I want to thank Adath Israel for the priviledge to talk to you tonight. Much has happened since our last Rosh Hashanah together, and I am thankful to have us as a community to process the sadness, madness and miracles of the past year.
When I went to university in Sao Paulo, my second major was Hebrew Language and Literature. I was ecstatic when I got a transfer from Chemistry to Hebrew Langugage and Literature. I liked all my first year classes, with the exception of one, which I believe was Jewish History – the trauma was so great I would like to think I forgot what we were studying, but it was Jewish History. The teacher’s first name, and I am not joking, was Maria. Maria Rabinowicz. Her mother, she told us, had given her the most Christian name she could think of so that Maria could blend in and not be singled out as Jewish.
What could she expect would happen, I ask you, as Maria Rabinowicz asked us, with a last name like Rabinowicz? She was made fun – by Jews and non-Jews alike. By Jews because – what kind of name is that for a Jewish girl, Maria? And by non Jews because what name is that, Rabinowicz? With a C and a Z at the end?
She was the most bitter Jew I had met until then, and few I met since have rivaled her bitterness. She taught Jewish history accordingly – disaster after persecution after tragedy. She would pause every so often and say Why did we have to be chosen by God? Chosen for what? To suffer?”
And she was my first encounter with what is called Negative Judaism. Now Negative Judaism happens when we define our Jewish identity, our Jewishness, by the negative things that happen to us, either as individuals or as a collective.
This phenomenon is well known, so well known that it gave rise to the term “lachrymose Jewish history,” teaching Jewish history focusing on persecution and destruction, on the parts that make you cry. When historian Salo Baron first talked about this term, it was 1928.
And we happen to know a few more things today in 2024 than Salo Baron did in 1928, and yet, his point remains: we cannot define our Judaism, our being Jewish, by the negative alone.
We hear the same thing when people explain to you that they were brought up in a “very reformed house” because they didn’t go to temple or anything. Or when they say they are Consevative Jews because they don’t want to be Orthodox, but would never eat traif. Or Orthodox, because it’s a shanda that the women wear a talis and a yarmulke in shul!
In his book, Tikkun HaAm, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, a Reform thinker, posits that Liberal Judaism is in crisis. Mind you, he wrote the book before October 7th – it was ready to go to the printer on that date, and on October 8th he pulled the plug on the publisher and rewrote the beginning to make it actually relevant. He posits that us, liberal Jews, we have to fix ourselves, all across the board, particularly now. In part, because defining oneself by the negative, by supporting your identity and your children’s identity because of a crisis – any crisis – is not something sustainable long term. We have to be defined because we built a great and loving community, because we do service to others, because we study, and because we share certain values. We have to recover the surety that we, as proud Jews, have something to contribute to our more perfect union. We have worthwhile ideas and attitudes that can help bring light to this world.
One of these values is the art of disagreement. The famous “two Jews, three opinions” is used as a put down, like there is not really any right way to do anything so why bother – that is negative Judaism. And this is not the disagreement I am talking about. I want to bring to you tonight the story of Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt.
Just raise your hand if know who Gershom Scholem is.
Gershom Scholem was arguably the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism, in truth, he probably was the greatest scholar of Judaism that the 20th century produced.
The amazing thing about Gershom Scholem is that he came from a very assimilated German Jewish family. His father was such a contrarian Jew that when his mother lit shabbat candles, his the father would light his cigar off the candles. And would say Baruch Atah boreh pri tobacco.
Which shows that he was Jewishly educated enough to be a pain. And of course, you already know that Gershom Scholem was not called Gershom in grade school. He was Gelhard. But as a teenager he falls in love with Zionism, changes his name to Gershom. And the parents, you ask? Well, the parents gave him as a gift of a portrait of Herzl. That’s the good news. The bad news? It was for Christmas, not Hanukkah. But I digress – Gershom Scholem becomes one of the great scholars of Judaism of the 20th century. And with whom he exchanges letters? With none other than Hannah Arendt, whose book Eichmann in Jerusalem became much more famous in Jewish households than Scholem’s Basic Trends of Kabbalah. This is reversed in Rabbinic schools.
So they are friends. Now if you know anything more about Hannah Arendt you know that she was a problematic figure.
I could be slipping into lashon hara, into gossip, but this is all public knowledge. It’s too close to Yom Kippur for me to risk it, you know.
First of all… there’s no nice way of saying this… while married she had an affair with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. And before you think I am a prude, I have an equal problem with whom she chose to have an affair with. If you know what Heidegger thought of the Jews and how big his support of Nazism was, well, then you understand me better. If you didn’t, now you know. And yeah, so I think there’s a compounded problem with that particular choice made by Hannah Arendt.
And yet – Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt had this correspondence for decades.
They were actually friends, there were no text-guessing and no figuring out the tone in an email, I’m talking pen and typewriter type of correspondence between two very articulate individuals. The letters were published by the University of Chicago in 2017.
The New Yorker sends Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. And she goes to the trial and then comes a series of articles which becomes her most famous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book was problematic for several reasons. One of them is how she portrays Eichmann himself, as a boring, mediocre, soul-less bureaucrat. And then there are the harsh things she wrote about those who served in the Yudenrat, the Jewish councilpeople in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, those who had to to obey Nazi orders, to make up the list that people will be deported, to collaborate the deaths of their fellow Jews, and then they themselves go to their deaths.
It is as if she could never imagine having to face choices that were no good. Some of the Yudenrat committed suicide – just to be replaced by other leaders. But Hannah Arendt had no space for nuance on that side of things, she was very judgmental to her fellow Jews.
And those depictions infuriated Gershom Scholem. So he writes the following:
“It is the heartless, the downright malicious tone you employ in dealing with a topic that’s so profoundly concerned, it’s the center of our life. There is something in the Jewish language that is completely indefinable yet fully concrete, what the Jews call ahavat Israel, or love for the Jewish people. With you, my dear Hannah, In you, dear Hannah, … I find little trace of this.” He comes this close to calling her a self-hating Jew.
Do you know what she answers?
“You are quite right – I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. … The greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that? Well, in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.”
What she was saying to Scholem is: number one, it’s not my job to love the Jews. Number two, it’s God’s job to love the Jews. Number three: How can I love a huge faceless entity that cannot possibly love you back?
Well, good philophical answers. And between you and I – I have seen friendships crash and burn for far less.
In the letter she acuses him of misunderstanding her work, her ideas, her passions, her life. It is a very harsh letter. But do you know how does she chose to end the letter? With: “best wishes for your trip to Europe.” And they continue their correspondence and friendship for a few more years.
She was basically saying, I disagree with everything you’ve written, you misunderstand me, you malign me, you rip me to shreds, you insult me, but… have a good trip to Europe. We are still friends after all.
It is not by chance that this happens. Ours is a culture of profound disagreement and of profound respect – within friendship. Take a listen to Israel in Turmoil, a podcast of the Hartmann Institute in Jerusalem that has Doniel Hartmann and Yosi Klein Halevi as sparring friends. You can learn a lot about respectful and friendly disagreement from them.
But that does not spring in a vaccum either. The Talmud is full of disagreements, and one of the greatest stories that the Talmud has is the story of what happens to Rabbi Yochanan when Resh Lakish, his sparring partner, dies. Rabbi Yochanan is inconsolable. The rabbis find another partner for him, Rabbi Elazar Ben Pedat, deeply learned in his own right, to learn with him. Rabbi Elazar Ben Pedat offers prooftexts to validate each opinion that Rabbi Yochanan expresses. To which Rabbi Yochanan says: Do you come even close to the son of Lakish? In our discussions, when I said something he would raise twenty-four difficulties against me in an attempt to disprove my claim, and I would answer him with twenty-four answers, and the halakha would become broadened! And yet you say to me: There is a ruling which is taught that supports your opinion. Don’t I know I’m right?!”
His end is a sad one. He looses his mind with his broken heart over this loss, going around calling: “Oh, son of Lakish, oh son of Lakish where are you?”
Yehuda Amichai, the famous Israeli poet, has a wonderful poem and you can find it on page 10 of the High Holiday booklet. It’s called “From the place where we are right”:
From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring. // The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. // But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow.// And the whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.”
Now, none of this appears in a vaccum. We are a people that can offer many things to the current moment in America and in th world. One of them is the art of disagreeing and still seeing the humanity of the other, still entertaining their thoughts, listening to their reasons – even if to disprove or to be disproven, to embrace the possibility of changing how we see things.
This holiday we do a great Mitzvah. I don’t want to give you a spoiler if you weren’t able to be here, but there is a shofar involved.
And, I would like to remind you that the mitzvah is not to sound the shofar. No, to sound the shofar is a nice thing to do, but it’s not a mitzvah. The mitzvah is to listen to the shofar.
So may this be a year in which we are able to remind ourselves to have passionate and respectful disagreements, searching and growing towards a positive, rich, interesting Judaism.
LeShanah Tovah – no, actually I want to offer a change to the traditional greeting. Given what year we had, may we make this a better year than last year. LeShanah Tovah, no – LeShanah Yoter Tovah – may we go on to have a better year.
LeShanah Yoter Tovah.