Rabbi Norman Patz

Past, Present And Future

Shabbat Nahamu 5781/2021

Rabbi Norman Patz

Temple Beth Shalom

I would like to share with you a brief look at our past, our present and our future in terms of Judaic tradition and Jewish persistence.

Shabbat Nahamu, the Sabbath of consolation, follows Tisha B’Av, the day which commemorates Jewish national tragedies in 586 BCE, 70 CE, and 1492 among others. On Tisha B’Av, Sefardic Jews have a kinah, a lament, that starts Ma nish’tana – “Why is this day different” (the same phrase in the Passover Haggadah that introduces the Four Questions). The kinah concludes with an expression of comfort and hope in the form of a poem written by the greatest of our medieval Jewish poets, Yehudah HaLevi. It is one of his shirei tziyon – songs of Zion. 

Zion, don’t you have any response
to your last remaining flocks, your captive hearts,
who send you messages of love? 

…

When I dream of how your exiles will return,
I become a harp (singing) your songs.

Our Jewish tradition assigns haftarot of consolation for the seven Shabbatot following Tisha B’Av. According to Rabbi David Abudraham, a great scholar who lived in 14th century Spain (hibur peirush ha-b’rakhot v’ha-tefilot – “A Composition Explaining the Blessings and the Prayers” – published in nine editions because of its popularity). The seven haftarot, all from Second Isaiah, provide an escalating drama of comfort and consolation that we can relate to. They make sense in terms of our modern understanding of the psychology of grieving.

The first week’s haftarah, (Isaiah 40:1-26), “seek comfort My people,” describes a people who struggle to be reconciled with God. The second haftarah (Isaiah 49:14-51:3), laments that “God has forsaken us.”  The third (Isaiah 59:11-55:5), describes Israel as nevertheless still stubbornly seeking comfort from God. In the fourth week’s haftarah (Isaiah 51:12-52:12), we read God’s response: “I, I alone will comfort you.”

And so, in the fifth and sixth weeks, we have new reaffirmations of Israel’s faith in God. The haftarah for the fifth week (Isaiah 54:1-10), “Sing O barren one, you who bore no children… break out, sing aloud!”

And in sixth week (Isaiah 60:1-22), “Arise, shine for your light has dawned.” And finally, in week seven (Isaiah 61:10-63:9), “I will rejoice … Redemption is on the horizon.”

Abudraham portrays the progression of haftarot as going from despair to renewed faith and exultation. That’s the way our tradition has treated the devastating impact on our people’s continuing existence. And all of this, of course, in the words of Jews living in exile from Israel, the still-yearned for ancestral homeland.

Fast forward to the present. Israel has been realized. The ingathering of the exiles has begun. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 is the greatest success of all the 20th century movements of national liberation. The full prayer for the State of Israel describes that creation in theological terms as reishit tzi’mihat ge’ula-teinu – the beginning of our redemption. Yet suddenly, in denial of all truth, popular narrative today has transformed Israel into the worst villain of all nations. It’s not just the Soviet accusation that Israel has been transformed from the David resisting the Arab Goliath into the monstrous Israeli Goliath persecuting the poor Palestinians. Now, Israel is accused of being a nation of colonialist settlers, practitioners of apartheid and genocide, white Jewish supremacist oppressors of defenseless Palestinians. 

Even many Jews are persuaded by these accusations. A recent poll says that 25% of American Jews believe that Israel is an apartheid state. Twenty-two percent believe that Israel is committing genocide. Twenty-two percent more are undecided. And nine percent believe that the State of Israel should not exist. Again: these are opinions of Jews living in America! Why don’t they know that the charge of genocide is false? That in 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza, there were a million Palestinians and that today there are five million Palestinians living in those areas?

Why don’t they know that the accusation of white Jewish supremacy is false? That two-thirds of Israelis are people of color and that 15-20 % of American Jews are people of color as well?

Those who believe these lies are victims; they have been taken in by ideologically driven narratives that are unconnected to reality. One of these is the official narrative of the Black Lives movement that pillories Israel and distorts the truth beyond recognition. Another narrative uses critical race theory to reduce Jews to white oppressors. A third is the internationalization of intersectionality that has compassion for everyone except Jews. Yet another narrative merges anti-Zionism into antisemitism. Net: all Jews are guilty, even those who subscribe to these devastating interlinked narratives. And yes, I am dealing only with the left today because of my deep disappointment with the naivete of Jewish progressives and the relative silence of people who should be our allies.

Now, let’s look at the future by way of an imperfect analogy. Nissim de Camondo, the son of a wealthy French Jewish family, was a fighter pilot in World War I. After he was killed in action, his father, Moise, deeded the family’s grand Parisian home to the French State. Despite the high status of the family (they were married to richest Jewish families, the Rothschilds and the Ephrusis), and despite the fact that France had been the first modern European country to grant the Jews full civil rights, during the Second World War, the Nazi-backed Vichy government arrested the surviving members of the Camondo family and sent them to Auschwitz. The official record says that the de Camondos died for France. But the truth is that they died because of France.

The Nissim de Camondo Museum still exists in Paris, but only a tiny plaque makes these connections. It is clear that the nation that the Camondos loved savagely betrayed them. (David Bell, New York Review of Books, July 1, 2021) 

In an eerie contemporary parallel, a young French woman of mixed North African descent, offended by French racism, is quoted in yesterday’s New York Times as saying: “I often say that I’m in love with a republic that doesn’t love me.”

What are the implications for American Jews? Most American Jews still think that we are safe. But so did French Jews. So did German Jews. So do Argentinian Jews. So do Venezuelan Jews. 

If Jews are merely tolerated in Western countries despite our patriotism, despite our cultural, scientific and economic contributions, what is our future?

I wish I could talk in terms of sweetness and light. On this Shabbat, when the Torah reading includes the Ten Commandments, I would have preferred to include Mark Twain’s praise “Concerning the Jews” (as Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Congregation Kehillath Jeshurun of Manhattan is doing this Shabbat), but I cannot.

This what Mark Twain wrote in an article for Harper’s Magazine in 1898:

“To conclude. —If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one per cent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of … He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.

“The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

I need to put the dark story I have sketched out here together with Mark Twain’s optimistic vision. Doing so, enables me to remain a prisoner of hope. As Shaul Tchernichovsky, an early 20th century Jewish poet, wrote: A-ah-minah gam b’atid – “I still believe in the future.” 

How can we reconcile our traditional literature of consolation and hope with the dark reality that seems to be emerging?

Commence worrying. Details to follow.

I just can’t let go of Hanukkah yet. Our TBS daily candle lightings, with shared greetings, smiling faces and wonderful memories described each night, were truly extraordinary. They fulfilled the Hanukkah message: Banish darkness, spread the light. All despite COVID and the technological limitations of Zoom.

My unwillingness to let Hanukkah go was reinforced yesterday afternoon by my participation, again by Zoom, in a lecture presentation by a rabbi whom some of you know because he has led services here at TBS: Rabbi Dr. Rifat Sonsino. He spoke about Sefardic Hanukkah customs. In his childhood home in Istanbul, Turkey, his mother made a hanukiyah by pouring oil onto a plate and arranging eight wicks from the oil in the center of the plate to just beyond the rim and that was it! (Note: Sefardi Jews made beautiful hannukiyot too. One of the hanyukiyot Naomi and I lit this year comes from 19^th century Iraq: it has five “yad” – hand – designs and a Muslim crescent above the shamash.)

Rabbi Sonsino’s family didn’t give gifts or spin dreidels. They are Ashkenazic customs which he learned only when he entered rabbinical school in Cincinnati. They ate burmuelos, puffy fritters deep fried in oil – fritos con azete – and not potato latkes, and to this day Ines Sonsino, Rabbi Sonsino’s wife, makes bizkochos (cookies) as a special Hanukkah treat. As for songs, no Yiddish of course; perhaps some Hebrew melodies plus Ocho Candelikas.

Rabbi Sonsino expressed a strong opinion about the Hanukkah miracle. He said very emphatically that he doesn’t believe in miracles. God, for him, doesn’t intervene in the workings of nature. Rabbi Sonsino emphasizes instead the military victory, as I do – with some additions I’ll remind you of in a moment—and he explained how and why the oil miracle story entered the tradition very late – in the Talmud, codified around the year 500 CE, some 660 years later than the story of Hanukkah. The earlier texts – First and Second Maccabees, which are not in the Bible but in the Apocrypha, do speak about eight days, but indicate that the number represented a delayed celebration of Sukkot, which was a very important festival for an agricultural society. It was the end of harvest work and a time for celebration, entirely likely more important than Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.

As you know, I too acknowledge that the oil story seems to be a late add on. For me, that addition itself is the real miracle of Hanukkah. Here is why:

It has two parts: First, a military victory against the great Seleucid empire, successor to Alexander the Great. How could a small group of rebels win against these great armies, particularly since the geography of the Middle East made Israel a very important and sensitive military area – the land bridge to Egypt, where the rival Ptolemaic Empire was located? Israel wasn’t a backwater that the Syrian Greeks could ignore; it was like the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea today. So, what happened? The Seleucids were facing other military threats. On their east, the Parthians and on their west, the Roman Empire. These were their main strategic concerns. Judea, while important, was more of a distraction than a strategic concern for the Seleucids. What’s more, Judah Maccabee very wisely had made an alliance with Rome. These factors help explain how the Maccabees could have achieved a military victory.

But there’s a second part to the miracle. The Maccabee revolt unleashed the power within the Jewish community to update Torah law. Why was that necessary? Because of changed circumstances. Before the Greeks arrived, Judea had been an agricultural society with one city, Jerusalem. The Greeks changed all that, creating many new cities populated by merchants and urban workers as well as Greek soldiers who settled there with their families, forming a new elite class in Judean society.

The urban Jews needed new ways to observe Torah law. A struggle developed among rich and comfortable conservatives who were not affected by the changed situation, assimilationists who wanted to discard all the old laws and become Greeks, and the large mass of urban dwellers who were essentially disenfranchised in their daily lives because Torah law wasn’t working for them.

An emerging class of teachers, who eventually came to be called Rabbis, figured out how to address the challenges. They formulated new interpretations of Torah law that met the needs of these people. In addition to this internal process, they also figured out how to deal with powerful conquerors. By 63 BCE, Rome had come to control Judea and the Roman armies were invincible. Jews could no longer hope to establish Jewish political sovereignty as it had been in previous centuries. The Rabbis’ solution, symbolized by Yochanan ben Zakkai’s founding of an academy in Yavneh, was to surrender political sovereignty as a means for national survival and replace it with religious autonomy granted and backed by the Romans.

That’s the real miracle: assuring both spiritual and physical survival for the politically powerless Jewish people.

And that external strategy explains the story of the oil. The Romans could not see it as an challenge to their control if it was God, not human rebels, who brought about the rededication of the Temple (especially if the Maccabees were barely mentioned at all in that context). And the miracle of the oil provided an appealing and Jewishly acceptable parallel to all of the winter solstice fire ceremonies of the neighboring pagans.

The Rabbis of that era were brilliant, inspired strategists and tacticians. We are their heirs. We praise them, along with the Maccabees, in the English language setting of the song Mi y’ma-leil with the rousing – and remarkable – paralleling of the military and spiritual victories with the words: “In every age, a hero, a sage, came to our aid.”

Shabbat Miketz

12/18/2020

Rabbi Norman Patz

Temple Beth Shalom of Puerto Rico

Rabbi Norman Patz

Temple Sholom of West Essex

August 14, 2020 – 25 Av, 5780

The obituary for Adin Steinsaltz, published in the New York Times on Tuesday (Joseph Berger and Isabel Kirschner NYT 8.11.20) alerted us to the passing of our generation’s greatest Talmud scholar. Starting in 1965, when he was 27 years old, he worked, usually 10 hours a day, on a translation of the Babylonian Talmud, with a commentary as well, making the legal and theological content that governed the Jewish community from the 3rd century to the late 18th century, accessible in ways unknown before. Forty-five volumes! Astonishing scholarship and insight!

Among Steinsaltz’s concerns was lashon ha-ra, the Jewish injunction against speaking evil. One of his specific teachings on the subject caught my eye in the obituary and I will share it with you at the conclusion of these remarks.

In our time, in the current situation, both here and abroad, lashon ha-ra, vile talk, literally “bad tongue” – or, more colloquially, “bad-mouthing,” is a very serious problem. Polite discourse is a thing of the past. Today, personal insults are a daily matter of course, reflected in heated arguments about the limits, if any, there should be on free speech. Today’s battles for definition recall the opinion of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (Schenck v. U.S. 1919), denying free speech protection to statements which are false and dangerous. Justice Holmes wrote about the danger of “falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

False and dangerous. That’s lashon ha-ra!

Our tradition contains a vast literature on lashon ha-ra: derogatory talk, slander, defamation, malicious rumors that destroy reputations. The evidence starts in the Bible, in the Holiness Code (Vayikra/Leviticus 19:16): “Do not act as a talebearer among your people.” And in D’varim/Deuteronomy (24:9): “Remember what God did to Miriam,” referring to an incident described earlier (Bamidbar/Numbers 12:10-15) where Miriam, Moses’ sister, talks behind her brother’s back, “he married a Cushite woman,” she says (Cushite is a term used to describe people of color).

Her punishment? She gets leprosy, (not what we know today as Hansen’s disease but) a severe skin rash, and is quarantined outside the camp for a full week. The Hebrew word for leprosy is tzara-at. There is a whole parashah in the Torah, entitled M’tzora, which deals with leprosy. It’s like reading a public health code. For obvious reasons, M’tzora and the parashah which precedes it Tazria, are the two worst possible b’nei mitzvah assignments of the Jewish calendar year!

But even for b’nei mitzvah, there is an important life lesson in this parashah. Based on the Miriam story, the Rabbis taught that M’tzora is a shortened form of three words – motzi shem ra – a teller of evil reports (to use an antiquated term). And on that basis, they taught that lashon ha-ra introduces leprosy into society: the social leprosy that hatefully divides people and sets them against one another. They warned: “Life and death are in the power of the tongue” (Mishlei/Proverbs 18:21). A person who willfully listens to slander, they said, will be open to being slandered. They said, lashon ha-ra kills three people: the slanderer, the listener, and the one who is slandered. Lashon ha-ra, they said, is a serpent with a poisonous three-forked tongue. Rashi teaches that “one who strikes his fellow in secret means ‘harming a person by a verbal attack without their knowledge’.” The Rabbis taught that the Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed because of lashon ha-ra (Yoma 9b, and Gittin 55b ff).

And note, the first passage offered in Hebrew and in English in the silent prayers at the conclusion of the Amidah, is “My God, keep my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile…” (based on Psalm 34:14). This key prayer on the power of speech has appeared in Jewish prayer books since the 9th century.

The Musar Movement in Judaism, which began in the late 19th century, concentrated on ethical speech. Its main book, by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, was published in 1873. It is entitled Hofetz Hayyim, which translates into English as “who is the person eager for life?” (Psalm 34:13).The answer to which, in the following verse from Psalms, is “guard your tongue from evil and your lips from deceitful speech.”

The advent of the Internet and the networks of social media has been both a blessing and a curse. While it has enabled communication among deaf people, for instance, it has perhaps even more amplified the power of individuals and groups eager to spread lashon ha’ra. Think of the conspiracy theories that have spread instantly, like Pizzagate and Bible-burning. Both are deadly serious charges. That they have no substance in reality at all, hasn’t stopped them from being circulated widely. And there are a lot of gullible people out there who read these truly fake stories.

Here’s a story that demonstrates gullibility. After President Trump hyped hydroxychloroquine, the Wall Street Journal reported that sales of Hydrox cookies (the predecessor of Oreos), skyrocketed (Spencer Jakab, WSJ, May 19, 2020).

All of the conspiracy theories, this lashon ha-ra, which is unverified and unverifiable, whether from a seventeen-year-old computer geek, a neo-Nazi group, QAnon, the Russian secret disinformation unit of the GRU (Russian secret police) and RT (Russian Television, which Naomi and I saw screened on monitors on both PATH platforms and trains during the months we were going into the city for the trial. RT is an official propaganda arm of the Russian government. I don’t know if RT is still carried; I do know that we wrote letters objecting to its presence). And so many others, too many to name which aim to disrupt and destroy our democratic society.

What can we do personally? Look at the motto of a wildly popular current Israeli street campaign: Face masks, signs on public buses, stickers and bracelets, all saying: lashon ha-ra lo m’dabeir eilai” – I will not be persuaded by lashon ha-ra (Jerusalem Report, July 20, 2020).

Speaking evil starts with one person and one listener. So here are some guidelines:

Don’t gossip or listen to gossip – and certainly don’t repeat it.

Teach by example. Speak out when necessary.

Question sources. Don’t be gullible. Even if it’s in the papers or on the internet, it’s not necessarily true. If it sounds too good to be true, and connects the dots too readily, it’s sadly too likely not to be true.

Use basic civility and common sense.

Work to build a decent society. Don’t assist in tearing it down.

Rabbi Steinsaltz taught this to the members of the staff the Jerusalem Report: While most parts of the body have their limits – arms can carry only so much weight, legs can run only so fast – the tongue’s ability to do harm is unlimited. That’s why the tongue is set in a cage-like jaw in our mouths as a reminder: guard your speech carefully.

So let us do. So may we be wise. Kein y’hee ratzon.

AFTER THE EARTHQUAKES

Rabbi Norman Patz 

Erev Shabbat Vayehi

January 10,2020 – Tevet 14, 5780  

Temple Beth Shalom, the Reform Congregation of Puerto Rico

[Preface: Our congregation’s custom is to follow the mi sheh-beirakh prayers for healing with an opportunity for congregants to share good news. When I asked what happy events there were to share, virtually everyone present shouted spontaneously and in unison: “We’re still here!” So at that point, I did what I had planned to do at the end of my sermon and led the congregation in reciting the gomel prayer expressing gratitude for surviving danger. After which, I began my sermon.]

This has been a hard week for Puerto Rico. The recovery from Hurricane Maria is still painfully slow. Much suffering continues more than two years later. And now this: it shakes the spirits of this normally resilient population. Some congregants have sustained structural damages to their homes. Our neighbors, particularly from Ponce westward, are being hit the hardest. The congregation has started a relief fund to help address the suffering.

At our home in New Jersey, Naomi and I have a large woodcut made by a Polish-Jewish artist named Joseph Budko, who was born in 1888. After his art studies in Vilna and Berlin, in 1933 he went to British Mandate Palestine. Budko is regarded as a pioneer in the 20th century revival of woodcuts as an important art medium. The Budko woodcut we have is one of his most well-known. It was used as the poster art for the Seventeenth Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland in 1931. It’s mostly black. In the foreground, in spare white outlines, is the image of an old man, serious, even grim in appearance. He is bearded and dressed in a robe, with a kippah on his head. This man, who represents traditional religious Judaism, is leaning heavily on a wooden cane. Behind him is Budko’s image of the “new Jew” – a much younger man, clean-shaven and gaunt, with a determined set to his jaw. This man is hatless. He wears an open-collared shirt. Behind and above the young man’s head is a four-word inscription in Hebrew: LO YIV’RAH ISH KAMONI – A man such as I does not flee. (The probable source for the text is Nehemiah 6:11 – Shall one such as I flee?) 

It is not clear which of the men is saying this. Is it the older or the younger? Both are depicted as very determined. Perhaps it is both. Or is it the personification of Budko’s understanding of Zionism: a determination to return to the land of Israel without waiting passively (and defenselessly) for the coming of a messiah?

I started thinking about this woodcut and its meaning after I read the statement by Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, the rabbi of the synagogue in Poway, California after the shooting attack there last April. He said “I was attacked because I am a Jew. I will never back down!”

His statement is as sadly appropriate now, after the antisemitic events of recent weeks, as it was last spring – and has been again and again through our people’s history.

A person such as I does not flee. I will never back down. What should these proud, stubborn,  defiant statements mean for us today in this land that for the most part has been for us Jews the goldene medinah – our “golden land” since the time of Asser Levy’s victory over Peter Stuyvesant in Niew Amsterdam?

You all know the three-part saying from Pirkei Avot, The Sayings of the Fathers: Im ein ani li, mi li? “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? That’s the first part of the message.

We must not hide. We must stand tall. We must not be afraid to wear our actual or metaphoric mezuzot and Jewish stars.

We must continue to stand up for the rights of others.  U-k’sheh-ani l’atzmi, mah ani? If I am only for myself, what am I? That’s the second part of the message.

We must welcome and celebrate allies; friends, churches, government officials, the Bill of Rights… We are not alone in America.

We should stay Jewish and identify as Jews not because of our enemies or antisemitism but because of the beauty and humanity of our faith and the achievements of our people.

We must not be like the assimilated Jews of 1930’s Germany who had no inner strength to resist emotionally because they knew so very little about Judaism. I am reminded of the American soldiers who were taken prisoner in the Korean War and were subject to intense brainwashing by their Chinese captors. They broke down quickly because they were ignorant of American democracy and its values. Please understand that I am not blaming the victims with these examples. 

We must understand who we are and know how to answer – to ourselves as well as to others. We must know why we are Jewish – for our own self-respect and because we have excellent reasons to be proud. When our enemies, whether on the left or on the right, attack us, we should ascribe their hatred to envy – and know why too!

Admittedly, this prescription is only one aspect of not backing down, of not fleeing. But it’s a vital and urgent dimension of our self-defense. 

And the third part of the prescription in Pirkei Avot: V’im lo ahshav, ei-matai? And if not now, when? It’s where we need to start so we can stand tall. The problem is not what’s wrong with us, but what’s wrong with those who would attack us.

This Shabbat, we conclude the reading of Breishit/Genesis in our annual cycle of Torah reading. We say HAZAK HAZAK V’NIT-HAZEK – May we be strengthened by the lessons of the book of the Torah we have just completed reading. May we be strengthened and strengthen one another: that is the challenge for us in this time. People like us do not flee!  Amen

Rabbi Norman Patz has been one of the visiting rabbis of Temple Beth Shalom since 2007.

Sunday, December 29,2019/7th Day of Hanukkah, 5780

Dear Members of Temple Beth Shalom:

We are horrified by the stabbings at the home of an Orthodox rabbi in Monsey, New York on Saturday night. The attack comes shortly after a series of assaults on Jews in the Greater New York during the Hanukkah week.

I want to share three statements with you. The first is from the New York Board of Rabbis, in which Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Orthodox rabbis in the New York area are members. (I am a member of the NYBR.)

The second is an excerpt from a tweet by an important commentator on Jewish matters, Bethany Mandel (who is a relative of mine by marriage). She writes, in frustration and anger: “…Jewish blood is cheap and Hasidic blood is on clearance.”

The third is the sermon I delivered at the erev shabbat Hanukkah service two days ago (below). It analyzes two major challenges we are now facing as Americans and as Jews.

2019: ELEMENTS OF A BIG PICTURE

There’s an old Jewish joke that seems always to be relevant: 

The chairman of a major Jewish organization receives a telegram from the investigator he had sent to a troubled area. Only seven words were permitted in telegrams, and this one read: 

“Commence worrying. Details to follow. Your investigator”

This bitter joke reflects our sense of edginess and precariousness even in a society that has welcomed Jews more fully, arguably, than any other country in history. The welcome may be owing to what has been featured as the pluralistic, non-ethnic nature of American society. Or perhaps it is due to America’s vast natural resources that have permitted upward mobility without coming at the expense of others – not a zero-sum game. Despite that, when a bank is robbed, we worry — was the robber Jewish? We worry that the three Congressional chairs dealing with the impeachment, as well as the scholar-witnesses who offered expert testimony on impeachment, are Jewish. Is it time to worry when a right-wing fundamentalist Christian minister rants on his email publication about a “Jew coup”?

What are we to make of the secular year now ending? What are some of the big issues that will trouble us in the year ahead? Tonight, I will focus on two issues that are separate from our concerns for Puerto Rico.

The first is the polarization of domestic politics. You are either with me or against me. Today, there is a near breakdown of willingness to agree or negotiate or compromise on anything. Every issue is subjected to a purity test, enforced by party loyalty: truth versus tribalism. Each side claims its narrative is true. Obvious lies are repeated endlessly to distract and confuse people. Institutions and government officials attack one another in the vilest of coarse ad hominem language. Each side claims to be defending the Constitution. But when loyalty replaces reason, reason is in full-scale retreat and demagogues, using powerful social media, get to have leverage that endangers American democracy.

And endangers American Jews in particular!

 The second issue is the rise of global antisemitism. It’s only 75 years since the Holocaust, but the golden age of American Jews is over. The most ancient, most irrational, most senseless and murderous prejudice of the Western world is back and achieving mainstream status. In one of its forms, it is the disguising of anti-Jewish expressions as criticisms of Israel, not only Israel’s policies but its very existence. This strategy aims to delegitimize the only democracy in the Middle East, judging Israel by standards not applied to any of the real human rights violating nations in the world. That’s the method of operation of the BDS movement, as well as of the agencies of the United Nations. 

And in domestic political and cultural terms, the “progressive left” vilifies all Jews as “Zionist oppressors,” and therefore disqualifies and excludes them from any and all social justice issues. There are Israel supporters on the right, but most of the “very fine people” at that end of the political spectrum want to make sure that “Jews will not replace us.” For Jews, there is no more left and no more right! Both exclude us. 

And now add to this poisonous mix the accusations of disloyalty being leveled against American Jews. 

These verbal assaults have led to physical attacks on ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews, who are especially vulnerable because of their distinctive clothing at the traditional Etz Hayyim synagogue in Pittsburgh, at the Chabad congregation in Poway, California, and the kosher grocery store in Jersey City. [And the night after I delivered this sermon, a machete attack on an Orthodox rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York while the family was lighting the Hanukkah menorah.] 

To be sure, there has been a dramatic increase of physical violence in American cities and towns, in general, but the attacks on Jews are much more than simply one category among many: Jews are the first to be victimized. We are the canary in the mineshaft of Western democracy. The first to be victimized, but not the last. The red warning flags are up.

We can take a bit of comfort in the acts of solidarity that have followed some of these attacks, yet current Jew-hatred is a stubborn reality that I’m afraid is becoming the new normal.

As the new year approaches, let us resolve to hang on, to resist being intimidated into fearful silence. We Jews have always been prisoners of hope – asirei tikvah (Zechariah 9:12) and we shall continue to be so in the year ahead.

“Yet though we bolt and bar our house from You, to every door, O Death, You have a key.”

We all knew that Jimmy was ailing, but he had come back from every crisis. His resilience and his will to live were formidable, as formidable as Jimmy was himself. Rabbi Jacob Rudin wrote, “To ask of death that it never come is futile, but it is not futile to pray that when death comes for us, it will take us from a world that is in even the smallest measure better because we changed a corner of it.”

Jimmy certainly changed a corner of the world – many corners, in fact. There was the public Jimmy, not that he ever sought center stage; the Jimmy who had both dreams and practical ways of realizing them; the Jimmy whose reputation for honesty and fairness was well-known and well-earned; the Jimmy who never asked from anyone else anything he wouldn’t be willing to do himself. 

And there was the private Jimmy, the very foundation of his family—Sue’s best friend, her most loyal ally, the love of her life; the Jimmy who was such a great father, beloved to Michael, Flippy, David and Cindy and their families, the Jimmy who ended each day sitting with Sue to review the news and watch another episode of Jeopardy. 

And there was the Jimmy whose public and private sides intersected: in Temple Beth Shalom, from its founding more than 50 years ago; in the World Union for Progressive Judaism, that Jewish world that was his passion, from the congregations and communities he and Sue visited in the World Union’s farthest reaches; in their beloved Crane Lake Camp – so many institutions that preserved and expanded the love for Judaism and the Jewish people that benefited from Jimmy and Sue’s devotion and their largesse.

In my years as one of Beth Shalom’s visiting rabbis, Naomi and I had the privilege of seeing Jimmy in action – quiet, steady, wise and, as in every aspect of his life, purposeful. We loved hearing the stories he told so well and so modestly. We loved hearing his High Holy Day appeals. No one could ask for contributions in a more gracious, encouraging, clear, decisive and inclusive and effective way than Jimmy. I particularly value the memory of Jimmy discovering the names of 70 members of the Frankl branch of his family who were murdered during the Holocaust years. That was a moment when all of Jimmy’s worlds came together and became even more precious to him than they had been before.

His life took its meaning from his engagement, interlacing with all these other lives, and the result was that, on all sides, Jimmy was beloved. Jimmy was “royal-hearted, rare.” Naomi and I loved him, admired him and respected him – as, I am sure, did all of you. Not only our memories of Jimmy, but our actions too, must continue to be inspired by the life he led so well.

Our dear founding member Jimmy Klau passed away on Thursday, November 28th. You can read his obituary here.

Rabbi Norman Patz

Temple Sholom of West Essex

Yom Kippur Morning, October 9, 2019 – 10 Tishri, 5780

To my Temple Beth Shalom family:

Naomi and I send you warm greetings on the New Year 5780 and wish you a good year. We look forward to spending the months from Hanukkah to Purim with you. I thought you would like to see the sermon I delivered on Yom Kippur morning in my New Jersey congregation.

 “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” These are the opening lines of Charles Dickens’ book, A Tale of Two Cities, written in 1859, the inspiration for the musical “Les Mis.” It was the time of the French Revolution, a period of upheaval in human history. 

Sounds like a description of today, doesn’t it? But it shouldn’t. We are arguably the luckiest people who ever lived, and our lives are incredibly comfortable. And yet, when we look beyond our day-to-day personal existence, we are frightened and confused by the seemingly relentless escalation of tension and controversy here and abroad. We feel cut loose from what we were sure were the secure foundations of our lives. We worry about the very future of our planet itself. Above all, we have a sense that the world has lost its moral compass: that we are living in the best of times … and the worst of times. 

The other day, Naomi and I received a new year’s card from a rabbinic colleague that offered a prescription for “How to stay SAFE in today’s scary world.” Complete with illustrations, the homemade card urged us to avoid riding in cars because they account for 20% of all fatal accidents. Don’t stay home, because 17% of all accidents occur at home. Avoid walking on sidewalks or streets: 14% of all fatal accidents involve pedestrians. Don’t travel by plane or train or bus, not to mention motorcycle. That’s 16% of all accidents right there. We’re up to 67%, if you are counting. And most certainly, don’t go to hospitals: 32% of the remaining 33% occur in hospitals!

However, the new year’s card assured us, only one one-hundredth percent –that’s 0.01% – of all deaths occur in synagogues. It’s only logical, therefore, that the safest place you can be is in a synagogue! 

It’s a funny idea, almost a shaggy fatalities joke, but it’s got a sucker punch aspect too. In a synagogue? With all the security measures we’ve had to put in place? In a synagogue, after the attacks in Pittsburgh and Poway in recent months? Or the terrorist hatchet attack on worshipers at a weekday morning service in Jerusalem suburb five years ago? (We learned later that day, of the aborted yet fatal attack on the synagogue in Halle, Germany.) Safe in synagogue? What was my rabbi-friend thinking? 

What was I thinking to suggest the synagogue as a haven of safety?

Because it is. We are inundated with information day after day: hundreds of emails, texts and alerts, many contradicting others. News analysts and opinion pundits 24/7 in the televised media and in print, screaming over one another to insist that their various conflicting views are THE truth. Who can we believe? What can we believe? Which “truths” are true? 

Look at the people opposing vaccinations, claiming the right to protect the integrity of their children’s bodies against government intrusion. Their anti-scientific stance has made vaccination hesitancy one of the greatest threats to global health. For these zealots, “science has become just another voice in the room. Science as fact has lost its platform. Now you simply declare your own truth” (Dr. Paul A. Offit, infectious disease expert, Children’s Hospital, Philadelphia, The New York Times, September 24, 2019). I disagree. Opinion doesn’t automatically equal truth. Of course we are all entitled to our own opinions, but we are not entitled to our own facts! (attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan).

Then how do we know what’s right? One mother told her son: “Use your common sense: What rings true to you? What rings false?” Use your intuition. Go by what “feels right” (Brett Kavanaugh’s mother’s advice to her son, quoted in Hanna Rubin’s review of The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, The New York Times Book Review, 9/22/19). 

But that begs the question. What informs common sense? Intuition can go only so far.

I am not dismissing common sense altogether. I am only rejecting common sense which is unexamined – gut reactions not based on insight or knowledge. What I am advocating is common sense shaped by education, by learning, by self-scrutiny. It is a common sense grounded in the universe of accumulated wisdom of civilization, by the writings of our rabbis over the centuries who struggled to extract lessons from life’s endless complexity: common sense pounded, trampled, cajoled, frustrated and finally sufficiently refined to be the valuable guide to living that we absolutely need.

This is where the true value of the synagogue becomes clear. The synagogue is the home of Jewish values and beliefs. We find them in the Shabbat and High Holy Day prayer books, prayers that deserve careful reading because they give us an underpinning with which to face, to confront, the world in which we live. In this world, the synagogue can be our haven of safety. 

And yet, paradoxically, the synagogue can also be a very threatening place, shaking us out of our certainties, challenging our complacencies. How so? Because our tradition requires us to evaluate and seriously process information. The values we learn here in the synagogue should be the basis on which to accept or edit and delete the information we’re exposed to, for these are the values that should guide our admittedly largely secular lives.

On Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Groffman identified three key Jewish values as guides with which to measure our lives: kedushah – holiness; tzedakah – righteous social responsibility, and hesed –habits of gratitude and kindness. This morning, my focus is on the PROCESS of identifying and evaluating our beliefs. 

For this, I turn to the Yom Kippur ritual of the High Priest in the Temple in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. A powerful remembrance of that ritual is a highlight of the afternoon service in Gates of Repentance. Every year, the stark solemnity and faith expressed in its words and imagery gave me chills. On Yom Kippur, the High Priest would go into the Holy of Holies, the innermost court of the Temple – a curtained-off space forbidden to everyone except the Kohen Gadol – and he could enter it only on Yom Kippur day and there pronounce the ineffable, otherwise forbidden, name of God.

The Holy of Holies was so sacred, we are told, that the High Priest had a strong rope tied around his waist before he went into the chamber. If he fainted or died while he was inside this kodesh ha’kodoshim – this holiest of holy places – he could be rescued, or his body retrieved, without anyone having to endanger themselves by entering the space.

The preparation of the High Priest was very carefully planned and the instructions specific because it had to be right. Three times, the white robed High Priest recited a careful confession of sins. First, he made atonement for himself: “Pardon, O Eternal One, the sins, iniquities and transgressions that I have committed before You….” Then, having confessed his own sins, the High Priest recited a confession for his family, the sons of Aaron – his priestly family. And finally, a third time, the High Priest confessed for the whole House of Israel. Only then did he enter the Holy of Holies.

When the other kohanim and the people who stood in the Temple court heard the High Priest, full of reverence, utter God’s holy and awesome Name, they fell on their faces and, prostrate, they sang Barukh shem k’vod malkhuto l’olam va-ed – Praised be God’s sovereignty forever and ever.

What drama! I found that even just the reciting that ritual in the Yom Kippur afternoon service in our sanctuary was stirring and inspiring!

Beyond the drama, though, it is the PROGRESSION that attracts my attention. The ritual starts with self, then extends to family and then, finally, moves to encompass our entire people, a process that expands, step by step: a process that ascends in holiness and, I believe, imposes on each of us a sacred task – and a   guide by which to achieve it. 

First, we must start with ourselves, each of us as individual human beings. We must compare our intuition, our “common sense” understanding of what is right or wrong, to the values of our Jewish tradition. We may be skeptical of one Jewish value or another. That’s not a problem; it means we are thinking and it’s the process of analysis that’s important because we are using Jewish behavioral values to analyze how we should behave in the world.

These values are summarized in the Hebrew precept which asserts that “just as God is compassionate” – mah hu rahum – “so too must you be compassionate” – ahf atah rahum (Talmud Shabbat 133b). 

So, in the second paragraph of the Amidah, starting with the words atah gibor, we find a list of God’s values for us to apply to how we live our lives: support the fallen, heal the sick, set free the unjustly imprisoned captive, keep faith with those who came before us. 

The language is abstract, general, but the meaning is clear. These are guides against which to measure our behavior, holy imperatives for leading honorable lives, starting with ourselves.

There’s an old story that probably applies equally to serious religious leaders of any faith, but of course we tell it about a rabbi. And because it is an old story, the rabbi in the story is a man. A young rabbi, just out of rabbinical school, is filled with grand ideas and elaborate plans. He’s going to change the world – social justice, Israel, immigration, the environment — everything! After a series of inevitable disappointments, he reconsiders. I’ll improve my congregants! More disappointments. His family? Even harder to do. Finally, more mature, he realizes that he had better start with himself! That’s the first step for us to take in the process of identifying the values that truly matter, the ones we need to live by, the ones we want to be remembered for.

The High Priest’s second confession was for his family. Every family, even the most loving and forgiving ones, experiences rocky times. Which family doesn’t have to cope with unrealized hopes and dreams? Who among us doesn’t have painful, even wrenching, memories we can’t shake? Unpleasant events, divorce, illness or death that force unexpected changes in our lives? 

Or long-simmering resentments that blow up in symbolic moments at inappropriate times, like an extended family Thanksgiving dinner. Remember the oldest brother in the film “Avalon”? Every year, when he and his wife and kids came late, he’d say: Don’t wait for me. Just start. But one year, they actually take him up on it and begin to eat. “You cut the turkey? You cut the turkey!”, he shouts. Mortally offended, he stalks out and they never speak again. 

And we all know families that don’t talk to each other over arguments whose details none of them remember.

In the haftarah of the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the prophet Jeremiah describes God as a parent who always takes back His children in love: “Even when I reproach you, I think of you with tenderness. My heart yearns for you; I will welcome you back in love, says the Eternal.” (Jeremiah 31:20) 

Can we each be agents of love and reconciliation, of thoughtful and habitual kindness in our own family?

The High Priest’s final confession was on behalf of his people, the House of Israel. That’s us. We are Israel, the Jewish people. And we are Americans. Dual loyalty? Of course! Everybody has multiple loyalties, and it’s fair to say that American Jews have two promised lands. And that creates a tension that needs examining. 

In recent years, we’ve been troubled by the right-wing settlers and ultra-religious overreach in Israel. We need to understand how to understand our distress. 

For example, many Americans, Jews included, think of the Palestinians in the West Bank in terms of human rights, but most Israelis think in terms of sheer survival. We don’t live in Sderot on the volatile Gaza border, or in K’far Yonah, nine miles from Tulkarm in the West Bank, where a missile-making factory was discovered two week. Or in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Netanya where suicide bombers have killed hundreds of innocent Israelis over all the years of the State’s existence. We need to understand that difference and respect the existential concerns Israelis have.

The Israelis are our family. We may not like a current government there, but we must not walk away. How will history judge us if we did? How will our grandchildren judge us? How could we live with ourselves? 

And when white supremacists in America who shout openly “Jews will not replace us” create websites featuring the number 109 or 110, antisemitic shorthand that claims that Jews have been expelled from 109 countries and that the United States should become the one hundred and tenth, does that affect/alter our assessment of Israel? How do we react when the hard Left conflates ant-Zionism with overt antisemitism? “No more left, no more right,” I said from this pulpit years ago. We have no friends on either side. How scary it is that these opposites agree on two issues: hatred of Jews and dismissal of centrist democracy! In the light of this reality, how should we relate to the Jewish value that says all Israel, all Jews, are responsible for one another? 

Or to the prophet Jeremiah’s exhortation to the Jews in exile in Babylonia to “Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to God on its behalf; for in its prosperity shall you prosper.” (29:7)

In this work we need allies – and to secure the durability of American democracy, they need us as well.

I offer this presentation as a conscious process for us to use in identifying and assessing the values by which we can actually live. This is the path to wholeness: knowing what we believe and acting accordingly. That’s how to give our lives the meaning they should have and to make it more likely that the consequences of our behavior will be in line with our beliefs. We have good reason to be nervous. All the more reason to be better Jews, better Americans, better people – better members of a society that at its best cherishes individual life and liberty and human dignity. 

On this Yom Kippur day, may we resolve to be worthy of our heritage and our future and thus merit being inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for the new year.

Amen

¡Buenos días! Una vez más, tengo el privilegio de representar a la comunidad judía de Puerto Rico en la inauguración de la Semana Nacional de la Policía. Gracias al sargento Axel Valencia por tramitar mi invitación.

Desde los tiempos bíblicos, los judíos siempre hemos orado por el bienestar y la seguridad de los lugares donde hemos vivido. Hace dos mil quinientos años, el profeta Jeremías le dijo al pueblo judío que había sido exiliado a Babilonia, lo siguiente: “busquen la paz de la ciudad a la que los he exiliado y oren a Dios en su nombre, porque en su paz tendrán paz”. . ”(Jeremías 29:17). Unos siglos antes, el libro bíblico de D’varim / Deuteronómio nos enseñó a nombrar jueces y policías en todas nuestras moradas para poner en vigor las leyes que mantienen el funcionamiento de la sociedad (Deuteronomy 16:18). Comprendieron que la justicia solo se pudiera lograr en una sociedad donde la vida cotidiana de sus ciudadanos fuera segura, sin que nadie tuviera miedo (Miqueas 4: 4). Por lo tanto, no es sorprendente que cada libro de oración judío, dondequiera se imprima, incluya una oración por el bienestar del gobierno del país y sus funcionarios.

Aquí hay una versión moderna de esas oraciones, compuestas en inglés por un liturgista, Alden Solovy, del movimiento Reformista del judaísmo estadounidense. Escribió esta oración, titulada “Para la policía”, en un momento en que la confianza pública en la policía debiera restablecerse y fortalecerse. Ha sido traducido al español por el Dr. Marc Schnitzer, catedrático jubilado de lingüística de la Universidad de Puerto Rico y ex presidente de mi sinagoga, Temple Beth Shalom.

Para la policia
Dios de los desinteresados,
Dios de los fuertes y valientes.
Vela por los que dedican sus vidas.
Para servir y proteger a los demás,
Hombres y mujeres que han contestado el llamado
Del honor, del deber y del servicio,
Quienes arriesgan la vida y la salud para mantener la ley y el orden,
Quienes arriesgan la vida y la salud entre los primeros al responder.
A los desastres naturales y al terror hecho por el hombre.
Otórgales protección en la búsqueda de nuestra seguridad.
Dales la habilidad en la búsqueda de nuestro bienestar.
Dales sabiduría en la búsqueda de la justicia.
Bendice las almas de los que han muerto en nuestro servicio.
Que su memoria sea santificada con alegría y amor.
Roca de la verdad,
Cuida nuestras comunidades con amor.
Pon fin al crimen y a la violencia,
Para que todos sepan
Tu compasión y tu gracia.
Roca de los siglos,
Fortaleza y refugio,
Bendice a todos los que sirven en las profesiones policiales con tu cuidado.
En su trabajo, bendícelos con fuerza y fortaleza,
Perspicacia y juicio.
En sus vidas, bendícelos con alegría y salud.
Seguridad y bienestar.
Que sus hechos resuenen con equidad e integridad,
La vocación de su profesión,
Una fuente de bendiciones entre nosotros.
Roca del amor,
Cura las heridas de nuestra nación.
Sana el dolor que nos destroza.
Y seamos todos bendecidos con la paz.

© 2016 Alden Solovy y tobendlight.com. Todos los derechos reservados.

A lo que agrego:

Que los corazones de nuestros y nuestras policías latan con honor y con el sentido de propósito elevado al que sirven. Llévalos a casa con sus familias al final de cada jornada laboral, oh Dios, con seguridad y en paz.

Amén

Rabbi Norman Patz

Temple Sholom of West Essex

Shabbat Toledot

November 9-10, 2018 / 2 Kislev, 5779

“Don’t send your boys to school in the morning.” That’s what a neighbor told the mother of John and Ernie Oettinger on November 9th 1938. The neighbor was a fireman who knew the SS plans for attacking Jews and Jewish institutions that night and the next day. The Oettingers lived in a small German town, Buttenhausen, where Jews had lived since 1800. Thanks to Fireman Schultz, the Oettinger boys didn’t go to school that day and they succeeded in fleeing to America where John, as a married adult, and his family became members of Temple Sholom of West Essex. Before his own untimely death, John told this story many times to the students in our religious school, motivated by his sense of gratitude to America and the vital need for Jews of the next generation to know.

Walter Klein, Laurie Katzmann’s older cousin, has memories that go back to when he was three years old. As an adult, he remembered and talked about his home in Bad Neustadt, where he played and slid down the cellar door with his dog Nellie. He particularly remembers the day when there was a parade outside. His parents told him to go inside and not look out the window. It was a Nazi parade of destroyers and looters. His father was arrested and imprisoned for four months. The family went to the prison every day to wave and talk to him. Walter remembers that his older brothers and sisters were expelled from school and not allowed to use the town swimming pool.

Fred Gottschalk’s mother chastised her eight year old son for leaving the family house in Oberwesel to watch Adolph Hitler pass by in a motorcade. She said, “A Jew risks a lot doing that.”

Why were these children told to stay inside? Why were they kept away from school? What was going on? It was Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” November 9-10, 1938.

What happened to earn that night 80 years ago its name? SS storm troopers shattered the plate glass windows of 7500 Jewish-owned stores across Germany, half the whole year’s production of the Belgian glass industry. They attacked nearly 1400 synagogues, totally destroying 217 of them, throwing Torah scrolls into the gutter outside and stealing ornaments. Thirty thousand Jewish men, mostly well-to-do, were arrested and sent to Dachau, Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald concentration camps where a thousand of them died. Over a hundred Jews were murdered in their homes or on the streets. It was a night and day of unimaginable, out of control mob violence in a country that had long been admired as one of the most civilized nations in Europe. It shocked the world and traumatized the German Jewish community, which until then had tried to adjust to Nazi persecutions and to tough it out, until – they thought – Hitler would be gone.

What made Kristallnacht happen? The immediate cause or excuse was the death of a German consular official in Paris named Ernst vom Rath. He was shot by a 17 year old Polish Jew, Hershel Grynszpan, who was distraught about the Nazi government’s expulsion of all Polish Jews from Germany, dumping them on the Polish border. Among those 20,000 stranded Jews were Grynszpan’s parents. Vom Rath’s death gave the Nazi leadership an opportunity to solve a very challenging problem.

Before revealing the problem, we need to ask: Why was Kristallnacht such a shock? Antisemitism had been increasing in Germany from the end of World War I in 1918. One of the most widespread myths was that Germany had surrendered on November 11, 1918 one hundred years ago this weekend not because its armies had been defeated but because Germany had been “stabbed in the back” by Jews on the homefront. The Jewish Dolchstüss had caused Germany’s humiliating surrender.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, one of the earliest arranged anti-Jewish events was a boycott of all Jewish-owned stores. On April 1, 1933, uniformed SA thugs stationed themselves in front of Jewish stores preventing customers from entering and they painted signs on the windows saying Kauft nicht bei Juden – don’t buy from Jews. This was a government campaign to identify and separate Jews from the rest of the population. Then came the Nuremburg laws of 1935, depriving German Jews of citizenship, firing all Jewish civil servants, and more. You’d think Jews were a big problem, but of Germany’s 1935 population of 67 million, there were about half a million Jews in Germany, less than eight-tenths of one percent total.

Identification, separation, isolation and deprivation of rights escalated, all cloaked in “legal” steps. The Berlin Olympics of 1936 had to be to look good, and so they seemed. But by 1938, the anti-Jewish campaign got more severe, particularly after the Anschluss in March, when Hitler took over Austria, bringing 185,000 more Jews under Nazi control. One success after another emboldened him and his followers. That April, the Nazis ordered Jews to register all their property, a value of two to six billion (1938) American dollars. In June, the synagogue in Munich was burned to the ground; in August the Nuremburg synagogue suffered the same fate.

In July, American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt convened an international conference at Evian in France to deal with the refugee crisis – that is, Jews trying to flee. The conference results: They appointed a committee to study the problem. No quotas were raised, not even for children. The only country willing to accept Jews was the Dominican Republic.

The Kindertransports that brought 10,000 children out of Nazi Europe without their parents were a private enterprise accepted by the British government. Most of the children were Jewish; one of them was John Oettinger’s brother Larry.

With the failure of the Evian conference, Chaim Weizmann said, “The seemed to be divided into two parts: those places where Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.”

Now I want to speak about the other very challenging problem that Germany was facing beyond figuring out how to get rid of their Jews: an acute financial problem. In 1937, Germany had a trade surplus but owing to the costs of the Nazis’ ambitious rearmament problem, by 1938 the government was 413 Reichmarks in debt and unable to pay back bond obligations of 12 billion Reichmarks. The solution? Make the Jews pay. And vom Rath’s death presented the opportunity. The Jewish community was forced to pay an “atonement” fine of 1 billion Reichmarks for hostility to the Jewish people and Reich. The insurance claims for damages to Jewish-owned properties that should have been paid to the Jewish owners were taken by the government and all Jewish property in the entire country was confiscated, “Aryanized.” Jews seeking to emigrate had to pay a huge “flight tax” in addition to surrendering their property. By early 1939, Göring reported to Hitler that Nazi finances were sound.

So Kristallnacht was not just the product of blind, irrational, Nazi-instigated Jew-hatred bursting out in “spontaneous” anger. It was that but it was much more:  a wholly orchestrated, government-initiated and ordered operation, a massive, pre-planned assault on Germany’s Jews, an ideological cover for the coldly calculated, fiendish theft that solved the Nazis’ financial crisis.

Some Jews thought it was the climax of persecution. Others, however, knew better. It was the beginning of the end.

How does this compare with the attack in Pittsburgh? Some contrasts with Pittsburgh are important.

First, Kristallnacht was government-organized. The Etz Hayyim gunman acted alone.

Second, in Germany the police stood by. In Pittsburgh, the police risked their lives and rushed in to rescue.

Third, the leadership of the Jewish community – already weakened by Nazi law – was stunned into paralysis. All they could do was carry on “business as usual” even though it was anything but. One German Jewish official wrote memos and dictated letters at his desk while through his window he watched the Fasanenstrasse synagogue go up in flames. And the leaders of the American Jewish community in 1938 decided against public protests, having good reason to fear an American antisemitic backlash. Remember Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, which published an English language translation of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery; Father Coughlin’s radio attacks on Jews and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic isolationism. Today, we see a rather more energetic, unapologetic public outcry.

Fourth, in Germany the crowds witnessing the destruction were silent and unhelping. In Squirrel Hill, everybody pitched in to help and the national reaction was a closing of ranks in solidarity with American Jews. It’s an American problem as well as, as much as a Jewish problem. It’s even possible that some rapprochement between Black advocates and Jews might emerge. Reverend Eric Manning, the pastor of the Charlotte, South Carolina where nine people 2343 murdered in June 2015, flew to Pittsburgh to show solidarity with synagogue members there. When he met with Rabbi Myers, the rabbi of the Etz Hayyim synagogue, they hugged. He said he didn’t want the rabbi to feel alone, and he read the 23rd psalm at Rose Mallinger’s funeral, the last of the eleven. That’s a hopeful note in this time of darkness.

As Kristallnacht was a wakeup call for German Jews, the massacre of Jews at worship in Pittsburgh should be a warning and an alert for us. Read Ruth Wisse’s article* in the silent sermon you have at hand.  Read my 2015 sermon on Kristallnacht on the Temple Sholom website.** These map out the dimensions of our immediate concerns.

And by way of highlighting these concerns, consider two stories: John Oettinger’s father fought in the Kaiser’s army in World War I. He was awarded an Iron Cross for his bravery. Tonight his grandson Kenny, who grew up in our congregation, brought the documentation. Having earned that award didn’t help many German Jewish veterans, but it may have made John’s brother Larry’s escape possible and thereby the rest of John’s family, an instance where a Jew’s love of his country helped. That Iron Cross may have also prompted the fireman neighbor to family on that fateful night. One lesson here is that Jews should be strong, engaged patriotic citizens and not take our American comforts for granted. We all worry about the divisions in America today. We need to work to strengthen civil society in our country while it is still possible.  

The second story: Fred Gottschalk whose mother told him to avoid the Hitler parade became a rabbi and was the president of HUC-JIR, our Reform movement’s rabbinical school, for 25 years until 1996. The day after Kristallnacht, Fred’s grandfather gave him shreds of a Torah scroll he had rescued from the river after that night of terror, telling him: “One day, we will put them together again.”

That’s our second lesson. Not literally to put shredded Torah scrolls together again but to be good Jews.

We need both: to be diligent, seriously committed American citizens and to be good Jews – for our own sake and for the safety and security of this country we love. Each can and ought to strengthen the other. Yes, the German Jews were loyal to Germany: Fully 20% of German Jews volunteered to fight in the First World War, a huge number! They won more Iron Crosses than any other group. It may have helped at the beginning but it wasn’t enough to withstand Nazi hatred. America is different! And yet Jewish history teaches us that we can never be complacent.  Our vigilance is vital for Jews and for democracy.

*Ruth Wisse, “The Many Faces of Jew-Hatred,” The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2018:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-many-faces-of-jew-hatred-1541025486

** “Kristallnacht + 77: What Have We Learned?” NRP sermon of November 13, 2015