Month: April 2019

Jews Also Cry for Notre Dame

~ slfuchs ~ 4 Comments

After the European Union for Progressive Judaism convention in Amsterdam in March 2012, I visited Paris in my capacity as President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

Overshadowing our Paris visit was a horrible tragedy in which four people were savagely murdered at a Jewish day school in Toulouse. When word came, Rabbi Tom Cohen, of Kehilat Gesher in Paris, was showing us the magnificent Cathedral of Notre Dame. Ms. Miriam Kramer, Chairman of the European Union and Mr. Stéphane Beder, President of the French Union of Progressive Judaism were with Vickie and me as we stood in awe in front of the magnificent Cathedral.

When the news of the horror in Toulouse reached us, we quickly repaired to a café in the shadow of Notre Dame to hastily and sadly draft the WUPJ response to the massacre of innocent Jews.

I am reliving that tragedy as I watch live news film of Notre Dame in flames.

I confess that part of my first impression of Notre Dame in 2012 was similar to what I feel whenever I tour magnificent houses of worship: How many homeless people could be housed and how many hungry fed with all the money it took to build this edifice!

That said Notre Dame is a place of matchless beauty and a symbol of a people’s faith in God. To see it in flames exacerbates the fear and uncertainty of the times in which we live.

Thankfully the fire of Notre Dame did not involve the unspeakable loss of life our nation suffered on Nine Eleven. Human lives are worth more than any building.

Still, seeing its famed spire collapse was even more shocking than seeing the Twin Towers in New York City fall on Nine Eleven. After all, the World Trade Center opened in April 1973. Notre Dame was completed in 1345.

If ever a building represented beauty, stability and order in the world it was Notre Dame.

For that reason, we Jews join with Christians around the world in bemoaning the fire in Paris.

A building of unsurpassed beauty is burning in the City of Light, and somehow the whole world seems a little less safe and a little less secure than it was before.

 

A War Between Gods!

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Passover begins tonight, and more Jews will participate in a Passover Seder of one sort or another than any Jewish event in the entire year. The Passover story is the “enabling event” that opened the door to all subsequent Jewish experience.

A recent letter I received from a man claiming the Exodus never happened and that Bible stories were fairy tales did not surprise me.

I have long known some scholars question whether the Exodus happened or not, and I leave the question to those who spend their professional lives in such inquiry.

For me the truth of the Exodus story like all Biblical stories does not depend on did it happen or not? Or is it scientifically correct?  The truth of a biblical story lies in what it teaches us that help us to be better people and encourages us to use our talents to make the world a more just, caring and compassionate place.

The Exodus

To understand the Exodus narrative, we must view it as a war – a boxing match if you will – between gods. In one corner, we have the Egyptian god, Pharaoh. Pharaoh is like any pagan god. One worships him by glorifying him with monuments, pyramids, sphinxes, and garrison cities. If slaves are required in order to build these structures, so be it. If it is necessary to beat those slaves in order to keep them working, or even kill one or two occasionally to send a message, that is fine too. And if overpopulation becomes an issue (see Chapter One of Exodus), simply throw their baby boys into the Nile.

In the other corner, though, we have the one true God of the Hebrew Bible, who created us in God’s image! God’s highest goal is that we create a just, caring, and compassionate society. God wants us to treat one another with respect and dignity! God wants us not to steal, cheat, or lie. God has particular concern for the powerlessness of society: the widow, the orphan, the outsider, the abused and the impoverished.

The contrasting value systems represented by Pharaoh and God cannot coexist peacefully.

Imagine the scene from many a Western movie in which the sheriff says to the bad guy, “This town ain’t big enough for both of us,” and a showdown ensues. Well, Exodus is a showdown between God and Pharaoh. Because it is our story, our God wins by redeeming us from slavery and bringing us to Mount Sinai, where God renews and expands with an entire people, the sacred covenant God once made with just Abraham and his family.

Because God intervenes so dramatically, we owe God a debt we can never fully repay.

Our lives were hopeless. We lived in drudgery and oppression. We never knew when we might be beaten or killed. Life had neither meaning nor purpose. Suddenly, God delivered us. Because of that, we freely choose how we will earn a living, how we will spend our leisure, and how or if we will worship. In short, we believe we owe God a debt that we can never repay.

Yet, we try. We try by performing acts of kindness, caring, and compassion. We attempt to establish justice and righteousness in society.

Passover is a story of movement, as the (Baskin, 1974, p.34) Haggadah puts it: 

  • from slavery to freedom
  • from degradation to dignity
  • from the rule of evil to the sovereignty of God

Passover is not just a history lesson. “In every generation” each of us should act as though we go forth from slavery to freedom. And because we have had that experience we feel a duty to do all we can to free others from the many bond that enslave people today, hunger, homelessness, lack of heat in winter, foul water. The list is endless.

None of us can do everything, but Passover teaches us the we all must do something to ease the suffering in our world. That is the TRUTH of the Passover story!

 

 

 

What God Is and What God Is Not

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In Germany and in the states, people often ask me: How could a good God allow the Holocaust?

For me the best answer to this question lies in the story of Cain and Abel. Cain is angry and jealous when God rejects his offering but accepts that of his brother Abel.

The efforts of commentators to justify God by saying Cain brought dried out stalks (see Bereshit Rabbah, chapter 22) while Abel brought the choicest of the firstlings of his flock ring hollow.

It was Cain who initiated the idea of an offering and Abel also (the Hebrew word is גם GAM) brought his choicest flocks.

Why then does God reject one offering and accept the other? I do not know. God does not answer to me, but I try my best to answer to God.

My strong conjecture is to teach us a lesson on how to deal with rejection.  We all face it. Like Cain we have made offerings that are not accepted. We tried as hard as we could, but we did not make the team. We deeply loved a woman, but she did not love us. We wanted a certain job, but we did not get it. The list is endless.

Cain felt just as we do when our “offerings” are rejected. He was angry and jealous.

We all know he killed his brother in his rage, but we often overlook what happens in the story before that.

God speaks to him encouraging him to do his best.

When we do our very best, that is the highest measure of success and affirmation. Of course we should all learn from constructive criticism, but knowing we have done our best is more important than the affirmation of a coach, another person or an employer. For many it is the hardest life lesson to learn.

But that is what God in the Torah is: a teacher. And the truth of biblical stories is not historical and not scientific. The truth is in the lessons we learn from them.

But even after God speaks so directly to Cain, he kills his brother anyway.

So, when people ask me Why God did not stop the Holocaust, I point them to this story. At the very beginning of Genesis we learn we have no right to expect God to thwart the designs of those who do evil. That is our job.

Whether God can stop evil and chooses not to or whether God’s power is limited are questions I leave to others. I rather deal with the Truth (for me that is a capital T) Torah teaches.  God wants us to do what is just and right, but God does not make the choice for us.

Often our unwillingness to accept the notion that God never promised to shield individuals or the world at large from evil, blinds us to what God does do if we allow God to do it: Encourage and inspire us to reject the path of wrongdoing and choose the path of justice, caring and compassion.

In Psalm 25, the petitioner asks God: “Show me Your ways…teach my Your paths…All the paths of the Eternal One are mercy and truth for those who keep God’s covenant and testimonies.” (Psalm 25:4,10)

God is the Consummate Instructor but only for those who want to learn who choose to strive to learn and keep God’s teachings.

Among the ingenious innovations of the shapers of Reform Judaism was changing the Torah reading for Yom Kippur morning from Leviticus 16, about the observance of Yom Kippur in biblical times to the majestic passage that reaches its climax in Deuteronomy 30:19.

We have a choice, good or evil, and God urges U’vharta ba-hayim, “Choose life! God is the force that urges us to choose life and good, but God does not make the choice for us.

Preface to …And Often the First Jew

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It is a heady but eerie feeling to preach in a church with a cornerstone with the year 1220 on it and to have one of the community leaders inform you that you are the first rabbi to preach there in the church’s history. “Many of our worshippers,” he continued, “have never seen a Jew before.”

It was not a unique example. When I spoke in German churches in towns and villages like Schulensee, Kaltenkirchen, Bordesholm, Husum, Friedrichsstadt and even in cities as large as Leipzig, Neumünster or Kiel, I was almost always the first rabbi to ever speak there, and for many worshippers, I was the first living Jew that the worshippers had ever seen.

To be “the first” is both a privilege and a burden.  I am ever mindful the impression those to whom I speak will have of Jews and Judaism depends on what I say and the way I say it.

For four years it has been my privilege and that of my wife Vickie to spend part of the year in Germany. There, in addition to my work in synagogues and churches, we teach together in German high schools about the Holocaust.  To facilitate our lessons, we use a wonderful exhibit about Vickie’s own 97-year-old mother, Stefanie Steinberg. She was born in Breslau and was uprooted along with her family in 1936 when the Nazi government informed her father, a respected Radiologist who had served in the German army during World War I that he could no longer be a physician in Germany. The family moved to Barcelona, but after the Civil War erupted in Spain, the family dispersed, and Stefanie lived in a Kinderheimin Switzerland.  When she was 17, she made her way to New York and eventually to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

High School students find her story enthralling, and some have reached out to connect with her personally. Almost all the students to whom we speak have never seen a rabbi before; many have never seen a Jew.

“Being the first” causes Vickie and me to feel a special responsibility similar to the one I feel when I speak or teach in German churches. We want students to know about the Shoah, and its horrors. But I constantly say to students and parishioners to whom I speak:

Wir können die Vergangenheit nicht ungeschehen machen, aber wir können gemeinsam an einer besseren Zukunft arbeiten.We cannot undo the past, but the future is ours to shape.

If in some small way, our experiences in Germany and the essays in this book can somehow contribute to that besseren Zukunft –that better future, our efforts will be amply rewarded.