Yom Kippur Sermon

Rabbi Charles L. Arian

Beth Jacob Synagogue

Norwich, CT

             I own a set of books which has crossed the Atlantic Ocean five times. It is not a complete set but it is five volumes of a multi-volume commentary on the Prophets and Writings, in other words, those books of the Bible which come after the Torah itself.

            These books were published in Warsaw in the 1880s  and they belonged to my great grandfather, Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Arian. He brought these books with him when he came to this country in the early 1900s, but for some years they were in the possession of a distant relative. How that happened and how they came into my possession is an interesting story.

            In 1981, I was a first year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. HUC, the Reform seminary, requires its students to begin their studies with a year in Israel since most of them -- myself included -- do not have strong Hebrew backgrounds and it's easier to be brought up to speed in Israel than in, say, Cincinnati. The dean of the school was a man named Michael Klein. He was an American immigrant to Israel and, though dean of a school for training rabbis, seemed to be a secular Jew through and through. He was especially hostile to Orthodox Judaism and would occasionally gather us in the chapel for lectures on traditional practices which would, often as not, turn into what most of us first year students considered "Orthodox bashing" sessions.

            A few weeks into the school year, Dean Klein stopped me in the hallway and said: "Arian, Arian. Are you related to Mollie Arian in Brooklyn?" And I said, "we call her Malka, not Mollie, but yes, she's my great aunt." The dean said, "well, then I'm your cousin."

            When I called my father and told him that my dean, Michael Klein, claimed to be my cousin, my father was a bit surprised. I remembered that before heading off to Israel my great aunt  Tante Malka had told me I had a cousin who was an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem, but she didn't really know how I would be able to get in touch with him. Well it turned out that my cousin the "ultra-Orthodox rabbi" was actually the Orthodox-bashing dean of the Reform seminary. When my father told Tante Malka, she called Michael's mother, her cousin Esther, to tell her that we had met, and cousin Esther was devastated.

            Because my late cousin Michael Klein -- who passed away after a tragic illness in 2000-- had indeed been raised as an ultra-Orthodox Jew and had studied at some of the finest yeshivot in the world. In fact, in Baltimore we had a friend who had been in yeshiva with him and remembered him as a brilliant student. But one day, my cousin Michael had a question, a question of belief, so he went to his rebbe and posed the question. And the response, cousin Michael said, was "we don't ask that kind of question here." So on the spot, he decided to leave not only the yeshiva but the Orthodox world in which he was raised. Using the tremendous background in Judaica which he had from his yeshiva studies, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his Ph.D. He then made aliyah and became not only the dean of HUC but the world's leading expert on Targumim, ancient Aramaic translations of the Hebrew bible.

            Most parents would be proud of their son's achievements but not Charlie and Esther Klein. They were embarrassed that he was no longer Orthodox and so told no one, and maintained the pretence that Michael was an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem. When he came back to Brooklyn to visit his parents, they told no one, and his father would lock away all the wine in the house, lest the glance of his no-longer-observant son turn the wine unkosher.

            When my father visited me in Jerusalem, he and Michael renewed their relationship. They had not been particularly close when younger, since my father was born about ten years before Michael and had a much less traditional upbringing, but they enjoyed reminiscing about family and the old neighborhood in Brooklyn. Some weeks later, the phone in the rented apartment I was sharing with two other HUC students rang literally seconds after Shabbat was over, and it was Dean Klein on the phone, sounding very agitated. At first I was afraid he was calling with some bad news, but in fact, he was so excited because he had been going through his library that afternoon and found some books which had belonged to my great grandfather. He knew this because, in fact, my great grandfather had written his name in them, and seeing that triggered his recollection of how they had come into his possession.

            Apparently, when my grandfather died -- about three years before I was born -- Michael was studying in the yeshiva. Since neither my father nor his older brother had enough command of Hebrew to make use of the books my grandfather had inherited from his father, they were given to Michael with the thought that they might possibly be of use to him. But now that I was studying for the rabbinate, Michael felt that I ought to have them, so he returned them to me.

            I said a few minutes ago that these books crossed the Atlantic Ocean at least five times. They crossed from Ilya, Lithuania, with my grandfather when he came to this country, where he served as the shammes at the synagogue on the Lower East Side founded by the association of Jews from that town. They went to Israel with my cousin Michael, came back with me after I finished my studies in Jerusalem, went back to Israel when I spent two years there after finishing rabbinical school, and then came back again. In some ways, these books' journeys are symbolic of the history of our people over the last hundred and fifty years or so.

            The books left the possession of my immediate family because of a rupture in the chain of tradition. My great grandfather had a traditional Jewish education, and served in this country as a shammes, not exactly a rabbi but a position requiring a good degree of Jewish education. He was apparently an ordained rabbi, however, for so his tombstone indicates. He made sure his six children received a thorough Jewish education as well, but he was also a bit of a maskil, a modernist. Tante Malka told me that, for example, she had read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in Hebrew while in high school, something certainly not on the curriculum of more traditionalist schools. But for whatever reason, my grandparents didn't give my father or his brother as thorough a Jewish education, and they became the first males in our family line for perhaps two thousand years who were unable to fully understand a Hebrew book. And thus, when my grandfather died, the books went to a cousin who had received a more thorough Jewish education.

            But that cousin, himself, later made a break with tradition, leaving the yeshiva and going to the university, leaving Orthodoxy and training Reform rabbis. And if he had not made that break, it is highly unlikely that I ever would have met him and thus been in a position to be given the books back when he re-discovered them.

            But these breaks with tradition are, in a certain way, a continuation of tradition. For Judaism has always been diverse and there has never been only one way to be Jewish. On the first morning of Rosh Hashanah I spoke about Judaism as a conversation. What I tried to convey to you then was an appreciation for the complexity of the phenomenon of which we are a part. I quoted one of my rabbinical school teachers who said that "Judaism is not what the Bible says, Judaism is what the Rabbis said the Bible means."

            In other words, Judaism arises in the encounter of human beings with a book which was believed to have been divinely revealed. Even if you accept the most traditional understandings of the origin of the Torah, the Torah itself is not enough. We will not, for example, cast lots later today and sacrifice one goat here on the bimah while we send another off into the woods. We do not execute rebellious teenagers or people who gather sticks on the Sabbath. You will find nothing in the text of the Torah explaining to us the content of the prayers we are to recite today, how to build a Sukkah, or how long we are supposed to wait after eating meat before we can have ice cream. Judaism as we live it did not simply fall from the sky. It developed over centuries as our ancestors pored over holy texts, struggling to understand what it was God wanted of them and how they might best fulfill the teachings of the Torah and create a holy community.

            That struggle is what my teacher Michael Cook was referring to when he said that "Judaism is what the Rabbis said the Bible means." Professor Cook's statement is true, but it is incomplete. Because Judaism was created not only by rabbis, but by communities of Jews over the centuries. Solomon Schechter, the founder of most of the institutions of Conservative Judaism, coined the term "Catholic Israel" to describe that which determines normative Jewish practice. As explained by JTS Professor Neil Gilman, "Catholic Israel" means that "throughout the centuries and across the length and breadth of the Jewish community, there has remained a core of serious Jews who want to live their Judaism fully. In a totally natural and intuitive way, these Jews retain certain patterns of belief and behavior, drop others, create new ones- all in the name of keeping Jewish religion alive."

            Michael Klein left the Orthodox community in which he was raised, not because he wished to cease being a Jew but because that community did not give him the answers he sought. Not only did it fail to give him answers, it chastised him for raising questions. And so he went and studied and became a different type of Jew. He contributed to the state of Israel by raising Israeli children and becoming an important figure in its intellectual life. He contributed to world Jewry by helping to train rabbis who now serve in Jewish communities in more than a dozen countries. And he contributed mightily to our knowledge of the development of Jewish theology through his studies of the Targumim, ancient Aramaic translations of the Bible which show what our ancestors just before and just after the destruction of the second Temple believed and practiced.

            Catholic Israel, the community of Israel, is incredibly diverse. Contrary to what Michael Klein's parents believed, there is not just one way to be a Jew. Ultra-orthodox and modern Orthodox, Reform and Conservative and Reconstructionist, secular Zionists, all contribute in their own way to continuity of a sort with the Jewish past, but more importantly, to creating a vibrant Jewish present and building the Jewish future.

            There are many ways to build the Jewish future, and on the surface they seem not to have so much in common one with the other. What does an ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist Jew living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, have in common with a secular, atheist Israeli kibbutznik who raises pigs for meat and does not fast on Yom Kippur?

            One thing that they have in common is access to the books which I used as the departure point for this sermon. A number of years ago, I attended the annual "State of World Jewry" lecture at Washington Hebrew Congregation, a large Classical Reform temple in Washington, DC. By Classical Reform, I mean that a friend of mine was actually fired as a Hebrew school teacher there because he insisted on wearing a kippah in his classroom. At Washington Hebrew, despite the congregation's name, there is very little actual Hebrew in their services.

            The lecturer, Leon Wieseltier, who is the literary editor of the New Republic and a prolific writer on Jewish and general themes, angered many of the audience members. He said that American Jewry, for all its affluence and power, would leave little impact on Jewish history. Why? Because our literary and cultural products are in English, not Hebrew, and it is Hebrew which is the Jewish language. Only a book written in Hebrew is guaranteed to be accessible to future generations of Jews.

            Wieseltier, I am certain, was being intentionally provocative, but in the sweep of Jewish history he may well be right. 200 years ago, in 1807, who would have predicted that the single largest concentration of Jews in the world would be in the United States? Yes, today there are more Jews in American than anywhere else.. But will that be true 100 years from now? Two hundred years from now? Perhaps, perhaps not. But one thing is certain. Two hundred years from now, Hebrew will be, as it has always been, the language of Jewish prayer and higher level Jewish learning.

            I am surely not the only person in this congregation who owns some very old Hebrew books passed down from previous generations. Indeed, on occasion I receive a call from a congregant asking how best to dispose, respectfully, of such a book; and sometimes, Barbara or Joseph or I will find a bag of old books left in the library or in the office for burial or donation. And surely some of you have some of these old books displayed proudly on your shelves at home.

            Our tradition values holy books to the extent that we are forbidden to simply throw them away. Someone who brings books to the synagogue in hopes they'll be disposed of in a proper and reverent manner is showing respect for our tradition and is to be commended. All the more so, someone who places the books on their shelves in a place of honor -- they are showing pride in their heritage and demonstrating their desire to be connected to it.

            But Jewish books, Hebrew books, are not written and printed in hopes that they will ultimately be buried in a Jewish cemetery or reverently displayed on a shelf, their contents both literally and figuratively remaining a "closed book." They are meant to be read and studied.

            And the sad fact is that few American Jews can do so. I suspect it is true that a majority of us have the ability to decipher the Hebrew letters so that we can at least participate in our services which are conducted mostly in Hebrew. But our supplementary educational system cannot possibly give our children the ability to read and translate a Hebrew book. We have five hours a week for about half the weeks of the year, and in that time we are trying to teach not only Hebrew but Jewish history, holidays, beliefs and practices and how to participate in traditional services. We also have special programs, holiday celebrations, and so on. Even if parents did not allow their children to miss religious school because of sports or dance classes and competitions, visiting friends or relatives, or simply because the children are feeling tired or overextended -- the supplementary religious school will not be able to teach our children to be truly Jewishly literate.

            I am a passionate advocate of Jewish day schools, at the same time that I recognize that day school is not for everybody. Graduates of our local day school, as a rule, have a better command of Hebrew and of liturgy than those who went to religious school. They know more about Israel and about Jewish history. I was told recently that most Solomon Schechter Academy graduates have a Hebrew vocabulary of about 500 words. That's great, but a 500 word Hebrew vocabulary does not a literate Jew make.

            I mentioned a few minutes ago that when my cousin Michael returned my great-grandfather's books to me, I realized that my father and his brother were the first male Jews in our line for hundreds of years not to be able to read and understand a Hebrew book. If my father, who was raised in a nominally Orthodox home in New York and had his very devout grandparents living with him, cannot do so, the fact that our kids cannot do so is perhaps not exactly surprising.

            For hundreds of years, Jewish men -- unfortunately the same cannot be said of Jewish women -- were universally literate in Hebrew and the Jewish tradition. But on the other hand, they were denied the ability to participate, for the most part, in the culture of the countries in which they lived. We are fully Americans and fully Jewish. Our ancestors were not Lithuanian or Polish or Egyptian or Hungarian; they were Jews who happened to live in Lithuania or Poland or Egypt or Hungary. Their education did not need to prepare them to function in general society, because they were not going to do so.

            I would love to see an educational system which makes all of our children fluent enough in Hebrew that they could translate an average passage from the prayerbook or the Bible. But that sort of education is not what my fatber got from his parents, nor is it, in fact, the sort of education that my parents provided for me. What he got, and what my parents gave to me, was sufficient education that I could function comfortably in a Jewish milieu, that I could participate in the prayers and feel connected to the Jewish past.

            But more importantly, they realized that the school alone could not do the job. The home in which I was raised was not kosher, we did not observe Shabbat, we did not build a Sukkah or have a mezuza on any but the front door. But my parents, who were active in our Temple and served on both the temple board and the education committee, said many times that the school could not do its job if the lessons taught in school were not lived at home. So Friday night at our house meant candles and kiddush and challah and services. On Jewish holidays, we stayed home from school, but we went to services. When I wanted to spend summers at a Jewish camp, my parents were supportive and paid for me to do so.

            And so, the chain of tradition which was ruptured was ultimately re-connected. The Jewish education my parents originally provided me was not sufficient for me to read and understand a Hebrew book. But it was sufficient to plant in me a love of Jewish learning and Jewish living and a desire to do more and learn more. Perhaps, realistically speaking, this is the best that our shuls and schools can do; but if we plant some seeds they may grow, if we light some sparks they may catch on fire. In this way, we can add our own link to the ongoing chain of Jewish tradition.