Sermons and Divrei Torah
Nostalgia and Victimhood
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Rosh Hashanah 5761)
Herr Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in
Berlin in 1935. “Herr Altmann” said his secretary, “ I notice
you’re reading Der Sturmer! I can’t understand why you are carrying
a Nazi libel sheet. Are you some kind of masochist, or G-d forbid,
a self-hating Jew?” “Oh no” answered Altmann. “On the contrary,
Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned
about were pogroms, riots and assimilation. But now that I read
Der Sturmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the
banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge
of taking over the entire world. You know, reading this makes
me feel a whole lot better!”
I thought of this joke this summer, when like many of you, I went
to Stratford to see Anne Frank. Now in truth, I was a consultant
to the producer Al Waxman, so I especially wanted to see this
cast of mostly non-Jews pronounce the blessings over the Chanukah
Menorah properly! But while we were at Stratford, we figured we
might as well catch the other Jewish play of the season, Fiddler.
What an interesting juxtaposition, I thought, Fiddler and Anne
Frank. Although one is light hearted and the other quite serious,
they are both about Jewish worlds that were lost. The persecution
of the religious, and the persecution of the assimilated. The
Jews vanquished, and the Jews triumphant again. My eldest son
turned to me after seeing Fiddler. “What did you think?” I asked.
“They really did things differently than us, but its nice that
we still practice some of those things, like Shabbos,” he answered.
Nostalgia. “And what about Anne Frank?” I asked. “It scared me
a little bit.” Victimhood. Nostalgia and victimhood, the two features
of Jewish life that we all share across denominational lines.
Nostalgia and victimhood, universal themes that everyone in the
audience could relate to no matter what ethnic or religious culture
they had come from, for every modern remnant of an older people
can remember “the good old days” and has felt at one time or another
the slap of not belonging. Nostalgia and victimhood. Will these
be the two Jewish flags that what we are going to bequeath to
our children?
I pondered the audience full of non-Jews trying on the one hand
to understand a Jewish culture resembling nothing like the Judaism
most of their friends and neighbours would practice, and on the
other hand a Jewish culture no longer alive. What would those
non-Jewish audiences think about Jews and Judaism, I wondered,
if Anne Frank and Fiddler were their only contextual framework?
And more important, I wondered what the Jews in those audiences
thought about their own Judaism when they left the theatres. What
if these two motifs, the religion of nostalgia on the one hand
and the religion that’s dangerous to practice on the other, were
the only two frames of Judaic reference a person ever had?
Anatevka and Germany. Nostalgia instead of a living, joyful, practiced
religion. Anatevka and Germany. The Jew as eternal victim.
“Jewish survival” was our banner in the 60’s. Judaism survives
so that Judaism can survive; a Judaism alive to beat the enemy,
to never hand over a posthumous victory. As Dow Marmur says, “
a faith forged by foes.” Jewish survival” was our banner in the
60’s. That changed to “Jewish continuity” in the 80’s. OK. We
survived. We continued. We have even prospered. So what? Whats
next? What did we survive for? What will be the reason for the
tenacious art of Jewish survival in the new millenium?
In her book God and the Victim by Elisa Lampman, the author speaks
of how religious value becomes attached to being a victim. Sacred
memory, martyrdom, stories of valiant suffering, all help to make
sense of tragedy, to justify victimhood, and to assign meaning
to being a victim. We invoke God’s name and lend some degree of
holiness to our victimization. But the danger of romancing victimhood
is very great. Unfortunately, there have been plenty of opportunities
for Jews to be victims. On Yom Kippur afternoon we will recite
the martyrology, a whole section of the service devoted to speaking
and listing and memorializing those Jews who died “al kiddush
Hashem”, for the sanctification of G-d’s name. We end the martyrology
with a song of defiance, “We are Here.” But we have to be diligent
not to make a religion out of memorial. Perhaps we read the Akedah,
the story of the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac, as a kind
of warning against the inclination to extol our victimhood.
Isaac, the poor “middle generation child” between Abraham the
father of monotheism and Jacob the father of the twelve tribes.
Isaac, known forever for the near-sacrifice up on the mountain;
famous for his silence when the knife was at his throat, remembered
for his pitifully innocent question, “where is the ram for the
slaughter?” Isaac, the prototypical Jew, the prototypical victim,
best summed up by the modern Israeli poet Hayim Guri in this poem
he calls “Heritage”:
-
The ram came last of all. And Abraham did not know that it came
to answer the boy’s question-first of his strength when his day
was on the wane.
-
The old man raised his head. Seeing that it was no dream an that
the angel stood there- the knife slipped from his hand.
-
The boy, released from his bonds, saw his father’s back.
-
Isaac, as the story goes, was not sacrificed. He lived for many
years, saw what pleasure had to offer, until his eyesight dimmed.
-
But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. They are born with
a knife in their hearts.
The knife in the Jewish heart. The knife bequeathed to every Jew,
in every generation. Isaac was not sacrificed, but his descendants
were. I wonder how many in the audience at Anne Frank continued
to think of the “poor Jews” and their on-going victimization.
I wonder how many Jews left, like my son, frightened of the danger
of being Jewish. I think it’s time to take the knife out of the
Jewish heart.
Now, the knife is good for fundraising. There’s nothing like danger
to pull us together. This is not to say there is no anti-Semitism,
there is, both large and small, if you can quantify such acts.
After all, the attack on the California JCC and the attack on
one of our own local Toronto cemeteries was this year. Just last
High Holidays we read of a mugging on an older Jewish man on his
way home from shul on Bathurst Street! And every day insensitive
remarks are made. We are so comfortable in this open, multicultural
society that many of us just don't know what anti-Semitism is
anymore. We’ve never personally experienced it. There’s an old
Yiddish proverb, “An anti-Semite is a person who hates Jews more
than is absolutely necessary.” We know by now that no matter how
you try and “explain” anti-Semitism, it is an irrational hatred
with no basis in rationality. We now understand the sophisticated
sociological notion that while many factors contribute to anti-Semitism,
none of them causes anti-Semitism. We now understand that thinking
that Jews can control anti-Semitism by being less “this way” or
more “that way” is futile, and that Jews don’t cause anti-Semitism
any more than children cause child abuse. Those who think there
will be less anti-Semitism when Jews act differently have not
studied the cold facts of history: that Jews have been hated whether
we are rich or whether we are poor; whether we stick together
or whether we assimilate; no matter what we wear, how we act,
what language we speak, who we marry or with whom we work. There
has been anti-Semitism in times of great interfaith understanding,
and in times of dark ignorance. Jews do not cause anti-Semitism,
anti-Semites do.
I don’t believe that Jews make anti-Semitism, but I don’t believe
that anti-Semitism makes Jews, either. What positive reasons will
we give the next generation to be Jewish? A negative definition
is not a real definition; to be Jewish because of the Holocaust
is not the same as to be Jewish despite the Holocaust.
I do not wish, ever, G-d forbid, to denigrate the memory of those
who perished. I would never, ever want to trivialize their suffering.
I would never, ever want them to have died in vain. And I do not
mean to suggest that we should ever forget the lessons of the
Holocaust or stop teaching or talking about it. However, anti-Semitism
and memories of the Holocaust don’t make good Jews. They make
good victims.
In this, we can learn much from those who struggle against AIDS.
In the beginning of this terrible disease, people were AIDS victims.
Then the struggle became political, and today those with AIDS
just call themselves “People with AIDS.” Shelby Steele, a black
writer, has written powerfully about the romanticization of victimhood.
He warns against a “victim mentality” in which he says a person
needs to see themself as a victim in order to have a self-identity;
in effect, he writes, “being a victim gives you a perverse sort
of “status”. If we Jews are not to enjoy that kind of “perverse
status” than Judaism must be an affirmation rather than a negation,
and we will need something solid to replace the centrality of
our suffering. Something more than both Fiddler and Anne Frank
combined.
My parents had the comfortable settling into safe suburban Judaism
and the giddy realization that they were accepted by their neighbours
to focus on. I had the Six Day War, and the freeing of Soviet
Jewry, and the birth of Jewish feminism. But what does the new
generation have? “
Dow Marmur writes, “If survival is is not to be at the mercy of
our adversaries, it must be based on a sense of Jewish purpose.”
A sense of Jewish purpose. A strong and positive reason to be
Jewish. The “joy” of being Jewish, not the “oy” of being Jewish.
It has to, or we will be nothing more than an ethnic group of
collective kvetchers. It has to, because no one- and I mean no-one,
in their 20’s and 30’s is going to choose either nostalgia or
victimhood. The next generation of Jews needs something strong,
something young, something self-assured and hip and horizon-stretching
and risky and innovative, positive role models who have the courage
to challenge the status quo with all its accepted wisdom. The
next generation of Jews will accept nothing less than a Jewish
renaissance.
Only a Jewish renaissance will take the knife out of the Jewish
heart.
It will take joy, optimism, humour, learning and courage. It will
take people willing to fund experimental programs that might not
even work. It will take Jewish organizations willing to broaden
their missions and reevaluate their mandates. It will take partnerships
we have not yet begun to imagine. It will take idea people who
don’t get shot down by naysayers and people who have “been there
and done that.” It will take the courage to look south of the
border at incredible creative programs in New York and Philadelphia
and Boston and for us to stop saying for a little while that Toronto
has nothing to learn from anywhere else.
I’ve seen the seeds of the Jewish renaissance here at the Toronto
Jewish Film Festival, at Ashkenaz, at the new outreach programs
and learning services and special events for young Jews being
offered in the local synagogues. I’ve seen it right at our own
Kolel as we move into new models and stretch our own horizons.
Only a Jewish renaissance will give the next generation of Jews
a shared sense of Jewish purpose.
We will replace suffering with joy. How often have I heard someone
say, “I suffered through Hebrew school, and now I’m going to send
my kids so they can suffer too.” What a legacy to pass on! Do
we have to still carry around our own twenty-year old negativity
and be darn sure our kids get it too? We rise from the fast of
Tishe B’av, from memorializing the destruction of the Temple,
to preparing for the High Holidays. We say Yizkor on our three
most joyous festivals: Sukkot, Pesach and Shavuot. That says something
about our insistence on celebration.
We will replace suffering with optimism. There is an old fable
about a mighty king who condemned one of his subjects to die.
The poor man offered to teach the king’s horse to fly, if only
the king would postpone the execution for one year. “What? Are
you crazy?” his friends asked. “No” the man said. “The odds are
four to one in my favor. You see, the king might die, I might
die, the horse might die...or I might actually teach the horse
the fly!” When I first came to Toronto there were alot of people
convinced you can’t build something new from scratch, especially
not in Toronto... there’s already a very well known and popular
Orthodox outreach centre...how many Jews want to learn Torah on
a week night? and on and on. I kept thinking to myself, “I might
teach that horse to fly...”
We will replace suffering with laughter. I know many people hated
Life is Beautiful and Punch Me in The Stomach and that whole new
generation of comedians who deal with humour in the face of the
Holocaust. But I also know that in every generation Jews have
made fun of their enemies. Look at the holiday of Purim, in which
we masquerade and stamp out the name of Haman. The ability to
laugh at oneself and one’s most sacred institutions is a gift.
Laughter is an antidote to sadness. Without laughter, we are a
dull people.
We will replace suffering with learning. Learning that leads to
a new spirituality rooted in discipline, not in the fad of the
hour or the guru of the latest talk show. We will find community
in Torah study, in the kind of serious, thoughtful, mind-expanding
study that was only open to men a generation ago. We will sit
around a table with Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist,
secular, atheist, struggling Jews and we will ask the same questions
our ancestors asked and we will wrestle with the same texts that
only ten years ago were considered “owned” by an elite. The kind
of learning that matches the highest standards we set for our
secular educations.
And we will replace suffering with the courage to take risks.
This is the beginning of my tenth year at Kolel. It has been the
hardest ten years of my rabbinate, but without doubt, the most
rewarding. I left a senior position at my American congregation
to press the “rewind” button on my life and spent the first two
years postering up and down Bathurst to get people to come to
a class or an event. I don’t think I was courageous; I think I
was crazy, but ten years later alot of courageous people have
joined me and pushed the Toronto envelope to include an institution
which is not a synagogue, not a school, not a Jewish centre, not
in the definitional box, none of the above, all of the above.
Joy, optimism, humour, learning and courage: these will fuel our
shared sense of Jewish purpose. I don’t want Anne Frank and Fiddler
to be the benchmarks of why my kids are Jewish. I don’t want nostalgia
and victimhood to be their inheritance from me. When they read
the Akedah, I want them to notice the ram right away. The ram
was the solution. The ram that no one saw until the last minute,
when all the conventional answers were used up and they didn’t
know what to do. I don’t want my kids to identify with Isaac,
nebuch. I want my kids to identify with the answer. I want the
next generation to butt a few heads and shake up some new ways
of thinking.
Or we’ll never take the knife out of Isaac’s heart, and we’ll
never have anything to put in its place.
Shana Tova.
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
