In Yaakov’s confrontation with Esav, Yaakov was prepared in three ways. As a well-known “Rashi� points out: “L’doron, litfillah, ool’milchamah—with gifts, with prayer, and with preparedness for war.� As it turns out, even though Esav came up against Yaakov with an army of four hundred soldiers, Esav seemed to be placated by the gifts (appeasement), and behaved somewhat amicably as Yaakov had hoped for in his prayer. Yet, Yaakov wished to separate himself and his people from Esav and his people as expeditiously as possible, knowing Esav’s true character and designs and that this truce, this reconciliation was only temporary. Esav still down deep, emotionally and culturally, wanted to conquer Jacob and annihilate b’nai Yisrael.
One knows instinctively as a Jew where the world’s sympathies lie in the War on Terrorism. At the capture of Saddam Hussein, a Cardinal at the Vatican could only express sadness that this butcher of tens of thousands was “humiliated� by being shown to the world dirty, disheveled, and having his head inspected for lice and his mouth checked for hidden cyanide pills. The International Red Cross, who cooperates with terrorists by letting them use their ambulances to smuggle arms and explosives and combatants through checkpoints, is worried about the quality of Saddam Hussein’s treatment. The European Union, and the U.N., those paragons of virtue, who would have left him in power because of debts and contracts they all had with Iraq, are only worried that he not be executed. Like the liberals, those “useful idiots� that all totalitarian rulers love to negotiate with, there is a jaded world out there that cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys anymore. And, of course, the Palestinians, the inventors of modern terrorism against innocent civilians, are “freedom fighters.� Let’s give the Arabs the Jews and the Jewish State. That is the way to solve the emergent Islamic militancy and bid to conquer the West. But, remember, as throughout all of history, the Jews are like the canaries in the coal mine. Islamic ambition and fantasy are the biggest threat of the twenty-first century. The U.S. administration seems to be among the few who understand that this is a new kind of war that needs new rules of engagement to combat it. In the small theater of the Arabs’ war against Israel, we all have had a foretaste of how the Islamic world is fighting and how it will continue to wage its jihad against the West and the developed nations.
Doron—appeasement—does not work for long. Tefillah—prayer—helps us to strengthen our resolve not to sacrifice our own values and culture in order to give in to the mindless “multiculturalism� that seeks to understand the mind of primitive fanatics and romanticize them and denigrate its own very values of tolerance, justice, democracy, and peace. There are times when there is no choice left but milchamah—battle—against forces that religiously and ideologically wish to do us in. To wait until they have the technological means to do so is to lose the war and be taken over by those who negate the whole notion of “multiculturalism� and “live and let live.�
Parshat Vayishlach marks the end of a year of these “Kol Romm�s. In them I have disclosed quite a bit about myself, and those people close to me. I have looked back upon the two years since I retired early from the Conservative rabbinate, and established homes and lives in Riverdale and Haifa. Over the course of this past year two new grandchildren have come into our lives, bringing the total of grandchildren to four, three to Rav Zvi and Shira, and one to Gadi and Jana. Our parents have gone through episodes and changes.
I worry about the years ahead and their impact upon my generations of the twenty-first century. I know that they will continue to be active, proud Jews, no matter how the tides turn. Yisrael is a “struggler� and ultimately will prevail. Yisrael is also a “prince,� no matter how denigrated. Torah is a heritage and a privilege, no matter how ignored. I will continue to do good to the best of my ability and try to be an influence for good in my small way.
And since December 18 is our thirty-second wedding anniversary, I thank Diane who has enabled much of our life’s journey together, and wish us years of walking hand in hand throughout the many challenges of at least as many years ahead.
The Shabbat of Vayeitzei was spent at Zvi’s on the Lower East Side. It coincided with the first snowstorm of the season that piled snow in great accumulation with driving blizzard winds all Shabbat from Friday night throughout the day on Saturday. Yet, the Bialystoker Shul was packed with at least a hundred people at every service. You have to understand that “every service” in the Bialystoker over Shabbat means Kabbalat Shabbat, two complete Shacharit-Musaf services, Minchah and two complete Motzaei-Shabbat Maariv services, upstairs and downstairs. In addition, Zvi’s pre-Minchah shiur on Hilchot Shabbat (which he and they pronounce Hilchos Shabbes) not only took place while a Nor’easter snowstorm was raging outside, but was excellent in content and in Zvi’s presentation, and had a large audience besides. I was, frankly, amazed.
Already by the Torah reading at the second Shacharit service, the one I attended, I was feeling elevated spiritually at the experience of davenning with Zvi as the rabbi and among a congregation of religious Jews, a kind of warmth of community, of (how else can I put it?) “Yiddishkeit” that negated the cold, roaring world outside the shul. Like Yaakov I awoke as from a sleep and marveled “Ma nora hamakom hazeh! Ein zeh ki im bait Elokim v’zeh shaar hashamayim—How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God and this is the gate of Heaven.”
In my thirty years of the Conservative rabbinate, I never felt like this. Aside from the fact that I never had attendance in these kinds of numbers without a Bar or Bat Mitzvah even without a blizzard, I find that there is a big difference spending Shabbat in shul with a congregation of the genuinely Sabbath observant. This was never my lot in the Conservative Movement.
It made me remember one of the many vignettes of shul life from the last congregation I thought I had served in my erstwhile rabbinical career. It is one of thousands of those “you can’t make this stuff up” type stories that emanated from that place.
The story centers upon a religious-philosophical question. Should officers and board members, the “lay leadership” of the synagogue, come to shul on Shabbes, ever, or at least sometimes in the course of the year outside of being invited as guests to a “Bar Mitzvah?” (Of course, the broader question is: Should a shul member, and especially a lay leader, ever take a stab at practicing the Jewish religion? But, for the moment let’s stick to the narrower question: Should officers and board members show up on Shabbat in shul at least a half a dozen out of fifty-two Shabbatot a year?) Obviously, these officers and board members did not!
The ritual committee brought a motion to the board. Based upon the required attendance of the Hebrew School students at Shabbat morning Junior Congregation (minimally six times throughout the entire school year) the ritual committee suggested that every board member and officer take it upon himself or herself to attend shul on Shabbat at least six times a year. It would seem minimal and certainly not an onerous obligation for those purporting to be synagogue leaders.
But what a firestorm of angry reaction this proposal created! How dare you make us come to services! We serve the synagogue and the Jewish people by sorting schmates for the rummage sale, or by throwing imbecilic gasoline on the acrimonious fires of pointless sisterhood and board meetings. When we say we want women to count in the minyans and get aliyahs to the Torah we didn’t mean that any of us should actually be at minyans or be at Torah readings except at Bar and Bat Mitzvah services, and then under duress that the service is too long and the kid’s part is just a small one somewhere in the middle. How dare you propose that we come to shul just to come to shul. And the rabbi is not charismatic enough to draw us week after week, year after year, anyway.
Suffice it to say the proposal was overwhelmingly rejected. I think of that board meeting as the night my synagogue’s board voted down the practice of the Jewish religion. God definitely was not in that place.
On the other hand, on Shabbat Vayeitzei, in the midst of a blizzard, I definitely felt the presence of God in the Bialystoker Shul.
We have an announcement! On Thanksgiving day, our new granddaughter was born to Rav Zvi and to Shira. Chavi not only got her wish for a baby sister: the baby looks just like her, nearly everyone agrees. Aharon is thrilled with "his" baby, too, and is still assessing exactly what the new arrival may mean in terms of time alone with Imma.
As a grandfather, back from Israel in time for the new arrival, I immediately fell in love with this newest descendent. It was so appropriate for Zvi to name her in shul on Shabbat Toldot. Her name is Miriam Leba, after Diane's mother, who has been "waiting" for a name for fifteen years. A past generation (and a very nice woman of whom I have fond memories) has found a "presence" in the present and established a link to the future.
In fact, this double arrow, to the past and to the future, is probably what the Hebrew word "toldot" has been implying for millenia. Toldot is usually translated as "generations" or "progeny" in many English versions of the Bible. It, indeed, is a word that is built upon the Hebrew root yod-lamed-dalet which has to do with being born. But in medieval Hebrew, "toldot" is often used in the sense of "history." "Toldot," too, can be used for "results," or "outcomes." It all makes sense if we think of the past as being the parent of the future, giving birth to "outcomes" generation after generation.
May this new little "outcome" do honor to the name of my mother-in-law. As I sat in shul on the Shabbat of her naming, at a Torah reading beginning "V'eleh toldot Yitzchak...," I was very happily contemplating my own.
J.Leonard 9:28 AM
Monday, November 24, 2003
CHAYEI SARAH
When Rivkah saw Yitzchak for the first time, the Torah tells us: “Vatikach hatza-if vatitkas—She took (her) veil and covered herself.” To this day, Jewish brides are veiled at their wedding ceremonies. Before the wedding ceremony itself, there is a ceremony whereby the groom gets to see his bride before the wedding and the opportunity to personally cover her face with the veil. Many people assume that this custom of the “badeken” is derived from the experience of Yaakov, who thought that he was marrying Rachel and instead married the heavily veiled Leah. While, admittedly, it is not a bad idea to ascertain who it is that you are marrying before proceeding to the wedding canopy, the badeken is based upon our pasuk about Rivkah veiling herself before first meeting Yitzchak. In fact, part of the berachah pronounced over the newly veiled bride: “Achotainu at hayee l’alfay rivivah—Our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of myriads” is based upon the berachah given to Rivkah by her family upon her setting off after Avraham’s servant to be a wife for Yitzchak.
So why did Rivkah cover her face upon seeing Yitzchak?
Sforno comments that Rivkah was afraid to look upon Yitzchak. Similarly, we find regarding Moshe at the Burning Bush: “Vayaster Moshe panav—Moshe hid his face.” Yitzchak’s piety and sanctity of being (as the “olah temimah” of the Akedah) was such that his appearance inspired awe and reverence in others. Rivkah’s reaction to him was not unlike Moshe’s to God’s appearance to him in the Burning Bush.
My question to Rivkah would be: “Did your pre-marital awe last throughout the marriage?”
Many years ago, my wife told me what they had discussed at a Long Island “Wives of Rabbis” meeting. She said that the women almost unanimously agreed that a common problem with their rabbinical husbands was that they were given to believing that they were so revered and deferred to with awe in their public lives, that it was hard to convince them that around the house part of their jobs was to take out the garbage. I guess that on the domestic front none of these wives believed in post-marital awe.
Some thirty-three years ago when Diane and I first started dating and before we were formally engaged, I thought that she was a little in awe of me and afraid of “losing me.” After almost thirty-two years of marriage, after becoming the parents of grown and married children and grandparents to three with a fourth very soon on the way, I know that Diane loves me and supports me emotionally and materially in all my life’s decisions. But is she in awe of me? If that feeling ever existed, it was certainly gone by our first full day of marital bliss.
On the other hand, I probably was never “all that” in the piety and awe-inspiring departments.
One cannot escape noticing all the domestic tugs and pulls in Parashat Vayeira: Sarah and Hagar, Yishmael and Yitzchak, Avraham Avinu trying to referee all sides, his ordeal at the Akedah, and then finally the bits of news about “the relatives” back in Syria. Family matters really matter.
Diane and I are blessed with two wonderful daughters-in-law in Shira and in Jana. Our adult sons get along with each other and visit with each other and their growing families. For Diane and me, the months we spend in Israel, as wonderful as they are, are marred by the longing to play with our grandchildren and to be a tangible part of their lives.
We are back now in the Riverdale apartment because Shira’s due date is the first week in December. This baby will be our fourth grandchild, God willing, and the third child for Zvi and Shira. But I was really also champing at the bit to see my grandchildren again. I miss them profoundly when I am in Israel, and the constant phone calls to the States are no substitute for the real thing.
And what changes the three months have made! Beni (Gadi and Jana’s son) has passed the half-year mark and is alert, responsive, happy, and a handsome little kid (and I say this admitting that he mostly looks like Jana’s side of the family, Gadi’s protestations to the contrary). He is a fun baby to play with because he really “plays” back and smiles and laughs to my clowning around with him.
We spent Shabbat Vayeira at Rav Zvi and Shira’s magnificent apartment on the gentrified Lower East Side and, of course, were honored guests at Zvi’s shul, where he is quite a sensational rabbi. But not taking away from the nachas shept over both our sons, each phenomenal in his own chosen way, I longed to see Chavi and Aharon that weekend. Chavi, at five, is as gorgeous as ever, and is reading and writing in English and in Hebrew. Aharon, who hardly spoke three months ago, is now speaking in sentences with a vocabulary that astounds me in its variety and complexity, all articulated in a cute little voice. So what was I worried about? Aharon will tell you that he “likes trains.” So do I. He doesn’t yet know what I have been saving for him for over a year until he was ready—a 70 piece wooden train set. And wait until he gets to see the apartment in Haifa. The back bedroom, the room yet to be “finished,” will house my electric train collection (finally) from the Lionels and American Flyers of my own childhood to the many sophisticated HOs (not toys) I have acquired over the years.
In addition to being a Jewish role model as a grandfather, I hope also to introduce to my grandchildren a world of eclectic interests, including a love of nature and natural history, a love of art and design, and a willingness to explore, to try out ideas, and to sustain over the years all kinds of intellectual pursuits and curiosities. If they become the kind of people who can synthesize diverse fields with original insights I feel that my life as a grandfather will not have been in vain, especially if it helps them as my personal descendents to become creative, vibrant links in the Jewish masoret.
May this microcosm of Avraham’s descendents—my direct descendents—grow up following good ways and making good lifetime contributions for the benefit of all humanity. “V’hitbar’chu b’zaracha kawl goyay ha-aretz—And all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your offspring.”
From God’s mouth to our ears in today’s cockamamie world.
I am writing this posting after Shabbat Lech Lecha as a retrospective.
Upon arriving in America from Israel, our first agenda item was to see our parents who had been going through health issues and lifestyle changes while we were in Israel. Although we both were on the phone every day with Philadelphia and Owings Mills, our first priority was to see Diane’s father in his new independent living apartment and my parents at home after my father’s month-long hospital ordeal.
Gadi picked us up in his car at JFK airport. We spent one night in the Riverdale apartment. Felix, the concierge, had taken good care of my plants and aquarium, as requested, but I spent the night “fixing up” the final touches such as pruning, cleaning up dead leaves, and doing a partial water change in the aquarium. Nobody takes care of my living things the way I do, and even with the best of Felix’s intentions, the three months of my absence had taken their toll. My plants and fish really need me. Felix had also been turning over regularly the ’87 red Nissan Pulsar NX, my New York car. It started up the next morning perfectly. Loaded up, it was ready for its journey of several hundred miles, crossing over 135,000 very nostalgic miles on the odometer.
Our plan was to see Diane’s father first. We stayed with him overnight. I left Diane with him, to help him go through boxes upon boxes of his accumulated documents and important papers, while I traveled north to Philadelphia to see my folks and spend Shabbat with them and in my father’s shul. I would go back to the Baltimore suburbs the beginning of the next week and bring Diane back to Philadelphia to my parents. Gadi had a business show in Philadelphia then and he and his business partner Roger would also stay over two nights at my parents’ home.
My father-in-law was acclimating well and loving his new apartment and circle of friends, even though he had had a medical procedure just prior to our arrival. My father seemed well and back to himself. He had been out and back to all his community work already. He was driving his car even!
They both seemed to speak of their respective communities in terms of “family.” The residents of the mostly Jewish independent living apartment facility were like a “family” into which my outgoing father-in-law seemed to be accepted right away. My father, on Shabbat morning, from his President’s podium, thanked the congregational “family” for all their concerns, visits, and actual help and assistance to my mother and himself during the past month. This feeling of family was a result of fifty-three years of living in a close-knit neighborhood, and, of course, of my parents’ community concerns and doing for others themselves over the years. The synagogue, in many ways, is like a family, with its love and nurturing, its feuds, its rivalries, and its senseless hatreds. There are shared histories and traditions that individuals plug into with greater or lesser intensity over the years and according to need at different stages of their lives. I feel it, too, on those occasions when I “come home” to Overbrook Park.
I was thinking about “family” while sitting in shul among these remaining, elderly survivors from among the neighborhood parents of my friends, the young post World War II adults of my childhood in what was then a newly built neighborhood. While I think of them as active authority figures and myself still a child in my memory, the reality before my eyes was of “elderly people,” some with canes, most of them shrunken, some bent, but still a living community. The current rabbi, a man in his forties, never knew the human beings behind many of the names on the pew plaques in the chapel and in the sanctuary, on the stained glass windows, on the embroidered parochot, amud covers, and Torah mantles, on the silver, or the names for the library, the classrooms, the sanctuary. I did. I knew them all. Shared history.
As the Torah reading of Lech Lecha began, this insight about our “family” of Jews was driven home to me as an almost oracular reinforcement of what I already knew in my heart. God commands Avram to leave his paternal home and homeland and go to what would become Eretz Yisrael: “V’e’esecha l’goy gadol va-avarechecha va-agadlah shemecha veh’yeh berachah—And I will make of you a great nation; and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.” We began as a single family.
We Jews are truly like one big family, with a shared history and traditions, and memories in common over the millennia in many different places, shared memories that are learned anew in each generation, even by relatively recent “inclusions” into the family. We relate to one another as relatives no matter where we may travel and both support and reinforce one another even as we bicker and fight among ourselves within the family. The worst crime is to betray the family and give ammunition to our detractors who are many and have been so throughout our history.
“Jewish family” is learned first through our own families, then expands to our local communities of Jews, and grows ever wider, in growing concentric circles of Jewish experience, throughout the broadening journey of our lives, lech lecha. I know from personal and historical experience that “avarecha mevarechecha umekallel’cha a-or v’nivrichu b’cha kowl mishp’chot ha-adamah—God will bless those who bless us and curse those who try to do us harm so that the entire world may be blessed through us.”
As a small minority of mankind, we have contributed far out of proportion to our numbers to the civilization and progress of the world throughout history. Those nations who have hated us and tried to harm us and were successful in eliminating us from their midst, by doing so marked the beginning of their own decline and disappearance from the center of the world scene.
“Veh’yeh berachah”—and what kind of reciprocal berachah can this family of Abraham’s be for God? The blessing of God is that He should receive some nachas from His creations.
Upon this return from Haifa to America we went first to parents and reconnected with our past, which at this time and stage in our lives has a real claim upon us. The next step is to reconnect with our future, our children and our grandchildren, all of whom we miss terribly while we spend our time in Israel. But this Jewish family reunion and the ensuing berachah of shept nachas will take place and be posted after the Sabbath of Vayeira.
The parashah of Noach begins with “Eleh toldot Noach...” and ends with Avram’s (Avraham’s) immediate parental and generational geneology. If we compare the language used to describe Noach’s character and righteousness with the wording of God’s command to Avram, immediately following in the beginning of Lech Lecha, we see why it was natural for the classical midrash to contrast the relative merits of Noach with the much greater virtues of Avraham Avinu. What struck me most, however, was an observation by a relatively modern Martin Buber: “Noah stays put in nature; a man of the soil is rescued from the deluge. Abraham is the first to make his way into history as a proclaimer of God’s dominion.” That is, Noach is like those religious people who are content to save themselves and their families, and do not care about the rest of the world. Avraham was not singled out for survival (like Noach), but for a mission. Avraham acted upon and inspired the world around him.
I am thinking about my father, zu lange yahr, whose Jewish name is Avraham in Hebrew, but was pronounced by his parents as Avrum in Yiddish. I have not mentioned it before in these writings, but he had been in the hospital from just before Rosh Hashanah until the end of Simchat Torah. He had picked up an infection starting in his foot, probably from walking barefoot around the pool, the whirlpool, and the showers at the local YM-YWHA, that turned into quite a severe case of cellulitis requiring hospitalization and intravenous delivery of super antibiotics.
It is hard being in Israel, so far away, at these times. Needless to say, I called on the telephone every day except for Shabbat and Yom Tov and sometimes more than once a day. I was in touch with the admitting doctor at the hospital. I was on the phone daily with my mother. The sense of guilt that they were being looked after by a community of neighbors, friends, and people from their shul (for rides for my mother to the hospital, for taking my mother grocery shopping, for the many bikur cholim visits by friends and neighbors) and not by me, the first born son, was palpable in me over this past month or so, grateful though I am that they are both so respected and cared about in their community.
I worried that the hospital would take a cavalier attitude towards an eighty-seven year old man with a serious infection that kept him in bed and immobile for the first week and a half of his hospital stay. With me there, in Philadelphia, I could be more of a “nudge” to the nurses and an advocate for his getting well and coming home.
What they didn’t see in this old man, lying in bed and—I imagine—looking fully geriatric and helpless, was the oldest currently sitting synagogue president in all of United Synagogue. His is still an active mind, heartbroken at the thought of these first High Holidays in his life that he could not be in shul. He wrote all of his president’s speeches and instructions from his hospital bed and gave them to the rabbi who made “working” hospital visits to his room before the holidays.
During his hospital stay he was awarded a plaque from the Overbrook Park Civic Association in honor of years of work as a volunteer ambulance dispatcher and active member of the Neighborhood Watch in a surprise ceremony at a dinner planned well before his hospitalization. In addition to the personal plaques awarded to my father and to my mother (who attended the ceremony on his behalf) the service award will become an annual event in their names. Their names are the title of the award as engraved on a large wall plaque hanging at the Civic Association’s headquarters. Each year, from now on, new recipients of the “Albert and Laura Romm” award will have their names added to the large plaque.
I am happy that he and my mother are so revered by their community. He is Avraham Dov married to Chayah Sarah. The community is returning to them in their old age—this Avraham and Sarah, my parents—the concern and outreach that they gave the community over fifty-three years.
Diane and I have tickets to return to America for November 4, purchased before my father entered the hospital. I look forward to coming first to Philadelphia and staying with them and helping out as my father is on the mend at home.
One is always too close to one’s father to see him as the world sees him. But this latest illness has proven to me once again from afar that my Dad is no Noach stuck in nature merely surviving, but truly is “Avrum,” a center of influence and effect upon the world around him, and not just upon us, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
