A letter I wrote to Morris at the request of the organizers of the yeshiva's trip to Poland -- I have no idea what other parents wrote, I can't believe anyone else wrote something like this. I doubt it was helpful, but I really didn't know what else to say.

February 25-29, 2012

Dear Morris,

We were sent email  on February 23^rd [two days ago, just before Shabbat] asking us to write -- in the next week  --  a letter with an appropriate  message to be given to you at the end of your tour of Auschwitz, along with a request that it be returned by this coming Friday, March 2^nd. Our instructions stated:

Things you can write can vary, it can be your feelings about your sons trip to Poland are, the role in the future of the Jewish people you think he is capable of fulfilling. You should write to him about his connection to his family, his tradition, his nation, and his land. Write things that will strengthen him, and let him know how much you love him.

Well and good. It reminds me of the letter your teachers at Hausner had us write you for the Gold Rush trip in 4^th or 5th grade, except, of course,

•      that letter was done in a fictional context  and
•          we were given more advance notice.

Still, here you are, in a very real place of horrific destruction and pain, and, whatever my irritation at the assignment, you deserve whatever comfort I can give you. 

Well, what comfort can I be? You know, I think, how much we love you and how proud we are of you.  I don’t think it’s meaningful to try to quantify it [“7,” we’d say when you or Henry asked a question that we obviously couldn’t answer, the joke being that it was an arbitrary number without any units attached to it and could therefore mean anything and thus meant nothing. I hate to explain the joke, but it would be cryptic to anyone else reading this otherwise.] 

Frankly, words are inadequate, reasoning inadequate, and I think, though you probably don’t agree with me, religion is inadequate to explain, or cope with the magnitude and cruelty of the Holocaust, let alone to justify it.  When I got the email requesting this letter, I immediately thought of the haftarah from the week before, for parashat  Mishpatim, in which Jeremiah says that the destruction of Jerusalem was because the people had broken their covenant with Hashem by recapturing their freed slaves. Of course, elsewhere [Rav Google cites Yoma 9b], it’s blamed on the idolatry, immorality and bloodshed that went on in the temple. The same page famously – even I had heard of it – goes on to ascribe the destruction of the second Temple  to the baseless hatred Jews felt for one another.

Were  prophecy still alive,  we’d no doubt learn from a modern-day navi what caused the Holocaust, or God’s purpose in it; Of course, there is no shortage of secular and religious writers willing to step into the void. Was it because of European Jewry’s abandonment of traditional Judaism? Or is the beginning of the seed of the dawning of the redemption, the birth-pangs of the Messiah? Or punishment for Zionism itself? [The Satmar rebbe said something like this, but I shouldn’t twist his words].

Is anti-Semitism explainable in socio-economic terms, or from religious rivalry and jealousy, or is there some deeper theological meaning? Is it a punishment from God for our sins? Or a tool to keep us from assimilating?

Is God nonexistent? Or limited in power? Or does he choose to remain hidden to allow us to exercise free-will at any cost? Or is all just part of a larger plan we can’t understand, but would appreciate if we could?

Bleah. It’s all insufficient and none of it is compelling. Maybe it’s all true at the same time in all its contradictions. So what?

But, as I said before, here you are, in this real place, where real evil happened, where real people, maybe even some not-too-distant relatives, suffered and died.

[I don’t know if you had any ancestors who died at Auschwitz, but I’m pretty sure some of Bubbe’s family died at Treblinka.  For example, Sheyl Chajka, who was the brother of my maternal grandmother and his family, from Wysokie Mazowieckie, for example. Zeyde’s family had relatives in what is now Belarus who died in the Holocaust, but I’m not sure if any died in concentration camps – some may have died in the liquidation of Dolginowo.  Does that change anything?  Maybe it does, I honestly don’t know.]

Am yisrael chai. Ankoraŭ. We’re here. You’re here. Slogans aside, who knows if there are more tragedies in the future of the Jewish people? Prophecy aside, who knows if there is a future for the Jewish people? We can’t honestly answer those questions, they are in God’s hands (of course, so was European Jewry).  

All we can do is our part – to grow, to learn, to be decent and kind, to contribute as best we can to the Jewish people and to the world. You’ve been doing a very good job of all of this so far, we’re proud of you, we love you [did I say that already?].

Love

Dad [and on behalf of Mom, too]

P.S. I still have enough sympathy with universalism  to feel uncomfortable mourning the destruction of the Temple while cheering the extermination  of the Canaanites – even the Amalekites, not that they wouldn’t have done the same to us. Showing any mercy, as King Saul did, was a severe offence. If so, the issue isn’t the horror and cruelty, but the choice of victim.   

I looked over jordan, and what did I see?

a band of evil angels, coming after me ...

which is, of course, an allusion to line 49 of (psalm 78 (here is an english version), which is probably most familiar from its citation in the Passover haggadah. The phrase is:

מִשְׁלַחַת מַלְאֲכֵי רָעִים

"a band of emissaries/messengers/angels of evil"


In context, this is part of the punishment of Egypt in the Exodus. But the line always was mysterious and evocative to me. Angels of evil! What could they be like? They are clearly bad news, yet still angels, in some sense of the word. Divine beings, with a task of conveying ... well, evil!

Recently, I've had reason to connect this to the phrase (from Torah, in fact,
Shmot/Exodus 23, verse 2 (again, here's an English version):

לֹא תִהְיֶה אַחֲרֵי רַבִּים לְרָעֹת

"don't follow a multitude into evil"


There is some sort of balance in these two phrases; the multitude off to do evil are presumably ordinary people, רבים though they may be -- yet, like the angels, they are in a group and they are performing a task. Maybe it's even a divine task! They present the opportunity to fulfill a mitzvah by not following them, when one has the chance. They are emissaries of evil -- they bring us a message, and give us a choice.


In fact, all of us are, wittingly or unwittingly, emissaries (of what?) to everyone around us. While we go about our own business, we are:

• setting examples -- of rudeness, of kindness, of bravery, of cruelty


• causing others pain or pleasure


• providing opportunities for others treat us with virtue, or treat us in some other way

OK, flash forward a few thousand years. Our younger son's first grade class has a "siddur ceremony" at the end of the school year, at which each student receives his very own siddur (Siddur Meforash, which is an odd choice for our school, I think -- though I could quibble with its design and usefulness for children, I'm pleased that it at least has as much as it does.). Wait, what does this have to do with evil, or angels?

fun quiz, but is it accurate?

I don't believe this result! It puts my parents' influence on my accent above
where I grew up, where I went to college, and where I've lived for the last 20 years...

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Response to Easterbrook's article

Cleaning out my old mailfiles, I found this letter I wrote to TNR online in February 2005... it feels like a waste not to post it somewhere, even though it's 18 months old -- it's not like anything has changed on this issue. Anyway, here it is.

There are a few truths in Gregg Easterbook's online column ( "Word Perfect", 2005-2-21). Certainly people, as a practical matter, should be able to learn languages that will enable them to prosper in the world; and if people wish to preserve their own smaller languages, they will have to pursue bilingualism and do it largely with their own resources.

But it is indecent to suppose that, as smaller languages die out it's
all for the good.

When Easterbrook says "People who romanticize indigenous languages usually, themselves, achieved comfortable positions in life by speaking and writing one of the top ten tongues and by living in a society that has single-language cohesion." -- how does he know? It's probably true that they speak and write one of the top ten tongues -- but wouldn't that be true of most everyone on both sides of this debate? And haven't the people who trivialize the death of languages usually, themselves, achieved their comfortable positions in much the same way? Yes, for them, it is a "small price to pay for improved communication for everybody."

Easterbrook also says that cultures can survive the death of a
language, and that he wouldn't mind if English were to die out, so
long as some other tongue became a global standard. It's a safe thing
to say, I suppose, and I hope his language lessons are going well. But
would he really think that the culture of Shakespeare, and the King
James Bible -- or Lewis Carroll, for that matter -- would "live on" in
a recognizable sense if the few people left capable of reading the
original were scholars whose native tongue was Mandarin?

While walking in the stacks of a university library, a few weeks ago, I happened to pass through an aisle of Yiddish books; I know enough to distinguish them from the Hebrew books, and I could even translate one title that caught my eye, written in large, jagged letters: "Hear my cry!" It was probably a Holocaust book, judging from the artwork. I pulled it off the shelf -- it seemed that no one had done so in many
years. But the pages were largely a mystery to me beyond a pronoun and cognate here and there. It's a cry my grandparents could hear, but I can't.

Well, this is an interesting take on the some of the same issues

I go back and forth on DovBear, some of his writing irritates me no end, but
this thoughtful post connects to what I've been trying to clarify for myself about Conservative Judaism.

Rough Draft

It seems to me there are two parameters -- one has to do with
the nature of halacha, and how mutable it is, how mutable our understanding of it can be.

Another is what it means for the level of halacha -- whatever it is, kashrut, shabbat observance, niddah/mikvah -- to be "accepted" in the community. Obviously, at some level, each individual either decides to follow some particular point, ignore it, or follow it to some personal degree. But there are clearly degrees of cimmunal observance, ranging from one in which everyone more or less follows it, to one in which some people do and some people [privately] don't, but the general assumption is that everyone more or less does, to ones that the "rabbis" are expected to follow, but most everyone else doesn't. Maybe I'm naive, but I assume
it doesn't work this way in Orthodox communities!

And maybe it's worst in Conservative communities -- after all, in Reform communities, the halacha isn't considered binding even on the Rabbis. (I don't mean to be rude -- in fact, I'm trying to more or less paraphrase what Rabbi Bennett said tonight.) Conservative has the mixture of still considerable adherence to halacha, at least in principle, yet considerable avoidance of it by many laypeople, in practice (again, I don't mean to be rude and I am NOT excluding myself!). But we do seem to have the awkward situation in which Conservative Rabbis are generally fairly observant but most of the rest of us are not.

------------
side point: by not having to UPHOLD them, it leaves us free, in some ways, to want the rules to stay strict!

side point: this is why the single biggest issue with the current position of the law committee is the don't ask/don't tell ordination of gay rabbis thing. [there's also the issue of same-sex commitment ceremonies, but even that can be resolved differently at some congregations.]

--------------------------------------

Anyway, that's one issue. The other issue is generally how much freedom we feel to review, revise, or reinterpret biblical commandments in creating halacha. Again, For the Reform, at least as Rabbi Bennett expressed it, this is not an issue at all -- for the orthodox, there is similarly less of an issue. But the Conservative movement is in an awkward middle ground.
-------------------------
there's more to flesh out there, can I work in a link to this?

here are sentences that don't fit anywhere yet

Rabbi Bennett, in effect, questioned the premise of the class in studying these teshuvot. The people in Trembling Before G-d would question it, too.

Rabbi Greenberg, in his book,
only mentions the Conservative movement in passing, describing its position on homosexuality as one of "characteristic ambivalence" ...


Rabbi Bennett mentioned that he didn't think the people in Trembling Before G-d were particularly good models for gay Judaism, calling them "troubled" souls. That may well be, but I couldn't help thinking that, unlike those Orthodox who thought the movie's characters needed psychological treatment for their homosexuality, Bennett might think that they need treatment for their commitment, despite everything, to Orthodoxy.


Another unrelated thing that troubled me about so much of this is the focus on the upshot, the outcome, the end-product (ok that one breaks the meter).
Bennett praised Greenberg's book, not because he cares about the halachic arguments or thinks of them as particularly persuasive -- he's persuaded already! The teshuvot were classified only as more pro-gay or less so -- even Dorff's, which seemed pretty liberal to me, and only hesitated to overturn the status quo without some evidence of movement-wide support, went into the anti-gay pile, simply because it DID maintain the status quo.

And today we actually had the last class

I still think I was in a different seminar than everyone else. When I read the supposedly hidebound tshuva of Rabbi Roth, I found it to be sensitive and compassionate, hardly fire-and-brimstone. For that matter, when I read the supposedly outrageously radical article of Rabbi Artson, I found it not so dramatically different in its view of homosexuality than Roth's paper -- though the two certainly different in their view of halacha, they don't so much differ in how they judge people.

I wish we had looked at a more recent paper -- though not much is there -- maybe Rabbi Handler's?

But this week, we didn't do any of that, anyway, we had a visit from
Rabbi Bennett -- it was moving, too, but in a rather different way -- and, in an interesting sense, it paralleled the first week, in which we saw Trembling Before G-d -- not just in putting aside teshuvot for personal experiences, but in what it said -- partly by omission -- about the Conservative movements approach to halacha, quite apart from the specific issue of homosexuality.

I want to expand in this, but I have to work it out in my mind a bit first. Or maybe I should just dump it all on paper, while the muddiness is at least fresh.

Well, I'm not going to finish this post

this was from two weeks ago:

Today, in our weekly seminar on Homosexuality within Conservative Judaism at
my shul, we discussed the teshuva of Rabbi Joel Roth, which was, I think the principal statement behind the ultimate consensus
statement of policy . It's long (63 pages), we only had about 75 minutes, not everyone had read it beforehand, and -- well, it's a discussion group so we often got sidetracked.