Dedicating Ourselves to the Rebuilding of Jewish Life in Ukraine

This week, as my family has lit the Hanukkah candles, I have placed the Soviet Jewry Movement and Boston’s participation in the Dnepropetrovsk Kehillah Project alongside the rededication of the Temple as miracles to be thankful for.  This inclusion is especially appropriate because last week, we celebrated the 25^th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Soviet Jewry.

On December 6, 1987, over 250,000 people, representing 300 Jewish Federations, Community Councils, synagogues, youth groups, and other Jewish and non-Jewish organizations, rallied at the Washington Mall to urge President Reagan to prioritize human rights in his upcoming meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.  The March was the culmination of the struggle to free Soviet Jewry and it succeeded. Like present-day Maccabees, Jews came together against mighty odds and contributed to the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Jewry Movement was about more than rescuing Jews from the USSR. It was about the freedom of Jews to celebrate their culture and religion. Over the following months and years, more than one million Jews emigrated from the USSR to Israel, Europe, and the United States. 

At least as many remained behind in the Former Soviet Union, a place where generations of Jews were forbidden to practice Judaism and where many hid or even forgot their Jewish identity.  With the fall of Communism, however, came the opportunity for renewal, even as Jewish life remains a challenge throughout the region.

Amid the heroic efforts of many individuals and agencies, we in Boston were fortunate to partner with Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, where a thriving Jewish community has risen out of the ashes of the Holocaust and Communism to become one of the most important communities in Europe.

Through JCRC's 20-year partnership in the Dnepropetrovsk Kehillah Project, which thrives thanks to generous funding from Combined Jewish Philanthropies, many Jews in Greater Boston have been privileged to play a small role in the miracle that has happened there: the rebuilding of Jewish life. In the process, our partners have inspired many of us to reengage our own Jewish identities.

Today in Dnepropetrovsk, 400 students attend the Jewish Day School, Dnepropetrovsk Hillel recruits the largest Birthright delegation from the FSU, and the largest Jewish communal center in Europe has just opened.

At the same time, the community continues to honor its obligation to the heroes and heroines of the past. With Boston’s support and expertise, they have opened the assisted living facility Beit Baruch and the new Jewish Medical Center to care for elderly Jews. Ida Tzypkina, one of the first residents of Beit Baruch (and known to many in Boston as “Yiddishe Mama”), now lives her life in dignity and safety, celebrating her Jewish heritage in ways she never thought possible during the war.

Challenges remain, and Jews in Dnepropetrovsk and beyond still struggle with antisemitism, poverty, alienation, and the lingering effects of the Soviet suppression of Jewish life.  But this year we recall our partners in Ukraine, along with the countless FSU Jews in other lands, who have accepted these struggles and have dedicated themselves to rekindling Jewish life. For this blessing, we thank the heroes of the Soviet Jewry Movement who helped bring this miracle to reality.  We will strive to follow their example.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Hanukkah!

Dnepropetrovsk Trip Report – Executive Summary

October 17-23, 2012

JCRC’s very productive visit to Dnepropetrovsk coincided with the opening of the Menorah Center, the largest Jewish communal building in the world.  With this opening, Dnepropetrovsk confirms its status as a central Jewish address in Ukraine and all of Eastern Europe.  Thanks in part to the advocacy of the Boston Jewish Community, the building is wheelchair accessible and offers an unprecedented opportunity for the inclusion of people with disabilities and their families.  Most of the Jewish community’s offices will be located in the Menorah Center, which also houses a Museum of Ukrainian Jewry and the Holocaust (with the support of the JDC), a hotel, a youth hostel, a kosher supermarket and restaurants, a concert hall, and a large scale ballroom facility. 

Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki has made it clear that the relationship with Boston has helped make the Menorah Center become a reality.  To give a specific example, the community acted on advice from Boston partners to make the management of the Menorah Center independent of its other activities, which has both improved the building and freed the community to focus on its religious, education, and charitable priorities.  Unfortunately, they do not expect to receive any dividends from its operations for some years. 

Beth Moskowitz, the chair JCRC’s Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry, received the honor of cutting the ribbon for the new museum, and was the only woman to be named during the ceremony—another example of subtle Boston advocacy!

Invited to cut the ribbon at the entrance to the museum were Yuri Kiperman, one of the pioneers of the Jewish renaissance in Dnepropetrovsk, Beth Moskowitz, leader of the delegation from our sister Jewish Community of Greater Boston (USA) and the chair of their Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry, and Leon Sherman, a philanthropist who has donated a unique collection of artifacts to the museum (http://djc.com.ua/news/view/new/?id=8101).

Much of our visit was devoted to developing our medical partnerships with old and new partners.  The Corky Ribakoff Women’s Clinic will soon celebrate its fifteenth anniversary, and we hope to celebrate that milestone in the spring.  We were proud to learn that the training Dr. Valeria Sidelkovskaya received this past spring in Boston has paid off: her new skills with the Doppler feature of the Ultrasound Machine we donated in 2009 allowed her to make a life-saving diagnosis.  With our friend Yuri Bolbot, we made plans for a post-graduate course in pediatrics in the spring, including an effort, in cooperation with the Medical Academy and the Dnepropetrovsk Municipality, to spur a media campaign encouraging the immunization of infants and children.  Finally, one of our Boston doctors, a psychiatrist, lectured about postpartum depression at Hospital No. 3 to twenty doctors and nurses from throughout the city.

We also had meetings with several of our agency and Dnepropetrovsk partners, including one with Marsha Frankel of JF&CS, who works (among many other projects) with the Educational Resource Center for Special Needs, and Susan Wolf-Fordham, co-chair of the ERC Steering Committee, where we came together to sketch out a strategic direction as Beit Chana Teaching College (the host of the ERC) begins plans to move downtown next to the Menorah Center.  Our collective vision is to make the ERC a lab school for a new Department of Special Needs Education at Beit Chana.  Both Beit Chana and the community at large are committed to the inclusion of children with special needs throughout the community.  For instance, our Jewish Big Brother and Big Sister program for the first time includes “littles” with Downs Syndrome who have been welcomed with open arms by the other children.

Thanks to the generosity of an individual donor, the ERC has been able to add an accessibility ramp to the new van they received from Women’s Philanthropy during the Community Mission last May.

 Beth Moskowitz watches as Tamara Olschanitskaya and Svetlana Efimova ride the new accessibility ramp. 

   Larissa, Sonia, and Sonia, littles from Jewish Big Brother Big Sister of Dnepropetrovsk at the Day School.

Finally, Beth and Noga Nevel had a productive conversation with the leaders of Dnepropetrovsk’s Next Generation Movement, making plans for a trip to Boston in the spring of 2013 and ongoing social media communication.

The trip culminated in a beautiful Shabbat, with dinner at Rabbi Kaminezki’s and lunch with Zelig Brez and his family.  As usual, we came away with an infusion of yiddishe ruach in our souls and a sense of the blessings of this remarkable partnership.

Engaging Difficult Jewish Stories - Sermon for Yom Kippur 5773

Rabbi Jim Morgan
Sermon for Kol Nidre, 5773
September 25, 2012
Worship and Study Minyan of Harvard Hillel

Shana Tova, and G’mar Hatimah Tovah.  I’m Rabbi Jim Morgan, and I am so glad to be with the Worship and Study minyan for my first yamim nora-im. 

These are the Days of Awe, days of terror, days when we look into ourselves and see all that is wanting.  Days on which review our actions, our decisions, and cannot help but ponder the things we did wrong, the things we would change if only we could.  And they are days for difficult conversations, both with our selves and with our loved ones and friends.  For our community, they are days for difficult stories, difficult and challenging texts in the synagogue.

Torah texts can always present challenges to our worldview, challenges to our assumptions.  Often we disagree intensely with the point of view Torah presents.  At other times, passages we disagree with intellectually somehow resonate with us emotionally, so we feel a crisis of ambivalence.  There are, of course, stories that we simply find disturbing, and we would prefer not to think about it, thank you very much.  Then there are those passages that we really just wish were not in scripture—they are so disturbing, so horrifying, that really wouldn’t be better simply to excise them?

The texts we read on the yamim noraim are just such texts—consider: at his wife’s behest, a father banishes his concubine and their son to the desert and to their likely death; the same father obeys God’s command to sacrifice his son, who is saved only at the last minute by that same God withdrawing the command; God then instructs the Jews in a confusing and disturbing ritual that will effect atonement for the community’s sins. 

On Yom Kippur afternoon, we are faced with a particular textual challenge: Leviticus 18 rehearses a list of forbidden sexual unions, culminating in a tripartite condemnation—and you’ll forgive me for quoting the King James Version, which was the basis for the "old" JPS translation:

And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shall thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord.  Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination. Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.  (KJV)

It’s hard to overestimate the hurt that these words have caused to humankind, both in their casual linkage of same-sex physical intimacy with child sacrifice and with bestiality and in the way that our tradition and its sibling traditions of Christianity and Islam have used them to oppress gay men and women.  Why, voices in our community, in our congregation will ask, should we read these horrible things? Is there not anything more edifying to read on the most solemn day of the year?  Well, indeed there is, and you can find it in our machzor, and indeed we will read it tomorrow.  Instead of Leviticus 18, we’ll skip to the next parasha and read chapter 19, from Kedoshim—you will be holy.

This substitution is not a tradition that started in the Conservative movement.  Rather, by the early twentieth century the Reform Movement was reading selections from Leviticus 19 in the Union Prayer Book.  The practice extended to the Reconstructionist Movement, whose first machzor in the late forties designated Leviticus 19:1-18 with no option to read Chapter 18.  In the current Reconstructionist machzor, Kol Haneshama, the commentary explains that “The forbidden sexual relationships [in Leviticus 18] strike many contemporary Jews as inappropriate to the mood of the day, and they are objectionable in a number of their particulars, perhaps most notably in their condemnation of homosexual relationships.”[1]

To my ear, this commentary sounds anachronistic—certainly liberal Jews today are concerned with gay rights.  But in the post-war era, when the Reconstructionist Movement was editing its first machzor, there was no such concern.  Indeed I would imagine that by and large, all Jews, from Reform to Orthodox, were not focused on the ban on same-sex intimacy since it was entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial.

By the seventies, however, when Conservative movement published its new machzor—the one you have before you—gender and gay rights had begun to percolate into the general culture, and today it seems that otherwise traditionally-minded liberal Jews name this infamous verse as a primary reason to make the shift.

I understand this decision and I respect the rationale for it.  However, I disagree with it, both because it impoverishes our own conversations about the difficult aspects of our tradition and because it hampers our capacity to engage in the larger conversation about important issues, in this case, the religious case for or against the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of our society, our communities, our congregations.

Let me take the second concern first, which is less pressing for me tonight.  A quick example: among the Republican presidential candidates was one who had a tendency to claim that if we legalize marriage between two men, then we would be on the road to legalizing marriage between a man and a dog.  When such talk was common in the media, I wondered how many people understood that this seemingly bizarre and clearly non-logical connection stemmed from our sequence of verses?  My guess is that most secular-minded people had no idea, but that people who read their bibles got the reference immediately.  I imagine it was not a serious concern, but rather a coded way to refer to the bible, to score points with this candidate’s bible-reading base while insulting his opponents in an infuriating and bewildering manner.

This evening I am more concerned about how our tendency to avoid difficult texts hampers our own, Jewish conversation, our own growth, both individually and as a community.  By avoiding this text in synagogues on the days with the highest attendance, we forgo an opportunity to struggle with some of the most disturbing aspects of our tradition, to wrestle, to question, to protest, but above all to engage.

Last week, in responding to a beautiful d’var Torah by Zvi Abusch, our friend Hilary Putnam mentioned that some liberal Jews of his acquaintance argue that, like Leviticus 18, the story of Abraham and Isaac, the Akedah, is too terrifying, too disturbing, and too violent for us to read on Rosh Hashana.  Indeed, in the Reform machzor, Gates of Repentance, congregations have a choice between the Akedah and the Creation story in Genesis.  The story of Hagar and Ismael, another disturbing text, is not included as an option.

Hilary would not agree with a decision not to read the Akedah, if I understood correctly—and Hilary I apologize in advance if I’m misrepresenting you—because God’s test of Abraham echoes the kinds of tests that we humans face every day.  Abraham’s example is not necessarily one to emulate, but his situation resonates with ours in cases when we face competing loyalties and unbearable choices.  Indeed, Abraham’s behavior echoes our relationships with our own children, not in the explicit threat of sacrifice, God forbid, but in the way we favor the demands of our own heart—our own God, so to speak—over their needs.

But what, some may ask, if we see the Akedah not descriptive so much as predictive or even prescriptive?  Does the fact that this congregation not only read the Akedah but engaged in three discussions about it over the two days of Rosh Hashana mean that we will unconsciously reenact it?  Or, rather, does our act of reading and discussing give us the tools to recognize Abraham’s dilemma as our own and to negotiate it without needing to rely on God’s last minute saving grace?

I found the inspiration for these questions in another passage by Margaret Atwood, whom I quoted last week as well. She asks:

Do stories free the human imagination or tie it up in chains by prescribing “right behavior”...?  Are narratives a means to enforce social control or a means of escape from it? Is the use of “story” as a synonym for “lie” justified, and if so, are some lies necessary? Are we the slaves of our own stories—our family narratives and dramas, for instance—which compel us to reenact them? Do stories optimistically help us shape our lives for the better or pessimistically doom us to tragic failure?[2]

By and large, I tend to side with those who would claim that a person’s reception of the story she reads determines its effect much more than the story itself.  Of course, the kind of Jewish engagement with our stories that will “help us shape our lives for the better” requires work, requires questioning, requires attention.

I want to affirm both our need to read these stories and to challenge them the way that Abraham challenges God in the midrash: God says “Take your son,” and Abraham says “which One”, God says “Your only one,” and Abraham says “I have two,” God says “The one you love,” and Abraham says I love both of them, so God has to specify “Isaac.”

Challenging the stories is equivalent to challenging God (and a lot more comfortable for people who aren’t sure about their belief in God!). -      As Alicia Suskin Ostriker writes: “The … God of what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call, simply, the Bible or Torah, seems to like being challenged and called to account, and even rewards those who most boldly interrogate him [sic].”[3]

So that’s what I’d like us to do—to challenge and to interrogate these stories, these laws.  I don’t want us to stand idly by, letting other people determine the shape and the direction of the conversation.  Not reading it allows us not to think about it, to pretend that although gay men and lesbians continue to suffer oppression and exclusion, even here in Massachusetts, we are allowed to overlook the fact that we, our tradition, our heritage, played a role in enabling that oppression.  We must acknowledge and we must challenge.

So: Levticus 18 verse 22:  Thou shalt not lie with man, as with a woman: it is an abomination.

Baruch Levine, in his JPS commentary to Leviticus, links male on male sex with ancient Canaanites: the story of Sodom in Genesis and the concubine of Gibeah in Judges 19—truly terrible stories.  In both cases, male on male sex is a violent expression of xenophobia—as Levine comments: “This extreme fear of strangers induces a community to attack visitors.”[4]  Or, he should say, to sexually assault visitors.  Given the Torah’s emphasis on protecting the stranger, this extreme form of xenophobia aroused opposition to what came to be known as sodomy.

Rabbi Steven Greenberg also foregrounds the connection with Sodom, arguing that Leviticus 18 “prohibits the violent and demeaning ways people can engage in sexual relations.”[5]  In that sense, can we disagree with it?  In that sense, does the connection to bestiality and to Molech seem less unmotivated? He writes about Molech that “the practice of child sacrifice is the height of violence in the name of religion.”[6]  Indeed for me, the injunction against Molech resonates with the Akedah; it’s the Torah’s own internal challenge to Abraham’s—to God’s—impulse to child murder for the sake of obedience.  Just so, verse 22 is the Torah’s own challenge against the people of Sodom.  It is not a call for violence against homosexuals, even though too many people have invoked it as such.

There are many different ways to parse the halakhic implications of our verses, but none of them revokes the commandment incumbent upon us Jews—and upon Jewish communities—to protect kavod ha-briot: human dignity.[7]  In this particular case, we must to support gays and lesbians and to welcome them, truly welcome them, into our communities.  By omitting Leviticus 18, we forgo the chance to grapple with these difficult issues and thus to internalize the verse from Leviticus 19 that we will read at minchah tomorrow: “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor…”

Shana tova and G’mar hatimah tova!

---

[1] Kol Haneshama: Prayerbook for the Days of Awe (Elkins Park, PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1999), 1044.

[2] Joyce Carol Oates, “Where No One Has Ever Gone,” review of Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, New York Review of Books (March 22, 2012), p. 40.

[3] Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1997), xi.

[4] Baruch Levine, The JPS Torah Commentary: Leviticus (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 123.

[5] Steven Greenberg, “Never Stand Idly By,” [in] Text Messages: A Torah Commentary for Teens, ed. Jeffrey K. Salkin (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2012), 139.  Greenberg also argues against replacing Leviticus 18 on Yom Kippur: “Out of deference to gay people, some congregations have stopped reading that verse on Yom Kippur, but I think that just gives it more power. {Things you deny get bigger, not smaller.)”

[6] Greenberg, 140.

[7] See, for example, Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel S. Nevins, and Avram I. Reisner, “Homosexuality, Human Dignity & Halakhah: A Combined Responsum For The Committee On Jewish Law And Standards” (2006): http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/public/halakhah/teshuvot/20052010/dorff_nevins_reisner_dignity.pdf

Our Stories--Jewish and Otherwise -- Sermon for Rosh Hashanah, 5773

Rabbi Jim Morgan
Sermon for Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5773
September 16, 2012
Worship and Study Minyan of Harvard Hillel

Shana Tova uMetukah. I am Rabbi Jim Morgan and I want to begin tonight on a note of gratitude. This is my first year as the rabbi of Worship and Study and I am honored and humbled that I stand before you tonight in the presence of my two predecessors: my teacher, Rabbi Norman Janis, and his teacher, Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, who w as also the founder of this minyan and a transformative figure in the Jewish life of this university and in the Jewish lives of so many of the people in this room. I have big shoes to fill, but also
broad shoulders to stand on, and I hope I can convey how grateful I am that both of you are here to guide me.

I want to tell you a story, beloved of my younger son Moses.

A teenager, orphaned as a small child, idolizes his father, a scientist and an inventor. He looks up his father’s former partner, who now works as the lead researcher for a giant biotech company. Intrigued by the work going on in the labs, our hero does a little too much poking around. A genetically modified spider jumps into his hoodie and bites him on the neck. Soon, the boy—let’s call him Peter Parker—finds that he has gained strangely spider-like abilities, cool wristbands that spit out limitless supplies of arachnid silk,
and a sudden need to seek revenge against bullies at school and criminals everywhere….

“But wait,” says Moses. “Shouldn’t the story go like this?”

A teenager, orphaned as a small child, has a best friend whose father runs a giant biotech company. One day, the two boys visit the lab and our hero—let’s call him Peter Parker—does a little too much poking around. A genetically modified spider jumps on his arm and bites him. Soon, Peter finds that he has gained strangely spider-like abilities, including super strength and odd little holes at the base of his wrists that spit out limitless supplies of arachnid silk….

Why, Moses wanted to know, are the stories different? Why does the spider jump down the hoodie of Peter Parker #1 but on the arm of Peter Parker #2? Why does Peter Parker #1 need to invent silk shooters but Peter Parker #2 just produces the silk as another form of bodily fluid? (I should acknowledge that Moses didn’t ask that second question—I did!) Behind these questions, I think, is a deeper one: which one is the true story? How do we know what really happened?

I tried to answer Moses’s question, suggesting that comic book movies, like the Greek myths he also loves, can vary details without losing the essence of the story. Different versions of stories can have different details, but I’m not sure I convinced him. Isn’t there one true story and all the others have
got it wrong?

Let me tell you another story. Let me return to a story we tell every year.

A father is told by an angel to sacrifice his son. In turn, he tells his son to saddle the ass and to gather wood, an axe, and a flint stone. They are going on a journey. They travel together for a few days in the company of some servant boys. When the father—let’s call him Avraham—sees the top of the hill he has in mind, he tells the boys to stay with the ass and that his son—let’s call him Yitzhak—and he will go, make a sacrifice at the top of the hill, and return. On the way up, Yitzhak asks his father about the ram for the sacrifice—Avraham hedges. At the top, Yitzhak builds an altar of wood and Avraham binds him upon it. He raises the axe, but at that very moment, and angel calls out to him: “Avraham, Avraham!” “Here I am,” he replies and as he looks up, he sees a ram, tangled in the bushes.

But wait, someone might say, you’ve got the story wrong. Let’s return again.

A father is told by an angel to sacrifice his son. In turn he tells his son to saddle the ass and to gather wood, an axe, a flint stone. They travel for several days until they reach the base of a mountain. Leaving their servants behind, the father—let’s call him Abraham—tells his son—let’s call him Isaac—to follow him up the hill to make a sacrifice to God. “Where is the ram for the sacrifice,” asks Isaac. “God will provide,” responds Abraham.

At the top, Isaac builds an altar of the wood and Abraham binds him upon it. He raises his axe and brings it down, plunging it into Isaac’s heart. “Abraham, Abraham,” calls an angel. “Here I am,” he replies, and as he
looks up, he sees a ram, tangled in the bushes. Why, you might ask, did we change the story? Why did Abraham kill Isaac in the second story if Avraham didn’t kill Yitzhak in the first one? Why did the angel come too late in the second story? Why didn’t God intervene sooner? And in any case, which one is the true story? After all, the fate of Isaac is not just a random detail like the location of Peter Parker’s spider
bite—it determines our entire experience of the story.

Hints to some of these questions lie in our tradition itself. In Genesis, Abraham is prevented from killing Isaac, but nonetheless, Isaac disappears. Abraham returns alone to the servant boys, returns alone to Sarah, and mourns Sarah’s death alone. Isaac reappears on the scene only when Rebecca arrives on the scene. The rabbis have lots of suggestions: Abraham sent him away to avoid the evil eye, Abraham sent him to study
Torah, God took him up to the Garden of Eden for three years to recover from his trauma. That last one seems only a step away from a version that perhaps belongs more comfortably in spring at Easter time rather than in the fall at Rosh Hashana: Abraham did kill Isaac, who arose to heaven and three years later arose again from the dead to continue Abraham’s line.

I should stress that these are all Jewish, rabbinic versions of the Akedah. I take them from the prologue of a wonderful study of the Akedah by Shalom Spiegel called The Last Trial, which illuminates how successive generations shape their understanding of the story of the Akedah to make sense of their past and present, of their own lives in relation to their tradition and to the surrounding culture.(Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah, trans. and intro. by Judah Goldin [Woodstock, VT, 1993]). In particular, he’s concerned with the use of the Akedah—specifically in the version in which Isaac is killed—by Jews who experienced the Crusades and mass martyrdom. In such a reality, the horror of a father killing his son (in this case to avoid forced conversion) was perhaps less unthinkable than it would otherwise be.

For these generations of Jews, the Akedah functioned as myth—not “a myth,” as in a widespread but false belief or as in a story from this or that traditional mythology, but as myth. Rabbi Neil Gilman defines myth as “a structure through which a community organizes and makes sense of its experience.”(Neil Gilman, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew [Philadelphia: JPS, 1990], 26). Gilman gives the example of psychoanalysis, in which the Freudian myth of id, ego, and superego makes sense of the often confusing vagaries of human behavior. For religious communities, says Gillman, these myths are contained in scripture and generate liturgies, rituals, and interpretations that shape the community’s experience, both in the sense of transmitting tradition and in the sense of making sense of the often confusing and sometimes traumatic events of life.

In our postmodern, postcritical condition, it has become difficult to inhabit religious myths in an uncritical way. The pressure of what we might loosely call “science” or “criticism” has pushed us away from our
stories towards ones that seem to make more rational or ethical sense: the scientific method, evolution, psychoanalysis, Marxism, Zionism, feminism, environmentalism, Star Trek—the list can go on, but all of them, I think, offer some variation of a mythic structuring of the world that their adherents can grasp hold of, can use to make sense of the world. And I should also be clear that despite many claims to the contrary, these mythic structures are not necessarily mutually exclusive: the animosity of certain psychoanalysts towards religion (and certain rabbis against Freud) strikes me as willful blindness to one’s own mythic assumptions more than as a triumphant unmasking of the other’s bad faith, but I digress…

The challenge I see here in my juxtaposition of stories is that the first set of questions about Spider Man seem to come up more readily than that second set of questions about Avraham and Yitzhak. The first, in case you
haven’t realized, are based on the distinctions between two recent movie versions of the story. The second set of questions stems from midrashim cited in a fairly obscure book, not likely to inspire a film version. But this second set of questions are full of resonance on this day of on which we proclaim the sovereignty of God (whatever that means) and celebrate the creation of the world (and let’s be honest—we don’t really know what that means either!). Which questions are we more likely to hear from our children? Which ones did I hear from my children?

Let me be clear that I don’t mean to denigrate the first set of questions. Nor do I mean to suggest that we discourage our children from watching super-hero movies—on the contrary, such stories, like other children’s stories, both literature and movies, provide heroes to identify with and emotional
struggles to recognize in oneself. Harry Potter is a hero not only because of his magical ability, but also because of his self-sacrifice and his capacity for both friendship and self-doubt. Peter Parker’s frightening new power brings forces of chaos and death into his life, forces he struggles mightily to bring under control. These stories provide mythic resonance for our children’s lives, for our own lives.

The challenge is how not to lose track of our own stories, our Jewish stories. In her recent book, In Other Worlds, Margaret Atwood “argues persuasively that myths have become detached from traditional religion,
and thus from traditional religious imagery" (Joyce Carol Oates, “Where No One Has Ever Gone,” review of Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, New York Review of Books, March 22, 2012, p. 39-40.) Atwood writes, “I’m far from the first commentator to note that science fiction is where theologically linked phenomena and reasonable facsimiles of them went after Paradise Lost. The form has often been used as a way of acting out a theological doctrine, as—for instance—Dante’s Divine Comedy was once used…. The religious resonances in such films as Star Wars are more than obvious.”

All very good, but why should we, as Jews who care about our tradition and the questions that it has engendered over the generations, be satisfied with this detachment? Can’t we love both Hermione Grainger and Rebecca? Can’t we thrill to Spider Man and to the heroic Rabbis of the Talmud? Of course we can, but here we get caught up on the question of truth. I remember several anxious parents at a Hebrew School orientation, concerned that we would teach their children bible stories, concerned, I imagine, that we would suggest to the children that these stories are true, concerned that we would attempt to turn their children into uncritical believers.

Questions of truth become irrelevant when we’re talking about Spider-Man or Star Wars—no one insists upon the literal truth of Harry Potter, so it can go about the business of mythmaking without interference from skeptics or true believers. The bible has not been so lucky, despite a legacy of midrashim that encourages the free play of the exegetical imagination upon the scriptural text. Our stories, our Jewish stories, get caught between the Scylla of fundamentalist cant that insists upon their literal truth and the Charybdis of rationalist denunciations of the bible as retrograde and false. If the bible is “literally true” (or literally false, for that matter), if there’s only one answer, if Peter Parker can be bitten on the arm or under the hoodie but not both, then these questions become inadmissible, silly even, because there’s one answer and its not worth discussing.

But stories don’t work that way—they are retold, in different times and different places with different goals. These days, if Peter Parker is a cool kid, he must be wearing a hoodie. If he’s wearing a hoodie, how can the spider get to his arm? It can’t, so it goes down his neck. If a Christian tells the story of Isaac, shouldn’t he prefigure Christ, die and be resurrected? If a Muslim tells the story, shouldn’t the son be called Ishmael and represent the true descendent of Abraham? And this shouldn’t frighten us—it’s a mark of the power of our stories that we, no less than our Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters, can retell them in different configurations—even with different endings—in order to make meaning from them and from our lives. It is a mark of the power of our tradition that we return to the same stories year after year and make them new. But this we must do, and ideally more than only once a year at the high holidays. We must make a commitment to engage with our own stories, with our own myths, as regularly and as readily as we do with so many others that inform our culture. Only thus can we grow Jewishly and, what is equally important, do our part to help grow Judaism.

I wish you a year of sweetness, a year of success and life and peace—and a year of meaningful and challenging Jewish stories.

Grand Opening of the Menorah Center in Dnepropetrovsk - October 16, 2012

Greetings from Dnepropetrovsk! I am here, along with a small delegation from Boston’s JCRC and CJP, to celebrate the opening of the community’s new Menorah Center, the largest Jewish communal building in the world, which contains a museum of Ukrainian Jewry and the Holocaust, a hotel, a hostel, a shopping mall (with a kosher supermarket), and office space for community organizations.

The opening was a formal, caviar-fueled event, with dignitaries from the Ukrainian and Israeli national governments, the ambassadors of the United States and Germany to Ukraine, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, and the mayor of Dnepropetrovsk all present and accounted for. Hundreds of people from Dnepropetrovsk and from around the world stood for an hour or more outside the impressive building as various people made speeches and children from the Jewish Day School sang and waved flowers. After Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amara affixed the mezuzah, the ribbon was cut and the whole crowd poured into the building, admiring the recreated facades of the city’s vanished synagogues and historical films from Jewish Dnepropetrovsk. The halls rang with the voices of excited people and, when it came time to dedicate the new Museum of Ukrainian Jewry and the Holocaust, the strains of “Ani Ma’amim”—“I believe.” Our own Beth Moskowitz, chair of JCRC’s Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry, helped cut the ribbon to the museum (as the only woman to be honored at the opening—a great source of pride for Boston).

Afterwards, we enjoyed what our beautiful invitations called “a lavish banquet,” listening to the Day School’s klezmer band and wonderful speeches. Most moving were the remarks of John Tefft, US Ambassador to Ukraine, who praised both the Jewish community for its strength and the Ukrainian government for its support of religious diversity, the bedrock of the United States’ vibrant democracy. In conclusion, the ambassador, a Catholic who hails from Kansas, recited the Shehechiyanu, in Hebrew, to an audience that included a strong contingent of black-hatted Chabad rabbis (and this one unorthodox rabbi from Boston!). Only in Ukraine. Only, in fact, in Dnepropetrovsk.

Dnepropetrovsk, which was a closed city until the fall of the Soviet Union, boasts one of the strongest and most unified Jewish communities in Europe. Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki, the Chabad shaliach (emissary) handpicked by the last Lubavitcher Rebbe more than twenty years ago, has built a thriving religious community and an impressive charitable enterprise while developing strong ties with the national and local governments. The synagogue here is crowded every Shabbat and the community’s educational programs attract a steady stream of newly engaged Jews. The city is located in the historical pale of settlement (where Jews were allowed to live in the time of the Tsars), so even as Jews emigrate, others reclaim their Jewish identity. For the Jewish community, as for the municipal and national government (and the Ukrainian majority, at least in Dnepropetrovsk), the Menorah Center underscores the admirable status of the Jewish community and its importance to the financial and cultural wellbeing of Ukraine. This in a city and a country in which both the communists and the Nazis believed they had succeeded in destroying Jewish life forever.

The Menorah Center is the brainchild of Gennadi Bogolyubov, an industrialist who is the president of the Dnepropetrovsk Jewish Community Fund. In his speech at the opening, Bogolyubov said that he wanted to make a gift to all Ukrainian Jews, preferably in Kiev, the capital. In Kiev, however, community leaders could not agree upon a vision. In Dnepropetrovsk, where Bogolyubov was born, there was immediate enthusiasm. Dnepropetrovsk, he realized, is the Jewish capital of Ukraine and this building, its seven branches evoking the seven flames of the menorah, proves it. One can only admire the chutzpah, the self-assurance, the confidence of a community that knows its strength and is not afraid to demonstrate it with a building that evokes the past and endows them for the future.

(You can see pictures of the opening—but text only in Russian—at http://www.djc.com.ua/news/view/new/?id=8094; you can also look at my twitter feed at https://twitter.com/RabbiJimM, where you’ll find pictures, notes in English, and a record of my ongoing visit here; for information on JCRC’s Dnepropetrovsk Kehillah Project, have a look at http://www.jcrcboston.org/focus/strength/dkp/.)