Erev Yom Kippur Sermon | 10th Tishri 5770 – 27th September 2009

We began this evening with silence.   Erev Yom Kippur is marked out by the haunting melody of Kol Nidrey, the Medieval text, opening with the words ‘All vows’, which has also lent its name to the first service of the special day out of time that is Yom Kippur.  But for me, the meaning of the day is always signalled a few minutes earlier.  It is when we stand silently before the open ark, the silence etched by the faint tinkle of the bells of the rimonim that adorn the scrolls cradled in the arms of their temporary custodians, that I really know that this awesome day has arrived.

 

Silence:  It is not the Jewish way of every day; we talk; we shout; we sing – we are rarely silent.  And even on this exceptional day of Yom Kippur, we will spend most of the time uttering words and singing; delving only briefly into pools of silence.  If a non-Jewish visitor were to come here on Yom Kippur, who had never been with us before, they might be forgiven for thinking that it’s a very busy day of marathon proportions – not least because of the endless changes of personnel; both leading the service and participating in it.

 

But all that external hyper-activity is only half the story.  For all the comings and goings, something else is happening that can’t be seen.  But still, we might ask, why is it that we are silent so infrequently on Yom Kippur?  Perhaps, one of the reasons is that silence is only partly characterised by the absence of noise around us; it is when everything around us is quiet and still that we are more likely to be aware of the noise within us:  Not just our gurgling stomachs around noon on the day of Yom Kippur, but the beating of our hearts and the voices in our heads.

 

The truth is, more than anything else, we have come here on this most sacred day of the Jewish year to listen to the voices within – not the sounds without.  Or rather, the purpose of all those external sounds – the beautiful words and evocative music – is to beckon us to enter into ourselves.  But entering ourselves is very hard – even scary; without the external garb of the liturgy, we feel a kind of spiritual nakedness; much safer to wrap ourselves in the words and the music…

 

Have you ever read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett?   It tells the story of nine year old Mary Lennox, who, following the death of her parents during a cholera epidemic in India, goes to live at the home of her uncle, Archibald Craven, in Yorkshire.  He has a huge house with grounds that include several walled gardens.  Brought there from London by Mrs. Medlock, the housekeeper, lonely Mary, already a neglected child, finds that her uncle is not interested in her – in fact, he departs the morning following her arrival to resume his travels.  Left to her own devices, Mary explores the new world around her, and discovers a garden that has been locked for ten years…

 

I have no intention of telling you the whole story.  If you missed out on The Secret Garden as a child – do find the time to read it.  I’ve mentioned this novel for two reasons: because of solitary Mary Lennox – who does, fortunately, find a friend; and because of that mysterious garden that she just has to discover for herself.  Reading Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beautiful tale at face value, the plot is simple: there is a lonely little girl and a garden.  But at another level, we can discern that Mary and the garden are one: not only that secret place, but also Mary, herself, is a mystery she unlocks and explores.

Yom Kippur is an invitation to unlock the garden of our inner selves.  When we went to Cornwall for six days in June, Jess and I spent time in St. Ives.  Jutting out into the Atlantic and boasting three rugged coves, St. Ives is as famous for its art as for its beaches, and while we were there we visited both the Tate, which displays international modern and contemporary art, and also the house, studio and garden of sculptor, Barbara Hepworth.   When you are outside the high walls of Barbara Hepworth’s house, which opens straight on to a narrow street, it is not apparent what lies within.  The garden is dense with foliage and also with sculptures, which seem to express the relationship between exterior and interior in a way that draws you in from the beautifully wrought stone and wood rounded surfaces to an inner landscape, where space is the dominant feature.    You want to explore with your fingers – which, of course, is not allowed – so, the next best thing is to follow the lines, shapes and hollows with your eyes, and walk this way and that to see how the space changes.

 

Having engaged in this way with the Barbara Hepworth sculptures displayed in the Tate, opposite the massive window overlooking Porthmeor Beach, seeing the sculptures in her garden, outside the studio where she worked was a very different experience.  So, what was the difference?  At first glance, it might appear that the gallery is a carefully constructed environment and the garden is a more natural setting.  But, of course, this is not the case:  the garden, like all gardens, has also been crafted, reflecting Barbara Hepworth’s imagination as much as the sculptures themselves.   The difference lay not in the contrast between gallery and garden, but in what the garden represented:  the living world of the artist.

 

When we look at the work of any artist, we have the immense privilege of glimpsing a part of what for want of a better word, I will call their soul – an experience, which is deepened when we also enter the environment in which the artist lived and worked and see their soul’s creations in situ.  Of course, being an artist involves immense technical skill, but more important than this is their creative vision and their unique way of translating that vision into forms – traditionally, sculptures or paintings.

 

Few of us may be moved to express ourselves as painters or sculptors – but as human beings all of us are blessed with the gift of creativity, which we may live out in different ways.  It is, indeed, our creativity, our ability to shape the world around us, which distinguishes us from the other creatures, with whom, after all, we share so much from a biological point of view.

 

Just over two months ago now, two ten week old half-Siamese black-brown kittens, sisters, whom we have called Dinah and Lailah, took up residence in our house.  I could devote an entire sermon to my reflections on and what I’ve learnt from Lailah and Dinah, but I will cut to the chase:  A few days after they had received their last vaccinations, when they were almost fifteen weeks old, we let them outside into our tiny back garden for the first time – accompanied of course.  A pleasant decked area with plants and vegetables and small trees, it was a revelation to watch them discover the world outside.  But before they began to scamper about and find new nooks and crannies to explore, they were completely still:  their ears pricking as they took in the new sounds – the squawk of sea-gulls over-head and the buzz of the bees; their noses twitching as new unfamiliar smells assailed them; their eyes darting in all directions – and then becoming transfixed as they saw for the first time, flowers and plants moving in the light breeze.  As I watched their fascination, I realised that, of course, until that moment, things only moved when they – or we – moved them.

 

Dinah and Lailah have discovered a whole new world of the outside, which will expand as they grow, and begin to explore beyond the garden walls – which, now twenty weeks old, they cannot wait to do…  They will, no doubt, become great explorers and bring back trophies of their expeditions, but creatures of nature they will never know what it is to cultivate a garden or plan their day or listen to their inner voice.   Less naturally agile than cats, much slower to develop, nevertheless, we human beings have unique creative and expressive abilities, which we harness as we go out into the world.

 

But today is not a day for going out into the world.  On the contrary:  Yom Kippur is the time for stepping back from the sturm und drang – the ‘tumult’ of daily existence – and investigating our selves and our inner lives, so that when we return to our day to day concerns, we are not only refreshed, but also ready to try and live in a new way.  But this is much easier said than done.  How do we begin to live in a new way?   What can possibly help us during these twenty-five hours to start anew?

 

Of course, what we find helpful will very much depend on who we are as individuals.  Nevertheless, I have a feeling we could all learn a lot about what it means to investigate ourselves, and pay attention to our inner lives by thinking about the various tasks involved in gardening – which are essentially the same, whether the garden is big or small, an artist’s garden, or our own cultivated domain at home.  And, for those, who either don’t have a garden, or don’t look after the one they have, I hope my remarks, nevertheless are useful as you begin to think about taking care of your inner self.

 

So what are the most important gardening tasks?  Top of the list must be, preparing the ground, clearing the weeds, and enriching the soil.  Then, there’s planning what you want to grow, where.  Next, there’s the planting itself – and the watering; an on-going essential – along with dead-heading and weeding and feeding and pruning.  Anyone who has a big garden will be occupied almost full-time on these tasks during the spring and summer.

 

So, what has all this got to do with ourselves?   Well, today is the day for taking the neglected garden of ourselves in hand; for raking through the tangle of our mistakes and stubborn ways; for exposing the little deceits and convoluted conceits that enmesh us, to the light and the air of honest reflection; for examining our bad habits and resolving to break them; for allowing ourselves to be nourished by the words and the music of the prayers, and the messages of the readings; for thinking about ways to better look after our bodies, nurture our minds and tend our souls; for considering what we can do to enhance the lives of others and work for justice and peace.

 

Today we are called not just to stand and sit, to read and sing and ponder, but to garden.  And where better to work out how to garden our selves than in a garden?   Welcome to the garden that is Yom Kippur; a garden so long established, so attuned to visitors for millennia, so perfectly appointed, that all we have to do is enter it, enjoy its light and shade – and eat of its fruit – metaphorically speaking, of course!   Here, in this special sheltered space, set apart behind its walls of ritual and liturgy from the everyday world, we are invited to dwell awhile.  Here, in this container of tranquillity, holding the now for a long moment, we have the opportunity to pause and be still.  How can any of us resist?

 

We can’t.  That’s why we are here.  But there is work for us to do – that gardening of ourselves – and while we are busy doing it – or, perhaps, busy not doing it – we can’t help waiting; it is all here before us – and yet we wait: because there has to be more than a beautiful garden; there has to be more than the challenge to garden ourselves.  And there is.  But the ‘more’ cannot be scripted.  It’s like when Lailah and Dinah went into the back-garden for the first time and became transfixed by the flowers and plants moving in the invisible breeze.   We read in the Torah, in the tale of the first human beings, in Genesis chapter 3, that after they had eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree, ‘they heard the voice of the Eternal God walking around in the garden at the windy time of the day and hid themselves….. from the presence of the Eternal God amongst the trees of the garden’ (:8).  Unlike Dinah and Lailah, the first man and woman knew that something was making the leaves rustle; they heard a voice that walked in the wind – ru’ach, a word that means both ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’ – and they were afraid because they knew that they had transgressed.  We, too, know that we have done wrong and gone wrong – that’s why we are here.  But being here, it’s not enough for us to admit our errors – we could do that on our own at home – we need to feel that being here has made a difference.

 

Since most of us don’t have that ready and direct awareness of God, we wait – not for a voice, or for a sign, but for a moment that stills us; a moment of silence between the words and sounds that surround us, when we realise that who we are and what we do, for good and for ill, really does matter.   It is in that moment, that we will begin to find ourselves and so begin to find each other.  It is in that moment that we will be ready to return to ourselves, and so be able to return to one another.  It is in that moment that we will know that when we walk out into the world once more we will have the resources to take responsibility for our lives, and begin a new year.  May each one of us, in our own ways, discover that moment.  And let us say: Amen.

 

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom Verei’ut

Erev Yom Kippur, 10th Tishri 5770 – 27th September 2009

 

 

Rosh Ha-Shanah Shacharit 5770 – 19th September 2009

A DAY OF RECKONING

ACKNOWLEDGING OUR CAPACITY TO NURTURE AND DESPOIL THE EARTH

In June, while taking a few days break in Cornwall, Jess and I visited the Eden Project at Bodelva, just off the A390, a few miles north of St Austell Bay.  As the web-site puts it: “The Eden Project exists to explore our dependence on the natural world, rebuilding connections of understanding that have faded from many peoples lives” (1).  Just ten years ago, the Eden Project ‘Green Team’ took over a derelict tin-mining site, fit only for gorse to grow, and since that time through careful planning; sourcing and planting, have nurtured over a million plants from every part of the world.  This means that when you enter this new Eden, you can wander from the ‘Mediterranean’ to the ‘Tropics’ – or vice versa – each region recreated in its own huge ‘bio-dome’.  We were fortunate that it was raining on the day we visited because the Tropics bio-dome was quite warm enough without the sun beating down on it!

 

The Eden Project is much more than a giant green theme park.   Its aim is to educate people about the natural world, and through its exhibits, programmes, projects, events and workshops contribute to creating “a culture” that, as the web-sit puts it, “knows how to sustain the things that sustain us and at the same time nurtures creativity, imagination and adaptability.”

 

But that’s not all.  In response to “unprecedented change” across the globe, which includes “revolutions in science and in the economic and political maps of the world alongside threats such as pandemics and the ‘demographic time-bomb’ on top… of the challenge of climate change”, the Eden Project ‘Green Team’ has launched “Climate Revolution”, a remarkable climate change programme to meet what they see as “a level of social change” needed “equivalent to the industrial revolution”.

 

We have all heard a lot about ‘climate change’; the Eden Project has identified some of the key challenges that climate change produces, “ranging from the need to address environmental refugees or find new energy technologies to the question of how to finance infrastructure changes for more unpredictable weather.”  What is so inspiring about the Eden Project is that it not only addresses the problems, it is also working out the solutions, and so the “Climate Revolution” encompasses “educational projects with schools, the exploration of new technologies for a low carbon world, research projects, climate-related events, conferences and training sessions and public events such as the first ever Green Car Show”

 

We can all get very depressed about the ‘state of the world’; the Eden Project tackles the issues head on – and, even more important, focuses on how we can deal with them; it is practical, up-beat and very compelling.   But there is a sense in which it is important for us not only to address the specific problems that the world faces, but also to explore our human culpability for these problems – and to ask, what is it about us – Homo sapiens; the human species – that we have got the world into such a mess?   There are lots of ways of responding to this question, depending on your point of view or area of expertise.  I would like to offer a Jewish response – which seems rather appropriate given that it is the biblically named, ‘Eden Project’, that is leading the way in showing us how to sort out the mess we’ve made.

 

The Garden of Eden – in Hebrew: gan eden.   According to the Torah, that is where the first human beings took their first steps.  Of course, it’s a ‘story’ – but it’s not only a story.  And in fact there are two stories – two accounts of the Creation of the world – but more of that in a moment.  So, the first habitation for humanity was a garden – not a mountain, a valley or a plain; not a jungle or a desert – not, in other words, simply some part of the natural landscape; rather: a garden. What is a garden?  A cultivated space; a place where nature has been tamed and shaped and nurtured – by human beings.   The people of Britain know all about gardens; gardening is one of our national past-times.  Gardening involves digging and planting and weeding, pruning and watering.   We read in Genesis chapter 2, verse 15:  ‘The Eternal God took the human being and put [the human being] into the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it – l’ovdah u’l’shomrah.

So, the first human being was a gardener – and more than this.  We read a few verses earlier: ‘The Eternal God formed the human being out of the dust of the ground’ (2:7).  The English is clear – but the Hebrew is clearer: ‘The Eternal God formed ha-adam – the human being – out of the dust of ha-adamah – the ground’.   We could say that the human-being is an earthling – if that word did not carry with it confusing sci-fi connotations (2).   What does it tell us about what it is to be human: that we are one with the ground?   Interestingly, the words adam and adamah are both related to the Hebrew word for ‘blood’, dam: the red earth; the human being pulsating with blood – and something more:  the text tells us that ha-adam is a ‘living being’ – nefesh chayyah (ibid.).  Again:  the Hebrew is more instructive than the English.  Later on, following the great Flood, when humanity and the earth must make a new beginning, Noah is instructed by God: ‘Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; like all the green vegetation I have given you; / only flesh with its being – nefesh – which is its blood, you shall not eat’ (9:3-4).  In the Torah, nefesh means ‘being’ rather than ‘soul’; the concept of the soul, which emerges in rabbinic writings, is influenced by Greek philosophy.  And so, nefesh is real matter – hence, ‘blood’.   And nefesh is not unique to humanity: all creatures have a nefesh – which is why we must not eat blood.  Indeed, earlier, in the first account of Creation, we read that every creature is a ‘living being’ – nefesh chayyah (1:21).

 

So, adam is not only one with adamah the ‘ground’; adam is also, like all other living creatures, a nefesh chayyah.  Everything in the garden is rosy it seems.  But of course it isn’t.  The verses from the Noah story I just quoted hint at the problem:  Why is it that after the Flood humanity is permitted to eat flesh – basar – albeit without the blood – the nefesh?   We read in the first account of Creation that God has given all the vegetation and all the fruit as food, both, for humanity and for the animals (1:29-30) – so what’s changed?   A rational answer to this question might be that the plants and trees simply didn’t survive the forty days and nights of rain, so, a new food source was required.  But this response misses the opportunity to comment on why there was a Flood in the first place.   The Torah tells us that God brought the Flood because the earth was ‘ruined’: ‘for all flesh had ruined their way upon the earth’ (6:12) and ‘the earth was filled with violence through them’ (:13).

 

Ruin and violence:  The Hebrew terms are based on the roots, Shin Chet Tav – to ruin, corrupt, destroy – and Chet Mem Sameich – to treat violently or wrong.   Ruin and Violence:  this more or less sums up the state we’re in now, doesn’t it?   We are ruining the earth; wherever we go, we perpetrate violence.   The only difference is that when the next great Flood comes – or maybe it will be a great drought or another Ice Age – most people will understand that rather than being ‘acts of God’, these disasters will be very much of our own making – which is, of course, what the biblical account is really teaching us:   If it hadn’t been for the ruin and violence inflicted by Noah’s generation, there would never have been a Flood.

 

But how is it that we went from working and tending a garden to wreaking such destruction – then and now?   I’ve mentioned a few times that there are two accounts of Creation in the Torah.  The first is the well-known Creation in seven days version recounted in Genesis chapter 1 and the first three verses of chapter 2.   Controversially, there are ‘Creationists’ – biblical fundamentalists – who insist that the account describes actual events in real time.  But what’s really controversial about this version in my view is not that it speaks of seven days – which, after all, can be understood to mean seven epochs – but, rather, the rigidly hierarchical nature of the account, which posits humanity at the apex.  We read (Genesis 1:26-28):

God said, ‘Let us make humanity – adam – in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. / So God created adam in His own image, in the image of God He created it (oto); male and female he created them (otam). / Then God blessed them; and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply. And fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creeps upon the earth.’

 

According to the first Creation account in the Torah, God blesses humanity – not only with fertility, but also with capacity to subdue the earth and have dominion over it and everything in it.  What a message!  Is it any wonder that this Master Race felt – and continues to feel, it seems – licensed to do anything?   But there’s something even more troubling:  The text suggests that exercising this special role of Mastery is a direct consequence of being an ‘image of God’.  Is this what it means to be created in God’s image – to trammel the rest of Creation into submission?   Is God a domineering Master, too?

 

Well, yes – but not only that:  God is also a potter, forming adam out of the red dust of the ground –  and adam is also a nefesh chayyah, a living being, at one with the other creatures, whose special task it is to be a gardener, working and maintaining the earth.   God has two dimensions, and humanity, too:  Master – and servant; to work the ground, l’ovdah, based on the root letters Ayin Beit Dalet also means to serve the ground; elsewhere in the Torah an eved is a servant, or, as the Exodus story relates, a slave.

 

But it’s actually more complex than this binary view would suggest.  If we return to the second account of the creation of adam, we find that the complete verse says: ‘The Eternal God formed ha-adam – the human – out of the dust of ha-adamah – the ground – and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life – nishmat chayyim – and ha-adam became a nefesh chayyah – a living being (Genesis 2:7).   ‘The breath of life’ – nishmat chayyim: Here we are shown another aspect of what it means to be created b’tzelem Elohim – ‘in the image of God’; to be an ‘image of God’ is to be infused with God’s breath.  As the story of Moses and the burning bush suggests (Exodus 3), it is impossible to capture God.  When Moses asks for God’s name, so he can tell the slaves, who sent him, when he returns to Egypt, the answer he receives is, as Gabriel Josipovici has observed, ‘as near as we can get in language to pure breath’ (3): Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (3:14).  The translation: ‘I am that I am’ or I will be what I will be’ – the Hebrew can be translated either in the present or the future – while indicating the ‘being-ness’ of the Eternal One, misses a more fundamental point.  As Gabriel Josipovici puts it:  ‘God…. also indicates by his palindromic utterance, with its repeated ‘h’ and ‘sh’ sounds, that his is the breath that lies beneath all utterance and all action, a living breath… (ibid.)

 

Unlike the English translation, Ehyeh expresses the sense that the Eternal One is ‘a living breath’ infusing humanity with nishmat chayyim – ‘the breath of life’ – ‘the breath that lies beneath all utterance and all action’, which also means that humanity, like God, has the power to create and to destroy, to nurture and to despoil – and, not or.  It would be so much simpler – and nicer – if we could somehow make the nasty, domineering, destructive dimension of our humanity disappear.  But we can’t; like breath, like air, both dimensions are one and indivisible; what is more the energy that makes for creativity is also the energy that wreaks chaos; just think of the other elements: fire and water; both, simultaneously, forces of creation and destruction.

 

Alternatively, ponder what the rabbis had to say about the two ‘inclinations’: the yeitzer tov, the ‘good’ inclination’ and the yeitzer ra the ‘evil inclination’.   Born with the capacity for good and evil – a yeitzer tov and a yeitzer ra – we might think that living a constructive existence involves suppressing our evil impulses in favour of our good ones.  The early rabbis, who formulated these concepts, discussed the nature and problematic consequences of the yeitzer ra at length, but they also recognised that the impulses represented by the ‘evil inclination’ are necessary to life.  And so we read in Midrash B’reishit Rabbah, a commentary on Genesis:  ‘Without it [that is, the yeitzer ra] a human being would never marry, beget children, build a house, or engage in trade’ (9:7).  Significantly, the Hebrew word yeitzer is connected to the word that tells us that God formed – va-yyitzer – ha-adam out of ha-adamah.  Unlike the more abstract concept, ‘create’, as in ‘God created – bara – the human being in His own image’ (1:27), to form is to mould, to fashion – like the potter kneading clay.  So: the yeitzer tov; the yeitzer ra – both inclinations are like that: tangible, malleable, endlessly changeable and changing; melding into one another; producing new forms.

 

So, where does this leave us right now, on the day that the rabbis called harat olam, ‘the birthday of the world?   As we consider the good works wrought by the Eden Project and all the other initiatives directed at taking responsibility for the planet and limiting the damage that we’ve done to it, we know that the birthday of the world is a day of reckoning; that’s why we are here, and why we return to this gateway of renewal each year to make a journey that is all about returning – to God, to one another, to ourselves; that’s why we take this annual opportunity to reflect on our actions – so that we may find a new way, a new path, a new direction.  As the alphabetical litany of our failures, we recite on Yom Kippur expresses it:  rashanu, shichatnu, ti’avnu, ta’inu, titanu – ‘we have dealt wickedly, we have ruined, we have acted abominably, we have gone astray and led others astray’ – all of us – collectively and individually.  May the sound of the Shofar – the ram’s horn that is completely inert until it is infused with breath – stir within us the will to harness all of our energies to the task of healing ourselves, restoring our relationships and repairing our world.  And let us say:  Amen.

 

 

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom Verei’ut

Rosh Ha-Shanah Shacharit 5770 – 19th September 2009

 

 

Notes

1. www.edenproject.com See also: eden project. the guide 2009 (Eden Project Books – www.booksattransworld.co.uk/eden).

2. The term ‘earthling’ is originally from Old English eorðe (ground, soil, dry land) and the suffix -ling (from Old English -ol, -ul, -el; and -ing, meaning “a person or thing of a specific kind or origin”. First used in 1593, earthling (or worldling) referred to a mortal inhabitant of earth as opposed to one from heaven or the underworld (Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 27 Jul. 2008. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=earthling).  The first use of the word in the contemporary sense was by science fiction author, Robert A. Heinlein, in Red Planet, 1949. (The Heinlein Society, http://www.heinleinsociety.org/)

3. The Book of God. A Response to the Bible. Yale University Press, 1988, p.74

 

Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah 5770 – 18th September 2009

Do you recall the moon-landing on July 21st 1969? (1)  I remember watching the images on television – and also gazing at the moon through the window: my eyes flitting between the two frames.  Was it really possible that men were up there on the moon?  And when my eyes returned to the screen, they were mesmerised, not only by the sight of two men walking on the unknown landscape over there, through the window, but also by the blackness of space around them…

 

Of course, there had been ventures into space before that momentous day, but somehow, the sight of two people treading terre ferme somewhere else, out of this world, suddenly made me aware that, yes, the Earth really was a planet, spinning around in space.  Fourteen years old back then, as I gazed at the night sky and at the dark backdrop to those TV images, I seemed to understand for the first time that the world I inhabited was finite; a tiny speck in a vast universe…

 

Unlike the Pilgrim festivals of Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot, which take place at the full moon, Rosh Ha-Shanah begins in darkness; the sun sets on the old year, but there is not even the glimmer of a crescent moon to light the way of the new one.  If we were all to leave the synagogue right now, and go into the Downs, somewhere far away from any signs of human habitation, we would be greeted by the blank blackness of a moon-less night; that is how the New Year emerges out of yesterday.   It’s as if we are being taught a lesson about what it really means to leave the old year behind, and step into the unknown beyond.

 

But, of course, the issue is not simply that we are here this evening standing on the threshold of the unknown beyond this moment.   The Moon landing forty years ago gave us a new perspective:  It wasn’t just the images of the men on the moon which caught my imagination, but also the pictures of the world from space:  the blue planet, wreathed in clouds, looking so serene.   Didn’t the concept of the ‘global village’ really have its origins in that moment?  Hinneinu – Here we are: all of us together; all of humanity; all the creatures of the earth, inhabitants of this one small world.   Rosh Ha-Shanah not only marks the beginning of a new year for the Jewish people; the first day of the month of Tishri is the anniversary of Creation – that’s what the date, 5770, however mythical, represents; as the Rabbis of old taught:  Ha-yom harat olam, ‘Today is the birthday of the world.’

 

Not quite a birthday, July 21st 1969 was an important milestone for the world – which is not to say that this planet wasn’t also at that time – and has not remained every day since – riven with conflict.  But nevertheless, despite all the divisions, that perspective – the perspective of the blue planet – also remains:  We are one – and divided.

And there is something else – highlighted by another milestone:  the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 (2).   The cracks had begun to form in the 1980s as Mikhail Gorbochev promoted the new ideology of Perestroika – ‘restructuring’ (3).  Then, in May 1989, West German Television broadcast the news that Hungary was opening its borders to Austria.  By September so many people from East Germany had arrived in Hungary, that over the course of a few hours, 4,500 East Germans were allowed to cross into Austria as a good-will gesture.  In this climate the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic on October 6th inevitably provoked protests:  That evening thousands of young people took part in a grand torch-light parade, and two days later, a group of pacifists held a candle light vigil in a church in the city of Leipzig.  Day by day, increasing numbers took to the streets.  By October 16th the number of protesters had reached millions.

The end of the GDR was drawing near. On November 9th East German television announced that East German citizens could now travel without restriction to the West.  On November 10th and 11th the flow from East to West was endless. The main artery of West Berlin, the Kurfuerstendamm had to be closed to traffic. In the evening of November 11th the first concrete slab was removed from the wall.  The following day, the Wall was opened at Potsdamer Platz, which once was one of the busiest crossroads in Western Europe.  Finally, on December 22nd the Brandenburg Gate was unlocked.

As soon as people began to stream from East to West on November 9th and 10th, they also began to climb onto the Brandenburg Gate.  I remember the TV images very vividly.  Modeled  after the Propylaeum in Athens – the gateway to the Acropolis – the Brandeburg Gate, built from 1789-1791, as the French Revolution raged, is a true symbol of Imperial power; made all the more daunting, after the defeat of Napoleon, by the addition of an iron cross to the goddess of peace standing in the two-wheel chariot that dominates the structure.  And while the Brandenburg Gate was badly damaged during World War II, when the Quadriga – the chariot with its four horses abreast – was completely destroyed, in 1956, five years before the Berlin wall was erected, the gate was restored, and in 1958 the Quadriga was recast from the original and again displayed (4).

 

So, although it took six weeks, the opening of the Brandenburg Gate on December 22nd was a defining moment.   And then, three days later, on Christmas Day, to usher in the new tomorrow, none other than Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at East Berlin’s Schauspielhaus (now Konzerthaus).  Significantly, Bernstein changed a crucial word in Schiller’s poem – the poet’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (5) – Freude – became ‘Ode to Freedom’ – Freiheit. A celebration of freedom, the concert was also a proclamation of reconciliation:  Assembling musicians from the Bavarian Radio Symphony together with those from orchestras of each of the four countries which had occupied Berlin since the end of World War II, the choral section included singers from both West and East Germany, while the four soloists were drawn from the United States and Europe (6).

 

The performance attracted over 200 million viewers world-wide.  I was in Germany at the time – in Trier, on the Rhine; birthplace of Karl Marx – and watched the historic concert on German TV.  Like everyone else I was caught up in the euphoria – the joy of freedom.  But I also felt some disquiet.   Was it a coincidence that the East German government announced that the way to the West was open on November 9th – the anniversary of Kristalnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ that marked the beginning of the violent persecution of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis in November 1938?  Had the terrible events of a united – and expanding – German nation prior to the division between East and West in 1949 been trumped by the reunification of Germany in 1989?  Would the memory of November 9th 1938 now be supplanted by the memory of November 9th 1989? What a troubling irony that Germany should once again have the potential of becoming the dominant power in Europe on the day that the Third Reich had come of age fifty one years earlier.  Not surprising, of course, that as people flowed through the newly-opened check-points on November 9th 1989, no one was thinking of another November 9th…

These were some of my thoughts and questions back then.  Today, of course, despite enormous upheaval across the continent of Europe and the destructive events in the Balkans during the early 1990s, life in Europe has become completely transformed.  No less than ten states, once subsumed in the Soviet Union – including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Poland – are now members of the European Economic Union, and their citizens are free, not only to cross borders, but also to live and work in any EEC country.  Germany is a strong nation, but has not lost its memory – either of the years of division between East and West, or of its Nazi past.   And so, sixty years after the defeat of Hitler, in May 2005, a very unusual Holocaust Memorial was inaugurated (7) – which I saw from the outside just before it was opened to the public, when I visited Berlin with a group of my rabbinic colleagues a month earlier.

The Memorial to the Sho’ah occupies a huge 19,000 square metre (204,440 sq foot) area of prime land between the Brandenburg Gate and the site of Adolf Hitler’s bunker, and is situated diagonally across from the old Reichstag building, which, enhanced by its new Norman Foster glass dome,  has been home to the German Parliament, the Bundestag, since 1999.  Designed by US architect Peter Eisenman the Holocaust Memorial is very difficult to describe: a maize of stones – each one a unique shape and size – ‘tilting like shadows’, through which visitors may move from any direction.  Controversially, there are no plaques, inscriptions or symbols of any kind – so in response to concerns about the totally abstract nature of the design, a visitors’ information centre was constructed underneath it; a compromise which allows this enormous domain of stone, evoking both ‘cemetery and concrete wilderness’, to remain powerfully and appropriately overwhelming.

If you visit Berlin the Sho’ah Memorial is impossible to miss – which tells you everything about Europe post-1989.  The dismantling of the very concrete Berlin Wall and the lifting of the more symbolic ‘Iron Curtain’ created new vistas, new possibilities, new freedoms and new challenges – as well as revealing a new disconcerting landscape in which nothing is hidden – neither the horrors of the past, nor the problems of the present – anymore.  For me that is the real significance of that seemingly endless sprawl of stone alongside a magnificently refurbished Brandenburg Gate and the glittering glass dome filling the old Reichstag building with new light.

And the significance is not only particular to Europe; there are also universal lessons to be learned when a wall comes down and a curtain is lifted – and two men walk on the moon.  It may seem that the moon-landing was an event of a completely different order – but there are connections.  To begin to understand what these utterly distinct events have in common – twenty years apart, separated, quite literally, by 238,855 miles (8) – it might be helpful to recall the primordial myth of the first human beings in the Garden of Eden.  On the face of it, the Garden of Eden bears no resemblance to a divided Berlin – for one thing, Eden was a natural paradise, not a man-made prison.  But like the East Germans, the first human beings were confined, and what is more, prohibited from eating of the Tree of Knowledge, their realm of action was restricted (Genesis 2-3).  On the face of it the Garden of Eden was just a garden, but a microcosm of the Earth, Eden represented for its two human inhabitants the whole known world; what lay beyond it was a complete mystery – so when they left the garden, they entered an utterly new unknown domain.

And so, we can see that the moon landing of July 1969 and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 both involved breaching the boundary between the known and the unknown.  The known may be beautiful or terrible or relentlessly familiar – but the unknown is always simply that: utterly mysterious until we take a leap and enter it. We cannot know what we will find there until we go there; and we cannot fully understand where we are here, until we regard here from beyond the horizon, over there.  Death, of course, is the final boundary, but before we die there are many other boundaries for us to cross.   And so, this evening we cross a boundary into the unknown realm of the New Year beyond this moment.   And so, we mark the passing years, not only to recall the past and everything we have experienced until now, but also to remind ourselves that life is always a stepping out into the future.   May each one of us find the courage to step out into the future with hope.  And let us say:  Amen.

 

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom Verei’ut

Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah 5770 – 18th September 2009

Notes

  1. www.news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/…/21/nesid_2635000/2635845.stm
  2. 2. ODE TO JOY AND FREEDOM.  The Fall of the Berlin Wall by Ursula Grosser Dixon: www.nevermore.tripod.com/wall.html
  3. 3. www.historyguide.org/europe/perestroika.html
  4. 4. www.berlin.de/tourismus/sehenswuerdigkeiten.en/00022.html
  5. 5. Schiller wrote the poem “The Ode to Joy” in 1785.  www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/931_Schiller_Ode.html
  6. 6. www.npr.org/about/press/061222.berlin.html
  7. 7. www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4531669.stm
  8. The mean distance between the Earth and the Moon is 238,855 miles – 384,400 kilometres. www.stardate.org/resources/ssguide/earth_and_moon.html

 

 

Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah 5771 – 8th September 2009

Here we are again on the threshold of another new year: are we ready to look back – and to move forward? What were we thinking as we journeyed here this evening? About the old year? About the future? Perhaps, we were simply in a hurry to get here on time. So, now we are here – but where are we? We are congregated together in this synagogue, obviously – but where are we in ourselves? Are we ready to make a new beginning? What are we feeling? Expectant? Anxious? Excited? Nervous? Hopeful? Fearful? Each one of us will be feeling different things, of course – and perhaps, some of us are not aware of what we’re feeling; at least not of our deepest feelings, although we may be aware of feeling hungry because we missed dinner, or pleasantly replete because we have just eaten a delicious festive meal, or vaguely uneasy because we’re really not sure why we are here, or simply, happy to have arrived at this special moment of celebration.

 

Yes, here we are – each of us with our own bundle of feelings, needs – and, maybe, questions – like: is there anything new about the year – except the date? And: what difference will it make to our individual lives that the Jewish year has changed?

 

It will not make a difference – this New Year of 5771 – unless we want it to; or rather, unless we are able to make a difference, or to do something different; that is the challenge we face: to renew our lives. Some of us really like new challenges: stepping out on a new path; trying something different; exploring an unforeseen opportunity; embarking on an adventure. But some of us, really don’t: we feel fearful and anxious about the unknown; and feel that there is just too much change going on all the time already; bewildering us and constantly overtaking us; the change some of us yearn for, is for everything to slow down – and, preferably, stand still; if only the hectic world we live in today was a bus, moving on its predetermined route, stop by stop, and we could just ring the bell, and get off when it suited us.

Judging by my own experience and my pastoral work as a rabbi for the past twenty-one years, I would say that the people who embrace the new and are eager to explore uncharted territory are in the minority. But it’s not just a matter of our personal predispositions. The Danish 19th century philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) explored the phenomenon of anxiety in his work, The Concept of Anxiety, first published in 1844 (1). Known as the “father of existentialism”, Kirkegaard, was also keen to revitalise Christianity, and so, drawing on the biblical account of Creation and the Christian concept of ‘original sin’, he identified the primal anxiety as the choice set before Adam to eat from God’s forbidden tree of knowledge or not. The first human being was free to make the choice, and according to Kierkegaard, the mere fact that one has the possibility and freedom to do something, engenders feelings of dread. As Kirkegaard famously put it, “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom.”

For Kierkegaard then, anxiety is intrinsic to the human condition. But it has been during the past hundred years that anxiety has also come to be seen as the spirit of the age.  Ever since the Great War of 1914 to 1918 wreaked its havoc; squandering a generation of young men and destroying the sense of optimism and hope that had marked modernity’s steady march of progress, thinkers have been talking about living in ‘an Age of Anxiety’. And some have argued that modernity itself has been the problem: In his book, The Crisis of the Mind, published in 1919 (2), French thinker, Paul Valery, argued that ‘the crisis of the mind’ was a direct result of “the free coexistence…. of the most dissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles of life and learning, [which] is characteristic of a modern epoch.” And so, according to Valery, although the military crisis was over, ‘the crisis of the mind’, precipitated by the loss of a fixed system of reference for living and thinking, remained.

The thinker, whose reflections on the Age of Anxiety became the most influential during the second half of the 20th century, was Protestant theologian-philosopher, Paul Tillich. In his book, The Courage To Be, published in 1952 (3), Tillich identified three types of anxiety: Ontic anxiety, focused on fears about fate and death, moral anxiety, centered on feelings of guilt and fear of condemnation, and spiritual anxiety, characterised by a sense of emptiness and loss of meaning. While all three may be present in any age, Tillich associated each one with the end of a major epoch, arguing that ”at the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety”. He wrote, further:

It is significant that the three main periods of anxiety appear at the end of an era. The anxiety which, in its different forms, is potentially present in every individual becomes general if the accustomed structures of meaning, power, belief, and order have disintegrated. These structures, as long as they are in force, keep anxiety bound within a protective system of courage by participation. The individual who participates in the institutions and ways of life of such a system is not liberated from his personal anxieties but he has means of overcoming them with well-known methods. In periods of great changes these methods no longer work. Conflicts between the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old of its intrinsic power, produce anxiety in all directions.

Like Valery, Tillich connects spiritual anxiety with the very nature of modernity, arguing:

The breakdown of absolutism, the development of liberalism and democracy, the rise of a technical civilization with its victory over all enemies and its own beginning disintegration – these are the sociological presuppositions for the third main period of anxiety. In this the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness is dominant. We are under the threat of spiritual nonbeing.

 

Emptiness; meaninglessness; spiritual nonbeing.  It was the 19th century German Philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who is understood to have been the first thinker to speak of ‘the death of God’ – but there have been so many other deaths since Nietzsche made his somber pronouncement: the death of hope, the death of progress; the death of reason; the death of the human spirit; eclipsed by the deaths of millions of human beings – from the trenches of the Great War to the Nazi death camps; from the Stalinist executions to the killing fields of Cambodia and the machete-wielding mobs of Rwanda.  Is that why so many people today feel tormented by feelings of emptiness, meaninglessness and spiritual nonbeing?

 

You may be wandering what Jewish thinkers have to say about all this? Could it be that we Jews are all too preoccupied with feeling anxious most of the time to devote much time to thinking and writing about it? Or, perhaps, the extent of Jewish anxiety explains why so many Jews are practitioners of psycho-analysis and psycho therapy – beginning, with Sigmund Freud, of course, who developed his theories on the basis of his clinical work with his, mostly, Jewish patients in Vienna.

 

Psycho-analysts and psycho-therapists treat individuals. In recent years, the Age of Anxiety seems to have spawned a new epoch characterised by ‘catastrophic thinking’ – a concept first identified by psychologists, working with individual sufferers, and now applied on a societal level.  Interestingly, in an article published online a year ago, an Israeli American writer and blogger, called Benjamin Kerstein, contributed a skeptical note to the debate (4):

We are living in an age of catastrophic thinking. Our social and cultural discourse on any number of subjects – the environment, the economy, public health, technology – is defined by a vocabulary and a worldview that can only be described as apocalyptic. The world, we are constantly told, is in a state of mortal crisis, and unless we act fast enough to stop it, we are all facing disaster and oblivion. Everything, it seems, is swiftly accelerating toward a terrible end.

 

One gets the feeling that Benjamin Kerstein is not convinced.  But whether we agree with his tone or not, or think that we are approaching the apocalypse, or not, it does seem that the Age of Anxiety has gone global.  So, how does what we are doing here this evening connect with the zeitgeist?  Is there a connection at all – or are we participating in some kind of anachronistic rite in an effort to fend off the sprit of the age? Are we taking refuge from the concerns of the world around us – or, as we share this sacred moment, are we engaged, on the contrary, in reviving the human spirit and restoring hope to our broken planet? Ha-yom harat olam: as the Sages put it, ‘today is the birthday of the world’; is it just too fanciful to imagine that by coming to this Erev Rosh ha-Shanah service – whatever brought us here, and however we are feeling – our participation in the celebration of the world’s birthday might actually make a difference?  After all, if a collection of over-excited traders at the Stock Exchange can destroy or revive economic fortunes, depending on the collective mood, why can’t all the Jewish congregations assembled across the world this evening summon up the spirit we need for a shanah tovah – a good year?

 

It could work… but we would need to believe in what we are doing here at least as much as those stock-brokers believe in what they are doing over there… and isn’t it a strange thing that while religion is so often dismissed as ‘nonsense’ these days by atheists and secularists alike, the irrational antics that determine the fortunes of the economy, are not…

 

Of course there are real problems out there and justifiable fears – at home and abroad: unemployment is still rising; a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians continues to be elusive; oppression and persecution remain rife across the globe; climate-change is in evidence… the list goes on.  And yet, beset by real threats of all kinds, and feeling anxious and anguished, we can still choose to celebrate Life – as our ancestors did before us – and, so choose to challenge the increasing dominance of ‘catastrophic thinking’. In doing so, we might find inspiration in the words of the poet, W.H. Auden (1907-1973), whose long six-part poem, entitled, The Age of Anxiety. A Baroque Eclogue, was published in 1947.  Auden’s allegorical reflection on the spirit of the age, centered on a fictional cast of characters in a New York bar, includes this sharp comment (5):

Yet the noble despair of the poets
Is nothing of the sort; it is silly
To refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry – “Miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am.”
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

As Jews we would hardly think of climbing ‘the cross of the moment’, but perhaps no other people knows as well as we do, what it means to grasp the tasks at hand and to climb out of the abyss for the sake of tomorrow.  Auden won the 1948 Pulitzer prize for The Age of Anxiety. Meanwhile, that same year, Leonard Bernstein, inspired by Auden’s work, began to compose his Symphony No.2, giving it the same title – and, even more pertinent, from a Jewish perspective, the modern State of Israel was established: Whatever has happened in and around Israel, and across the world in the past sixty-two years, do we need more evidence that hope can triumph over despair and that anxiety can be transmuted into a transformational impulse?

 

Interestingly, Kierkegaard did not simply regard anxiety in negative terms; he saw anxiety as a way of salvation for humanity, as well as a torment, because, as he understood it, through the experience of anxiety we can become truly aware of our potential, our choices and our personal responsibility; in this way, anxiety can be a vehicle for recognising and realising our true identity and freedoms. And so, while in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard expressed its horrors graphically, “No Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety”, he also believed that, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

 

We are here this evening to apprehend intimations of the ultimate in our midst – and in the, as yet, unknown realm of tomorrow beyond this moment. May we all learn in our own ways to transform our anxieties into a source of enrichment and growth, for our own sakes, and for the sake of our families, our community, our people, and our world. And let us say: Amen.

 

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom Verei’ut

Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah 5771 – 8th September 2009

 

Notes

1. Kierkegaard, Søren (1981), The Concept of Anxiety, Princeton University Press (first published as Begrebet Angest in June 1844; first English translation, 1946, as The Concept of Dread)

2. “La Crise de l’esprit” – “The Crisis of the Mind” by Paul Valery originally appeared in English, in two parts, in The Athenaeum (London), April 11 and May 2, 1919. The French text was published the same year in the August number of La Nouvelle Revue Française.

3. Tillich, Paul, The Courage To Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 61-63

4. Kerstein, Benjamin, “The Age of Catastrophic Thinking” in Azureonline, Summer 5769/2009, No. 37) www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=504

 

5. W.H Auden, The Age of Anxiety. A Baroque Eclogue (London: Faber, 1947)

 

Women as Agents of Change | 17th March 2009

My contribution to this evening’s reflections focuses on a story, the formative story of the Jewish people, which Jews the world over will return to in three weeks time, when we celebrate the festival of Pesach – Passover.  Today, the human population of the globe has expanded to six and a half billion; of that number just 14.2 million are Jews; a tiny minority; it has always been so.  And yet this story has provided a powerful raison d’etre for Jewish existence – ultimately more powerful than persecution and genocide – because this story is about our liberation from persecution and genocide.

 

One might say that the Jewish people is still here, despite our recurring experience of persecution and genocide, because of the inspiration we have drawn from this story:  The Eternal One is a liberator; ultimately the oppressed must go free.  And yet, in recounting this story, we have sometimes forgotten the key individuals, whose actions made the liberation possible.  Even those, for whom the Bible is not their sacred literature, have probably heard of Moses – the fugitive-turned-shepherd, who was apprehended by the Eternal One in the wilderness, and then sent on a mission to return to Egypt and persuade both Pharaoh and the slaves that freedom was at hand.  But what about the other important characters?

 

Let me remind you on the story:  As the Book of Exodus opens, we read that a new king had come to the throne, who ‘did not know Joseph’ (1:8) – the Hebrew who had settled with his family in Egypt some time earlier.  Unlike his predecessor, who tolerated the presence of this minority people, the new Pharaoh was afraid that they might grow too numerous and pose a threat to his rule (1:9).  So, he decided to enslave the Hebrews (1:11-14), and then instructed the mid-wives to kill all the new-born males (1:15-16).  But he didn’t reckon on the courage of two particular midwives, Shifra and Pu’ah, who defying his orders, ensured that the baby-boys lived (1:17-19); and he knew nothing of one family, of a mother and her eldest child, a daughter – unnamed at this point – whose bold and decisive actions ensured that the baby boy of their family, did not die (2:2ff.).  Not only did the mother prepare a floating basket and hide her baby in the reeds of the river; standing guard, the daughter was quick to act when Pharaoh’s daughter came down to the river to bathe and found the baby – offering the princess the services of a Hebrew woman as a wet-nurse:  hence the baby Moses grew up in the Egyptian court, with his mother looking after him until he was weaned.

 

So, a small band of women subverted the great and powerful Pharaoh.  On one level this story serves no other purpose than to provide an explanation of how Moses survived to lead his people out of bondage and into freedom.  Looked at in this way, the women involved simply serve the narrative, which centres on the all-important male figure.  Nevertheless, their role in a story that is essentially about Moses doesn’t diminish the importance of what they did – and the immense courage and determination that exhibited in the face of tyranny.

 

But, as it happens, one female character in the Exodus story does much more than serve the plot – Moses’ sister.  The Torah makes no mention of her again until, years after she saved her baby brother, she surfaces once more:  The slaves have escaped Egypt, passed safely on dry-land through the sea of reeds, and Moses has led them in a song of exultation.  Then we read (Exodus 15: 20:21a):

Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.  / and Miriam sang to them.

It’s only a small word in Hebrew – lahem – ‘to them’ – but, interestingly, it is the masculine gender.  Hebrew is a gendered language – there are no ’neutral’ ways of speaking; by using the masculine gender, by saying lahem instead of lahen, the Torah let’s us know that Miriam sang not only to the women – lahen – but also, to all the people – hence, lahem.  It seems like a tiny point.  But it is very important.  We haven’t heard from the sister of Moses for fourteen chapters – three portions of the Torah – and now suddenly she not only appears, she is given a name, Miriam, and is described as ‘the prophetess, the sister of Aaron’.  This description is contradictory:  If Miriam is a prophetess – n’vi’ah – then she is parallel to Moses, who is later called a prophet – navi (Deuteronomy 34:10); but her designation as ‘the sister of Aaron’, suggests that, together with Aaron, who is not called a prophet, she shares a lower status than Moses.  And yet, Miriam not only leads the women – a secondary sub-set of the people – she also sings to the whole community.  But this short but dense reference to Miriam is very frustrating for readers of the Torah, interested in knowing more about her:  while Moses and Aaron take centre-stage, after this tantalising glimpse, Miriam immediately disappears from the narrative once more until chapter 12 of the fourth book of the Torah, the Book of Numbers.

 

Miriam’s absence from the story is baffling enough – but when we do meet Miriam again, she is leading a rebellion – against Moses!   If you read the English translation, you will find that it says:  ‘Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses’ (Numbers 12:1).  But the Hebrew puts the verb in the feminine singular: Va-t’dabbeir – which means ‘She spoke’.  So a more accurate translation would be: ‘Miriam spoke – and Aaron – against Moses’.  Aaron went along with her – but Miriam was the prime-mover.  The Torah tells us that Miriam – and Aaron – spoke against Moses, for two reasons: first, because of the Cushite woman, whom Moses had married (:1) – did Miriam perhaps feel aggrieved on the part of Moses’ existing wife, Tzipporah? – and, second, because of Moses’ exclusive relationship with God.  It isn’t surprising that Miriam, ‘the prophetess’ should feel aggrieved.  And, also, not surprising that although Aaron joins her in saying: ‘Has the Eternal indeed spoken only with Moses?  Has He not spoken also with us?’ (:2); Miriam alone is punished: her skin made leprous, as ‘white as snow’ (:10).

 

Miriam is punished for stepping out of line, for forgetting her place.  But that is not the end of the matter.   Like all those with ‘leprosy’, she is shut out of the camp for seven days until she is healed.  But the Torah makes a point of saying that ‘the people did not journey on until Miriam was brought in again’ (:15).  On the one hand, the Torah account marginalises Miriam; on the other, the Torah acknowledges the importance of her leadership role for the people.

 

Miriam’s challenge to Moses is the first of a series of rebellions against Moses – and, subsequently, against Aaron, too – recounted in the Book of Numbers.   The rebellions take place in the second year of their wilderness journey – when the people have already reached the border of the land beyond the Jordan, which is their destination. However, they are condemned, for their rebelliousness, to wander for forty years until the last member of the generation that left Egypt, has died (Numbers 14:28ff.).  Silent, once more, about Miriam following her outburst, the Torah says nothing about those thirty-eight years.  And then, significantly, when the narrative resumes in the first month of the fortieth year, the first thing is relates is that after arriving in the wilderness of Tzin, and settling at Kadesh, ‘Miriam died there’ (Numbers 20:1).  The eldest of three sibling leaders died first.  It makes sense.  But the brevity of the reference to Miriam’s death immediately after the yawning lacunae in the narrative, only serves to highlight how little is said about her in the Torah – less than thirty verses in total.

 

Interestingly, the midrash – rabbinic commentary – regarding Miriam goes some way to compensate for the marginal role she plays in the Torah.  Immediately following Miriam’s death, the Torah relates that the people murmured against Moses and Aaron for lack of water (Numbers 20:2ff.).  The rabbis made a connection between the two events:  And so we read in the midrash* that during their forty years of wandering in the wilderness, ‘Miriam’s Well’ accompanied the Israelites on all their journeys; it only dried up after she died – hence the clamour for water.

 

Why did the rabbis, the scholarly leadership of the Jewish people, following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, choose to relate this whimsical tale about Miriam?  Was it perhaps, one of the forgotten stories about her that didn’t get included in the Torah?  Or does the story simply emerge out of the imperative of exegesis – interpretation – demanded by the text?  If the Torah says Miriam was a n’vi’ah, a ‘prophetess’, and shows us glimpses of her leadership, surely her role in the Exodus and wilderness narratives was much more significant than the Torah lets on.

 

That’s the point:  Miriam was one of the leaders of the Exodus – and more than this, her role was crucial.   Together with her mother, Yocheved, and the midwives, Shifra and Pu’ah, she played a key part in setting the Exodus in motion; together they were agents of change, long before Moses and Aaron became involved.

 

But there is another point – which is the reason why I have shared the story of Miriam with you this evening:  Judaism was not shaped by Miriam and Yocheved and Shifra and Pu’ah; it was shaped by Moses and Aaron and the men who came after them.  The Torah tells the stories that men have told about the creation of the world and the formation of the Jewish people.  The teachings of the Torah, elaborated later by the rabbis, were formulated by men for societal arrangements in which women’s role was circumscribed within the private, domestic arena.   Of course, women appear in the Torah, in the Tanach, that is, the Hebrew Bible, and in rabbinic literature, but only a few exceptional women are included – and even these exceptional women serve the narrative that centres on the experience of men.   The story of Miriam – the most exceptional of the exceptions proves the rule.

 

But that said, Miriam is also a very inspiring figure:   The American anarchist, a Jewish woman called Emma Goldman, who challenged the male radical leadership of her day once said, ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution’.  Miriam wasn’t only a woman of action, bold and intelligent, she spoke out against an exclusive patriarchal leadership and had the spirit to sing and dance her way to liberation.

 

Nevertheless, we can’t get away from the fact that Miriam was a lone woman leader in a male-dominated world – and that for generations, feisty women have been exceptions.  But today we inhabit a different age.   We still live in a male-dominated society, but during the past three decades something has begun to change.  For the first time, since the sages deliberated in their academies over two thousand years ago, Jewishly-educated women – many of them rabbis – writing, and engaging with one another consciously as Jewish women, have begun to study the Torah and the corpus of rabbinic literature.   In doing so, they have not only challenged the gender divide, but also the gender of God.  Despite Moses’ mysterious encounter with the nameless, elusive, ineffable One in the wilderness (Exodus 3:14), God is presented in both the Torah, and subsequent rabbinic teaching, predominantly as male.  Alongside new interpretations of the Torah and rabbinic texts, women have challenged the patriarchal God by re-interpreting the Eternal One – in myriad ways.  What all these new approaches to the Eternal share in common is the awareness of the power of language and imagery about the Divine to shape and reinforce gender relations:  When God ceases to be regarded as Adonai Tz’va’ot, ‘the Lord of Hosts’ and melech malchey ha-m’lachim, ‘the king above the king of kings’; the power of warrior lords and of kings and emperors and dictators of various kinds is no longer legitimated ‘on high’.

 

So, where once there were lone exceptional Jewish women; today women as a collectivity have begun to transform Jewish life and teaching.  What does it mean for Jewish women as a collectivity, to move from the margins to the centre; from the private to the public arena of Jewish life?   It means women becoming leaders of religious services and synagogue Councils.  It means women engaging in learning and teaching.  It means women re-interpreting the Torah.  It means that Jewish life is changing – not only for Jewish daughters, but for Jewish sons, too.

 

And the leadership of women rabbis has been crucial to this process.  The first woman rabbi in Britain, Jackie Tabick, was ordained in 1975 before Jewish feminism arrived on the scene.  Today, half of the seventy progressive rabbis in Britain are women.  To give you an example of the significance of women’s rabbinic leadership:  Directly as a result of the work of women rabbis, the Liberal and Reform movements have produced gender-inclusive liturgy.  Indeed, published in 1995, the Liberal prayer-book, Siddur Lev Chadash, for daily and Sabbath use, has had a significant impact on congregational life.  Alongside the development of gender inclusive liturgy, women rabbis have also been involved in developing new rituals, which celebrate women’s lives, for example, covenant ceremonies for girls, while enabling women to lay claim to rituals and practices, like the wearing of tallit, the prayer-shawl, which have previously been the exclusive prerogative of Jewish men.

 

Of course, there is still a long way to go before there is complete gender equality in Jewish life – but still, the transformations that have already taken place are bound to make us wonder:  What would the synagogue and the home look and feel like if women and men played full and equal parts in both domains?   What difference would it make to the life of the Jewish people as a whole if Jewish teaching was transformed in such a way that it reflected the perspectives and experiences of Jewish women as well as those of Jewish men?

 

For the first time in the history of the Jewish people, Jewish women as a collectivity have become agents of change, and are in the process of transforming Judaism into an egalitarian, inclusive inheritance.  And so it will that in three weeks time when Jews around the world sit around tables in their homes and synagogues for the seder, the ‘order’ of the telling of the Exodus story, which is a central feature of the observance of Pesach, among many progressive Jews a significant new element will be added to the proceedings:  Alongside the Cup of Elijah – the prophet, who, according to tradition, will herald the coming of the Messiah, the messianic future of liberation, justice and peace for all the world – they will place the Cup of Miriam.  While the Cup of Elijah contains the fruit of the vine, the Cup of Miriam contains water; while, in Judaism, the fruit of the vine is a symbol of joy and celebration; water is a symbol of life. As we celebrate Pesach in joy, we look forward with hope to the joy of deliverance from oppression in the future.  But the future will not simply happen automatically:  That is the lesson of Miriam’s life from the waters of the Nile, through the waters of the Sea of Reeds, to the River Jordan;   life is a journey and a commandment; every step along the way, we are challenged to act, so that the promise of liberation, justice and peace, may become a reality for all.

 

 

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

Interfaith Contact Group Women in Faith Dialogue Event

Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue

17th March 2009

 

 

 

*See Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg, Vol. III (JPSA, Philadelphia, 1968), where the various midrashim about Miriam are compiled together under different headings, including, ‘Miriam’s Well’, pp.50-44.

 

Rabbi Regina Jonas lecture | 23rd February 2009 by ETS

FRAULEIN RABBINER REGINA JONAS, 1902-1944

THE FIRST WOMAN RABBI

Introduction: ‘Finding’ the ‘lost’ woman rabbi

Good evening everyone.  Thank you for inviting me here to tell you about Fraulein Rabbiner Regina Jonas, who received s’mikhah, rabbinic ordination, in Germany in 1935.  I first heard about Rabbi Regina Jonas in 1992, when I had been a rabbi for just three years.  Intrigued to discover that a woman had become a rabbi Germany in the 1930s, before the Sho’ah, I decided that I wanted to find out more about her.  As it turned out, my research raised many more questions than it answered – questions that remain very relevant to this day.

 

I gave a lecture about Rabbi Regina Jonas at the Leo Baeck College in 1994, which was later published in the journal, European Judaism in 1995.  Prior to this publication, a briefer account of my research into her life and work was included in the first anthology of the writings of women rabbis in Britain, Hear Our Voice, which was published by SCM Press in December 1994 1. At the time that I spoke at Leo Baeck College, I was honoured to be giving the first public lecture devoted to the life and work of Rabbi Regina Jonas, fifty years after her death in Auschwitz in 1944.  Research had already been conducted by a German Christian feminist, Katharina von Kellenbach – who, incidently, died a few months ago 2.  And in the years since my humble efforts, important work in the retrieval of Regina Jonas’ legacy has been undertaken:  Most significantly, Elisa Klapchek, rabbi of the Beit Ha’Chidush congregation in Amsterdam, who grew up in Germany, has written a biography, which was translated into English by New York-born, Toby Axelrod – who has also translated Regina Jonas’ 1930 treatise, “Can Women Serve as Rabbis?”  3

 

So, in an important sense Rabbi Regina Jonas is no longer ‘news’ – except, of course, to those who have yet to learn about her life and work.  And that is where I began – as a relatively new ‘woman rabbi’ back in 1992.  At that time, it had been exactly twenty years since Sally Priesand had received s’mikhah from the Hebrew Union College in the United States in 1972.  As far as I was aware, and as far as my women rabbinic colleagues were aware, Sally Priesand was the ‘first’ woman rabbi.  We largely saw ourselves in the context of a new era, which had been significantly shaped by the Women’s Liberation Movement which re-emerged in the late 1960s and led to profound changes in the lives and expectations of women, especially, in Britain, western Europe and the United States.  In other words, we saw ourselves as a new phenomenon.

 

And then we heard about a German woman rabbi called Regina Jonas who worked as a pastor, preacher and teacher in the Berlin Jewish community and in the Terezin ghetto and died in Auschwitz in 1944.  And we wondered: What contribution might she have made to Judaism if she had survived?  What difference would her survival have made to the development of women in the Rabbinate?  If Hitler has not come to power shortly after Regina Jonas completed her studies… if German Jewry had not become preoccupied with simple survival… if European Jewry had not been consumed by the fire of Nazism…  What would have become of Regina Jones and the other twenty-six women who studied with her at the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judenturns (the ‘High School for the Science of Judaism’) in Berlin? 4

 

Once I began my research into the life and work of Rabbi Regina Jonas, these questions, vital though they are, were soon overtaken by other questions – which amounted to one big question:  Why was the historical record so silent about her?  There is no reference to Regina Jonas in the Encyclopaedia Judaica .  There is no reference to Regina Jonas in H.G. Adler’s monumental work, Theresienstadt, 1941-1945, published in 1960.  Ditto the testimony gathered by the Council of Jewish communities in the Czech Lands, entitled, Terezin published in 1965.  Ditto Richard Fuchs’ article on ‘The Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums in the Nazi Period’ published in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (XII) of 1967.  Similarly, in his article included in Living Judaism in Spring 1967, in which he argues for the ordination of women, Aryeh Dorfler, Lecturer in Rabbinics at the Leo Baeck College at the time, makes no mention of the precedent set by Regina Jonas. 5

 

Interestingly, in the account of “The Last Days of the Hochschule’ by Alexander Guttman published by Hebrew Union College in 1972 – the year that the first woman, Sally Priesand, was ordained by that institution – Guttman refers to the dissension regarding Regina Jonas, both prior to, and following, her ordination.  And yet, in  Response to Modernity.  A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, published in 1988, Michael Meyer makes only passing reference to Regina Jonas in his discussion of the controversy about women’s ordination at the Hebrew Union College. 6 Even more perplexing, the specialist study, Women of Theresienstadt.  Voices from a Concentration Camp by Ruth Schwertfeger, published in 1989 7 does not include the voice of Regina Jonas – a spectactular omission.  Regina Jonas lost her life in Sho’ah, and, it seems that the memory of her life and work also vanished practically without trace.

 

Of course, there was the problem of written evidence.  While Regina Jonas is included in institutional records of the Hochschule, the Judische Gemeinde (Jewish Community) of Berlin, Theresienstadt (Terezin) and Yad Vashem – and there is lively discussion of the special ‘case’ of Regina Jonas in the Jewish newspaper of the time, Israelitisches Familienblatt – until the Berlin Wall came down, Regina Jonas’ letters and papers – including her rabbinic thesis – rested undisturbed in the Bundesarchives (State Archives) in Coswig, 100 kilometres east of Berlin for over four decades.

 

But the political realities of Germany after 1945 do not explain why the official records were not investigated earlier.  And then there is the question of the leading Jewish figures who knew Regina Jonas and survived the Sho’ah – like her teacher at the Hochschule, Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck, and Viktor Frankl with whom she worked in Terezin.  As far as we know, they did not breathe a word about her. 8 Why is this?  A surviving fellow Hochschule student – who became a senior Progressive rabbi in Britain – told me when I made enquiries that she simply had not interested him;  she was not his ‘type’! 9

 

But at the time at least, there were others who were far less indifferent and dismissive.  During her early years at the Hochschule (1926-1929), Regina Jonas corresponded with two of her teachers there, Eduard Baneth, Professor of Talmud, and responsible for rabbinic ordination, who supervised her final thesis, and Ismar Elbogen, Professor of Liturgy – and their letters to her are preserved in the archives. 10 Indeed, there is clear evidence from this correspondence that these distinguished scholars recognised the difficulties she faced as a woman.  As early as 1927, Elbogen wrote to Regina Jonas at Purim urging her not to be pessimistic of her chances of getting work.  He added that the community should not pay her less than the rate 10.  Perhaps Ismar Elbogen and Eduard Baneth would have remained stout supporters of their colleague following her ordination.  But Eduard Baneth, who originally conducted the rabbinic examination of Regina Jonas, died in 1930, during the course of it 11 and Ismar Elbogen, emigrated to New York in 1938 where he joined Hebrew Union College and died in 1943 12 .  These two scholars did not live to relate their experiences of Regina Jonas.

 

And what of Leo Baeck, who survived the Sho’ah and lived in London for eleven years until his death in 1956?  His letters to Regina Jonas span the period from 1934 to 1940, and reveal that he was not just a teacher, he was a friend.  Indeed, this is also true of Leo Baeck’s wife, Natalie, who also corresponded with Regina Jonas. 10 What is more, Leo Baeck and Regina Jonas were in Thereseinstadt – in Terezin – at the same time – although Regina Jonas was deported to the ghetto in November 1942, and dispatched to Auschwitz two years later and Leo Baeck was incarcerated there from 1943 until its liberation in 1945.

 

So why didn’t Leo Baeck keep the memory of his student alive and pass it on to the next generation?  One can only speculate – and in all fairness to the memory of Leo Baeck himself, speculation is dangerous.  Perhaps he did mention her.  But if he did, nothing he said seems to have been recorded 8.  Perhaps, too, Ellen Littman, a fellow student of Regina Jonas, who taught Bible at Leo Baeck College in the early years, also mentioned Regina Jonas to her students.  But if she did, the knowledge that a woman student at the Hochschule had received s’mikhah, does not seem to have excited the curiosity of the first post-war generation of European progressive rabbis.

 

And yet, by contrast, for a woman who was taught by Regina Jonas as a girl between the years 1934 and 1937 at a non-Jewish school in Berlin where she was a visiting teacher, ‘Dr Jonas’, as she was known there, left a ‘lasting impression’. 13 When the news of Regina Jonas’ ordination certificate and photograph was published in Inform, the  newsletter of the Reform Synagogues of  Great Britain in December 1993, a delighted Inge Kallman of Southport quickly wrote to the Leo Baeck College and the Principal, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Magonet, kindly passed her letter on to me.14 In her letter to me,15 she recalled that at twelve years of age, she was encouraged by ‘Dr Jonas’ to attend her first Oneg Shabbat.  And she went on to say that it was also at the instigation of Regina Jonas that she attended an Erev Shabbat service that her teacher conducted at an old people’s home near the Jewish Hospital in Berlin.  It was here that she remembers seeing Regina Jonas in her rabbinical robes for the first time.  In addition to these more formal settings, this former pupil also remembers:  ‘one occasion when the few Jewish children still remaining at the school were invited to her flat for biscuits and coffee, a flat she shared with her mother.’

 

Why did it take so long for these memories to surface?  Inge Kallman writes:  ‘Whenever I asked previously, it seems that although her existence was known, there was no evidence.’16 No substantial written evidence, clearly.  But if those who had known Regina Jonas, who taught her, studied with her, worked with her, had made an effort to transmit their experience of her to others, we would have had the evidence of oral testimony, and it would not have been necessary to rediscover Regina Jonas almost fifty years after her death in the archives where she herself deposited her letters and papers.17

 

Regina Jonas may have expected to retrieve her own work from the archives after the war – or perhaps, she did not think she would survive and hoped that future generations would rediscover her contribution to Jewish life.  But she died in Auschwitz and so it became the responsibility of the next generation to engage in to the task of retrieval.

 

In addition to reading Katharina von Kellenbach’s article published in the journal Schlagenbrut in 1992 2 and also the tribute by Hans Hirschberg published in Leo Baeck College News in 1993 11, I conducted my own piece of research in November 1993, when I visited the archives at Coswig – which have since been transferred to Potsdam, near Berlin.  Although I was only given access to a few letters, they helped to illuminate aspects of Regina Jonas’ experience as a student and rabbi and her relationships with her scholars/teachers.  Fortunately, after going to see Dr Hermann Simon, Director of the Zentrum Judaicum Foundation at the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue in East Berlin, he agreed to let me have the microfilm containing all the archive material – including Regina Jonas’ rabbinic dissertation on the ordination of women – which I finally received in March 1994 and deposited in library of the Leo Baeck College.  And so – technical issues of translation aside – for the first time, the written evidence of the contribution of Regina Jonas became accessible.

 

From Teacher to Rabbi

So, what do we know about the first woman rabbi?  Regina Jonas was born on August 3rd 1902 in Berlin.  At the age of twenty-one she began working as a teacher of Religion in the Orthodox Jewish School in Berlin, where her brother, Abraham, also taught, and spent the next twenty-one years until her death intensively engaged in Jewish learning and teaching.

 

However, Regina Jonas was not content with being a teacher.  She attended the Hochschule from 1924 to 1930 attaining the qualification, ‘Academic Teacher of Religion’ 18.  Did she plan to become a rabbi or did her studies at the Hoschschule lead her in that direction?  Further research may yield an answer to that question.  What we do know is that towards the end of her studies, she clearly sought ordination.  She devoted her thesis to an exploration of the Talmudic sources regarding Women’s Ordination and waited to receive s’mikhah.

 

But it was not to be – at least not under Hochschule auspices.  Although Regina Jonas had the support of the majority of her teachers, the Talmud Professor, Dr Chanokh Albeck, declined to put his name to a Rabbinic Diploma.  The controversy raged but was unresolved 19 and despite the fact that Leo Baeck was her teacher for many years he did not ordain her.  Hans Hirschberg argues that: ‘[a] possible explanation might be that Baeck presided over the General Association of Rabbis in Germany which also included Orthodox and Conservative Rabbis.  The ordination of a woman as Rabbi’, he writes, ‘may have led to unwanted arguments, likewise in Berlin, where Leo Baeck had to work with non-liberal colleagues in unified congregation (Einheitsgemeinde)’.

 

But the issue of ordination – or rather the lack of it – did not end there.  At the request of the Union of Liberal Rabbis in Germany on 27 December 1935 Regina Jonas received s’mikhah from Rabbi Max Dienemann in Offenbach who having examined her declared her ‘qualified to occupy the office of Rabbi’ 20.  Interestingly, Leo Baeck wrote to her just four days later on 31 December, congratulating her on her performance in her examination 10.  And it was Leo Baeck again, who, over six years later on 6 February 1942, signed a certificate confirming her s’mikhah 21.

 

It is the certificate alone – presented by Dr Hermann Simon, to Leo Baeck College on 3 October 1993, together with a photograph of Regina Jonas in her rabbinic robes – that provides the incontrovertible evidence of her ordination which sets her apart as the first woman whose status as a Rabbi received formal acknowledgement.  Interestingly, Inge Kallman recalls her teacher saying that ‘apart from a woman rabbi in America, she was the first woman rabbi’. 22 Who was that woman rabbi?  Perhaps Regina Jonas was referring to Martha Neumark, the daughter of a professor at the Hebrew Union College, who provoked an outcry when she requested ordination in 1922.  Michael Meyer discusses the controversy briefly in Response to Modernity (1988).  Apparently, while the HUC faculty were unanimous in their support of Martha Neumark, a majority of the College’s Board of Governors decided against changing the policy of ordination for males only 23.  So, Martha Neumark did not receive s’mikhah.  But if Regina Jonas was alluding to Martha Neumark when she spoke of ‘a woman rabbi in America’ then it seems that Fraulein Rabbiner Regina Jonas, at least, considered her a colleague.

 

Working as a Rabbi

What kind of woman was Regina Jonas?  And what kind of a rabbi did the first woman to officially assume that role, turn out to be?  The evidence explored so far reveals a picture of a determined individual, a dedicated teacher and pastor.  Here are some of the pieces in the puzzle:

 

The first piece is a picture:  a photograph, which now hangs in a classroom at the Leo Baeck College dedicated to the rabbis of the pre-war Hochschule generation.  Her face is strong: piercing eyes, firm chin, resolute mouth; her stance is defiant.  She looks like a force to be reckoned with.

 

Regina Jonas was a bold individual.  There are clear signs that she would not allow the absence of ‘official’ recognition to stand in her way.  And no doubt the fact that the dispute spilled out into the wider Jewish community, turning her into a public figure, helped to embolden her still more.  Shortly after she completed her examination at the Hochschule, the Jewish Journal, Israelitisches Familienblatt, published an article entitled ‘It strikes us’ on 4 June 1931, in which the author expressed his ambivalent reaction – and perhaps that of many others – to the anomalous position of Regina Jonas.  He wrote:

One is rightfully permitted to be proud of her.  One is rightfully permitted to see this as a good sign of the times when a young woman out of her own inclination and zeal grasps hold of the Jewish teaching profession …  But nevertheless it strikes us that in this certificate which the Hochschule for the Science of Judaism has bestowed, it was not stated that it is only a teaching and not a preaching Diploma …  As long as it is not the regular norm that women ministers are appointed and as long as …  many small communities …  give people with Academic Religion certificates, rabbinic functions, it must be said that this Diploma when bestowed on a woman should not include the qualification to preach which normally a certificate like this includes.  Otherwise it could happen that other Academic and Seminary-educated women religion teachers could climb the pulpit and claim to be qualified by their educational institutions to do so …

 

Perhaps if the German Jewish community had not been overtaken by external events, some of the other female students at the Hochschule may have risen to this challenge.  In any case, Regina Jonas pursued the case for woman rabbis.  She gave a lecture at the Judischen Frauenbund in Berlin with the title, ‘Can Women Become Rabbis?’, which was reported in the same journal (Israelitisches Familienblatt) on 5 November 1931.  Beginning with an historical sketch of the origin of rabbinic ordination, she explained:

In earlier times, there existed no exams for rabbis.  Leaders of the community were learned people who were authorised by other learned people to practice the rabbinical function.  They themselves had the right to name as rabbis, men who seemed to them to be worthy.

 

Regina Jonas knew that there were rabbis who considered her to be worthy – and members of the Berlin community with which she worked, too.  Perhaps that is what made her so tenacious.  And yet there continued to be many detractors 24 and the ambiguity which surrounded her role persisted even after she received s’mikhah. A survivor recalls: 25

In Berlin there lived at this time in the thirties the first woman rabbi, Fraulein Rabbiner Regina Jonas.  She watched carefully that one said ‘Fraulein Rabbiner’ to her because a ‘Frau Rabbiner’ was the wife of a rabbi … She came into the hospital and old age home very often, and there she wanted to function as a rabbi.  Generally, this worked in the old age home.  In the hospital, she came into the synagogue, wearing a purple robe – not black – she sat herself downstairs next to a man on the rabbi’s seat.  She wanted to give her lecture or sermon during the prayers, but always when this doctor was there and prayed with the people, he said to her, ‘You can do what you want, but for the prayers you go upstairs to the women, and afterwards you can come downstairs’.

 

Fraulein Rabbiner Regina Jonas worked with the old and with the young primarily as a pastor and teacher.  However, she found that despite the resistance of some people, once the violence and deportations began, she increasingly assumed an overt pulpit presence.  Hans Hirschberg writes 26:

Contemporaries praised her extraordinary personality and oratorical gifts.  Where and whenever she preached to those who were to perform forced labour, they filled the place to capacity and those who did not manage to get in, stood in the doorways as far as the street.

 

On 3 November 1942, Regina Jonas completed a declaration form listing her property – including her books – which was officially confiscated ‘for the benefit of the German Reich’ two days later.  On 6 November, she was deported to Theresienstadt 27.  But her rabbinic work did not end with deportation.  In the ghetto, she continued functioning as a rabbi, working together with the well-known psychologist, Viktor Frankl.   Her particular task was to meet transports at the railway station and help people deal with their initial shock and disorientation 28.

 

Curiously, Viktor Frankl, while he wrote extensively about what he learned from his experience in the camps after the war 8 did not mention his work with Regina Jonas.  However, when approached by Katharina von Kellenbach in 1991 and asked directly about her, Frankl described Regina Jonas as ‘loaded with energy and a very impressive personality’.  He also called her ‘a blessed preacher and speaker’ 29 – a reference to the fact that, in addition to her pastoral work, Regina Jonas also gave sermons and lectures.  The amazingly full cultural life of Terezin is well-documented, and she contributed to the programme of activities.  A hand-written list of her lectures, entitled, ‘Lectures of the one and only woman rabbi, Regina Jonas’ has survived in the Terezin archives. 30 Of the twenty-three different titles, five concern the position, meaning and history of Jewish women, five deal with Talmudic topics, two with biblical themes, three with pastoral issues, and nine offer general introductions to the  basic contents of Jewish beliefs, ethics and the festivals.

 

Like Viktor Frankl and her teacher, Leo Baeck, who both survived Terezin, Regina Jonas was clearly an inspiration for all those who knew her.  A glimmer of her spiritual strength is apparent in the one sermon delivered in the ghetto to have survived – which includes these words of hope. 31

Our Jewish people is sent from God into history as ‘blessed’, ‘from God blessed’ which means, wherever one steps in every life situation, bestow blessing, goodness and faithfulness – humility before God’s selflessness, whose devotion-full love for His creatures maintains the world.  To establish these pillars of the world was and is Israel’s task.  Men and women, and women and men have undertaken this duty with the same Jewish faithfulness.  This ideal also serves our testing Thereseinstadt work.  We are God’s servants and as such we are moving from earthly to eternal spheres.  May all our work which we have tried to perform as God’s servants, be a blessing for Israel’s future and Humanity.

 

After two years of tireless work on behalf of her fellow prisoners in the ghetto, Fraulein Rabbiner Regina Jonas was dispatched to Auschwitz.  There is some dispute about the date.  Katharina von Kellenbach, citing the Transport List held in the archives at Yad Vashem on which Regina Jonas is included as No.722 32, says that the date was 9 October 1944.  Hans Hirschberg states that the date was 12 December 1944 33.  The Yad Vashem reference itself seems to be dated 20 December. 34 von Kellenbach later revised her estimate and suggested that the date was 12 October. 35 What is certain is that Rabbi Regina Jonas did not live to see the New Year of 1945 and liberation in the Spring.36

 

Although since the time that I conducted my research, there have been further studies 3, much of the mystery that surrounds Fraulein Rabbiner Regina Jonas remains. It is clear that she was a gifted, courageous individual and a committed rabbi.  The circumstances of her time meant that she was, in her own words, ‘the one and only woman rabbi’.  We cannot know how many other women may have become rabbis after her if the Sho’ah had not happened.  We cannot know if Regina Jonas would have made a special contribution to Jewish life if she had been one of many and European Jewry had not been rounded up and slaughtered.  The chain was broken.  But today, women rabbis, who now make up half of the progressive rabbinate in Britain, are creating a new chain, and as we do so, we are proud to restore a missing link with our past:

Frauline Rabbiner Regina Jonas – zichronah livrachah, ‘may her memory be for a blessing’.  Amen.

 

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

The Jewish Historical Society, Brighton & Hove Branch

23rd February 2010

Notes

1.            Elizabeth Sarah: ‘Rabbi Regina Jonas, 1902-1944: Missing Link in a Broken Chain’. In Hear Our Voice.  Women Rabbis Tell Their Stories. SCM Press, 1994; ‘The Discovery of Fraulein Rabbiner Regina Jonas: Making Sense of Our Inheritance’. European Judaism, 95:2, December 1995.

2.            At the time I conducted my research, Katharina von Kellenbach had published: ‘Frl. Rabbiner Regina Jonas: Eine religiose Feministin vor ihrer Zeit’ in Schlangenbrut Nr.38, 1992, pp.35-39(kindly translated for me by Maren Freudenberg); “Forgotten Voices: German Women’s Ordination and the Holocaust” in Proceedings of the Second Biennial Conference on Christianity and the Holocaust, Rider College II (1992);  and: “God Does Not Oppress Any Human Being: The Life and Thought of Rabbi Regina Jonas” in Leo Baeck Institute: Yearbook XXXIX (1994).  In 1998 a further article was published in the journal, Shofar: “Preaching Hope: Denial and Defiance of Genocidal Reality in Rabbi Regina Jonas’ Work”

3.            See Klapheck, Elisa, ed. Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas—The Story of the First Woman Rabbi. San Francisco: 2004. (Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas—Kann die Frau das rabbinische Amt bekleiden?. Teetz: 2000); Axelrod, Toby, 2009: “My years with Regina Jonas”.  In: Bridges. A Jewish Feminist Journal, Autumn 2009, Vol. 14, No.2, pp.27-31.  Also see: Herweg, Rachel Monika. “Regina Jonas (1902–1944).” In Meinetwegen ist die Welt erschaffen. Das intellektuelle Vermächtnis des deutschsprachigen Judentums. 58 Porträts, edited by Hans Erler, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich, and Ludger Heid. Frankfurt, New York: 1997.  For a summary account of Regina Jonas, see the aricle by Elisa Klapchek in the Jewish Women’s Archive: jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/jonas-regina

4.            See Annual Report of the Hochschule for 1932 cited both in ‘The Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums in the Period of Nazi Rule.  Personal Recollections’ by Richard Fuchs (Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, XII, 1967, p.7) and in ‘Frl. Rabbiner Regina Jonas: Eine religiose Feministin vor ihrer Zeit’ by Katharina von Kellenbach (Schlangenbrut Nr.38, 1992, pp.35-39).  Fuchs points out (p.7) that there was a rise in the student population at the Hochschule after the First World War.  In 1921, there were 63 regular students and 45 external students.  In the Summer of 1932, the total number rose to 155, including 27 women.

5.            My thanks to Rabbis Jonathan Magonet and John Rayner z”l for drawing my attention to the articles by Fuchs and Dorfler respectively.

6.            Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity. A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. OUP, 1988.  He writes (p.379):  ‘When [women’s ordination] was raised again (note: the first time was in 1922 with the case of Martha Neumark) among Sisterhood leaders in 1958, even they were initially divided.  By then, however, one woman, Regina Jonas, had received private ordination upon completing her studies at the Liberal seminary in Berlin, and for a brief time had served as a rabbi before perishing in the Holocaust

7.            Ruth Schwertfeger, Women of Theresienstadt.  Voices from a Concentration Camp, Berg, 1989

8.            Leo Baeck’s biographer, Albert Friedlander does not recall any reference made by Leo Baeck to Regina Jonas (Private conversation, 20.6.94) and his biography, Leo Baeck, Teacher of Theresienstadt, Holt, Rinehart, Winston, New York, 1968 certainly makes no reference to her.  As for Viktor Frankl, he discussed his experience of the camps in his books, From Death Camp to Existentialism, later revised and included in a  larger work, Man’s Search for Meaning.  An Introduction to Legotherapy, Hodder and Stroughton, London, 1962.  However, although he worked with Regina Jonas in Theresienstadt, this text, at least, does not mention her.

9.            Rabbi Curtis Cassell.  Private conversation 14.6.94

10.          The Bundesarchives reference no. for the letters addressed to Regina Jonas is 75D JO 1

11.          See ‘Tribute to Rabbi Regina Jonas of Berlin’ by Hans Hirschberg (Leo Baeck College News 1993, p.46.

12.          Fuchs, 1967, p.23

13.          Inge Kallman, letter to Jonathan Magonet 4.1.94.

14.          ibid

15.          Inge Kallman, letter to Elizabeth Sarah, 27.4.94

16.          Inge Kallman, letter to Jonathan Magonet, 4.1.94

17.          Hirschberg, pp.46-7

18.          ibid. p.46

19.          Some of the controversy found public expression in the journal Israelitisches Familienblatt, quotations from which are included in Katharina von Kellenbach’s article (see note 2).

20.          Hirschberg, pp. 46-7

21.          ibid. p.47

22.          Inge Kallman, letter to Jonathan Magonet, 4.1.94

23.          Meyer, 1988, p.379

24.          von Kellenbach (Schlangenbrut 1992) quotes opponents of Regina Jonas.

25.          von Kellenbach, Schlangenbrut 1992, p.38.  Despite Regina Jonas’ express wish to be addressed as ‘Fraulein Rabbiner’ there is evidence that she continued to be addressed as ‘Frau Rabbiner’.  See, for example, a letter from the central office of the Judische Gemeinde (Jewish Community) of Berlin, of 11.9.40, concerning her work at the old people’s home (75 D JO1).

26.          Hirschberg, pp.47

27.          von Kellenbach, Schlangenbrut 1992, p.38

28.          ibid., pp.38-39.

29.          ibid., p.39

30.          ibid.

31.          ibid.

32.          ibid, p.38; footnote 22, p.39

33.          Hirschberg, p.47

34.          von Kellenbach, Schlangenbrut 1992, p.39

35.          von Kellenbach, “God Does Not Oppress Any Human Being”.   The Life and Thought of Rabbi Regina Jonas’.  Leo Baeck Year Book, No.39, 1994.

36.          There is no doubt that the last transports to Auschwitz took place in October.  Perhaps Regina Jonas was killed in December

 

 

«‹ 41 42 43 44