Waiting for a Miracle

Precisely 70 years ago, on September 29 and 30, 1941, the single most horrific and infamous mass killing of the Holocaust occurred at Babi Yar. It is an altogether sobering thought that during these hours that we gather in our holiday finest, seventy years ago, nearly 34,000 of our people were gathered together in a ravine outside of Kiev, ordered to strip down, made to lie on top of each other and were then shot by the Nazis and their collaborators. Having marched into the Soviet Union just a few months earlier, the Nazi Einsatzgruppen had turned their focus and function to the Jews, and on those two days an entire Jewish community was efficiently and systematically machine-gunned in a two-day orgy of execution. September 29 and 30, 1941. We remember them every day – especially today, 70 years to the day – and pray that their souls be forever bound up in God’s eternal embrace.

Babi Yar you already may have known about. But let me now tell you about what happened exactly twenty years later, in September of 1961. Because it was fifty years ago this month, literally from the very graves of Babi Yar, that one of the greatest stories in our people’s history arose.

As recounted by Gal Beckerman in his extraordinary book on the struggle for Soviet Jewry, it was in September of 1961 that the popular and influential newspaper Literatrunaya Gazeta published a poem called “Babi Yar,” written by a young writer Yvegny Yevtushenko.

Yevtushenko had visited Babi Yar only to discover that this ravine, the site of two of the darkest days in human history, had been ingloriously turned into a garbage dump. The first words of Yevtushenko’s poem lament, “No monument stands over Babi Yar.” Invoking the names of Alfred Dreyfus and Anne Frank, he condemned the anti-Semitism of his compatriots and the whitewashing of Soviet Jewry and he identified with Jewish suffering, concluding: “And I myself am one massive, soundless scream above the thousand thousand buried here. I am each old man here shot dead. I am every child here shot dead. Nothing in me shall ever forget!”

As moving as the poem was, its reverberations were both wider and more unexpected than anyone thought possible. The newspaper containing it immediately sold out. Thousands of students gathered to hear the poem read even as the government tried to squelch it. By April of 1962, Yevtushenko was on the cover of Time magazine. Shostakovich, the famed Soviet composer, set the poem to music, and by December 1962, the Moscow Philharmonic first performed the piece.

Beckerman himself would caution us from identifying any single moment as the tipping point in history, but by one telling, it was from the publication of that poem, fifty years ago this month, that one of the greatest reclamations of Jewish identity in history emerged. After decades of Communism, the horrors of the World War II, and years of Stalin, Jewish identity in what was then the Soviet Union had been thoroughly repressed under totalitarian rule. There was no legal way to teach Hebrew, no circumcision, no rituals of any kind. Jewish life had been physically and spiritually gutted.

The miraculous struggle of Soviet Jewry was not merely the story of Natan Sharansky, the refuseniks, the protests and legislation that led to the release of millions of prisoners of conscience. The miracle of Soviet Jewry was that against all odds, a community with the most tenuous connection to its roots – with every reason not to be Jewish, to forget their identity – remembered that they were Jews. In remembering, they heroically insisted on wresting their Jewishness back from the clutches of oblivion. The secret reading groups, the Hebrew classes, the production and distribution of samizdat, underground Jewish literature, the thousands of American Jews (perhaps some in this room) who participated in and supported daring and dangerous efforts to provide Soviet Jewry with a lifeline to its Jewish identity – the story of Soviet Jewry was a story of “Let my people go!” But it was also a story of “Let my people know!” Were it not for this retrieval of Jewish identity against all odds, then I don’t think it would be an understatement to say that the second, more public, story of release would have never happened.

I was raised on these stories, although because I was young, for my first few protest marches, I thought I was marching for Soviet “Jewelry,” not “Jewry.” But it was with these stories in mind that I traveled on a UJA mission to the FSU this past summer with John Ruskay, Natan Sharansky and New York rabbinic colleagues. Twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, years after the emigration of over one million Jews to Israel and America, what would Soviet Jewry look like? At long last able to practice freely what couldn’t be practiced for decades, able to live openly as Jews – this was something I had to see with my own eyes.

Much to my surprise, I discovered that Russian Jewry looks an awful lot like the American Jewry I see every day. We visited synagogues and campus Hillels, we saw Holocaust Museums and JCC’s, we saw Jewish summer camps – we saw the sacred mission of JAFI, JDC and UJA-Federation being actualized every day. We met with the young people in St. Petersburg who produced a YouTube Purim song to the Black-Eyed Peas, not unlike last year’s Hanukkah hit song set to the melody of Tai Cruz’s “Dynamite.” We saw gorgeous Jewish institutions that lacked for nothing on the same day we visited food pantries cutting back on their Jewish clientele for lack of sufficient funds. We met Reform rabbis complaining about Chabad rabbis and Chabad rabbis complaining about Reform rabbis, and we met upscale Moscow families boxing each other out to get into the JCC Early Childhood program. In other words, I felt right at home.

But more than the institutional similarities, what I was surprised to discover was that Russian Jewry and American Jewry have one essential feature in common. They both lack memory. I am hard pressed to think of two communities that experienced the twentieth century in more dissimilar ways. And yet the cultural consequence of living under the radical democracy and freedoms of America and the extreme totalitarianism of Soviet Russia are ironically the same. In both contexts memory has been wiped clean and cultural amnesia has set in. The great American writer Henry Miller once said about travel: “One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.” The “aha” moment of my Russian experience was the discovery that they, like us, are constructing Jewish identity on a tabula rasa. Like the story this past summer about the famous baseball player Ralph Branca who woke up one day to discover that he had been Jewish all along, contemporary Jewry – Russian, American and otherwise – are stumbling onto their Jewish identities, oblivious to the past investments and sacrifices of those who came before.

I am reminded of the sharp joke told of the rabbi leaving synagogue after Kol Nidre services. On his way home he was astonished to see Goldstein, one of his congregants, sitting in a non-kosher restaurant eating a sumptuous meal. The rabbi was furious, and waited for Goldstein to finish eating and pay for the meal. As Goldstein exited the restaurant the rabbi accosted him: “Goldstein, What are you doing, I just saw you eating treif, and paying for it on Yom Kippur. Explain yourself!” Goldstein replied, “Oy, I am sorry, Rabbi, but I just forgot.” “What do you mean? Did you forget that today was Yom Kippur?” “No.” “Did you forget that it is forbidden to eat and drink on Yom Kippur?” “No.” “Did you forget that it is forbidden to eat non-kosher food?” “Goldstein, tell me, what is it that you forgot?” “Rabbi, for a moment, I forgot I was a Jew.” We have become, to adopt the language of A.B. Yehoshua, Yehudim asher shakhahu she-hem yehudim, “Jews who have forgotten that they are Jews.”

Jonathan Safran Foer once wrote that Jews have not five, but six senses – the sixth being memory. Memory is the fiber that binds one generation to another, as a community. It is our ability to recall our past – historical and mythical – that binds us as a people. So too as individuals. Not unlike the experience of Proust, who once explained that his biting into a buttery Madeleine cookie triggered a powerful series of associations from his youth, the sounds, tastes and sensations of Jewish practice trigger the yiddishkeit submerged within each of us and in many cases link us to the arc of our identity that preceded our own individual existence. These associations are planted within us all, the substrata of our identities for which we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to those who came before us.

But here is the rub. While we are who we are owing to the seeds planted by prior generations, there is absolutely nothing cumulative about the construction of Jewish identity. It is a bit like my marriage – it doesn’t matter that I changed that light bulb last week – the only question that matters is when am I going to put that piece of luggage back in the storage locker! Yes, the practices of your grandparents and parents are important to you, as they should be, but that doesn’t mean they resonate the same way with your children and grandchildren. I don’t say this lightly, proudly or with any joy; it is deeply painful to concede that there is no inherited disposition to associate with synagogue, give to UJA, marry Jewish or engage in other Jewish activities. But the only thing worse would be to assume that there is. Even in Israel, Jewish identity has been superseded by nationalism; for many secular Israelis the tallit has been replaced by the Israeli flag. Whether it is New York, St. Petersburg or Tel Aviv, the assumed, mimetic modes of transmitting identity from one generation to the next are simply no longer in play. Our situation is like the scene in the classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, where Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells of an entire village in which people are afflicted with forgetfulness, a contagious sort of amnesia. One young man, still unaffected, tries to limit the damage by labeling everything. “This is the table,” This is the window,” “This is a cow, it has to be milked every morning.” All Jews have become, in a sense, Jews who have forgotten that they are Jews.

In 2011, we do not stand on the rubble of Communism, not on the shallow graves of Babi Yar. We are living through what will forever be known as the freest, most prosperous and most blessed moment of Jewish history – period! And yet if we are to arrive fifty years from now in strength, we will need a miracle as momentous and unexpected as that of Soviet Jewry. We need, as it were, a Marshall plan to restore Jewish memory to contemporary Jewry. Don’t forget that it is on the pivot of memory that every single redemptive moment of our people has occurred. It was when God remembered Noah that the flood waters subsided; when Joseph remembered his dreams that he began to reconcile with his brothers; when God remembered Israel that the redemption from Egypt began; and when Mordecai was remembered by Ahasuerus that the Jews of Persia were saved. The reason the rabbis give for why we read the Torah reading we do on Rosh Hashanah is that God remembered Sarah. For Jews the act of rebirth and renewal are tied into the act of remembering. Today, a day of new beginnings, is called Yom Hazikaron – the day of memory. The mahzor refers to God as Zokher kol hanishkahot – A God who “remembers all the forgotten things.” It is incumbent upon us to draw on this divine quality, to commit ourselves to remembering, to remembering even what has been forgotten.

This synagogue – and really all institutions of contemporary Jewish life – needs to recalibrate our mission with the knowledge that unless we are culturally competitive, we are dead in the water. Ours is an age of Sisyphean spirituality, in which the rock of Jewish identity is rolled up the hill in every generation, only to roll back again so the next generation must take up the task once more. Our schools, our services, our programming, our everything needs to recognize that every would-be Jew has the choice of what and how to practice. As the Haggadah makes clear, b’khol dor va-dor, in every generation, one must construct and reconstruct Jewish identity. It is at our own peril that we ignore the fact that Jewish life exists in the marketplace of ideas. But such an awareness does not mean lowering a bar, rather just the opposite – it means we insist, more than ever, that the product we create must burst forth with creativity, authenticity and excellence. The most successful programs on the Jewish scene right now – Birthright, PJ Library, AJWS, Chabad, to name a few – provide authentic, compelling and engaging Jewish content knowing full well that participants will vote with their feet, drawn in by excellence, and turned off by mediocrity. The Jewish institutions that are suffering are those that are operating on a business-as-usual model, working on assumptions of past affiliation that are neither compelling nor accessible to contemporary Jews. I promise that in this synagogue every single day, every single staff person we hire, every single dollar we raise, will serve the urgent and burning need to create dynamic Jewish life for passion-filled Jews. We will leave it all out on the field, we will not submit to the tyranny of mediocrity, we will give every searching Jew the most valuable and countercultural gift we know. We will give you the gift of memory upon which you can build your Jewish future.

That is what we will do, what I commit to today and every day I show up for work. But let me tell you – it is not enough. I need you to ask you to do the same. I need you to see your mission as being a generator of Jewish memory. Not just today, or at the Seder table, but as the single most important act you can do as a Jew. When you take your children to Israel what you are doing is creating memory. When you light Shabbat candles in your home, you are creating memories. When you come into this synagogue and follow the Torah reading with your grandchildren sitting next to you, they will have that forever. When you hear yourself, your child or your grandchild humming the cantor’s melodies after you have left the building, then you have created Jewish memory. It is an investment that may not yield a return until you and I are long gone. But this is your time and if you don’t do it nobody else will. That is what our predecessors did for us and that is what we must do for those who follow.

I began with a story of Russian Jewry and it is with that I would like to leave you. For me, the most moving stop of last summer’s trip was a visit to the Moscow Choral Synagogue. When the tour bus arrived, I immediately went upstairs to the women’s section wanting to see what is perhaps the most famous synagogue seat in Russian Jewish history. You may recall that in the darkest days of Soviet Jewry, Golda Meir went to the Soviet Union to serve as the ambassador for the fledgling State of Israel. A savvy politician, Golda understood timing. Though no announcement had been made, the public intuitively assumed that the Israeli ambassador would attend holiday services. Golda came to the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, and the Jews came, too. They kept coming and coming until the crowd – estimated at between thirty and fifty thousand Jews – overflowed into the streets. The synagogue was filled to capacity; there was no room to stand, no space to yield. The women in the balcony kept approaching Golda to kiss her hand, touch her arm. As Israel’s military attaché was called to the Torah, walking proudly in his yarmulke emblazoned with an Israeli flag, so many tears flowed that the service came to a halt. Eventually, the shofar blew for a final time, and Golda stood up to leave, overwhelmed by the weight of her own emotions. As the crowd saw her move, they erupted in Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish, Golda Shelanu, Nasha Golda, Goldele undser Golda, at which point a voice cried out the opening strains of Hatikvah. The crowd was filled with such emotion that Golda’s security had to usher her out. And at that final moment, Golda finally found her voice. She turned to the crowd and said in Yiddish. A dank eich vos ihr seit geblieben yiden. “Thank you…for having remained Jews.”

I sat there last summer, in Golda’s seat, thinking about that fateful Rosh Hashanah, thinking about the tens of thousands and I suppose millions of Jews who possessed only the most inchoate Jewish memories, the most meager reasons to stay connected. And yet they did, they chose to remain Jews, they remembered when they could have forgotten, and they built on those memories and their story went on to become the greatest Jewish story ever told.

It is Rosh Hashanah 2011 – 70 years since Babi Yar, 50 Years since the struggle for Soviet Jewry began – and I am itching for another miracle. Whether it happens or not – whether 50 years from now our descendents will look back to thank us – that is for me, that is for you, that is for all of us to decide. Today may we commit to making the right decision, to remember, to build – and may we be remembered as builders of a glorious Jewish future.