Sermon for Yom Kippur 5768

Marc Angel, rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, the oldest congregation in North America, told the following story in 2002. A Jewish man was riding on the subway reading a Nazi newspaper. An acquaintance of his, who was sitting nearby, noticed this and became very agitated. He approached him and said, “Moishe, have you lost your mind? Why are you reading a Nazi newspaper?” Moishe replied, “You know Avram, I used to read the Jewish newspapers but what did find? Jews being persecuted, Israel being threatened and attacked, Jews living in poverty, so one day I looked at the Nazi newspaper and what do I find? Jews own all the banks, Jews control the media, and Jews are all rich and powerful. In the Nazi newspapers, Jews rule the world. That’s why I switched; the news is so much better!’”

For Rabbi Angel the message of this story is that despite the fact that history has not been easy on the Jewish people, “we have managed to keep our sense of humor.” He wonders if we are foolish or if we are hopelessly naïve. He discounts these possibilities, expresses his pride in our survival despite all the years of persecution and victimization, and concludes his message by saying, “The mystery of Jewish survival is one of the mysteries of human civilization but an even greater mystery is how we Jews have managed to survive a brutal history while remaining optimistic, idealistic and dedicated to building a better world.” My friends, it is not a mystery; it is the reason.

The fact of the Holocaust begs the question of Jewish survival; how did any of the Jews of Europe survive that? Back in August, I caught a fascinating program on the Discovery channel. It was about a family of dwarves, the Ovitz family, who survived the Holocaust. While I know there is no hard and fast rule for us to predict who was more likely to be a Holocaust survivor, but common wisdom would expect most survivors to be stocky, strong young men whom the Nazis kept around for forced labor. How odd it is that not one or two of these dwarves survived but the entire family of the seven Ovitz dwarves survived. One factor in their survival was their musical skills. They were professional musical performers and could entertain all audiences. Secondly, they merited the bizarre fortune of landing in Auschwitz and being singled out by Dr. Josef Mengele as his dwarves. Thus they were spared the gas chambers. Before Mengele could carry out any of his diabolical experiments on the Ovitz family dwarves, Auschwitz was liberated. In all the transfers from ghettoes to camps that the Ovitz family endured they always insisted on staying together and because the Nazis valued their uniqueness and their entertainment potential, they were able to stay together. Lena Ovitz, the last surviving member of this family, credits their survival with staying together. This can and should be used as a model for the Jewish people in its entirety. Our rabbis tell us that the loss of the second Temple in Jerusalem was brought on by the infighting among the Jewish people. If the Jewish people in Europe in the 1930’s and 40’s had more communication and more interaction and less prejudice of German Jew versus Litvak and Litvak versus Galitzianer, many more lives could have spared during the Holocaust. And for the present and the future Jewish people, staying together is key to our survival. When the Orthodox and the Reform Jews in this country work together, accepting each other’s differences and acknowledging our common peoplehood, then our chances for survival are greatly enhanced. When the Ashkenazic and Sephardic and the religious and the secular Jews in Israel work in common purpose at all times and not only during times of war, Israel’s survival for many more than her current 60 years is all but guaranteed. But we have not been a people known for great cooperation, for sharing and pluralistic acceptance of each other’s different beliefs and practices. If staying together were all that mattered for our survival, then we would not have survived all these years. “Two Jews, three opinions” is not a joke.

In my first congregation in Steubenville, Ohio, my wife and I had the pleasure of knowing and befriending a Holocaust survivor from Hungary named Gabor Adler. Gabor was an amazing individual. Having survived Auschwitz, he was captured by Soviet soldiers and spent time in a Soviet prison camp. After being released from the gulag and living for a number of years in Hungary, he came to this country barely escaping Hungary with his life during the Soviet invasion of 1956. Gabor once told us a story that seems almost incredible but is frighteningly true. In advance of the Soviet onslaught, the Nazis took many of the camp’s inmates out of the camp, lined them up by a pit, and shot them all leaving them all for dead. Gabor was shot but the shot ricocheted off the bridge of his nose. He fell unconscious into the pit and was covered by dirt. Miraculously, nobody fell in on top of him and when he came to, he brushed the dirt off of him, got out of the mass grave and crawled back to the camp. He told me that he found the will to go on every day and not succumb to despair by telling himself, “Tomorrow, I’ll smoke a cigarette. Tomorrow, I’ll eat a good meal. Tomorrow, I’ll drink a glass of wine. I may not have it today but tomorrow I will.”

Rabbi Hugo Gryn was born in 1928 the town of Berehovo in Czechoslovakia. When he was 10, Hungarian troops took over Berehovo. The following year, as a result of the Munich Pact signed by Hitler and British Prime Minister Chamberlain, the German Army replaced them. In 1944, the Jews in the town were forced into the ghetto. Six weeks later the Gryn family were deported to Auschwitz. Hugo and his mother survived but his brother and father both died in Auschwitz. After the war Gryn emigrated to the United States where he trained as a rabbi. He later moved to England where he served as a rabbi for 32 years in a London synagogue. Rabbi Hugo Gryn died in 1996 but he left us this lesson from his life in Auschwitz.

One time when he and his father received a small bit of margarine, they did not use it on their piece of bread instead they set it aside and saved it to be used on Hanukah as fuel to light the menorah. Hugo and his father zealously protected that bit of margarine until Hanukah came. They tore some cloth into thin strips to use as wicks, dipped them in the margarine but the wick would not light. The flame sputtered out; margarine is not an effective fuel. Sixteen-year-old Hugo Gryn was angry, he could not accept that they wasted the margarine, their precious food, for the sake of a ridiculous, naïve notion that it could light the lights of the menorah. His father patiently counseled him that he should not be angry. He reminded young Hugo of the haftarah for the Shabbat in Hanukah where God tells the prophet Zechariah that things will not be accomplished in this world by might or by power but by God’s spirit. He taught him never to lose his faith in God’s spirit, that God’s spirit always provides, and that while the margarine could have given them more sustenance for one or maybe two meals, the hope that they could use the margarine to joyfully celebrate Hanukah in the barracks of Auschwitz helped them survive for months.

The word hope in Hebrew is “tikvah” as in Hatikvah, the national anthem of the State of Israel. It is related to two other Hebrew words, kav, which means a line, and mikveh, a special reservoir of living water. Hope, tikvah, is like a line thrown out to a person at risk of drowning that saves them. Hope is like a reservoir of support which we can draw from in times of trouble. Rabbi Angel wondered how we could survive all these years and still be optimistic. We survived all these years because we are optimistic, because we hope, because we grab on to that safety line, we hang on by a thread, we dig deep into that reservoir reaching out to connect to others, our families, our friends, our ancestors and our descendants, and we hold on with all our might – and we survive.

The Holocaust is in our past, the pogroms and expulsions are facts of a bygone age, and the State of Israel has existed for the past 60 years. The embodiment of all the hope of the Jewish people, our hope of nearly two thousand years, stands in defiance of all the persecutions and all the propaganda leveled at us by Nazis, Cossacks, Crusaders and Romans and everybody else in between. Yet we can still find anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Theodore Herzl had a brilliant idea; an idea he felt sure would eradicate the nasty problem that plagued the Jewish people since the days of Alexander the Great; the 2,300-year-old specific form of racism and xenophobia known as anti-Semitism. It was Herzl’s theory and conviction, as he emphatically stated in his 1896 work “The Jewish State,” that we are a nation and we will rid ourselves of our abused and victimized status once and for all when we become a nation like the other nations with our own land, language, government and international political standing. His theory, which came to be known as Zionism, proposed the end to anti-Semitism in our time. There was an undeniable logic to his proposition. Since the bulk of our Diaspora existence took place in Europe and it was in Europe that we were never allowed to fully integrate into the general society and were treated as outcasts and non-citizens, once we became citizens of our own state, left Europe and the rest of the Diaspora to live in our own land and under our own government, we would be equal to the French, British, Germans and other nations and we would not be persecuted any more. The theory failed because it did not take into consideration the fact that Arabs who also wanted and deserved a state of their own inhabited the land of Israel and that the vast majority of the Jewish people especially American Jews would not choose to leave their homes and live in the Jewish state. So while the European anti-Semitism that Herzl was familiar with is a thing of the past, Zionism did not end anti-Semitism. In fact, current political realities and myths have given rise to a new form of anti-Semitism; anti-Zionism.

This new anti-Semitism began in the late 1960’s following the Six Day War, became the mantra of the UN in the 1970’s, the underlying theme of media reporting from the Middle East since the 1980’s and over the past two decades, it has become widespread in the Western world especially in many intellectual, liberal institutions and social circles. Darling of the Saudi Arabian elite, ex-President Jimmy Carter, is one of the leading spokesmen for this newfound, socially acceptable and politically correct form of anti-Semitism. We have seen undercurrents of it in media reporting for many years but the most shameful and abominable display came in the form of the special CNN report on God’s warriors.

The term God’s warriors is a despicable term, a term that was used to grotesque excess in the Middle Ages with the Crusaders and the Inquisition and one that has no place in the vocabulary of the 21st century. The last time Jews saw themselves as God’s warriors was in our desperate and doomed rebellion against the oppressive, corrupt and pagan Roman Empire nearly 2,000 years ago. Yet Christiane Amanpour of CNN uses this term to lump together Orthodox Zionists who settle in the occupied territories, Orthodox American Jews who raise money to support the settlements and the rebuilding of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington, DC, Israeli government officials who overlooked the settlement or tacitly encouraged their expansion, American Jews that attend Zionist camps and are active in the Zionist youth movements, and Yigal Amir who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Baruch Goldstein who massacred Arab worshippers in Hebron in 1994 and the Jewish Underground that put bombs in the cars of several Palestinian Arab mayors of West Bank towns in 1980 and tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock.

One of the people that CNN highlighted in this program and defined as one of God’s Jewish warriors was an Orthodox American Jewish woman named Sondra Oster Baras who now lives on the West Bank. Sondra’s parents are Holocaust survivors who taught her that Israel was essential in case there is another Holocaust and that was the basis for her beliefs. She conducts tours in Israel for American groups especially fundamentalist Christian groups and speaks to churches and other Christian gatherings galvanizing financial support for Israel and the settlements, taking money from fundamentalist Christians and ignoring their theological view of Israel as a prerequisite for the second coming of Jesus when all non-believers are damned for all eternity. We understand that Sondra represents a small fraction of American Jews and for that matter Israelis but not only did Ms. Amanpour gloss over that fact and misrepresent our connection to Israel as a strident and extreme nationalism but she did it in such an underhanded way that nearly 50% of American Jews could be seen as guilty of fostering these extreme attitudes in their children. In telling Sondra Oster Baras’ story, Ms. Amanpour mentions that she grew up with a strong attachment to Israel because of her parent’s influence and went to a Zionist summer camp. She never said which one or to which Zionist organization it was affiliated. It could have been Tel Ha-Shomer, Ha-Bonim, Ayelet Ha-shachar or even Young Judea. She quickly zips through her early adult life, mentions that she was a successful Wall Street lawyer who left all that behind her to make aliya in 1984 and settle on the West Bank. Sondra then makes a statement, “I never felt fully American, I’m Jewish and I need to live here to strengthen the Jewish presence in Samaria.” And I am watching this and listening to this and I realize that Christiane Amanpour has implied that sending our children to Zionist summer camps leads to strident, ultra-religious, nationalism. She was essentially equating support for Israel with violence and terrorism. It was Zionism equals racism all over again and this time it was not in the limited arena of the United Nations but it was on national television for millions to see and be misled. How diabolically ironic and despicable it is that the very ideology designed to free us from the scourge of anti-Semitism is being turned upside down and misrepresented and used against us to engender anti-Semitism. Our 2,000-year-old hope defined and framed by Zionism for the past 120 years has become the very thing used by our enemies to vilify us.

Zionism is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it started long before Theodore Herzl gave it a name. Zionism, the attachment to the land of Israel and the desire to return to it and claim it as our homeland goes back 2,500 years to days of the prophet Ezekiel. Then the exiled children of Israel were languishing in Babylon. They were despondent and despairing. They though all was lost until Ezekiel shares with them his vision of the dry bones. A vision that is frightening yet inspiring, a vision that depicts the people of Israel as a pile of dry bones in a valley, and as Ezekiel watches, God talks to him and tells him that these bones can come back to life. And Ezekiel sees the bones growing muscles and tendons and skins and coming together and becoming people, and the people cry out “avda tikvateynu” our hope is lost. And God says, “od lo”, No, not yet for I will bring you out of your graves, I will bring you out of your despair and bring you back to your land once more.” And every year for the past 60 years, on Israel Independence Day, this Biblical passage is read over Israeli radio to inspire our brothers and sisters in the land of Zion and Jerusalem that our hope is not lost, that we still hold on to the dream of living in our land with freedom, security and peace. As the great American poet Langston Hughes said, “Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”

In spite of condemnations from the United Nations, in spite of anti-Israel bias throughout the world media, in spite of continued lies and accusations hurled at us by supposed world leaders, in spite of terrorism and violence against our people, we, the Jewish people and the people of Israel remain an idealistic, optimistic nation, committed to a brighter future. Our spirit has not been broken by the thousands of years of persecution, torment, death and destruction; we will not be broken now. In spite of it all, we will survive. Am yisrael Chai – the people of Israel lives. We will survive not because of power or might but because of God’s spirit working within us, the spirit we call hope - tikvah

Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “In spite of it all, I still believe that people are good at heart.” In spite of it all, we believe in the bright positive future for this world and all humanity. We dedicate ourselves to the purpose of tikkun olam, to making the world a better place for all through our righteous actions. All Jewish men, women and children, Reform Orthodox and all stops in between, should devote time and energy to improving our world and hoping for a better day. A popular song in Israel in the late 1960’s entitled “Machar” – tomorrow, sang about a day when Israel and the entire world would live and peace, sharing and celebrating together. The chorus said, “All of this is not a parable or a dream. It is as real as sunlight at noon. All of this will come true tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then the day after.”

In spite of it all, this is how we view the world. In spite of it all, we will laugh at our selves, we will believe in a bright possible future for all people, we will work together despite differences of opinions or levels of observance or places of origin and most of all, no matter what, we will hope that tomorrow will bring a day of security and safety for all our people, a day of cooperation and communication for all the world to share, and a day of justice for all people, freedom for those in emotional, physical or political chains, and a day when all people can live in peace sitting under their vine or fig tree without fear of anyone. We fervently hope that day will come tomorrow and if not tomorrow then at least the day after.

And let us say, Amen