I want to begin by thanking all of you for your sympathy and support following the death of my grandmother last week. Sara and I are very grateful. I’m returning to New York on Wednesday and our entire family will return to Chicago the following Sunday. We are eager to begin our second year together in this warm and embracing community.
The Jewish calendar contains two holiday seasons that are meant to evoke a specific historical process and to invoke a specific historical consciousness within us. The first of these seasons is the stretch of time between Pesach and Shavuot, sefirat ha-omer, which has now been augmented by the 20th century Jewish holidays, Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron, Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, and Yom Yerushalayim. The second season is bein hamitzarim, the three weeks that stretch from the 17th of Tamuz until the 9th of Av. The religious meaning of Jewish history depends on appreciating and experiencing both cycles.
Pesach is the quintessential holiday of freedom. More than simply celebrating the anniversary of our exodus from Egypt, we are told “hayav adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza mi’Mitzrayim – every Jew must see himself or herself on Pesach night as if he or she personally left Egypt.” The very next day, we begin our count of sefirat ha’omer, marching forward, having been freed from the fate of a slave, to pursue our destiny as a people. A few days later, on the 28th of Nissan, Yom HaShoah, we remember the untenable costs of powerlessness and confirm our determination to live as free people. On the 4th of Iyyar, Yom HaZikkaron, Israel’s memorial day, we remember and honor the cost of that freedom. On the 5th of Iyyar, we celebrate and express our gratitude for the State of Israel and the return of sovereignty to the Jewish people in modern times. On the 28th of Iyyar we remember the liberation of Jerusalem and the end of the existential threat to Jewish survival in the 20th century.
Finally, we turn towards Shavuot and we declare that freedom without responsibility is empty. We turn towards Shavuot and we declare that Jewish continuity without Jewish content is meaningless and impossible. We turn towards Shavuot and refine the covenant of fate, forged in Egyptian slavery, into a covenant of destiny, forged in the thunder and lighting of Sinai.
This seven week progression from Pesach to Shavuot is fundamentally and irrepressibly a time of optimism. The sad reminders along the way, Yom HaShoah and Yom HaZikaron, are linked to a triumphant story of Jewish survival, the flourishing of Jewish life, and faith in the ultimate victory of the Torah itself, and the values that the Torah injects into the universe.
The other season of historical commemoration and historical consciousness-raising in the Jewish calendar is the three week progression from the 17th of Tamuz until Tisha b’Av. These weeks remind us that all that we have accomplished as a nation can vanish in the blink of an eye when we are not faithful to God, when we are not faithful to the Torah, and when we are not faithful to each other. In the Torah portion we read this morning, in verses read in the uniquely sad melody of Tisha b’Av , Moshe asked, “Eicha – How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering!” Isaiah, Yeshayahu, asked in the haftarah, “Eicha – How has the faithful city, Jerusalem, turned into a harlot.” And Monday night we will hear Jeremiah’s words, the lament of Yirmiyahu, “Eichah – How does the city sit solitary, that was full of people!”
Yehudah Mirsky wrote this week, “On Tisha b’Av we take upon ourselves the burden, and the grace, of our connection to all Jews past, present and future, in times of suffering, as in times of joy.”
The progression of three weeks, culminating in Tisha b’Av – this season of mourning and fasting and introspection, reminds us that if we aren’t faithful to one another, we inevitably betray and undermine the basis for our shared life together, and destruction is the inevitable outcome. This season reminds us that power without justice cannot bring security , stability is illusiary, and our future is inextricably bound with our pursuit of justice and cultivation of ethics. In the words of Yeshayahu that were read this morning, “Tziyon b’Mishpat Tifadeh, V’Shave’ah Bitzdakah – Zion will be redeemed by justice, and her repentant ones by righteousness.”
My two grandfathers each died decades before I was born, but for my entire childhood I had two grandmothers and each of these larger-than-life women left me with a legacy that I treasure. Indeed, reflecting in the days following the death of my maternal grandmother, Gert Lang, last Sunday evening, it occurred to me that my two grandmothers, in addition to being infinite sources of love and attention, also represented these two seasons of historical commemoration in the Jewish calendar. My pious “Brooklyn grandma” and my cosmopolitan “New York grandma” are models for me for how Jews experience history.
My father’s mother was raised in an Orthodox home in Germany. She had beautiful blue eyes and would laugh and smile at the German soldiers guarding parks with “No Jews Allowed Signs.” In 1938, her husband, my grandfather, was deported to Poland. No one in my family every saw him again. A letter from the Red Cross tells us that he was admitted to Buchenwald on January 20, 1945. Following my grandfather’s deportation, my grandmother worked tirelessly to arrange a visa to England, first for my 6 year-old uncle, and then, in 1939, for herself and my infant father. She worked as a nurse in London during the war years, sending her children to the countryside during the worst weeks of the Battle of Britain while she remained in London. In 1949 she brought her family to New York, seeking greater opportunities for her children in America.
Her life is a testament to the power of an optimistic belief in redemption. In her youth, she made the incomprehensible decision to bring two Jewish children into the world at a time and a place where they were not wanted and were not safe. That decision alone, the reason I and my children are here today, is one of the greatest acts of faith, replicated by hundreds of thousands like her, that the world has ever seen.
In her later years, she married a Lubavitcher Hassid, from a prominent Chabad family. She embraced the rebbe’s mission to bring Mashiach now and her yearning for redemption, tzipiah l’y’shua, was palpable. For my Brooklyn grandma, we were on a march from Pesach to Shavuot. There was danger and tragedy along the way, but nothing could divert us from our path. The month that I finished high school and prepared to spend a year, the first of several, studying in yeshiva in Israel, my grandmother signed over to me her reparations check from Germany, signifying that our people’s embrace of Torah could overcome all of our our enemies. In her final years, in Aishel Avraham nursing home in Williamsburg, she would sing poplar Yiddish songs, in her still beautiful voice, preparing to sing in celebration at the arrival of Mashiach. Engraved on her tombstone, on Har HaMenuchot near Yerushalayim, are the words “tamid tzipatah l’yeshua – she always yearned for redemption.” She died between Pesach and Shavuot, during this historical season of optimism and freedom.
My maternal grandmother was born on March 25, 1917 on the kitchen table of her parents’ New York City apartment. The youngest of four, her family moved from apartment to apartment and from neighborhood to neighborhood because, in those days, landlords customarily gave a free-months’ rent if you moved in to a new apartment. Her father was a supplier to grocery stores. He would feed sample merchandise to his family during the depression which kept them all fed, but kept them all in poverty. Eventually the family settled on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.
My “New York grandma” attended Cooper Union art school, my grandfather was a student at Cooper Union’s school of engineering. After his 1938 graduation, he got a job with the public health service and immediately embarked on an ocean voyage to the South Pacific where he did public health work and sanitation engineering on various islands. My grandmother accepted his invitation to meet him on Pearl Harbor and they were married on December 26th 1940.
My grandparents spent the war years in various towns across the United States before building a home in Great Neck in 1949 to raise their children. My grandfather was on loan from the public health service to the Navy in 1951 and 1952, killing rats and fighting plague in French Vietnam when he was told that in the 1950s of Joe McCarthy, he had no future in the public health service and should leave. He did, returned to America and began work in the private sector, but succumbed to an aggressive brain tumor and died in 1953, barely older than I am today.
My grandmother, went to work, directing an art education institute in Roslyn New York, and then making the audacious decision to bring her children to Rome for a year. My family lived off of my grandfather’s pension, learned Italian, and my grandmother studied art. This inspired her to start a business, “Students Abroad” when she returned to America. Students Abroad brought small groups of American high school students to Europe for a summer of touring, studying art, and language education. She started with a handful of students in a VW microbus, and over the next fifteen years grew the business until she was supervising teams of group-leaders, each with their own VW microbus.
She eventually sold the business and did other work, all of it taking advantage of her creativity. When she retired, she devoted herself again to art and became an accomplished sculptor. First, making realist figures out of clay, and then more impressionistic figures out of wax, a period of amazing experimentation with found-objects, and further explorations in different media and different styles.
My grandmother asked me to officiate at her funeral twelve years ago. And despite having twelve years to think about it, it still is not entirely clear why she asked me. It wasn’t because I was the “rabbi in the family” – at that time I was not a rabbi and had no plan to become one. And… the big secret is that I haven’t done all that many funerals in a professional capacity (and I’m counting on all of you to keep it that way).
When I began to develop a greater interest in Jewish tradition as a teenager my grandmother was concerned and expressed her worries, worries that were not baseless, that I would cut myself off from other people, from the broad world that she had embraced and encountered.
At that aufruf Shabbat, the Shabbat before my wedding, she saw a group of friends and family enjoying Shabbat meals together with singing and expressions of love and friendship, and she saw that – for me – my connection to Torah and mitzvot were a way for me to build bridges to other people and to create community and she could understand and respect that.
I now see that her death on Rosh Hodesh Av is a reminder that her life, and particularly the artwork she left behind, has a message for this time of year. Her artwork was humane, her realist sculptures were not larger than life images of famous people that overwhelmed, awed, and intimidated the viewer. They were life-sized, or even smaller than life-sized sculptures of anonymous models or of friends. The sculptures could be appreciated and examined without intimidation. Her found object artwork was irreverent and playfully mocked power and pretense. One of her first experiments in mixed-media art was a piece she called “Board of Directors Trapped in a Six-Pack.” This was a soda six-pack pressed onto a flat clay tablet. A jowly face was contained in each circle of the six-pack, mocking the self-importance and illusory power of the board members. One series of artistic ventures was a group of life-like painted clay sculptures of old pieces of clothing that belonged to her grandchildren – an old sneaker, a baseball cap, a ballet slipper. These pieces, aesthetically no more beautiful than an old sneaker, emphasized love and human intimacy as a focus for artistic creativity. There was no reason why an old shoe was a worthy subject for a sculpture, other than as a symbol for the love of the artist for the shoe’s owner.
Her final major artistic creation was a paper-mache detail from a fountain in her beloved Rome – but the focus of this fountain was not a heroic figure, but three small boys playing in the fountain’s water who represented her first three great-grandchildren. Once again, the focus of her art was human relationships and celebrating love within a family.
That’s a message for the days prior to Tisha b’Av. A full picture of the meaning of Jewish history must combine the optimistic and heroic march towards Sinai that we relive during Sefirat HaOmer with the tragic awareness of our vulnerability. Our only hope for the future, in the face of that vulnerability, is treating each other with justice and with love, and in so doing act with integrity and love towards each other and towards God.
With thanks to Rabbi Benny Lau’s “Etnachta – Readings in the Weekly Parasha” for an eloquent depiction of the two seasons of historical commemoration in the Jewish calendar.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 