September 16 is Fran's and my wedding anniversary. That's right, today, Rosh Hashannah. It's our twenty- fifth! No, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I am not sponsoring the Kiddush this morning…but will you please do me this favor? We haven't done a thing to celebrate (I've been rather busy at work), so if you would wish my wife a Mazal Tov after services, I would really appreciate it!
And while we are at it, let me wish you all a mazal tov too. Because this Yom Tov you are celebrating not just one anniversary, but three: three anniversaries that involve every one of us here today.
The first one, you all know. Today, Rosh Hashannah, is the anniversary of creation. 5765 years of the human family, may we live in health and in peace. Mazal Tov.
The second anniversary concerns specifically our Jewish family. 350 years ago, sixteen boatloads of Jews left Brazil, exiled once again by the Inquisition. One boat went astray in a storm and was captured by pirates. When a French ship rescued the Jewish families, they were set ashore in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.
Although most of us hale from the great wave of Jewish immigration that began in the 1880's, those twenty-three souls established the first Jewish community in the New World, planting the seed of what would become the most powerful Jewish community in history. Again, I wish you all a Mazal Tov, may we continue to go from strength to strength.
Who knows the third anniversary that we all share in this year? I will give you a clue: It concerns specifically those of us who are sitting right here in this room, and in the tent, and our families. On Rosh Hashanah sixty years ago, seventeen families worshipped together in a rented Knights of Columbus Hall in a small New England town. By the final shofar blast of Yom Kippur, they had determined that the time had come to build a synagogue, to establish a community of their own. This Yom Tov, we are beginning the sixtieth anniversary celebration of Temple Israel of Natick; six decades of organized Jewish communal life in Natick Massachusetts. Now that's a reason to celebrate.
For several weeks this summer, I searched for just the right midrash, the right narrative, that would place these three communal milestones in perspective. What do the anniversary of creation, of American Judaism's 350th, and Temple Israel of Natick's 60th have to say to one another? Where is the theme that ties these separate milestones in time together?
The story I want to share with you, the story that I hope will in some way tie together the strands of our identity that these milestones represent, is from a novel titled In The Image, by Dara Horn. One of the characters is a college student, named Jason, who likes to volunteer his time visiting the residents of a Jewish old age home. In the scene I want you to hear, Jason is visiting Mr. Rosenthal, who is beginning to show the signs of senility. He no longer recognizes Jason, whom he mistakes for a grandson named Marcus:
"So Marcus, how are you these days?" Mr. Rosenthal asked. "You are still playing all those sports and games?" …Jason (playing along, pretending to be Marcus) answered that he was still playing soccer, and in fact had been made assistant varsity captain for next year's soccer season.
Instead of grinning and congratulating him, Mr. Rosenthal suddenly sprang all the way up in bed in a near fury, grabbing Jason by the arm with his shaky thin hand and refusing to let go. His smile vanished. "Marcus, listen to me," he said in a tone of utmost urgency. "I want you to be a deep sea diver.".
"Listen to me, Marcus," he said in almost a fierce whisper. By now he was clutching Jason's arm in a vise grip…."Deep-sea divers, they go and get things back from the bottom of the ocean, don't they?…Then forget all this soccer garbage," Mr. Rosenthal whispered furiously, "because that is what I want you to be. A deep-sea diver.".
Then Mr. Rosenthal began babbling on and on about (his) journey to America (as a young man), about how you had to cross two borders with forged papers just to get to Bremen, which was a town in Germany where your ship to England was docked, and then the ship took you to Liverpool, where you boarded another ship, this time for America, and then about how horrible it was in steerage class at the bottom of the ship, how you and all the other Jews were packed in by the hundreds, piled on top of each other like packages, and the ship kept rolling and everyone kept vomiting and there was no ventilation, and the whole place smelled like crap and vomit for two weeks and you couldn't even walk three steps without tripping over some screaming child.
After two weeks in this pit, Mr. Rosenthal finally reached the Promised Land, and he and all the other Jews on the ship crawled out of their steerage hellhole to go up on the deck as the ship pulled in right under the Statue of Liberty, and Mr. Rosenthal was as awestruck as everyone else. But then Mr. Rosenthal noticed that the other Jews on the deck weren't just looking at the Statue of Liberty. Instead they were actually pushing up to the edge of the deck, as if they were looking at something in the water. Mr. Rosenthal pulled in a little closer, and then he saw why they were all gathered on the side. They were throwing their tefillin overboard. Because tefillin were something Old World, and here in the New World they didn't need them anymore.
"And that is why I want you to be a deep-sea diver," Mr. Rosenthal told Jason. "I want you to dive down to the bottom of New York Harbor and bring those cast-off tefillin back up to the land." Then he collapsed on the nursing home bed…."
Tefillin: small leather boxes that hold carefully rolled scrolls of scriptural passages that Jewish men, and today, some women, wrap with leather straps around the arm and forehead in preparation for daily prayer. This act fulfills the Biblical commandment found in the first paragraph of the Shema: And you shall bind them as sign upon your arm and upon your heart."
Could Jewish immigrants arriving at New York Harbor, really have cast these holy objects into the sea, like an offering to the bronze goddess of Liberty under whose gaze they stood? The author, Dara Horn, did not invent this incident; I have read and heard about this bizarre scene many times. When they gazed at the skyline of New York for the first time, did Judaism really seem so irrelevant, so hopelessly outmatched by America?
Or is it a Jewish urban legend, an exaggeration, a powerful metaphor for our grandparents' headlong rush to assimilation and acceptance as new immigrants? In an interview, Horn says that she believes the story. She first heard it from a classmate at Harvard, whose great-grandfather repeatedly claimed to have witnessed it. Since writing her book, elderly Jews have approached her during book tours to offer personal testimony. Yes, they saw this travesty with their own eyes, as they and their families, on board ship so many decades ago, approached New York Harbor. Horn even reports being told of a museum in Nova Scotia that has an old, desiccated pair of tefillin on display, above a caption that reads: "A set of phylacteries (that's a fancy English word for Tefillin), removed from the floor of the Atlantic."
But like all great myths, it really doesn't matter if it happened in actual fact or not. As a midrash, a master story about our encounter with America, it tells us a piece of the truth about our ancestors, and about ourselves. America, warned many back then, was a "treyfe medina," and its people an "ama reyka, " a hollow people. A Yiddish paper of the time wrote, in a style that parodied the lofty language of the Mishna:
"The New World stands on three things: On money, and money, and again money. All the people of this country worship the Golden Calf."
One Jewish immigrant in the 1890's wrote:
"With every day that passed I became more and more overwhelmed at the degeneration of my fellow-countrymen in this new home of theirs…Cut adrift suddenly from their ancient moorings, they were floundering in a moral void. Good manners and good conduct, reverence and religion, had all gone overboard…The ancient racial respect for elders had completely disappeared…Tottering grandfathers had snipped off their white beards and laid aside their skullcaps and their snuff-boxes and paraded around the streets of a Saturday afternoon with cigarettes in their mouths, when they should have been lamenting the loss of the Holy City."
And so, if not literally on the boat, then soon thereafter, many, many Jews, succumbing both to crushing economic pressure, as well as to the seductions of a land without constraints, threw their tefillin, their well-worn prayer books, their candlesticks and traditions, all overboard. It happened, and it continues to happen, again and again.
Its been happening from the very beginning. There are Americans who can tell you that they are the descendents of the Mayflower. But there are virtually no American Jews who can trace their heritage back to that little boat that brought 23 Jews to New Amsterdam. Their descendents have all assimilated into the larger fabric of America. In fact, no wave of Jewish immigration so far has successfully resisted assimilation into the fifth generation. Can we predict with confidence what our own future will be?
We are no longer immigrants, forced to work backbreaking, seven-day weeks, in order to eke out a living. As a community we are, thank God, economically strong and socially secure. And we are blessed to live in an age of Jewish renaissance and renewal that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined. So perhaps the time has come to hear Mr. Rosenthal's plea to become deep-sea divers: To dive deep into the spiritual depths of our tradition, deep into ourselves, and rescue the abandoned tefillin.
Let me tell you something about tefillin. According to tradition, as one winds the strap seven time around the for-arm, one says the seven words from this verse from Ashrei, one word at a time, to mindfully mark each winding: "Poteach et yadecha, umasbia l'chol chai Ratzon. God, You open Your hand, and satisfy every living thing with favor." One places, with a blessing, the tefillin shel rosh on one's head. Returning the attention to the hand, you wrap the strap around the middle finger three times, as if it were a wedding ring binding you in holy covenant with God, and say the verse from Hosea, " I will betroth you to me forever, I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in loving kindness and mercy, I will betroth you to me in faithfulness and you shall love the Lord" Then one is ready to pray.
For a few minutes in the morning, leather straps tether my body neither to cell phone nor to palm pilot, but to texts of Torah, and dare I say it… to the presence of God. For a few minutes in the morning I do not serve my ego, or my intellectual pretensions about myself, or any earthly master; I am, for a moment, the servant and the intimate of the Kadosh Baruch Hu.
Awesome. There is power in such moments. And yet, most of us continue to deny ourselves access to these windows into the soul. The yearning of our hearts to reach towards something greater, fails to reach our ears.
I'll tell you something else about Tefillin in America. They mostly sit, untouched, in dresser drawers, safely tucked away under socks and underwear. They languish, year after year, until the day arrives when they are passed down, as a precious heirloom, to the Bar Mitzvah boy of the next generation. We do not have to cast them into the sea to tame their power; we have domesticated them, and made them easy to ignore.
When Judaism no longer speaks to our souls, our reason for remaining Jewish fades.
Are we afraid to stand before the commanding presence of Eternity? Is it so threatening to strip oneself of the protective armor of the commonplace and the mundane, that we choose instead, to starve the soul?
The gift of America is that here, we are allowed to become whatever we want to be. In the age of Jewish renewal and renaissance that we are entering, the challenge of America is to become who we need to be.
In my first years in Natick, Arnie Zarr Kessler, our Educational Director at that time, used to give an inspirational talk at the opening teachers meeting in September. He would tell them that we, right here in little Natick Massachusetts, stand on the frontlines of the battle for the soul of American Judaism. If a renewed commitment to Jewish life, learning, and spirit were to succeed in America, then it would have start right here in the typical suburban Synagogue and school.
Here. In Natick, we are learning how to be deep-sea divers, to recover what has been mislaid, but not lost.
But to be a deep-sea diver means being willing to take a risk. It means being willing sometimes to go against the tide. The tide of conformity, of complacency, of a way of thinking and being that limits us to the concrete.
When I started my talk today, I said that I would tell you how this story about deep-sea diving could bring our three anniversaries into meaningful perspective. So here it is: The 350th anniversary of Jews in America reminds us that if Judaism is to survive in this wonderful land of freedom and secularism, of materialism, and of very, very short term memory, then we need to be deep-sea divers. And it is within our power to do it.
Aaron Lansky relates that when his grandmother arrived in New York Harbor, she literally tossed her candlesticks overboard. But two generations later, do you know who Aaron Lansky is? He is the creator of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst.
His life's work is rescuing Yiddish books that had been consigned to the trash heap, and lovingly restoring them for future generations. Things that we think were lost may only have been mislaid, waiting to be found again.
Found, but not unchanged. The American Judaism that continues to emerge out of the waters of the Atlantic is different. It is more pluralistic, individualistic, anti-authoritarian and open ended, for better or for worse, than anything that came before. But expressions of the spirit never stay static; they shift and change to fit who we have become. And we have become Americans.
And the sixtieth year celebration of Temple Israel of Natick? It reminds us that through what we do together here, we can transform not only ourselves, but the larger American community of which we are a part. Learn Hebrew. Study Torah. Sign up for Solet, or Meah, or Ikkarim. Master the words of the Kiddush, and of the Siddur. Find some time each day to pray, or to meditate, or both. As Mr. Rosenthal bluntly put it: "Forget that soccer crap" and become a deep-sea diver. Do these things because they speak to your soul, and the soul is waiting to be nourished.
Finally, Rosh Hashannah reminds us that the time for Teshuvah, for diving deep into the deepest levels of who we are, is right now. For ultimately, the future of the Jewish experience in America is not dependent on sociology and demography: It depends on you and me. The world begins anew, today, at this very moment, and the responsibility is ours.
As we enter the New Year, I leave you with a poem by the American Yiddish poet, Jacob Glatstein. It was translated by Dara Horn:
The Crown
This song in my voice that chants, with proper cantillation
the melody of memory, the haunting and humming,
this crown, shot through with silver, that you see on my head
where did it come from?
Where?
With a wild prank,
With boyish will,
Some forty years ago,
Through a portal of the ship,
I sent my tefillin out on the waters.
Like cast off bread, the tefillin's crown came back.
After many years, the soaked crown came back.
A silver crown.
Like an unhatched egg,
God's sorrow lay before my father's threshold,
When, with a heavy heart, a half-dried wineskin,
I set out on the roads.
Severed, forlorn and tattered,
I began my wandering.
Through the terrifying wilderness of our century.
O, forty thorns of my century.
A God-seeker, I tapped blindly with my staff
And skillfully avoided the quorum in the synagogue.
As for my parents, made in God's image,
I more than once encountered them on the roads.
Your Jewish head is naked and bare,
I heard them say.
Your Jewish head, child.
O, leave your bread on the water,
The straps that bind you.
Throw them into the deepest abyss.
Throw! What kind of meaning do they have, anyway?
Many days from now, you will find them.
You will have to find them.
Now my parents have been rewarded.
My head is crowned.
With ancient gray Jewishness.
L'Shannah Tovah Tikateivu V'techateimu: May we be written and inscribed by a year of sweetness and health, of wholeness and of Shalom.