Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Herbert Gold, the American novelist, tells of an exchange between Claire Booth Luce, the wife of publisher Henry Luce, and a Jewish friend. “I must tell you, dear, that I find all this talk about the Holocaust to be insufferably boring: Holocaust, holocaust, holocaust.” Her friend replies, “Claire, I know exactly how you feel. I must tell you, dear, that I find all this talk about crucifixion to be insufferably boring: crucifixion, crucifixion, crucifixion.”

I was upset about this exchange; not merely because of the callousness and insensitivity of Claire Booth Luce. It is easy to dismiss her snippiness. But not the anxiety expressed by some serious, caring, thoughtful Jewish historians and educators who are disturbed by the way we transmit the whole history of Judaism as if it were nothing more than the history of the anti-Semitism. Is anti-Semitism the vortex of our Jewishness?

We portray Jews as eternal victims, caught in the leprous circle of contempt for the Jews. That we allow anti-Semitism to cast a towering shadow over our lives, that anti-Semitism – not God, not Torah, not ritual, not culture, not ethics – is central to our identification does not enter into the picture.

Have we become the “ever-dying people” (a term used by the Jewish scholar Simon Rawidoicz)?  We preach “Never Again,” but we have become the “ever-again” people. Consider the mantra in the Passover Seder:   “In every generation they rise to destroy us.” They and us, the children of darkness, and the children of light. The hostility of Gentiles and the defenseless of Jews – Esau vs. Jacob, Ishmael vs. Isaac, Rome vs. Jerusalem.  

What’s the definition of a Jewish telegram? A Jewish telegram sounds like this: “Letter follows. Start worrying.”

The Holocaust is the dominant psychic reality of our people, and as such there is left in its wake deep rage, anger, disillusionment, and suspicion of the world. The Jewish novelist, Cynthia Ozick, defiantly wrote, “They hated us, they hate us, and they will always hate us.” This seems to be our destiny.

If that’s true, some educators, rabbis among them, have said that after the Holocaust we should teach Jews the “614^th Commandment” : “It is forbidden to hand Hitler another posthumous victory.”

This is what professor Rabbi Emil Fackenheim first wrote. This was an appeal to convince people who are on the threshold of the synagogue not to leave us. Don’t abandon us. Don’t assimilate. If you lose your Jewishness, Hitler wins.

I’ve heard this argument, and I found it harmful. Guilt cannot replace love and loyalty. And I could never preach that loyalty to Judaism is based on spiting Hitler. Do you think that anti-Semitism will scare our children into love of Judaism?  

There is a provocative question posed by Philip Roth, among others, that concerns me: “Who are we Jews when the last anti-Semite is dead?” Do we need the hatred of anti-Semitism in order to love ourselves and our tradition?

So while I am annoyed at Claire Booth Luce and her fatuous remarks, I worry much more about what anti-Semitism is doing to our internality, to our interior self, to our self definition. Is the anti-Semite defining me? As the author Jean-Paul Sartre claimed: We are not so much Jews as anti-anti-Semites. Is that all there is in my Jewishness – my fear?

Beware of the use of – the overuse of – anti-Semitism.   historian, Lucy Dawidowicz, cautions, “If we are a people who get murdered, our young will flee from us.” This important historian is worried about what she describes as the almost excessive, ceaseless obsession with the holocaust.

And the world renowned Jewish historian Salo Baron objected to what he called the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” He was upset with the way educators and historians are teaching Judaism as a history of leidens geschite, “the history of suffering,” so that to be a Jew is to wear a yellow badge.

Not to teach of anti-Semitism or the Holocaust is impossible. One-third of a nation’s blood has been shed; two-thirds of European Jews decimated; one million Jewish children murdered, none even allowed to live to their Bar Mitzvah. But to teach Judaism through the black hole of hatred alone threatens to create a culture of cynicism. To judge the whole world with an obsessive scratch test: Scratch a Gentile, and find an anti-Semite; scratch a Jew, and find a victim.

To teach Judaism through anti-Semitism alone is to trivialize the heft of four millennia of Jewish creativity, culture, philosophy, literature, poetry, faith. Moreover, it lays a heavy stone on the heart of our children, and our own hearts. It is a painful dilemma. How do you – as a parent or educator – restore faith in a world, in God or in man, that closed ports and borders and hearts to frightened desperate refugees fleeing the voracious jaws of Nazi predators and their accomplices. All these images of piles of bones and mounds of eyeglasses, and extracted gold teeth. Does teaching Jewish history mean that all roads lead to Auschwitz?

In 1961, in Jerusalem, Israel held its trial of Adolph Eichmann, the mass murderer. But one matter is little known: As revealed by the great historian Martin Gilbert, the Eichmann trial revealed mounting evidence of the betrayal of the Jews by the nations of the world. Nobody cared, neither the church or state, not popes or princes, neither presidents nor priests nor politicians.

What I did not know, and what was to become revealed only in the last few years, is that David Ben Gurion – the Prime Minister of Israel during the middle of the Eichmann trial – turned to the Holocaust Memorial at Yad V’Shem and told its officers, “Find twenty-four non-Jews who risked their lives and the lives of their families, to save Jews fleeing from the clutches of Nazi predators. Find them, and plant trees in their honor.”

What was in Ben Gurion’s mind? What concerned him? Not anti-Semitism but the morale of Jews. He worried that the unrelenting drumbeat of anti-Semitism would weaken the Jewish will to live and the will to hope, or the will to trust. He didn’t ask the trial to stop, he didn’t ask for the names of Jews, he sought the names of righteous Christians. Because he understood that you cannot build a healthy state of robust people on the foundation of ashes of suspicion. You cannot build pride in Judaism on the toxic ground of Jewish hatred.

In 1963, I founded the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers, to search for Gentiles who risked their fortune, security, safety, life and life of their family, to hide and protect Jews. In the course of my search of non-Jews after a good deal of time talking in other congregations and on television, I found to my happy surprise that there were far more than twenty-four, but thousands – tens of thousands – who rescued. In each year, with every speech, I heard Jewish survivors who testified to Christian rescuers.

I met many of them, and learned from the Jewish survivors that these non-Jews who put their lives and fortunes on the line for the sake of men and women of a different faith and from all walks of life. I met them; I read their unknown stories. They were peasants, and farmers, and nurses, and nannies, and priests, and nuns, and janitors, and diplomats, who lived in every land that the Nazis occupied or threatened to occupy. They hid my and your brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents in pig sties and sewers, in cellars, attics, and closets. Not for money, not for fame, not to convert; but out of love for Jews – hunted, hurt, harassed Jews.

I have read a good deal about the Holocaust as have you, but I admit in shame that I knew nothing – absolutely nothing – about the 50 thousand Jews saved by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, by Bishop Kiril. How many know of Biship Kiril? I knew nothing about the Bulgarian Sobranie and the courageous self-sacrificing work of Demeter Pshev. I did not know, not in the 60s and not in the 70s, that the Bulgarian Church confronted King Boris and threatened that if he were to deport any Jews from Bulgaria the Church leaders would assemble at the railroad tracks and lie down, and that his own salvation was in threat. I did not know about the village of Le Chabon.

Why was I and the Jewish world in the dark? Why until this day are we ignorant of good, Godly people – unknown, unpreached, untaught, unheralded? Why is that history not taught? Why does evil take prominence? Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar had it right: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Am I become the gravedigger of goodness?

And I certainly did not know anything about the diplomats – Gentile, Christian diplomats – through Europe who risked their reputation, their careers, their wealth, their fortune; diplomats from China, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, Brazil, Holland, Turkey, Italy, Yugoslavia, Japan, German, the Vatican. Most of them were punished by their governments for falsifying visas and passports, for forging letters of protection, for bluffing their superiors and personally sheltering, hiding Jews and accompanying Jews to border countries.

I knew nothing of these diplomats who sat at their desk with two rubber stamps – one which said, “Approved,” and the other, “Rejected.” I did not know what they knew. That if they had too many approvals their career would be destroyed.

I never heard about Fen Chou Shan, a Chinese diplomat stationed in Vienna, who defied his government and issued false visas to Shanghai. He was dismissed, but he saved 18,000 Austrian Jews who escaped to China and elsewhere.

These diplomats lost their jobs and reputation. And I still shudder when I think of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a privileged, aristocratic Portuguese consul general, stationed in Bordeaux, France, who faced pitiable crowds of Jewish refugees fleeing after the German invasion of France, having no place to go; and how Portugal’s dictator Salazar warned Aristides that his protection of Jews would not be treated lightly.

Aristides threw open his doors and spoke to his staff. “I’m giving visas. There’ll be no more nationalism, race or religion.” All day and into the night he issued visas, and traveled to the Spanish border, confronted border guards to let Jews in! By order of Portuguese Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Aristides was stripped of his authority, dismissed from diplomatic service, and with twelve children to support he had to sell his family estate. He was supported by Lisbon’s Jewish community, and was seen eating at a soup kitchen.

It was a moment of revelation, of transformation, and a new way to see others and see myself: “Would I let them in, or would I lock the door? Would I keep them for days or weeks or months or years … this peasant woman, this fisherman’s family? Would I scrounge for food to feed them, knowing that the Schmaltzinikis – the informers – are waiting outside to pounce on me, to arrest me to prison or to death for a bottle of vodka and a carton of cigarettes…? Would I get hold of sleeping pills to silence the cries of the infant, whose sobs might give away the hiding place? Would I remove their refuse, and where would I conceal it? Knowing that the tell-tale signs would give me away? And, where to bury the dead?

There are thousands of such stories of Gentiles who, out of love, risked for Jews. There is goodness in the world. Goodness must be searched, created and celebrated. Every year, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous holds a dinner at the World Astoria, at which a Christian rescuer of Jews is flown in from Europe, and reunited with the Hewish survivor whom he or she saved. They have not seen each other for 40 years. At this event, the Jewish survivor spoke to her rescuer from Poland. “Mamushke, our tradition teaches that the person who saves but one saves an entire world.” She stopped and motioned to the floor; her children and grandchildren came to the stage. The survivor said, “Mamushke, here are your worlds.”

In an audience of Christians and Jews, not a single eye was dry. We shed not tears of fear, but of gratitude.

There is goodness in the world, and reason to rejoice. Sadness is no sin, but it must be fought. Your is a tradition of realistic hope and sober trust.

The Talmud puts it clearly, and expresses that which is unique in our tradition:

“The Divine Presence does not reside in sadness or in indolence – but only in the joy of doing good.” Indolence and sadness drains energy.

Judaism rejects asceticism and depression, and we celebrate the potentiality of the world despite all its evils. Consider how joy, open activism, enters our ritual laws:

• “If you mourn but one hour and a festival intervenes, the shiva is cancelled.”
• If a wedding cortege and a funeral cortege pass each other on a narrow, steep hill, let the funeral cortege make room for the wedding cortege; for life is holy and the joy of life is the joy of divinity.
• On Tisha b’Av, that commemorates the destruction of the temple, we go to the synagogue, but we wear no tallit and no teffilin; no prayer shawl, no phylacteries. We remove the curtain from the Ark, but we do not leave that day in sorrow alone. In the afternoon, at the mincha prayer, we put on the tallit and the teffilin, and restore the curtain on the Ark.
• On Tisha b’Av, we read the Book of Lamentations, which ends with this verse: “For truly, You God have deserted us, and bitterly raged against us.”  That is the end of the Book of Lamentations. But the rabbis said, “No, you cannot leave a congregation dispirited, rejected, depressed, and so the rabbis took another verse from the Book of Lamentations and they added it on as the conclusion of the Book of Lamentations. “Renew our days as of old.”

My children: There is evil in the world, and it must be fought. But there is goodness in the world, and it must be praised. You and I, we Jews, carry a double memory: Remember the evil and do not forget the good. There are and were those who would harm us, but there are those who protect and love us. What greater love than to risk life and limb for another?

We have friends in Yithro, and enemies in Amaleck; friend in Cyrus, and enemies in Haman; friends in Esther, and enemies in Jezebel.

Learn your history entirely – Jewish defeat and Jewish triumphs.   As you cannot know American history through Pearl Harbor or Vietnam alone, you cannot know Jewish history through Auschwitz and Treblinka alone.

We Jews are survivors and we are rescuers – as we are in Darfur, Sudan, the Congo, and in Haiti. Live not with the sad face of Cassandra, nor with the perpetual smile of Pollyanna.

On a wall in a cellar in Cologne, Jews hiding from the Nazis wrote:
Have faith in the sun when it sinks from view
Have faith in the stars even when it is beclouded
Have faith in the goodness of humanity even when it is darkened by fear or greed.

To lose hope is to drain your energy from action, from relief in t’shuvah: I can change. You can change. The other can change. The world can change. Do not surrender to cynicism. I have heard it said, “For as man thinks, so he is.”

The world has, and will, hate us… and there will never be peace between Arab and Jews.

In the shetls and concentration camps. There was one consistent call: Yiden zeit zich nisht misyaesh – “Jews – do not despair.”

L’shanah tovah. For a year of goodness for Israel and the world.

Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
Rosh Hashanah 5773