The Jewish Home Beautiful

Among the many ways I serve Shelter Rock is as the official sorter of dropped-off boxes of books their owners don’t want to hold onto but can’t quite bring themselves to throw out. The books in such boxes divide down easy into two categories: non-sacred books that we send to a thrift shop, and prayerbooks that we box up and store to hand off to the genizah guy who comes periodically to Shelter Rock to retrieve our stash of unwanted or damaged holy books and respectfully to bury them in the earth. There are the occasional exceptions to the rule. Sometimes, for example, I find book that would actually be a reasonable addition to our library. But it is extremely unusual for me to find a book in such a box that I don’t know of or that I haven’t ever seen before. (It does happen…but only very rarely.) If any reader would like one of those Israeli prayerbooks with faux silver covers tastefully adorned with greenish-blue Eilat stones, just let me know: I have a stack in my office just waiting for anyone who likes his or her prayerbook to have some serious heft and/or to be bound in shiny metal.

And now I get to the meat of my story: a few months ago, someone left off one of those boxes…and it actually had a book in it with which I wasn’t at all familiar. At first, I didn’t understand what a treasure it actually was. In fact, it was, as books go, quite ordinary-looking. Bound in blue cloth, its title, The Jewish Home Beautiful (emblazoned in golden letters across the top of the front cover), suggested, or at least suggesting to me, that it was a cookbook or some sort of Emily-Post-ish guide to Jewish dinner parties. I set the book aside, dealt with the rest of the box’s contents, then forgot about it. But then I found it under a pile of papers just a few weeks ago and this time I did open it and read it…and decided on the spot that it would be the subject of my Thanksgiving-weekend letter to you all this year.

The book, written by Betty D. Greenberg and Althea O. Silverman, was published by the Women’s League of the United Synagogue of America (as it was then called) in 1941, then reprinted in 1942, 1945, 1947, 1948, and 1950. Its authors were, in their day, well known: Betty Greenberg was the wife of Rabbi Simon Greenberg, one of the vice chancellors of the Jewish Theological Seminary for all the years of my residence there and a major figure in American Jewish life for scores of years. Althea Silverman was the wife of Rabbi Morris Silverman, the very long-time rabbi of The Emanuel Synagogue of West Hartford, Connecticut, and in his day the foremost translator and editor of prayer books in use in Conservative synagogues. The book itself is out of print, and has been for decades. But, this being the 21^st century, that is no real issue: you can see the whole book for yourself just by clicking here. (What a world!)  Also, you can read about both women in detail in JTS Chancellor Shuly Schwartz’s extremely interesting book, The Rabbi’s Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life, published by NYU Press in 2006.

But I want to focus on the book itself today, not its authors. Unexpectedly, The Jewish Home Beautiful comes in two iterations. One, the narrative version written by Betty Greenberg, was clearly intended to be read as an extended essay on the Jewish home. But the other, a dramatized version by Althea Silverman, was actually produced at the Joint Sisterhood Assembly in the Temple of Religion at the New York World’s Fair in September of 1940. But the year of publication is key here too: knowing what was happening to European Jewry as this book was printed and reprinted lends the experience of encountering it a certain eeriness. Yet the introduction to the third edition, published just two months before V-E Day and thus after the liberation of Treblinka and Auschwitz, too makes no reference to the Shoah and only nods in passing to the World War itself by expressing satisfaction that the book by then had been read and enjoyed by “hundreds of men and women” in the Armed Forces of our nation.

It would be easy to write off the Women’s League’s willingness to publish and republish a book about the Jewish home while unimaginable catastrophe was striking the Jews of Europe as a way of staving off a reality too horrible actually to contemplate and thus best dealt with by looking as far away as possible. Or perhaps there is a different way to explain its existence.

The world was still burning in March 1945 as The Jewish Home Beautiful went into its third printing. The war raged on. The fiend was still alive, still at the helm of his sinking ship, still bringing death and misery to countless millions caught in the crossfire…and that is specifically not to mention the war against the Jews that continued to be fought by the foe’s minions until the final capitulation. But our authors were possessed of a different vision, I think, one that seems almost impossible to fathom given how far down the pike we have come from where they were when they wrote their book. For these women, the great bulwark against barbarism and savagery was the intact home and, for them personally, the intact Jewish home. The stronger the home, the more safe the world. The more beautiful the Shabbat table, the more secure the universe. The more satisfying the Purim feast, the more strong the community. And so indeed are the women instructed to sing aloud in the dramatic version: “The Jewish Home Beautiful may be mansion or hovel, / On Boulevard, Avenue, or slum-crowded street. / With woman as priestess to tend to its altars, / Each home is a Temple, each hearth is a shrine. / While men build our houses and men fill our houses, / Women make these houses—homes.”

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since those words were sung aloud in the Temple of Religion in Flushing Meadows. The notion that the greatest thing any of us could ever to combat the forces of darkness in the world is to marry, to become parents…and to create homes that will then serve collectively as the sea wall that holds back the swirling, devastating waters of intolerance, indecency, injustice, and inequality—that is an idea that will strike most today as, at best, quaint. But what if Betty Greenberg and Althea Silverman were right? What if the dike that holds back the darkness best is not an army or an inventory of nuclear warheads but the family itself…and the home that family inhabits? For outsiders looking in, I suppose that the notion that the way to combat evil is to set a gorgeous Shabbat table will seem, to say the very least, naïve. It will seem that way to many Jewish people as well. But for those of us who know the Jewish home from the inside—not the bastardized, mostly unfunny parody-version promulgated by comedians, including particularly Jewish comedians, who themselves have no interest in living in such families or such homes—for those of us who know Jewish home life at its very finest and whose courage to face the world derives directly from the strength that inheres in such homes, that notion will seem almost obvious.

For me personally, Thanksgiving is the American version of the ideas set forward in The Jewish Home Beautiful, a book published when the world couldn’t have been darker that simply recommends that Jewish people respond to the horror by making stronger, richer, and more beautiful their homes, by transforming those homes into their personal bulwarks against whatever the world can serve up. In the end, the walls of Jericho didn’t protect the people of Jericho any more than the walls of Rome protected the Romans. But I believe, as did Betty and Althea in their day, that the walls of the Jewish home can indeed protect us and make us safe. And that is the gift from the past that I offer up as my Thanksgiving gift to you all. I hope you all had satisfying, happy Thanksgivings. And I hope that the strength of the home that we all feel at peak moments like Thanksgiving inspires us to create that kind of experience not annually on other people’s holidays, or not solely on other people’s holidays, but on our own as well…and particularly on Shabbat. 

Thanksgiving 2021

As I’m sure many of my readers also were, I was captivated by the story in the paper last week about Dr. M. J. Eberhart, age 83, the retired eye doctor from Alabama also known as Nimblewill Nomad who hiked both into Dalton, Massachusetts, and into the record books last week by becoming the oldest person known to have hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. It’s not a trifling accomplishment; the trail is about 2,200 miles long, stretching out between Mount Katahdin in Maine and Springer Mountain in Georgia. It’s a long walk. If you read Bill Bryson’s terrific account of his effort to hike the trail, A Walk in the Woods, published by Broadway Books back in 1998, you’ll understand something of Dr. Eberhart’s accomplishment. (The movie version starring Robert Redford as Bryson was good enough, but I found the book far more entertaining and way funnier.) The reason he ended up in Massachusetts rather than Maine or Georgia is because he walked the trail in stages and ended up at one point traveling north in a car to Maine and then walking south from Ketahdin to the precise spot at which he could legitimately say that he had completed the whole thing. That, of course, hardly diminishes his accomplishment. To say the least, I am impressed.

His story is interesting in its own right and his accomplishment, impressive and laudable. But the reason I thought of writing about Dr. Eberhart in my pre-Thanksgiving letter this year is because of an off-hand comment I heard on the radio a few days ago that struck me as worth pondering as we approach our best American holiday. The host was discussing the story of the doctor’s accomplishment and wondering aloud what could possibly have prompted a man his age to undertake that kind of test of his own stamina. The host, who was maybe a third Nimblewill’s age (if not younger), suggested that the reason must have had to do with the need we sometimes feel to demonstrate to the world something we know about ourselves but have no way of proving other than by doing it out loud and in public “He must have known he could do it,” the nice young man opined, “and that’s why he did it—to show to the world something he already knew.”

I don’t know the man. I have no idea why he took this on or what he hoped ultimately to accomplish. But I’d like to think the real story is the precise opposite of what the young radio guy thought: that the man didn’t undertake the hike to show the world something he already knew about himself, but to discover something about himself that he himself didn’t know. In other words, I’d like to think that this was not about a senior citizen showing the world how healthy and remarkably fit he was so everybody could then shower him with praise, but rather about a man finding the courage to test himself, to put his hand to the fire, to learn something about himself that could only be found out conclusively through the doing of the deed under consideration. In other words, what impresses me about Dr. Eberhart’s is the degree to which it is interpretable as an expression of one of the best parts of our American ethos and, as such, something more than worthy to contemplate as Thanksgiving approaches.

As I understand it, this willingness to grow, to test ourselves, to see if we can successfully summon up the inner strength necessary to reach for something that lies just beyond our grasp—this refusal ever to accept that we have already done all we can in life and have no specific reason to try to do even more is the most American of all virtues.

The story of Thanksgiving is usually reduced to the great feast of 1621 at which the fifty-odd surviving Mayflower passengers joined together with about ninety Wampanoag under the leadership of famed King Massasoit to share in a late-autumn meal. (There had been one hundred one board when the Mayflower landed a year earlier, but about half died in the course of their first year in North America.) That feast—described by William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation and by Edward Winslow in his Mourt’s Relation—has its own complicated background and legacy: to read it as a celebration of the degree to which tolerance and mutual respect were the foundation stones upon which the Europeans who eventually came to occupy all of North American built their new country rings especially hollow in the wake of the truth about the horrific deaths of more than a hundred native American children in a federally-operated boarding school in Nebraska between 1884 and 1934 coming to light. (For more details, click here. To set this in context by comparing the fate of these poor children to the more than four thousand Indian children who died in the residential school system in Canada under the joint auspices of the Catholic Church and the Canadian government, click here. To add Australia and the more than 100,000 aborigine children forcibly removed from their families and mostly never heard from again to the story, click here.)

But to abandon Thanksgiving because of the horrific fate of the native people who possibly thought the future would bring peaceful co-existence when they sat down to their meal of venison and wild turkey is at least a little to miss the point. That part of our nation’s past, so long ignored by adults and left untaught to our children in school, needs to be brought to the fore if the kind of national contemplative consideration that could possibly lead to atonement and reconciliation is ever to take place. But the notion of a nation coming into being to see if the lofty republican ideals the Founders embraced could actually serve as the foundation upon which a democratic nation could come to exist—something that had occasionally been attempted, but never actually accomplished  before their time—that notion is what animates Thanksgiving for me.

Dr. Eberhart could not possibly have known if he could complete the Appalachian Trail when he set out. I suppose he thought he might be able to, but he can’t have known for sure. How could he have? But what he did surely know was that the only one way to find out was actually to go into the woods and start walking. And so was it with our nation at its inception: none could have known if the lofty ideals our Founders learned and embraced could actually be brought to bear in the formation of a modern nation-state. I suppose they must surely have hoped that would be the case. But they can’t have known it with any certainty until they set forth, one step forward at a time, towards independence.

When Thoreau withdrew to Walden Pond in 1845, he had the same notion in mind: to see if he could do something he had no idea whether he could accomplish:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms....

I don’t know if high school students still read Walden these days, but they should. The spirit that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth and Thoreau to Walden is the same spirit that brought Dr. Eberhart to the Appalachian Trail. I like to think that I can add my name to that list, at least a little: I didn’t know if I could spend a lifetime preaching and teaching without succumbing to despair or uncertainty about my vocation until I set to it and found out. That notion of not knowing if you can do something and then plunging forward into life precisely to find out—that is the idea that strikes me as the most quintessentially American of virtues. Nimblewill Nomad is just our latest, and very impressive, example! And with that thought in mind, I wish you all a very happy and self-challenging Thanksgiving. 

Pigs

Sometimes two articles that pop up in the press the same week that, despite the fact that they have nothing to do with each other really, practically beg to read in each other’s light. There was an excellent example of this just last week. Was it synchronicity or mere serendipity? Or am I making something out of nothing? Read on to find out!

Like many of my readers, I’m sure, I was amazed—and thrilled—to read a few weeks ago about the successful transplant at NYU Langone in Manhattan of a kidney grown in a genetically-altered pig into a human being. Everything about the experiment was remarkable. The patient was, other than legally, dead—in other words, possessed of no brain function but still being made to breathe in and out by a ventilator. Normally, the time would have come for the family to make that most awful of decisions: whether to accept that the patient is gone and allow the machine to be turned off, or whether to hold back just a bit longer and hope for a miracle. In this case, though, a third option presented itself when the family was asked if they would agree to allow the doctors to see if a kidney grown in a genetically-altered pig could function well, or at all, in a human being. The patient clearly had nothing to lose. The family agreed. And so, while the ventilator kept the patient breathing, the doctors hooked up the kidney and stepped back to see what would happen.

What happened is as strange as it is miraculous. According to Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, it began to function normally “almost immediately.” And so we had, and for the first time ever, a patient with a functioning kidney that originated in a pig that the scientists had altered genetically to make its organs more compatible with the human body and thus less likely to be rejected. The experiment only went on for 50-odd hours, after which time the ventilator was disconnected and the patient died. But for as long as the patient was alive, the kidney functioned well.

This was a huge breakthrough. (Dr. Dorry Segev, a professor of transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins, was quoted in the paper as using that exact expression to describe the success of the operation, adding that this breakthrough was a “big, big deal.” Click here.) I’m hardly a professor of surgery, but even I can see why he would have said that: more than 90,000 Americans are waiting in line for a donor kidney, but there were only 23,401 kidney transplants in 2020. About a dozen people waiting for transplants die daily. But up until now there appeared to be no way around the basic problem that the only source for kidneys was from living or not living human donors…and that there are way too few of such people to provide enough kidneys to go around.

So to centerstage now steps the team from NYU Langone headed by Robert Montgomery to make the remarkable announcement that it could be possible genetically to alter not one or two, but thousands upon thousands of pigs to make their organs more suitable for transplant into human beings. (These pigs could and would be raised for this specific purpose.) Nor are we talking solely about kidneys. Dr. Amy Friedman, chief medical officer of LiveOnNY, an organ procurement organization, was quoted in that same article mentioned above as saying that she could easily imagine using this new procedure to procure new hearts and livers, as well as other organs, for sick people who might not survive without them. We have clearly come a long way from that day in 1984 when Dr. Leonard Baily transplanted the heart of a non-genetically-altered baboon into the chest of the child then known as Baby Fae (her real name was Stephanie Fae Beauclair), who then lived for three weeks—two full weeks longer than any previous recipient of an animal’s heart.

The question of the ethical reasonableness of “using” animals for their functioning organs is a complex one. On the one hand, there is something peculiar about feeling reasonable about raising animals for the slaughter and then eating them, but not about using them to grow organs that can save people’s lives. Nor does it seem all that ethically important that Americans do eat pork but don’t eat baboons or chimpanzees: raising animals at all to serve some human need is the basic question here, but it’s one for which Western culture has a very clear answer. Still, the idea of thinking of animals as boxes of organs instead of as living creatures endowed with their specific version of the dignity that inheres in all life—that doesn’t sit well with me either. And I speak as someone who was the recipient just this last May of a new aortal valve that was once part of an ox. I don’t feel a deep sense of kinship with that ox, although I suppose I harbor a vague sense of gratitude towards that anonymous beast. But the bottom line is still that I cannot see any moral obligation to equate animal life with human life. Killing animals for a legitimate purpose is not murder. Eating meat is not sinful. Using the carcasses of slaughtered animals purposefully is wise, not sinful. Yes, of course, the Torah requires that we only eat certain animals as a way of demonstrating our understanding that the fauna of the world were created by the Creator, who thus had the right to permit us to eat some of them and not others. And it is also true that the ones we do eat have to be slaughtered, because the Torah requires kindness even towards animals, in as painless a way as possible. But the bottom line is that the only way to get that meat is to raise animals for the slaughter and then to kill them, and that is fully countenance by Scripture. For a very interesting essay by my friend, Rabbi Dr. Martin Lockshin, about whether God originally intended for humankind to be vegetarians, click here. But no traditional rabbi, including Rabbi Lockshin, argues seriously that killing animals and eating their meat is a sign of moral depravity. And while the thought that there could some day be no one at all who dies in this country (or anywhere) while waiting for an organ transplant still sounds like an amazingly optimistic fantasy, wouldn’t we have once said the same thing about a dozen other medical advances that we’ve all come to think of as commonplace?

So the other article in the paper that struck me as worth reading against the one about the pig kidney transplant had to do with, of all things, kosher pork. Impossible Foods, the nation’s largest purveyor of plant-based meat substitutes, has perfected and is already marketing a kind of pork substitute that, being made solely of plants, is entirely kosher. Yet the Orthodox Union, the world’s largest kosher certification agency, has declined to grant the product its much-coveted OU certification. The rabbi in charge was quoted in the paper the other day as saying that the product is completely kosher, but that they will nevertheless not certify it as such because they are afraid people will be offended by the idea of kosher pork.

To such people, I reference the story about the kidney transplant. If you were dying of kidney failure and the possibility existed of saving your life with a transplant derived from a genetically-altered pig, my guess is that you’d agree to the operation pretty quickly. And that being the case, there’s probably something morally amiss in being so revolted by pigs that the thought of kosher pork is repellant or disgusting. That regular pork (i.e., the kind not made of plants) isn’t kosher doesn’t mean that pigs aren’t God’s creatures. And that being the case, allowing yourself to be so repulsed by any animal that the thought of a plant-based substitute for its meat being certified as kosher is repugnant—that is a repudiation of the faith in the goodness of Creation that Scripture wishes us all to adopt as a foundation stone of our approach to the world and its things. If the product is made of plants and is kosher, then the OU is behaving—to say the least—mercurially by declining to certify it as kosher. And for all those kosher Jews of whose negative response the OU is so worried, people who presumably can’t imagine why God made pigs in the first place, the team at NYU Langone has produced a pretty satisfying answer.

Remembering Martin Davidowicz

I was extremely moved by the description in the press last week of the burial of Martin Davidowicz in the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery, located on the northern slope of Mount Herzl just outside Jerusalem. The cemetery was originally established in 1949 specifically as a final resting place for soldiers who died defending Jerusalem during the Israeli War of Independence, but has since become the main cemetery for members of the Israel Defense Forces who have fallen in the line of duty. For Israelis, there is no more sacred ground, no place in the nation more suffused with the national will to survive and to thrive as focused through the effort specifically to honor those who have given their lives over the years to protect the State and its people.

What is interesting—and, to me, beyond moving—is that Martin Davidowicz never actually lived in Israel. In fact, he died before the State of Israel came into existence and never even set foot on the soil of what in his lifetime was still the British Mandate of Palestine. Yet he was nonetheless buried last week on Mount Herzl with full military honors and recognized as the first paratrooper to die in the service of the country he hoped to help create. He was twenty-one years old at the time of his death in 1948.

Davidowicz was born in 1927 in what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1943, when he was only sixteen years old, he and his family were deported to Auschwitz, where all but Martin were killed. He somehow survived as a slave laborer and was eventually liberated in the spring of 1945—at which time he was still only eighteen years old. He returned home, served in the Czech Army, and then, upon discharge, signed on to a course the Czech Army was offering to young Jewish men who wished to participate as paratroopers in the struggle to bring a Jewish state into existence in the Land of Israel. And it was in the course of that training course—and, at that, only three weeks into it—that a Czech Army officer accidentally shot and killed this poor lad who had survived Auschwitz, the annihilation of his family, and a stint in the Czech Army. Since the whole paratrooper training program was being conducted secretly, he was buried surreptitiously the next day in a nearby Jewish cemetery that the Nazis had somehow neglected to destroy. He was therefore neither a citizen of Israel nor an IDF combatant when he died. But Davidowicz was nonetheless formally recognized as the nation’s first fallen IDF paratrooper in 2001— and a full fifty-three years after his death.

For twenty years, nothing happened. And then, just this year, the Israeli government, realizing its oversight, began what became a successful effort to exhume Davidowicz’s remains and rebury him, this time with full military honors, on Mount Herzl among so many others of Israel’s war dead.

At Shelter Rock, when we recite Yizkor we always include a prayer for the fallen of the IDF, both those who gave their lives to bring the State of Israel into existence and those who fell in service to their nation since the day statehood was proclaimed in 1948. And my custom is almost always to introduce that prayer by reminding the congregation that the War of Independence was fought—not entirely but to a serious extent—by young people whose families had been murdered by Nazis and who were thus those families’ sole living survivors when they died. Since such young people by definition had no one to say any Yizkor prayers for them, I always invite the congregation to join me in taking on the role of surrogate family members and praying that they rest in peace and that their memory be a source of blessing for us all.

I’ve introduced that prayer with words along those lines for decades. But I’ve never mentioned the name of any specific person in that category for fear of making the memorial about that person and not all the others as well. But now that Martin Davidowicz has stepped out of time to take his place, at least briefly, on the front page, I thought it would be worthwhile to tell his story. May he rest in peace. And may his memory be a source of blessing for us all.