Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

May 26, 2010

by Harold M. Schulweis

It is right that we should meet here, in the sanctuary. There are dreams here. And visions. And an ancient biblical vision rising from smoke, blood and ashes. 

The Prophet stands alone before an open valley, strewn with mutilated bodies, and the broken shards of the ruined Temple. Suddenly, the Prophet is addressed by an anguished voice: “Son of man, can these bones live?” The Prophet Ezekiel answers, “God — you alone know.” 

God turns Ezekiel toward the valley of desiccated skeletons: , and declares, 

“Prophesy over these bones. You, dry bones, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live again. I will put sinews upon you and cover you with flesh. I will spread skin over you and you shall live again. I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live again. Come, O breath, from the four winds and breathe into their slain, that they live again.” 

This is from the prophesy of Ezekiel who lived in the 6th century B.C.E., in the shadow of the destruction of first temple in Jerusalem. As I read the Prophet Ezekiel, my mind reaches out to the Poland of the 21st century in the Common era. 

Can these dry bones live again? 

My family has ancestral roots in Poland: My mother was born in Czechonava, her parents in Neshelsk, my father and his family born in Warsaw, my cousin in Plonsk. 

In my parents’ home, they spoke nothing of Poland. Poland, once the largest concentration of Jews in Europe, and a vital culture, religious and secular, had become a charnel house for 3 million of our people; Poland was turned into a mass cemetery designed and designated by Nazi Germany, to be the slaughterhouse of the final solution. 

Can these dry bones live again? Can there be a whisper of life for Jews in Poland after the consuming fires of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, and Chelmno have turned life into ash? Who dares prophesy over these bones? 

I am conflicted. In the last years, bittersweet ironies spring from Polish soil, invisible seedlings breaking through the cemented pavements. Stories, anecdotes, newspaper articles tell tales of a “this worldly” resurrection. Jewish children once hidden by their parents in stables, cellars, sewers, monasteries of Christian Poles, slowly climbing out of the caves of their concealment, anxious to overcome their enforced anonymity, eager to recover their buried identity. 

We are told by Shavei Israel’s research that tens of thousands of Jews who have lost contact with Judaism out of fear of anti-Semitism have begun to rediscover their Jewish identities. Strange, slow transformations appear before our eyes. Poland today is now acknowledged to be the most proactive ally of the Jewish State of Israel: establishing diplomatic relations with Israel; purchasing $350 million of anti-tank missiles from Israel; allocating land and $26 million to construct a Jewish Museum in Warsaw; the Polish government rule denials of Holocaust as “hate crimes.” 

I meet with Jews born in Poland, living in our own Los Angeles community, who have established and support a significant liberal synagogue in Warsaw called Beit Warshava; people such as Severyn Ashkenazy and Alex Lauterbach who refuse to surrender Jewish life to the killers of the dream. I hear and read testimony of the existence of Jewish summer schools and adult classes in Judaism and Hebrew, of a Jewish center opened in Krakow, of Lauder-Morash, a Jewish day school founded in Warsaw. I meet with rabbis and cantors among whom I number my friend Cantor Nate Lam; Jews who were in Poland and who bear witness to the burgeoning of the Jewish will to live and thrive. 

Still, I am cautioned. Wait! Hold on! Do not be misguided by your enthusiasm. For there are others who whisper that the contempt of Jews and Judaism is far from extinguished in Poland. That too, I hear and understand, and that too I believe. 

And I am torn. How do you square the promise of Jewish renewal with the disappointing data of residual anti-Semitism? The nightmare of Jewish history hovers over the hopeful vision of a better tomorrow. The smell of death eclipse the thin rays of light. What am I to think? Whom to believe? What are my choices? 

Should I ignore the possibility of new Jewish life? Should I endow anti-Semitism with the curse of eternal recurrence? Should I offer Hitler and Stalin posthumous victories over today and over tomorrow? Should I douse the spark of hope? 

Still, there are mounting signals of Jewish renewal. Surprise is open to hope. Have I no reason to hope? Have I forgotten the historic resilience of my people? Have I forgotten the song of ancestors thrown into the lethal pits of despair and desecration, who chanted the Psalm, “Lo amut ki echyha v’asaper maasei yah” – I will not die, but live and declare the words of Godliness. 

Have I not, myself, met some of the tens of thousands of Polish Christian rescuers — farmers, peasants, nuns, priests — who risked their lives and the lives of their sons and daughters to rescues the sons and daughters of my people; to pluck innocents out of the predatory claws of Nazis and the blackmailers, the infamous informers against Jews called “Shmalzovniks.” 

Should I forget the Zegota, the underground Polish organization that saved the lives of countless precious Jewish children? Did I forget that the overwhelming majority of Christians whose rescue of Jews is documented at Yad V’shem, in Jerusalem, are persons of Poland? 

Do I not know that no other country occupied by Hitler who gave aid to Jews were punished with such severity as Poland. As early as October 1941, posters on bulletin boards in all the major cities of Poland announced that any Pole caught hiding a Jew would be shot on the spot. Taking a Jew in for a night, giving him or her a piece of bread, giving them a lift in a vehicle of any sort, was subject to the death penalty. 

The moral heroism of these Polish Christian citizens (some of whose stories and portraits grace the vestibule here at Valley Beth Shalom) lift my heart with gratitude and hope. There is goodness in the world. Human Godliness perseveres. 

Nor will I forget the “Polish Pope of Surprise,” John Paul II, the first pope in history ever to pray in a synagogue wearing a white robe and a white zucchetto, a skullcap; the first pope to establish a full diplomatic relationship with the State of Israel; the first Pope to exchange ambassadors between Israel and the Vatican; the first Pope to arrange a Papal concert in the Vatican and to request a chazzan to sing the liturgy? 

I have the right to hope in the possibility of the rebirth of Jewish life in Poland. I have reason to be buoyed by the promising visions of John Paul II in March, 2000, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. There, the Polish Pope addressed Christian conscience and the conscience of the world, out of his own memory of Holocaust: 

“Men, women, and children cry out to us from the depths of the house that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish its scale. We wish to remember. But we wish to remember for a purpose, namely to ensure that never again will evil prevail. I fervently pray that our sorrow for the tragedy which the Jewish people suffered in the 20th century will lend a new relationship between Christians and Jews. Let us build a new future.” 

Dear friends, that future we owe to our parents and grandparents. That future we owe to our children and grandchildren. Children: Remember the sorrow of the past but never surrender the future. We have before us a double memory: Remember the evil. Do not forget the good. Shall we visit the iniquity of the past on the promise of a different future? 

We have an opportunity, you and I. We cannot reverse history. We cannot resurrect the dead. We cannot make whole the burned, the amputated. We cannot remake the past, but we can sanctify the future. We can seize the moment. We can embrace each other with trust and hope. We can together struggle against the suffocating xenophobic “causeless hatred” with the fresh air of “causeless love,” so that we may breathe again. We can turn to the heroic wisdom of the ethics of Rabbi Nathan: “Who is a hero? One who has the will to make out of an adversary, a friend.” We must make friends. 

The worlds needs friends. The voice of Ezekiel echoes in our being: “Come, O breath, from the four winds and breathe into the slain that they live again.” 

“I will put breath into you and you shall live.” 

We shall live... We can live. 

These bones will live. 

CLOSING REMARKS 

Hope hangs like a thin thread 
So fragile, so easily torn 

By the burden of despair 
And the weight of distrust 
It can be severed 

Without it, we perish 
As individuals, or as members of a people 
A nation, a faith 

So we gather to strengthen each other’s hope 
For it is hope that makes the heart sing, 
The legs dance, the hands clap, the ears hear 
It is hope that returns the waters of laughter to quench the parched soul. 

Hope is the life that clings to tomorrow 
Embrace it whole 

We have started well 
We will meet again tomorrow. 
Tomorrow 
With trust, with faith, with hope.

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