of good, not evil, to accomplish rather than destroy. L’Chaim!”
I’m sure I had no idea what “L’chaim” meant—my Yentl and Fiddler on the Roof phase began later, sparked in part by this class, no doubt. L’chaim—to life! Reading it now, that “L’Chaim!” takes on a different significance. In a way, it becomes part of my ancestry.
In Toledot, finding one’s place in the ancestry of the Jewish people is a complicated struggle. Jacob and Esau bitterly battle over the birthright; Esau even vows to murder his usurping young brother; the two are not reunited until later in the tale, after Jacob has been reassured by God that the fate of the Jewish people lay with him and his sons. Before the twins are born, Rebekah learns, “Two peoples are in your belly, two nations shall branch off from each other, from your womb. One people shall prevail over the other; the elder shall serve the younger” (25: 23). These verses became proof texts in the generations of conflict, suspicion, and hatred between Jews and Christians. And in this week’s parasha we also read of Esau’s marriage to two Hittite women—women who “were marat ruach—a bitterness of spirit to Isaac and Rebekah” (26:35). Esau’s pain reaches us through both his actions and his words. In an effort to win his parents’ approval, he takes another wife, one of the daughters of Ishmael, son of Abraham (28:6-9). And when he learns that Isaac has already bestowed his blessing on Jacob, he pleads, barcheni gam ani, avi—“Bless me—me, too, father!” (27:34).
Esau, a Jew born to a patriarch and a matriarch of our faith, feels left out of the story of our generations. I can identify with that, as I am sure many of us can. It is difficult to hear that even the Sages are suspicious of any taint of non-Jewish family creeping into the line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They argue, in Genesis Rabah, that Rebekah, daughter of idolatrous priests, might not have been bothered so much by Esau’s Canaanite wives because she herself had non-Jewish family.
I’m not sure I want Rebekah, or Isaac for that matter, to have been so very upset about their son’s marriages, but what also bothers me is the Sages’ assumption that anyone with non-Jewish family ties (like Rebekah) is inherently less invested in the future of Judaism. It’s the same argument about the constant “threat” of intermarriage and a dwindling Jewish population. I know there are piles of statistics about “the children of interfaith marriages” and the lack of Jewish observance in interfaith households, but those statistics have been changing, and in part any lack of observance might stem from the marginalization of interfaith families in our synagogues and communities. And, indeed, those statistics blur the fact that we’re talking about people—and I mean really, concretely, people we know. Me. So many of my classmates, colleagues, and friends who are ourselves converts or the children of converts or proud Jewish descendants of one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent. Moreover, I saw in the readings for the retreated I attended that so many researchers lump together the children of converts and the children of interfaith families, and both are a source for “alarm” because we lack a biological connection to the generations of the Jewish people. Schulweiss, for example, writes, “[H]e who chooses for Judaism one day may opt to choose out of Judaism another day or else his child may. In halakhic [that is, Jewish legal] terms the infant of a Jewish womb, whatever he/she may later choose, is irrevocably Jewish.”
What does it mean to be “irrevocably” Jewish? How does it feel to be the child of an interfaith family or a convert to Judaism and hear those words? Or to ask a related question, is biology destiny? Can we connect to the generations of the Jewish people—of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebekach, Rachel and Leah—no matter our blood or our heritage or our family name? What of the emotional connection I, and others like me, felt when learning about the Shoa?
I would not deny that biology is important. My parents, my Italian-American heritage, my sincere and at least for a time nourishing Catholic background—these affect me, shape me, and neither can I simply will them away, nor would I want to. And biology matters in the history and the future of the Jewish people—a Jew by birth who denies his Judaism can still fall victim to bigotry, as we know all too well. But, in terms of the future of the Judaism I love, the Judaism we teach, I think biology is emotion, at its root. The biology we care about, at least. That biology, those generations, are the stories and memories that we tell and inherit and claim. That biology is about relationships and values far more than it is about blood and pedigree.
Being a part of the generations of the Jewish people is about the smell of Bubbe’s challah baking in the oven, the tzedakah [literally “righteousness” but related also to the modern notion of charity] projects children and parents create together, the response to schoolyard bullying that stems from the knowledge that all people are created b’tzelem Elohim [in the image of God], the conversations we have as a community about Kosher laws and other ritual commandments. Judaism emerges in community, through lived values.
A Brandeis study we read on outreach and inclusion urges Jewish professionals to consider conversion “the first, rather than the last step in creating a Jewish identity.” I would argue that birth, too, is simply a first step. There is nothing inevitable about how a Jew-by-birth will live the values of Judaism in her life—just as there is nothing inevitable about how a new Jew, newly named and emerged from the mikveh, will live the values of Judaism in hers. Both need the support and the prodding of a community of Jews who struggle to figure out what these ancient texts and longstanding practices mean.
Our teacher Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman puts out a call to the leaders of the Jewish communities of the very near future, leaders whose approach to living Judaism will affect converts and prospective converts, interfaith families, and born Jews. In his book Re-Thinking Synagogues, he adamantly urges that Judaism must be a religion for us, and not “ethnic nostalgia.” By “religion” Dr. Hoffman means a combination of spirituality and ethics that speaks to the realities of our contemporary lives. He writes, “The only question that counts for us is ‘Why be Jewish?’”
The answer to that question cannot be only, “I am Jewish because I am the son of Jacob and of Isaac and of Abraham.” It cannot be solely, “I am Jewish because my blood is Jewish.” When the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional organization for Reform Rabbis in North America, asks converts to commit to establishing a Jewish home, it points to “the presence of items such as Jewish books, Jewish music, Jewish art, a tzedakah box, and mezuzah, as well as adopting Jewish practices” like saying certain prayers. But the presence of ritual objects and the recitation of prayers say little about the deep, emotional, and resonant concerns of people’s lives. Objects and prayers are empty without the values and the ethics that underlie them. I want to have a conversation about those values; I want that conversation to be what carries me and my classmates through our relationship together as colleages, as rabbis, as cantors, as educators, as Jews, and as descendants and heirs of the generations of the Jewish people, bound in a covenant that leads us to act in the world in loving-kindness and in justice.
V’eileh toldot Yitzhak ben Avraham, “And these are the generations of Isaac, son of Abraham” (Genesis 25:19). What are our generations? A list of names tracing blood and biology, egg and sperm? Or something more? Stories that take time to unfold and reveal. The light in our students’ eyes when they make a connection between the Torah and their daily lives. These are our generations. V’eileh toledotai, and these are my generations: Nicole Lyn, daughter of Janice and Bob, granddaughter of Emma Rose, Dvora Nechama bat Avraham v’Sarah, and a child, too, of Mrs. Steinberg.
Until eighth grade world history class, I had remained utterly ignorant of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II). And then at age fourteen, I read obsessively—angry and weeping—about the cattle cars and the starvation, the selections and the gas chambers. The sheer information overwhelmed me. How could that have happened, then? But it was in Mrs. Steinberg’s class that I first saw the haunting images and started thinking about the Shoah in broader terms. Why? I asked, and the deeper question, How? How could human beings come to despise other human beings so, to ignore their humanity? There is no doubt that Mrs. Steinberg’s classes on the Holocaust left their mark on me, confirmed some things I knew about myself and my values and changed me, too, changed me down to my soul.
I’ve been thinking about those classes and those papers lately, reading an essay by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweiss called “The Stranger in our Mirror” and some other materials I read in preparation for a rabbinical school retreat on conversion and “outreach” (a term usually applied to Jewish efforts to include interfaith families in community and religious life). I read the materials alongside that week’s Torah portion, Toledot, a section that highlights the conflict between twin brothers Jacob and Esau. Rabbi Schulweiss notes that the Holocaust no longer unites the Jewish people as it had in the past; indeed, we spoke about this in our rabbinical school history class last year—the increasing personal distance from the Shoah, the aging and death of survivors, and the dilemma that seems to present for Hebrew School curricula. What happens to Jewish identity and Jewish memory when there is no longer a biological, generational connection to the formative events of the Jewish past?
So it was strange to have these ideas floating around in my head when I climbed up to my parents’ attic to clear out some of my childhood mementoes. Among the stuffed animals and the She-Ra action figures I found a box stuffed with writings—fraught, overworked, terrible poetry and essays on Steinbeck… and my paper on Night. So strange, to see my own concerns about the dehumanization of the Shoah laid out in prose upon paper, when I know the panic and the disgust I felt in even considering that slow and insidious process of transforming human beings into vermin. More surprising still were Mrs. Steinberg’s comments at the end of the paper, in red pen: “I’m reading [this essay] in the cafeteria of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where my father was given new life by the opposite of the monsters who could supply only death. […] How joyful I feel to read an essay like this from someone who will be on the side of good, not evil, to accomplish rather than destroy. L’Chaim!”
I’m sure I had no idea what “L’chaim” meant—my Yentl and Fiddler on the Roof phase began later, sparked in part by this class, no doubt. L’chaim—to life! Reading it now, that “L’Chaim!” takes on a different significance. In a way, it becomes part of my ancestry.
In Toledot, finding one’s place in the ancestry of the Jewish people is a complicated struggle. Jacob and Esau bitterly battle over the birthright; Esau even vows to murder his usurping young brother; the two are not reunited until later in the tale, after Jacob has been reassured by God that the fate of the Jewish people lay with him and his sons. Before the twins are born, Rebekah learns, “Two peoples are in your belly, two nations shall branch off from each other, from your womb. One people shall prevail over the other; the elder shall serve the younger” (25: 23). These verses became proof texts in the generations of conflict, suspicion, and hatred between Jews and Christians. And in this week’s parasha we also read of Esau’s marriage to two Hittite women—women who “were marat ruach—a bitterness of spirit to Isaac and Rebekah” (26:35). Esau’s pain reaches us through both his actions and his words. In an effort to win his parents’ approval, he takes another wife, one of the daughters of Ishmael, son of Abraham (28:6-9). And when he learns that Isaac has already bestowed his blessing on Jacob, he pleads, barcheni gam ani, avi—“Bless me—me, too, father!” (27:34).
Esau, a Jew born to a patriarch and a matriarch of our faith, feels left out of the story of our generations. I can identify with that, as I am sure many of us can. It is difficult to hear that even the Sages are suspicious of any taint of non-Jewish family creeping into the line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They argue, in Genesis Rabah, that Rebekah, daughter of idolatrous priests, might not have been bothered so much by Esau’s Canaanite wives because she herself had non-Jewish family.
I’m not sure I want Rebekah, or Isaac for that matter, to have been so very upset about their son’s marriages, but what also bothers me is the Sages’ assumption that anyone with non-Jewish family ties (like Rebekah) is inherently less invested in the future of Judaism. It’s the same argument about the constant “threat” of intermarriage and a dwindling Jewish population. I know there are piles of statistics about “the children of interfaith marriages” and the lack of Jewish observance in interfaith households, but those statistics have been changing, and in part any lack of observance might stem from the marginalization of interfaith families in our synagogues and communities. And, indeed, those statistics blur the fact that we’re talking about people—and I mean really, concretely, people we know. Me. So many of my classmates, colleagues, and friends who are ourselves converts or the children of converts or proud Jewish descendants of one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent. Moreover, I saw in the readings for the retreated I attended that so many researchers lump together the children of converts and the children of interfaith families, and both are a source for “alarm” because we lack a biological connection to the generations of the Jewish people. Schulweiss, for example, writes, “[H]e who chooses for Judaism one day may opt to choose out of Judaism another day or else his child may. In halakhic [that is, Jewish legal] terms the infant of a Jewish womb, whatever he/she may later choose, is irrevocably Jewish.”
What does it mean to be “irrevocably” Jewish? How does it feel to be the child of an interfaith family or a convert to Judaism and hear those words? Or to ask a related question, is biology destiny? Can we connect to the generations of the Jewish people—of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebekach, Rachel and Leah—no matter our blood or our heritage or our family name? What of the emotional connection I, and others like me, felt when learning about the Shoa?
I would not deny that biology is important. My parents, my Italian-American heritage, my sincere and at least for a time nourishing Catholic background—these affect me, shape me, and neither can I simply will them away, nor would I want to. And biology matters in the history and the future of the Jewish people—a Jew by birth who denies his Judaism can still fall victim to bigotry, as we know all too well. But, in terms of the future of the Judaism I love, the Judaism we teach, I think biology is emotion, at its root. The biology we care about, at least. That biology, those generations, are the stories and memories that we tell and inherit and claim. That biology is about relationships and values far more than it is about blood and pedigree.
Being a part of the generations of the Jewish people is about the smell of Bubbe’s challah baking in the oven, the tzedakah [literally “righteousness” but related also to the modern notion of charity] projects children and parents create together, the response to schoolyard bullying that stems from the knowledge that all people are created b’tzelem Elohim [in the image of God], the conversations we have as a community about Kosher laws and other ritual commandments. Judaism emerges in community, through lived values.
A Brandeis study we read on outreach and inclusion urges Jewish professionals to consider conversion “the first, rather than the last step in creating a Jewish identity.” I would argue that birth, too, is simply a first step. There is nothing inevitable about how a Jew-by-birth will live the values of Judaism in her life—just as there is nothing inevitable about how a new Jew, newly named and emerged from the mikveh, will live the values of Judaism in hers. Both need the support and the prodding of a community of Jews who struggle to figure out what these ancient texts and longstanding practices mean.
Our teacher Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman puts out a call to the leaders of the Jewish communities of the very near future, leaders whose approach to living Judaism will affect converts and prospective converts, interfaith families, and born Jews. In his book Re-Thinking Synagogues, he adamantly urges that Judaism must be a religion for us, and not “ethnic nostalgia.” By “religion” Dr. Hoffman means a combination of spirituality and ethics that speaks to the realities of our contemporary lives. He writes, “The only question that counts for us is ‘Why be Jewish?’”
The answer to that question cannot be only, “I am Jewish because I am the son of Jacob and of Isaac and of Abraham.” It cannot be solely, “I am Jewish because my blood is Jewish.” When the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional organization for Reform Rabbis in North America, asks converts to commit to establishing a Jewish home, it points to “the presence of items such as Jewish books, Jewish music, Jewish art, a tzedakah box, and mezuzah, as well as adopting Jewish practices” like saying certain prayers. But the presence of ritual objects and the recitation of prayers say little about the deep, emotional, and resonant concerns of people’s lives. Objects and prayers are empty without the values and the ethics that underlie them. I want to have a conversation about those values; I want that conversation to be what carries me and my classmates through our relationship together as colleages, as rabbis, as cantors, as educators, as Jews, and as descendants and heirs of the generations of the Jewish people, bound in a covenant that leads us to act in the world in loving-kindness and in justice.
V’eileh toldot Yitzhak ben Avraham, “And these are the generations of Isaac, son of Abraham” (Genesis 25:19). What are our generations? A list of names tracing blood and biology, egg and sperm? Or something more? Stories that take time to unfold and reveal. The light in our students’ eyes when they make a connection between the Torah and their daily lives. These are our generations. V’eileh toledotai, and these are my generations: Nicole Lyn, daughter of Janice and Bob, granddaughter of Emma Rose, Dvora Nechama bat Avraham v’Sarah, and a child, too, of Mrs. Steinberg.
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