Who Controls the Narrative?

A few weeks ago, some enterprising entrepreneur set up a food truck selling ice cream and waffles just outside the perimeter of the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, whereupon a gigantic firestorm of criticism exploded across the blogosphere and in the Jewish press.

On the one hand, the idea sounds almost reasonable. The camp—the worst of all the Nazi camps, a place of unspeakable tragedy and horror where 1.1 million Jewish people were murdered alongside thousands of Poles, Gypsies, and others deemed by the Reich unworthy of living in the world—the camp is now a national Polish museum that attracts something like 2 million visitors annually. The atmosphere is appropriately somber. There is no gift shop, no snack bar, no restaurant. It is not permitted to eat or drink on the site; even talking on the phone or taking pictures is restricted to certain specific areas. So it was probably inevitable that someone would have the idea of trying to sell snacks to visitors on their way out.

On the other hand, the decision to position the ice cream truck directly outside the infamous red-brick Death Gate, through which incoming trains brought their doomed passengers directly to the selection ramp could have been guaranteed to offend. But, at least to me, the debate regarding the ice cream truck masks a deeper, more serious issue, one much more difficult to resolve. The truck, after all, could just be moved to some less fraught location. Probably, that is what will eventually happen. But the issue behind the question of the truck’s location has to do, not so much with the noble goal of memorializing the martyrs as much as with the much stickier and more difficult issue of how exactly to make that remembering happen. And how much control we can realistically hope to exert over it.

Surely, no one wishes for the Auschwitz memorial not to exist at all. And, given that it does exist, surely we are all in favor of people visiting it—to learn from it, to be shocked by the experience of actually being in that place, to remember the people who died in that place, to feel chastened by a forced confrontation with the depths to which a nation can sink when it embraces the demonic and gives itself over to barbarism and unbridled savagery. But we live in an imperfect world and some of those people will inevitably not behave well. Some will show up dressed inappropriately for a visit to hell. Others, shocked by what they see, will seek comfort in sick jokes or other forms of vulgarity or tastelessness. Still others, unable to fathom where they are and what they’re seeing, will give in to the urge to deny, to insist that what they are told happened in that place can’t really have happened, that this whole Holocaust thing must be some sort of monstrous hoax. All of this can be predicted. It all has happened. It will all continue to happen for as long as millions upon millions of non-pre-selected visitors descend on Oświęcim, the Polish name for Auschwitz and the current name of the adjacent town, to experience that place in person. We want them to come. We want them to behave. We want them not to take selfies in front of the Death Gate eating ice cream cones. But we cannot have all of the above. And by now we should all know that.

My first visit to a concentration camp was to Dachau. It was 1977. I was a young man of 24. My friend Andrew and I spent a week in Paris, then parted ways. I can’t quite recall where Andrew set off for, but I myself took the train to Munich with the specific intention of visiting Dachau.

I found my way first to the town of Dachau, a quaint village about ten miles north of Munich. The residents of Dachau seemed intent on making it clear to visitors that they neither ran nor supported the concentration camp named for their village, that they mightily resented the fact that the name of their adorable village will forever be linked to the great evil the Nazis perpetrated down the road a piece. My German was plenty good enough to get the idea. But one hardly needed German to seize the concept: the shops selling “Ich ❤️ Dachau” t-shirts and coffee mugs made the point more than clearly enough. (I am not making this up. And, no, I didn’t buy one of either.)

And then I continued on to Dachau. It was a warm August day. I was prepared for reality in black-and-white, therefore was wholly unprepared to find a lush, verdant place beyond the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, a rural-ish setting complete with birds twittering around in the trees and buildings bathed in warm sunlight. After only thinking of Dachau as a place of misery and ugliness, it was shocking to see the place in full summer mode. And then I came across the gas chamber.

Of the 200,000 incarcerated in Dachau between 1933 and 1945, 40,000 were murdered. But most were either shot or shipped off elsewhere to be asphyxiated; the actual gas chamber at Dachau was apparently not used to murder inmates. Perhaps that detail is what gave me the courage to step inside—which I was amazed to see was permitted, if not quite encouraged—and, even if just for a long moment, to stand there and to take it all in. My regular readers know how profound a part of my journey through adolescence the experience of learning about the Shoah played. I read voraciously, if mostly secretly. I felt drawn to survivors, although I mostly obeyed my mother’s clear instructions never to quiz them about their stories. But this was completely different, something unlike anything I had ever experienced. I felt paralyzed, unable even to gather my thoughts coherently, let alone recite a psalm or a prayer. (I was a year away from ordination in 1977, so should have been able to think of something. But I felt empty. Empty and queasy and adrift from the world.) And then I suddenly had company: two Italian teenaged girls wearing short shorts and bright yellow halter tops, and eating ice cream cones they had probably bought in Dachau Town and brought along to the camp, came to join me. In shaky English, they politely asked if I would do them the favor of holding their ice cream cones while they took each other’s pictures. (This was in the old days when you needed two hands and a camera to take a picture.) So there I was, alone in a Nazi-built gas chamber with chocolate ice cream melting all over my hands while they snapped pictures of each other. It was over in a minute. They thanked me, took back their cones, left. And there I was again, all alone in that place…except now with my hands disgustingly sticky with melted ice cream. I remember thinking to myself that no matter how long I might yet live and no matter what could ever happen to me in the future, there was never, ever, going to be a stranger moment for me to live through than the one I had just experienced. So far, I seem to have been right.

What is it with ice cream? If that truck in Poland was selling cold bottles of water or bags of peanuts, would it have aroused the same reaction? People have to eat! And yet I was as outraged as anyone by that image, one that belongs in a Luis Buñuel movie and not in a news story about real life in today’s Poland.

When it comes to the Shoah, we want a lot of things. But those things come with other things in their wake that we don’t want. And so we are left on the horns of a mighty dilemma: will we take A and B for the sake of having A, or will we skip both if that’s the price of avoiding B? That is the question the ice cream truck sets at our feet.

We want the world always to remember. But that means making Auschwitz and Dachau and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam into tourist sites and then being unable to control who shows up to take a look around. And it also means leaving the telling to the Polish or German or Dutch governments, the natural administrators of sites in their own counties and thus the legal guardians of their legacies. We want Holocaust Education to be part of the curriculum in every American high school. But that means the material being taught by people with no personal, let alone visceral, connection to the subject matter, people all too eager to contextualize the Shoah by setting it against other horrific massacres in history rather than teaching it as a unique event in history and, at that, one that was the direct outgrowth of millennia of anti-Semitic teachings promulgated by people like Martin Luther, a figure whom the nation’s high school teachers are surely not prepared to vilify in public even if they are not personally affiliated with the Lutheran Church. In short we want to control the narrative—because it is our story to tell—despite the fact that there is no actual way to do that.

In the summer of 1298, mobs of anti-Semites under the leadership of a man named Rindfleisch crossed the southern German landscape destroying Jewish communities and murdering their Jewish residents. In the end, it is estimated that 146 communities were utterly demolished and about 20,000 Jews were murdered. This narrative, we own: the Rindfleisch massacres are not part of high school curriculum, nor would the man’s name be familiar to any but specialists in medieval German history. But the fact is the whole horrific episode is lost to us as well: I doubt one Jewish soul in a thousand has ever heard of Rindfleisch, let alone say who he was and what great evil he perpetrated.

No one wants Heydrich and Eichmann to go the way of Rindfleisch. But elevating the Shoah to the level of world-historical event will inevitably entail—has already entailed—relinquishing control of the narrative. And that is probably both as it must be and possibly even as it should be. In the end, no one is going to ask my opinion about the ice cream truck. Nor, other than with respect to the vulgar tastelessness of setting the truck where it currently sits, do I really care if tourists eat ice cream—or anything—after visiting the camp. More than I want to be in charge of the Auschwitz Memorial Site, I want the world to remember the people who died there. 

Shavuot 2023

There are lots of way to think about Shavuot, which begins this Thursday evening. There are, for example, many customs that pertain solely to the festival of Shavuot—the custom of eating dairy foods, for example, or the custom of engaging in nighttime Torah study on the evening before we gather on the first day of the holiday to hear the Ten Commandments read out from the Torah scroll in synagogue. And there are others as well, some widely observed and others less so. The reading of the Book of Ruth is universal, for example, and is part of our observance at Shelter Rock as well. And the chanting of the majestic hymn called “Akdamut Millin,” written in the eleventh century by Rabbi Meir bar Isaac, a contemporary of Rashi who lived in the city of Worms, is a feature of our Shelter Rock worship as well.

But the specific issue I thought I’d write about this week as a way of introducing the festival has to do neither with contemporary ritual nor liturgy, but with the question of inclusivity and exclusivity. For modern Jews such as ourselves, this is a big issue that manifests itself in many different ways. How wide open should our doors be? Should anyone at all ever be deemed unwelcome in our sanctuaries? Should membership in our congregations be predicated on anything other than the wish of an outsider to step inside and take his or her place in our midst? Should Jewishness itself be a criterion…or should non-Jews who are eager to be supportive friends of the Jewish community be permitted to sign on as members too?

Shavuot provides an interesting way to think through those specific issues.

One of the prominent rituals that characterized Shavuot in ancient times was the magnificent procession leading to Jerusalem created by the nation’s farmers bringing their first fruits to the Temple. The Mishnah describes the scene vividly:

[The night before the procession, people] would spend the night in the open street. Early in the morning, an appointed official would say: “Let us arise and go up to Zion, to the house of the Lord our God.” Those who lived near [Jerusalem] would bring fresh figs and grapes, while those who lived far away would bring dried figs and raisins. An ox would go in front of them, his horns bedecked with gold and with an olive-crown on its head. Flutists would join the procession and play until they actually reached the Temple Mount. When they reached the Temple Mount, they would take the baskets and place them on their shoulder, then walk as far as the Temple Court. When they got to the Temple Court, and while still holding the baskets on their shoulders, they would recite the passage from the Torah that begins with the words: "I acknowledge this day before the Lord your God that I have entered the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to grant to us” (Deuteronomy 26:3), then continue on until completing the whole passage. When reaching the words, “My father was a fugitive Aramean,” they would take the baskets off their shoulders and hold them by their edges while the priests would place their hands beneath them and wave them. Then they would complete the entire passage, deposit the baskets by the side of the altar, bow and depart.

I’ve always loved that description, especially the image of the horns of the oxen covered with gold and the beasts themselves wearing with olive-branch crowns. But the specific issue I want to write about today has to do with the declaration mandated by Scripture in Deuteronomy 26 that requires the person bringing the first fruit offerings make reference aloud to the Land of Israel as “the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to grant to us.” The Mishnah takes that seriously and concludes that, although converts are obliged to perform all the commandments just like any other Jewish people, a convert bringing the first fruits to the Temple is excused from making the declaration, since to refer to the land as having been given to that person’s ancestors—who were obviously not Jewish people—would constitute a falsehood.

And that offhand ruling sets the stage for a complicated, interesting debate. On the one hand, we have the principle, mentioned countless times in our law codes and legal texts, that converts to Judaism are to be treated precisely as any other Jewish people. They have the same obligations, the same burdens under the law, the same requirements. Yet here we hear the rabbis of old stepping away from that bedrock principle for the sake of honoring the literal meaning of an ancient prayer. It’s an interesting set-up and arguments can be made on both sides: it feels right not to make false distinctions between converts and native-born Jews, but it also feels right to honor converts by not requiring them to recite untruths in prayer—which practice would only debase the larger concept of approaching God through prayer in the context of candor and honesty.

So what should the law be? There were many attempts to answer the question before a final decision was made by Maimonides in the 12^th century. So that was a cool thousand years too late to be of any use to actual converts bringing their first fruits to the Temple. But the specific issue here is masking a dozen other ones hiding just behind it, many of which are fully relevant today. Can a convert without Jewish ancestors recite a prayer that references God as “our God and God of our ancestors”? Can a convert who is specifically not descended from the patriarchs and matriarchs of old recite the first part of the prayer in which Jacob is referenced as “my ancestor”?  And behind all those details is the largest question of all: if the Jewish people are a family, a blood group, a people in the shared-DNA sense of the term, is conversion even really possible? Even people who marry only become their spouses’ parents’ children-in-law, not their actual children!

Enter Rambam, who is willing to base himself (here and in many other places) on the Talmud Yerushalmi, the understudied and under-respected Talmud of the Land of Israel. And so he issues his ruling:

A convert may bring the first fruits and make the declaration, for the Torah (i.e., at Genesis 17:5) states with regard to Abraham: "I have made you a father to a multitude of nations," which verse clearly implies is that he is the divine Parent of all who would enter under the shelter of the divine Presence. (And it for that specific reason that) God’s promise that Israel would one day inherit the Holy Land was given to Abraham first.

There’s a lot there to unpack, but the short version is that Rambam understand that God meant the change of Abram’s name to Abraham specifically to reflect that, henceforth, the man’s destiny would be to become father to a multitude of nations.  I suppose you could interpret that phrase to reflect the fact that Abraham’s other son, Ishmael, became the progenitor of a mighty nation, as did his “other” grandson, Esau. And as also did all six of Abraham’s children with his second wife, Keturah. That interpretive line would make sense, then, because Abraham actually did become the progenitor of many different nations. But Rambam doesn’t go there and instead imagines the Hebrew phrase av hamon goyim (“father of a multitude of nations”) to mean that the Israelite nation, descended from Abraham through his grandson Jacob/Israel, would not in the end be a simple in-house group of family members linked to each other by DNA or, as the ancient would have said, by blood, but would rather be a faith group tied to each other by common adherence to the covenant with God and by matters of faith. The “nations” in “father of a multitude of nations,” therefore, references the variegated nature of the future Jewish people, a people consisting of natural-born Jews and Jews-by-choice.

It's actually a rather startling to see Rambam, the greatest halakhic decisor of all time, considering a mishnah that could not be more clear and coming down against its plain meaning by insisting that it simply does not reflect the law and that a convert to Judaism may indeed recite the declaration.

As we consider similar questions in our Jewish world, we would do well to consider Rambam’s take on the law regarding the first-fruits declaration seriously. People, he is saying almost clearly, who have traditionally been excluded need not permanently be kept out. Careful study of the Scriptural text can lead to all sorts of entry points for all sorts of people. What is requisite is not unflagging allegiance to the simple meaning of the words of Torah, but a supple intellect capable of focusing the words of the Torah through the prism of our own moral consciousnesses to determine if we have plumbed their depths adequately to take their simple meaning as the law. In other words, the task facing the pious is not to memorize a million verses and then be able to recite them by heart, but to develop a feeling, caring heart capable of interpreting the law so that it ends up fully and totally supportive of what we know to be just, kind, and fair.

That we read Ruth on Shavuot only make this point even more strongly. The book is a good tale, but it’s the end that counts—the last few verses in which it is revealed that Ruth, a Moabite convert to Judaism, became the great-grandmother of King David, the greatest of all Israelite kings and the poet whose psalms left an indelible imprint on Jewish life. What Ruth teaches is that, for all blood matters, faith and commitment matter more. 

Yom Yerushalayim 2023

Today, Friday the 19^th of May, is Yom Yerushalayim, the 56^th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Like many of you, I’m sure, I remember the events of those days in June, if not quite as though they were yesterday, then at least not as though they were more than half a century ago. But our sense of what Yom Yerushalayim is about has changed over the years, and not so much for the better: in 1967, when the Old City of Jerusalem had been in Jordanian hands for less than two decades (i.e., from when it was lost to the Jordanian Army in 1948 until it was recaptured from that same army in 1967), it felt like a momentary wrong was being righted, like something bad that happened within almost every adult-at-the-time’s lifetime had been fixed and made right. But as the years have passed, we have lost control of that narrative. And, indeed, to read in the press and in the blogosphere about what Yom Yerushalayim really means, the fact that there had been a Jewish presence in the Old City since Ottoman times—and for millennia before that as well—has been forgotten and been replaced with a narrative of conquest and taking-while-the-taking-was-good adventurism. In this narrative, Israel was at war with Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in 1967 and won an incredible victory over all three foes simultaneously, which led to seizing treasures from them: the Golan Heights from Syria, the Sinai from Egypt, and—best and most sacred and important of all—the traditional Jewish heartland of Judah and Samaria from Jordan…including the jewel in that specific crown, the Old City of Jerusalem.

That narrative, which makes Yom Yerushalayim more about the spoils of war and hardly at all about the justification of a wrong that had been perpetrated by the Kingdom of Jordan against the Jewish people for all nineteen years of Israeli independence, is the one I see featured on the pages of the world’s newspapers and on the websites I generally visit to gain as balanced a picture of the world as I can.

I’d like to remember out loud my first visit to Jerusalem, a story I haven’t actually written about before.

It was 1966, the year of my bar-mitzvah. I was a little boy on the cusp of adolescence. As it happened, the summer camp I had been attending in Connecticut on the verdant shores of Lake Oxoboxo closed permanently just the year before. My parents, therefore, had to find some new place for me to spend the summer and, somehow, my mother came across something called the Bar-Mitzvah Pilgrimage that was being offered to the public by the American Zionist Youth Foundation, headquartered in those days at 515 Park Avenue. This was highly uncharacteristic of my parents even to consider: I was not yet allowed to go into Manhattan on the subway by myself (when this was being considered, I was still twelve years old), and here they were considering sending me to the other side of the world in the company of people neither of my parents knew or had ever met. Given the level of protectiveness my parents brought to parenting, it was—to say the very least—uncharacteristic for them even to consider, let alone agree, that I sign on to such an adventure.

And yet they pursued it. I remember the interview I had at 515 Park. A nice man whose name I can’t remember gently probed our reasons for wanting to sign me on. He seemed sympathetic, interested primarily in determining if this was a good idea for as untried and untested a lad a myself. I must have made a good impression because he approved me to sign on. And then, far more amazingly, my parents did sign me on. And off I went. I don’t believe I had ever been in an airplane until that summer. And I certainly hadn’t ever left the United States. This was, and in a dozen different ways, terra totally incognita for me. And for them too, I suppose.

There’s a lot to say about that whole summer, about the youth village near Pardes Hanna that served as our base, about the friendships I made that summer, about the encounter—my first, as far as I can recall—with actual Israelis (i.e., the kind that actually live in Israel, not the Forest Hills version), about our visit to Yad Vashem (a story I’ll write about on a different occasion), about the strange journey I made all on my own to Ashkelon to spend a weekend with a  family of recent Moroccan immigrants chosen (by whom I have no idea) as a reasonable host family for kids like myself despite the fact that no one in the household knew a word of English and my Hebrew-School Hebrew was, to say the very least, limited.

The high point of the journey was our trip to Jerusalem. They waited a week or so—perhaps for jetlag to fade and for us acclimate ourselves to the heat of an Israeli summer—and then we were off. Approaching the city from the west along a road still dotted with blown-up armored vehicles and tanks left in place as a kind of on-site memorial to the men and women who died in 1948 defending the city that the nascent State of Israel had chosen as its capital, I was enthralled even before we got there. And the emotional level of the whole experience only increased once we actually entered the city.

For readers who have been to Jerusalem recently, it would probably be hard to conjure up the correct picture of the city in 1966. Jaffa Road, the main street leading through downtown to the Old City was paved. But there were unpaved streets all over the place. There was no light rail, just the bus. There were public telephones, but you needed special tokens called asimonim to operate them and it was rare to find one that was in working order. The bus station was more like an oriental bazaar than the Port Authority. I’m sure groups that take teenagers abroad these days protect them much more carefully and seriously, but we were permitted to go off on our own all the time. Nor were we required to go off with others; anyone inclined to explore on his or her own was permitted to go off alone. (This was, of course, long before cell phones so there actually was no way to contact any of us once we were all dispersed; the system—to the best of my recollection—was simply to wait at the bus until everybody showed up and then to depart. I don’t recall anyone ever not showing up or getting into trouble while off on his or her own. But I don’t see that being permitted today. (If I remember correctly, I attempted to smoke my first cigarette, a Time, when I was off with some of the other lads on our own wandering the city. Fortunately for my future health, it did not go well at all. We were staying at the Hotel Vienna, a fleabag that I remember thinking my parents wouldn’t set foot in, let alone take a room for the night. But that, of course, only made it more alluring to us boys. This truly was my first great adventure, my first foray into the world beyond Queens. And I was totally sold on the whole thing from the first moment we set foot on Israeli soil.)

But wandering around what was then called the “New City,” came after our first experience of the Old City.

Of course, we could not enter Old Jerusalem, which was in a different country at the time. Or at least under the control of a different country. (One interesting detail I do recall clearly, is that the word “Palestinians” was never used to describe anyone at all; our counselors and teachers referred to the people on the other side of the border as Jordanians or, more generally, as Arabs. The thought that the Arabs of Palestine were anything other than Jordanians I don’t recall anyone expressing ever.)

Our first encounter with the Old City was a visit to the Mandelbaum Gate, the sole access point from Israel to Old Jerusalem. It lives in our collective memory as a symbol of the divided city and that is not at all wrong—but the reality was that it wasn’t much of anything: just a ramshackle link fence with a gate set into it under some tin roofing. There were IDF soldiers on the Israeli side, but you could look through the gate—which was open when we were there—to see Jordanian soldiers and, beyond them, the walls of the Old City. So that was exciting too—I hadn’t ever been at a land border between nations.

To see into the Old City was a different experience, however. We were brought to the top of a six- or seven-story building at the bottom of Jaffa Road, now called Kikar Tzahal, and taken up in an elevator to the roof. And there, for a few coins, you could operate long-distance telescopes like the ones they used to have atop the Empire State Building and so look at the Jaffa Gate in the distance and, slightly, what lay beyond it.

There wasn’t much to see. The famous honey-colored walls looked more white than yellow in the strong sunshine. The gate, the famous Jaffa Gate, was visible, but you could only see a sliver of anything on its other side. There were, I think I recall, some vendors hawking their wares on the outside of the gate and those people we could see almost clearly. It feels as though it should have been a huge disappointment to me, that whole experience: a wall, a big gate, some people selling snacks, the occasional Jordanian soldier. And you didn’t get much time for your coin either: maybe a minute or two. Maybe three. Not more.

So you probably expect me to say how disappointing the whole experience was, especially after having had it hyped so intensely on our way into the city. But it wasn’t disappointing at all. Something within me changed at that specific moment in the trajectory of my adolescence, something that at the time I doubt I could possibly have understood or even identified. My connection to that place—and specifically to the Old City of Jerusalem—was somehow set in stone on that rooftop in 1966. I can’t say how I could have known, but I somehow did know that my life was destined to revolve around that city and that gate, around that place. We weren’t there long. We ended up, if I recall, me and my friends, eating felafel in the Machane Yehudah open-air market, a nice walk straight down Jaffa Road. But some switch had been flicked on, something within me had been permanently and irrevocably altered. I couldn’t have said it in so many words as a lad of thirteen. But when I think back on the story of my life to date, I believe that my destiny to spend the years of my life as a rabbi, as someone to whom Zionism and Judaism would be such allied concepts that neither could possibly exist without the other, as someone whom destiny led to acquire the home in Jerusalem that Joan and I proudly own—the first step on that path I took then and in that place.

I remember that whole summer very fondly. And I look forward to getting back to Jerusalem in just a month and a half. A lifetime has passed since my first visit to Jerusalem. No one today has the kind of experience I had then. But I am richer for having had it. And so I share it with you today as a kind of Yom Yerushalayim gift to you all.

Anointees

As subjects (sort of) of His Majesty, Joan and I made a point of watching all the best parts of the coronation on youtube and, of course, on the official coronation website, www.coronation.gov.uk. Whether we are technically his subjects, I’m not sure. But we both have Canadian passports and Charles III is indeed King of Canada, its Sovereign and its Head of State. The monarchy isn’t particularly popular in Canada these days, however, so who knows how long it will be before Canada follows Barbados and cuts its ties to the House of Windsor completely? And whither Canada goeth in this regard, thither soon enough shall surely followeth Australia and New Zealand, plus a host of other nations eager to assert their autonomy from their erstwhile occupiers. What can you do? Time marches on!

But the coronation itself was remarkable: a strange blend of magic and majesty, of pomp and tradition seasoned with an overt, sometimes slightly ham-fisted effort to make inclusive a ceremony that by its very nature could not conceivably be any less so. I watched, I do have to admit, with rapt attention. And there were some advantages to watching it hours after it happened because of Shabbat: as opposed to everybody present, we had the relaxing experience of watching the coronation unfold while already knowing that the whole thing was going to be pulled off almost without a hitch and that no one was going to try to make an anti-monarchic point by blowing up Westminster Abbey during the ceremony. So that was our stress-reducing reward for watching it not live, but fully after-the-fact.

The Jewish angle that has been discussed every which way in blogosphere has to do with the Chief Rabbi’s presence in Westminster Abbey, formally and in every conceivable other way a church, on Shabbat morning. (Depending on whom you read, the fact that the Chief Rabbi was put up over Shabbat by the future king at Clarence House, a nearby royal residence, either softens the blow or adds fuel to the fire.) Whatever! The part of the ceremony that caught my own attention, however, had nothing to do with the Chief Rabbi—who, at any rate, is at the helm solely of the Orthodox rabbinate in England—and had to do rather with the unexpected—unexpected by myself, at any rate—feature of Charles being formally anointed with oil prepared in Jerusalem in a ceremony so private and so secretive that screens were brought out to shield him from the prying eyes of those in attendance. Coronation literally denotes the act of investing someone with kingship by setting a crown on his or her head. (The word “corona” is Latin for “crown.”) And that act, where the giant crown is set on the king’s head formally to invest him with kingship, took place fully publicly in front of the two thousand attendees and the twenty-seven million people watching on television in the U.K. and across the globe. So that’s what I expected to happen. But what was the deal with the anointment oil?

It was a little bit to be expected, I suppose. The House of Windsor has this odd sort of conception of itself as related in some magical way to the House of David. (Yes, that House of David, the one in the Bible.) It all has something to do with a crackpot theory that achieved immense popularity in the nineteenth century called British Israelism according to which the people of Great Britain are actually descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. This theory, which is wholly bogus, was popular for a long time in England. Books like Colonel Garnier’s Israel in Britain, John Wilson’s Our Israelitish Origin, and John Pym Yeatman’s The Shemetic Origin of the Nations of Western Europe were bestsellers for decades; the 1906 edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia gave the figure of 2,000,000 adherents in the U.K. and here in our country. Archeologists convinced that they were descended from the biblical Israelites began to excavate various places in the British Isles looking for ancient and/or sacred artifacts; the excavations at the Hill of Tara in Ireland in search of the lost Ark of the Covenant are especially noteworthy in that regard. But there were others too!

And then we get to the part about the royal family. According to this part of the theory, King Zedekiah, the last king of the House of David to rule over Judah before the Babylonian Exile in the 6^th century BCE, had a daughter who escaped along with the prophet Jeremiah and his amanuensis Baruch ben Neriah to Egypt. That seems unlikely but could, at least possibly, have happened. But then we move into true craziness. From Egypt, they theory posits, they managed to travel to Ireland where Zedekiah’s daughter had the good fortune to marry a local High King of Ireland. And it was from that union that the royal houses of Britain descended. And that is why the Stone of Scone played such a big role in the coronation ceremony: nowadays it is the stone installed beneath the Coronation Chair on which the king sits when being coronated, but originally, long before the Stone of Scone had that name, it was the stone upon which Jacob set his weary head down to sleep when he saw the ladder reaching up to heaven at Beth-El. And, yes, there’s a whole made-up story to explain how that gigantic rock made its way from Israel to Egypt and then through Europe all the way to Scotland.

I suppose this is all tied up somehow with the endlessly fascinating question of why the boys of the House of Windsor since the time of George I have apparently all been circumcised. That too is a vestigial feature of British Israelism, the theory that the royal houses of Great Britain are all somehow descended from King David. Talk about putting the brit back into Britain!

And then we get to the question of the anointing oil.

Made from olives taken from trees on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the hand-pressed oil is then mixed with oils taken from orange flowers, roses, jasmine, benzoin, cinnamon, neroli (whatever that is), and amber. First, the oil is poured into a special anointing spoon encrusted with pearls. And then, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the official anointer, dips his fingers into the oil and smears it on the king’s hands, breast, and head. How he gets his hand into the outfit to reach the king’s chest I couldn’t find out. Maybe he just wipes his finger on the outer garment. And that’s the ceremony. Does it remind you of anything?

How about this:

And Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel. And Samuel said to Jesse, “The Lord has not chosen these.” Then Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” And he said, “There remains yet the youngest, David, but behold, he is keeping the sheep.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and get him, for we will not sit down till he comes here.” And he sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome. And the Lord said, “Arise, anoint him, for this is he.” Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward. And Samuel rose up and went to Ramah.

Later on, the kingship is passed to Solomon in roughly the same way:

So Zadok the priest, Nathan the prophet … had Solomon ride on King David’s mule, and brought him to Gihon. And Zadok the priest then took the horn of oil from the tent and anointed Solomon. Then they blew the trumpet, and all the people said, “Long live King Solomon!” And all the people went up after him, and the people were playing on flutes and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth shook at their noise.

So you see where this is all coming from. Even the recipe has biblical roots in a passage that has been translated a thousand different ways, including by myself:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Take the following fine spices: 500 shekels of liquid myrrh, half as much (that is, 250 shekels) of fragrant cinnamon, 250 shekels of fragrant calamus, 500 shekels of cassia—all according to the sanctuary shekel—and a hin of olive oil. Make these into a sacred anointing oil, a fragrant blend, the work of a perfumer. It will be the sacred anointing oil … Anoint Aaron and his sons and consecrate them so they may serve me as priests. Say to the Israelites, ‘This is to be my sacred anointing oil for the generations to come. ³² Do not pour it on anyone else’s body and do not make any other oil using the same formula. It is sacred, and you are to consider it sacred.

And that’s where the recipe comes from—although in the Torah the oil is used to anoint the priests of Israel, not the king—and that’s from whence also derives the concept of investing a king with the kingship not by crowning him but with anointing oil.

The British Israel theory has been abandoned for more than a century by more or less all. Even King Charles would not claim descent from the House of David. (Or at least I hope he wouldn’t.) No one thinks the ten lost tribes of Israel somehow turned into the Celts and the Saxons and the Angles and the Picts of old Britain. And yet there was just enough in the coronation ceremony to constitute a whiff of the old sentiment, the discredited but ancient theory, the magical connection of the House of Windsor with the line of kingship chosen by God in Heaven to rule over Israel.

Should we be pleased or horrified by all this? I suppose the answer would have to be: a little bit of both. It neither pleases nor displeases me to know the king is circumcised. The Archbishop can shmear as much olive oil as he wishes on the new king, but that does not mean he gets to transcend the House of Windsor and claim some sort of attenuated but real descent from the House of David. The whole thing is, to say the least, bizarre. On the other hand, that specific aspect of King Charles’s coronation ceremony points to the ultimate legitimacy of the notion that an anointed king from the House of David will yet rule over Israel. Did I mention that mashiach is the Hebrew word for “anointed one”?

An Honest Man

I was saddened this last week to hear of the death at age eighty-eight of Harold S. Kushner, Rabbi Laureate of Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and one of the most successful author-rabbis of his day. Or any day. He will be remembered for many things by those who knew him personally, but most others will recall him primarily for his six best-selling books, of which When Bad Things Happen to Good People, published more than forty years ago in 1981, was both the most successful and the most widely acclaimed. It remains in print in more than a dozen languages; more than four million copies were sold in the first twenty years after it was written. Amazingly, given that it was written by a rabbi drawing on the wellsprings of Jewish thought for his material, it was widely successful among non-Jewish readers as well as Jewish ones. And I can speak to that aspect of the book’s appeal personally: I knew a Christian minister back in B.C. who routinely gave copies to congregants trying to find their way through grief to solace.

My personal connection is that Harold Kushner and I both served as editors of the journal Conservative Judaism, as did also my predecessor at Shelter Rock, Myron M. Fenster. But that was more of a coincidence than anything else; what made me admire him the most was the breadth of his learning and, even more than that, his willingness to write and teach honestly always and without exception. For readers unfamiliar with the Jewish bookshelf of the four decades since When Bad Things Happen to Good People came out, this may not sound like such a big deal. And, really, it shouldn’t be. But the truth is that writing about theological ideas without dissembling or intentionally obfuscating, following ideas logically along their natural progression without feeling the need to avoid stress-inducing conclusions, and not mistranslating texts because their simple meaning would be upsetting or unduly challenging to traditional beliefs—these should be the natural tools any author possessed of spiritual and intellectual integrity (and particularly any Jewish author writing about Judaism or the nature of Jewish faith) should bring to his or her craft. But that is certainly not how things are in the real world of Jewish books, a world in which people routinely publish books in which they declaim as simple truths ideas that they find appealing and sustaining, but which they cannot say with any certainty at all are true.

Knowing the back story of When Bad Things Happen to Good People is crucial to appreciating its worth. The story itself is terrible. The Kushners had a son named Aaron who suffered from a disease called progeria and who died in 1977. Progeria is a terrible thing, a condition that leads to premature and rapid aging. This year’s Broadway hit, Kimberly Akimbo, features a bizarrely upbeat take on the disease, depicting the title character afflicted with it almost as fortunate because of the deep insights her misery suggests to her adolescent self. But the reality is nothing like what you see on stage and is truly tragic: when Aaron Kushner was ten years old, he had the body of a sixty-year old. When he died, he was as tall a toddler and weighed as little as you’d expect. And then, after such a strange trajectory through an impossible childhood, he died just a few days following his fourteenth birthday.

This is the kind of thing no one who hasn’t personally experienced can imagine. But most parents forced by circumstance to live through the kind of nightmare that features the death of an innocent lad who has never had a moment of normalcy in his short life would at least have the luxury, if that’s the right word, of being left alone by the world to work through their emotions in peace. Or, if that’s not quite true—the shiva week is, after all, designed specifically to make sure mourners are not left alone at all with or in their grief—then at least it is true that most people would be allowed to work through their loss without having to test that work against the dogmatic lessons of classical Jewish (or Christian or Buddhist or any) theology. Most people would be allowed to grieve in peace.

But Rabbi Kushner was not just anyone, He was the rabbi of a large congregation filled with people eager to condole with him  and with his wife, to help—even if only slightly—to dissipate the cloud of misery that had visited the Kushners’ home and left such terrible sadness in its wake. And—and this is the key part—and eager also to hear their spiritual leader explain how such horrific sadness could have been visited upon a man whose entire life had been devoted to serving others. Wasn’t God a just Judge? Isn’t that notion—that God judges the world fairly and honorably, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked—isn’t that idea at the very core of the High Holiday liturgy? If God visits misery on people arbitrarily, then why be good at all? And if God only visits misery on people who deserve it because of their wicked deeds, then how can people explain the suffering of people—like Rabbi and Mrs. Kushner—who appear to do only good in the world? And even if they did deserve—for some secret reason—to suffer the loss of a child, then what did the child himself do to merit such a severely truncated life? Surely, the boy was not responsible for his own misery!

For Jewish people, none of these questions can be asked without reference to the Shoah. And that was part of things too—Harold Kushner was born in 1935, so was just growing into his teenaged years as the true dimensions of the losses endured by the Jews of Europe were becoming known. He went to high school in Brooklyn, then to Columbia as an undergraduate, then to JTS, my own alma mater, where he was ordained in 1960. This was long before people were prepared even tentatively to try to work out a way to maintain traditional faith in a benevolent and just God against wartime stories of depravity and barbarism so horrific that even now, scores of years later, they seem unimaginable to most. The weak and unsatisfying idea put out by most who even tried to respond theologically—and which I myself heard spoken aloud many times during my years at JTS—was that the Shoah was a mystery that by its very nature will never be explained adequately…and that the best path forward would therefore be not even to try to explain it cogently or rationally lest failed attempts lead away from traditional observance or faith.

But the death of Aaron Kushner sparked something in his father that could not be tamped down with reference to divine inscrutability or ontological mystery. He was a rabbi and an honest man. He found himself paralyzed by grief and unable to explain how his blameless son could have suffered and died if Judge God is all-knowing, just, and fair. Most would just move forward and try to forget. But Harold Kushner didn’t forget. Or maybe he simply couldn’t forget. But neither could he stay where he was mired in melancholy—time was marching on and he needed to move along with it.

And so he began to write his book that became the most famous of all his works. In it, he took on the questions that most prefer—and prefer vastly—to ignore. And he produced an answer that worked for him. He angered many with his book. Among radical traditionalists, he was vilified for daring to write as he did. Some of my own teachers at JTS wrote unflattering reviews in which they breathlessly revealed that the solutions he proposed were inconsonant with traditional theological tropes. But the book was resonant not with thousands, but with millions. Countless readers who hadn’t ever studied theology seriously but who had experienced excruciating loss understood that Rabbi Kushner was writing about them, speaking to them, and baring his soul for them. I was in graduate school when the book came out. I read it almost as soon as it was available. And I was fully engaged by what he wrote: not by the details so much, but by the breathtaking honesty of a man unwilling to find comfort in fantasy…and yet who was also unwilling to abandon his faith and find solace in atheism.

The thesis of the book is that God is infinitely good but not infinitely powerful, and that the notion of divine omnipotence—that is, the idea of an all-powerful God—is so inconsonant with the world as we experience it in the context of our daily lives as to make it a ridiculous foundation upon which to build anything at all, let alone a spiritual life. And so, embracing the idea that God is infinitely good and just—but not that God can step into any situation to fix it and make it right—Kushner moves forward from chapter to chapter. Using anecdotal evidence gleaned from his own career as a preacher and a pastor but also providing textual support from the Psalms and from other biblical passages, Kushner makes a reasonable case for embracing faith as the foundation for life itself but without falling prey to the fantasy that God can right every wrong, that God could have saved all the children murdered by the Nazis but just didn’t for some reason, that God could easily have cured little Aaron of his terrible disease but decided for some inscrutable reason not to.

It's powerfully and intelligently written, that book. I read it when it came out and was astounded by the man’s insistence on not looking away no matter how painful staring directly into the light might be. Here was the honest man Diogenes sought. And that I myself also sought…and found in Harold Kushner.

May his memory be for a blessing. And may he rest in peace.