My father's bar mitzvah

After my father died, we sold his apartment in the Promised Land (sometimes known as Florida) but before we put it on the market we found treasures including his parents’ naturalization papers which list him as a one year old, but what struck me most was an invitation to his bar mitzvah. “Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Stein Request the honor of your presence at the Confirmation (and then in Hebrew ‘Bar Mitzvah’) of their son Joseph on Saturday April 10th, 1926 at 9 A.M. at Machzike Talmud Torah of Borough Park 1319-43rd Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. Reception at 8 P.M. at their residence 1847-48th Street, Brooklyn, N.Y.”

I wonder if I’m the only reader of the Voice & Herald ever to receive an invitation to their father’s bar mitzvah. The section from the Torah that morning was Sh’mini which among other things describes the deaths of two of Aaron’s sons and his silence in response. The Haftarah was from the book of II Samuel describing the moving of the recaptured Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and the death of one of the men escorting it who made the mistake of touching it when it seemed to fall from its cart. Sixty years later his grandson Daniel, our first born, read the same texts. Life can be odd that way.

I’ve tried to get the weather but people who write columns on typewriters don’t readily have access to such information. But what intrigues me more is that I know the future of those there in a way my grandchildren will know my future and the world as it unfolds beyond our time. I’m just visiting this planet; we all are. Some of us try to make it a better place in our limited allotted time; others simply reside as a tenant in someone else’s apartment, making no improvements, others exploit all advantages intended or not. I do not pass judgment as I am as often willing to laugh at the world’s absurdities from the sidelines as I am to roll up my sleeves to resolve them.

But I know that in 1926 Hitler was merely an ex-con heading up an obscure political party considered too radical to succeed; that the Great Depression was still three years into the future; Stalin would have his show trials in 1936; Pearl Harbor was fifteen years away; my parents married eleven months later and I came along seventeen months after that. None of this was known on that bright sunny day (as I picture it in my mind) when my father read from the Torah and haftarah way back then, eighty-four years ago.

What’s in store for us? One of the things I’ve learned as an historian is that attempting to predict the future is a fool’s game. The old cliché about history repeating itself is a canard, not a truth. Economists and political scientists try to anticipate events and trends all the time, and fail. They study their charts and computer print outs and fail to account for this little thing or that and so they are wrong as often as right. If it were otherwise we’d all be millionaires. After all, who in 1926 was predicting the Great Depression or could have foretold that in seven years Hitler would be Chancellor of Germany?

In Berlin there’s currently a showing of Hitler mementos which opened with some trepidation. This is the first time a German museum has had such an exhibit, and the curators say they have taken great care to avoid glorifying the villain who is their subject. The Central Council of Jews in Germany acknowledges that the timing is right, given today’s political climate where Germans are nervous about the economy and immigrants and some in the lower middle class seem to want a leader to extract them form the doldrums—paralleling some of the conditions of 1933. Exhibits are set up in ways to discourage neo-Nazis from taking heroic photos of themselves near images of Hitler. But Hitler though dead is still a living presence, alive to those who fear foreigners, non-Christians, the better educated. In America their ilk is confined, generally, to the wilds of Idaho and Montana (except when they emerge as a Timothy McVey in Oklahoma City).

None of this was known when my father, a young boy of thirteen innocently celebrated becoming a man in 1926, to which event I’ve just been invited.

A Newspaper's dilemma

There’s a current aphorism. “No good deed goes unpunished.” Case in point, the New Jersey Jewish Standard of Teaneck. Like this paper it has a page to announce bar and bat mitzvahs, births, engagements and weddings. But when the paper printed the announcement of a gay engagement, the consequences set an intercollegiate record for the number of times the word “disgusting” could be used in a single news cycle.

You’re familiar with the incident? If not, here are the pertinent details. In its September 24 issue the paper informed that two gay Jewish men were to marry. This disgusted local Orthodox Jews (and in Teaneck this is a formidable group to antagonize) which complained that community standards had been violated. Embarrassed, the paper issued an apology the next issue and said it would never do so again. The pro-marriage equality community was disgusted by this turn about and demanded that in future the paper publish gay wedding announcements. But that reversal sparked even more furor, prompting the newspaper this week to change course again, this time expressing regret for its hasty apology of the previous week. As of now, it's not clear what the newspaper's policy will be. To adjust a familiar quotation (by Sir Walter Scott) “Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to please”

We have four parties at play here. First there is Avi Smolen and Justin Rosen who wish to marry and though Orthodox have found a local Conservative rabbi to perform the ceremony. (A quick Ask.com search suggests that New Jersey does not recognize gay marriage so the whole question may be mute other than symbolically anyway.) Then there’s the Standard which thought it was doing a mitzvah by accepting the notice (and then by apologizing and then by re-apologizing). The Orthodox community is trying to protect what it considers the sanctity of marriage in Jewish law and custom while marriage equality people believe that the newspaper should reflect current sensibilities, or at least their sensibilities. In none of the above is there error, which makes the problem that much more difficult to resolve.

(Years ago, the editorial board of this newspaper discussed what we should do if we were sent notice of a gay engagement or wedding. The debate was heated but polite. I was of the “we should think twice before offending accepted morality mode back then, before I had a column, and in the end we took a rare vote and narrowly decided to accept what we were sent. Since then, we’ve received no such announcements, though my guess is that from now on we will. As I remember it the word “disgusting” was never used, either by the pro or anti sides, but we were younger then.) Back to our story:

Question: Should gay people be allowed to marry? (This is a question for the states to resolve, not me. It pits thousands of years of tradition against current standards of individual choice. If it were up to me government would get out of the marriage license business and let the chips fall where they may, but it’s not up to me.)

Question: If a gay couple wants to marry, should Jewish clergy perform the service? (This is a relatively easy one, and the New Jersey young men found the correct solution. Since what they were doing would be offensive [disgusting] to their rabbi, they found a rabbi who would do it.)

Question: Should rabbinical organizations permit or prohibit their members from performing gay marriages? (Well, the Orthodox say “no” in an unequivocal voice while the Conservative and Reform leave it up to the rabbis and/or their congregations to decide for themselves. This passes the buck. I think the Orthodox are correct in taking a stand unlike the Conservative and Reform organizations which seem to fear to.)

Question: Should Jewish newspapers publish notices of Jewish engagements/weddings? (Community standards have changed since I was worried about offending them. Since getting this column I have offended Orthodox standards on a few occasions, but I’m a columnist expressing an opinion, not the paper of record of the Jewish community of Rhode Island. If we could avoid offending the Orthodox, we should, but we should not exclude those who believe in marriage equality whether they are gay or straight. Does this mean not publishing any engagement/marriage announcements? I hope not.)

Messrs. Smolen and Rosen are scheduled to be married on October 17. It’s not an accepting world they are entering. I wish them luck.

Lea's Torah

The room which moments earlier had been filled with the sounds of adults talking and children running and laughing was suddenly hushed, profoundly quiet except for the scratching of a quill. The last two lines of the book of Deuteronomy were being inscribed onto a parchment section which would soon be sewn to its predecessors in the completion of a Torah scroll. As the scribe Jamie Shear dipped his quill into ink and then wrote, reciting each word before he did so, we his audience at Temple Emanu-El watched silently the fulfillment of an ancient command to write the words of the covenant for every generation. When he was finished the children and the adults started to dance and to sing, but there was more task to be done before the secular could be called holy, before the skin of an animal and wood and ink transcended the level of commonplace to become the sacred.

Our new Torah at Temple Emanu-El had been paid for by subscription. We’d recently lost a favorite teacher, Lea Eliash. Someone, I don’t know who, proposed that a fitting tribute to a woman who had devoted her life in America to teaching Hebrew to young children and mature adults after surviving the terrors of the Holocaust in Europe, would be to honor her memory with a new Torah scroll, and so was launched the “Lea’s Letters” campaign. And now the last of those letters, the word Yisrael, was being inscribed as permanently as anything in this world can be, to be read by bar and bat mitzvah candidates and their parents and grandparents, and by their children and grandchildren for as along as there is a Temple Emanu-El, and beyond, I imagine. Its rollers and handles (called in Hebrew Atzei Chaim, in English “Trees of Life”) were carved by her grandson out of wood from her dining room table, a place I’ve sat at and enjoyed meals and conviviality as have many in the community. Now it is reduced in size but increased in stature. Lea is gone, we all knew that, but this piece of her home will provide ample reminder of her presence and importance to the community for as long as we remembered where they were from. The collective gasp as this was revealed was almost the sound of a breeze through the tall grasses. In time, I suppose there will be fewer and fewer people who will recall that the wood of the trees of life were from the dining room table of a loving and gentle woman who once lived here, but for a while, at least, we who were there will remember, and when we do, her sweetness and grace will be called to mind.

In my mind scribes are old men in black suits, pot bellies, blackened fingers and shtreimels, or at least black fedoras. Shear does not fit the mold. Rail thin and smiling shyly he covers his head with a knitted kippah and while he has a beard, it’s a stylish goatee (I recently had one like that until my wife pointed out that enough was enough). Born and raised in Montreal, he attended High School and Bar Ilan University in Israel, moving there permanently four years ago. Emanu-El’s is his sixth torah scroll. It has the standard 245 columns, each checked by the scribe and then by two rabbis and then by a computer which scans it and spots errors, if any. At Emanu-El, just as he was about to sew the final stage onto the rollers, he noticed that an aleph, one of the letters he’d just written, was just slightly off. He described an aleph as a vov with two yuds, one above and one below. The upper yud was more of a blob than he felt appropriate and with the audience surrounding him he scraped off the offending digit and replaced it with a better one. Now he was finished and when the last stitch connecting parchment to roller was completed we broke out into a she’hecheyanu prayer—Blessed are you, Lord, who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this occasion. Nothing else seemed as appropriate.

Lea Eliash now has a suitable memorial; Jamie Shear now has completed another Torah—but he has another almost done which he’ll deliver to a congregation in Hong Kong next month. And we of Temple Emanu-El have a new torah, light enough to be lifted by thirteen year olds and solid enough to contain the words of our people as they have been laboriously penned by other scribes, again, and again, and again.