How Nations Grow

What is the right model for thinking about countries? Are they “like” people, who start off in infancy, then move through adolescence and adulthood into old age? That model sounds reasonable at first blush—we talk about the “birth” of nations all the time—and logical, but that kind of thinking seems necessarily also to impute an unavoidable future of inevitable decline to even the healthiest of the world’s nations. And decline is not the worst of it: there is also the detail to consider that human life is inexorably finite, and that eventually the curtain comes down on even the most robust among us. Some would argue, I’m sure, that that model, dour implications and all, is exactly how countries live…and eventually die. The world—or, rather, the world’s history books—are filled, after all, with the stories of once-mighty nations that felt invincible in their heydays—but which eventually just stopped existing, even (like the old Soviet Union) without being defeated militarily in battle. Nor is there any paucity of nations to consider that were once world powers but which feel as though they eventually declined into healthy or unhealthy old age.

Or are other models more right for the history of nations and peoples? To ask the same question differently, are countries specifically unlike individuals in that they have the ability (which human beings lack but would all love to have) to morph forward from iteration to iteration specifically without facing the inevitability of decline and demise? Holland, for example, was once a mighty world power that controlled a huge empire with land holdings on five continents. Clearly, those days are long gone—all that’s left these days are a few islands in the Caribbean—yet it would seem odd to describe the Netherlands as a senescent nation merely because it was once immeasurably bolder militarily, more powerful, and more influential than it is today. More reasonable, I think, would be to say that Holland hasn’t declined as much as it has morphed forward into a new stage of national existence, into a new version of itself. Nor does it seem all that logical to argue that the death of the imperialist impulse that led nations to consider it reasonable to seize huge swaths of other people’s property and unilaterally to declare them part of a vast, far-flung empire must inevitably imply that the once-imperialist countries themselves too must eventually collapse. So if today’s Netherlands, with an annual Gross Domestic Product of more than $840,000,000,000 (which figure reflects a per capita rate of more than $50,000 per citizen, a rate higher than our own nation’s, Germany’s and the U.K.’s) isn’t reasonably understood as the doddering version of yesterday’s Dutch Empire, then perhaps we should be talking about metamorphosis rather than decline, about national growth forward specifically not characterized—or not inevitably characterized—by the inevitability of national decline and death.

All of these thoughts occurred to me this week as I perused an article in the paper this week that caught my attention, one in which it was noted that our country crossed an impressive, very interesting milestone last week when Governor Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate. It seems that, for the first time in history, there is not a single white, Protestant man or woman among the top governing officials, or perspective governing officials, of our country, considering in that category the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of both parties, the nine justices of the Supreme Court, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate majority leader. At first, it seemed unimaginable to me that that could be the case. I quickly made my own hand list, letting Wikipedia supply the details I wasn’t sure about. But my own research yielded the same results: the above-listed group of fifteen is made up of nine Catholics, three Jews, two Mormons, and one black Protestant. That’s all of them…and, just as the article said, not a white Protestant among them. Even granting that the president himself is, at least genetically speaking, as white as he is black, he is still far from the white Protestant model that held sway not for decades or for scores of years, but for the entire span of our country’s existence. Until now.

As recently as the 1952 presidential election year, that group of fifteen would have included only one individual who was not a white Protestant man, Felix Frankfurter. And although there has not been an election year since 1928 in which the entire group of fifteen has been white, Protestant, and male, that surely was the case for the 150 years of American history that preceded that year. I realize that one can make a reasonable argument that Abraham Lincoln, whose religious beliefs have been endlessly discussed, was not a “real” Protestant, but, at the end of the day, he worshipped in Protestant churches (without actually joining any) and regularly spoke in religious terms that most of us would easily identify with Protestant beliefs. One could make a similar argument about Thomas Jefferson, who is often vaguely labelled as a “Deist” (that is, as someone who believes in God without actually espousing any specific religious doctrine), but that too is a bit overstated in that he played a role in governing the Episcopal Church near Monticello and regularly referred to himself as a Christian (“"To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian….”) Other than the two of them, only four presidents weren’t or aren’t formal members of Protestant Churches while in office (Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, and President Obama), but all had ties to Protestant Churches and self-defined as Protestant Christians. Other than Andrew Johnson, every Vice President of the United States except for the incumbent has been a member of a Protestant church. (I hardly have to bother adding that all have also been white and male.)

I suppose I could have seen it coming. Maybe even I should have, but this detail that we have crossed the line into a world of American political leadership in which no one at all is a white man affiliated with a Protestant church caught me completely unawares. Nor do I want to interpret this development by viewing it through self-conscious Jewish eyeglasses and lauding it based on the assumption that the more multicultural our leaders are, the more tolerant their leadership will be, and thus also the less likely to find acceptable any traces of prejudice, including anti-Semitism. That probably is true. In fact, I think it probably definitely is true, but that’s not the sole point to consider. Instead, I’d like to use this detail in our evolving American story as a springboard for considering how nations grow.

For the most part, social policy moves ahead imperceptibly as people gradually, sometimes over decades, morph into more sophisticated versions of their former selves. Ideas that are commonplace fall away almost glacially slowly, but then are suddenly gone almost to the point of unimaginability just years after they were almost universally held. The notion of bus stations having separate washrooms for black people and white people is a good example of something that now seems so difficult to imagine so as almost to sound more quaint than malign, something like putting sinners in stocks in town squares to allow them to atone in public for their misdeeds. The idea that it is reasonable consciously and intentionally to pay women who have the same jobs as men lower wages than their male counterparts, I think, falls in the same category of an idea that was once widely considered rational, but which now sounds beyond peculiar. Even the notion that there could be societal merit in pressuring gay people to devote lifetimes to making believe they are straight, despite the misery that kind of pretense must almost invariably entail, seems impossible to square with our basic American commitment to tolerance and reasonability. Yet that was indeed how people felt, and for a very long time!

And that is how I think countries too grow. Unlike with respect to people, where growth inevitably leads at least eventually to demise, nations and societies can morph into healthier versions of themselves without the experience necessarily leading to decline. There was a time when it would have seemed impossible to imagine a black family in the White House. There was a time when people spoke self-consciously about Jewish or Catholic seats on the Supreme Court, as though neither group could or would ever be represented without a seat being reserved for them in advance. And there was a time when the thought of the political leadership of our country not being affiliated with mainline Protestant churches would have seemed as unlikely as the political leadership of Russia not being Communist. Yet we have cleared all those hurdles not because we are losing our sense of what it means to be an American as we slowly decline into national decrepitude, but because we have managed to maintain a lively, ongoing national debate about ideas that has allowed us to grow forward into an ever-more-sophisticated version of ourselves and our nation.

In people, there is always an ominous, slightly dark, aspect to growth. But in terms of society, growth does not imply inevitable degeneration. The fact that we have in our lifetimes crossed a line that we would have seemed not just unlikely to our parents or grandparents ever to cross, but one that would have seemed to them totally uncrossable—that is not a sign of moral deterioration or societal decay, but rather one of healthy growth towards an idea we all profess to hold dear: the ideal of a society in which people are evaluated based on the morality of their behavior and on their ethical worth as productive members of society, not on the color of their skin, their gender, or the spiritual path they follow. It’s a whole new world out there…and, in many ways, a far better one than the one we inherited from previous generations.

The Circle Closes

Is life a line or a circle? It’s a good question, but also a misleading one because, by framing the concept in mathematical terms, it makes it sound like the answer must be one or the other, a line or a circle. But the reality—not in the world of geometric grids, perhaps, but in life as we actually live it—is that life is a line and a circle, both a journey forward and a journey back around, both a trip into the future and an endless journey back into the past.

The circle part is the easier one to notice. In 1966, when I was a bar-mitzvah boy and my parents, acting entirely uncharacteristically, sent me off to Israel on the Jewish Agency program then called the Bar-Mitzvah Pilgrimage, we were lodged at a youth village near Givat Ada (now part of Binyamina) called Alonei Yitzchak. From there we made different trips to various parts of Israel, staying overnight in some places and returning back to the village when the destination was close enough not to require an overnight stay. I remember those tiyyulim to varying degrees, but the one that has stayed with me the most clearly over all these many years—now more than forty-five of them—is our trip to Jerusalem.

It was 1966. Israel was all of eighteen years old. The Six Day War, in the course of which Jerusalem would be reunited, was still a year in the future and the city was still divided in two by barbed wire fences and military checkpoints. The Mandelbaum Gate, located at the end of Shmuel Ha-Navi Street, was still very much in place and I recall the experience of being brought close up to it so we could peer through the barriers at the walls of the Old City being guarded in the distance by Jordanian soldiers. And that, other than when we were brought up to the roof of some tall, bullet-scarred building on what is now called Kikar Tzahal to peer through coin-operated telescopes at whatever we could see of the Old City from that lofty vantage point, was all we were to know of Old Jerusalem. Perhaps I was too young to feel disappointed, but New Jerusalem was more than exciting enough for me. I remember it all remarkably clearly, especially the nighttime scene in Kikar Tziyon and along Ben Yehudah Street. Yad Vashem, now a state-of-the-art museum, was still more like a series of ramshackle galleries housed in several one-story buildings in those days, but it had a profound effect on me nevertheless. The now-mostly-forgotten memorial to President Kennedy, called Yad Kennedy, was brand new in 1966 and that too had a real effect on me as well. (In retrospect, it seems odd to equate the two. But at the time, lacking perhaps the perspective of a life-long student of the Shoah, I remember being struck by the two as symbolizing, each in its own way, the horror of senseless violence.) But what struck me the most was the New City itself.

This was, of course, the Old Israel. Public telephones, when they worked at all, worked with tokens you had to buy in newspaper kiosks or at the post office and which you somehow never had quite enough of. International phone calls—the kind you made to your parents when you were lonely or needed more money—could only be made at special international telephone centers located mostly in the central post offices of most big cities. Not all public toilets featured actual toilet bowls. (Perhaps the less said in this specific regard the better.) Israel, even at eighteen, was brand new, the overwhelming majority if its citizenry either immigrants from elsewhere or the children of such immigrants. The Shoah, of course, even not within the walls of Yad Vashem, was the unseen backdrop against which current events still unfolded. (That is still true, I think, to a certain extent. But not in the same way it was in the 1960s, when the world was filled with survivors still in their thirties and forties, and child survivors who had come to British Palestine even before independence were still on active duty as soldiers of the IDF or studying in university.)

And into the middle of all that somehow parachuted myself, the young me whose parents were still dithering about whether to permit him—me—to take the F-train into the city on my own. It was, to say the very least, an experience that changed my life. Or, to speak less charitably, that would have changed my life if I had already had enough of one for it to be changed. But the bottom line was that my visit to Israel, and particularly my visit to Jerusalem, set the course for my life that I feel myself still following. It’s been a long time. And it’s been a long journey. Mostly, it’s been a line. But it’s also been a kind of a circle.

When we visited Jerusalem, we stayed at Kiryat Moriah. Now Kiryat Moriah is a huge, modern Jewish Agency campus that hosts all kinds of tour groups, seminars, Birthright groups, and missions from abroad. But then, back in 1966, it was something more akin to a slightly dilapidated youth village set down between the southern suburb of Talpiyot and the apple orchards of Ramat Rachel, one of Israel’s oldest kibbutzim. It was also on the border, situated (if I remember correctly) adjacent to the strip of No Man’s Land that separated Israel from Jordan and far more similar in its feel to Alonei Yitzchak, “our” youth village, than to the college campus it resembles today. And it was there that we stayed, feeling brave for being so close to the Jordanian patrols we were assured were passing by menacingly on their side of the line as we slept peacefully on ours. It’s strange—I have only the haziest recollections of all sorts of things that came afterwards in my life, but that experience of visiting divided Jerusalem as a bar-mitzvah boy remains with me as a kind of watershed event that divided and still divides the part of my life that came before it from the part that followed.

Nothing stays the same. Within a year, Jerusalem was united, its earlier iteration as a divided city merely a recollection shared by those of us who were present actually to experience it. And, soon enough, I myself moved into the next part of adolescence, the part that involves some awkward combination of physical, mental, emotional, hormonal, and (slightly) spiritual growth, the part that relegated my own earlier iterations to the realms of pleasant and unpleasant memory. Kiryat Moriah too changed, as noted above, but only cosmetically: physically it remained where it always had been: on Ha-Askan Street in the part of Jerusalem now called Arnona. And it was right there, on the street facing the main gate into Kiryat Moriah, that Joan and I just spent the first three weeks of our summer vacation time trying to make our priorly unfurnished apartment into a living space that could accommodate people actually living there.

It all worked out beautifully. The place is lovely. The light, airy, sunny space we recalled from when we first saw the place was just as recalled. We found, even, a tenant—actually two tenants, young men pursuing degrees in Jewish education at the Pardes Institute—who will stay in the place until we can return next summer. Everything we needed, we somehow were able to find in some combination of the furniture stores on Herzl Street in Tel Aviv, the lighting fixture shops in Talpiyot, the shuk in Jaffa, and, of course, the giant, magnificently air-conditioned IKEA in Rishon Letziyyon. And so the circle closed: in the some parallel universe, the thirteen-year-old me is still lying in bed at night somewhere in Kiryat Moriah wondering if there really are Jordanian soldiers just a few hundred yards away, but in this one, in the iteration of the multiverse that seems to us all to constitute unchallengeable reality, the considerably-older-me just spent three weeks sleeping right across the street, worried not about Jordanian soldiers but about the VISA bill that, just as surely as dawn the night, will inevitably follow our return from Zion.

Other circles also closed. We had lunch last Shabbat with the woman who, twenty-eight years ago, was our Lamaze teacher when Joan was pregnant with Max, our oldest child. We had a lovely visit with cousins of Joan’s whom we hadn’t seen in almost thirty years. I went to the Kotel, closed to Jewish visitors from Israel in 1966 but which I visited for the first time in 1974 when I was a counselor on a summer teen tour to Israel run by the then-robustly-functioning American Zionist Youth Federation, and had a fleeting vision of myself in that place in that summer between college and JTS trying, mostly (I fear) unsuccessfully, to explain to my young charges why the place mattered, why it was so meaningful for us to be able to visit the Wall not under the begrudging aegis of the Jordanian government or the United Nations, but under the watchful protection of a mighty Jewish army protecting the citizens of an independent Israel and their guests from harm.

All in all, we had a fabulous three weeks. In many ways, and excluding the year we spent in Israel when Max was born, it was the most meaningful, most satisfying visit to Israel we’ve ever had. There are so many more stories I want to tell, so much more I want to share with you all about our experiences. But for the moment I’ll have to content myself with what I’ve written above, with the bare outline of what it meant for us to take a few baby steps forward towards being part of Israel not just emotionally but physically and financially in a way we have dreamt about forever, but only now have found the wherewithal—and the nerve—actually to undertake.

Why I'm Not Afraid of Higg's Boson

It’s probably not possible to know less than I do about particle physics. I’m not even sure my sense of what particle physics is is all that accurate, let alone my sense of what it’s really all about. Obviously, I took physics in eleventh grade. (Wasn’t it a required course? I think it was, at least for an academic diploma.) And, if I remember correctly, not only did I pass the Regents’ exam but I even got a relatively good grade for the class. But that’s not as relevant as you’d think. For one thing, they hadn’t exactly even invented particle physics when I was in eleventh grade. For another, to pass the final and the Regents’ basically required memorizing lists of mostly inscrutable things without necessarily understanding them in any particular depth. I have a good memory. I learned it all. I spit it all back too, and accurately, thus legitimately earning my good grade. But any teacher will tell you that depth of understanding is only peripherally related to prowess in memorizing. That’s probably true in most contexts in academic life, but it seems to me that it applies especially to the study of science. Precisely memorizing equations, I was excellent at. Profoundly understanding their implications, not so much.

Over the years, I’ve read a few books that purported to explain physics to the bewildered. I read Gary Zukov’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters when it first came out in 1979. From there, I went on to read Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, which I believe was actually published before Zukov’s great book and which I also remember enjoying immensely. But I haven’t really kept up as an ever-increasing number of books intended to explain the “new” physics to laypeople such as myself has been published over the last decades. (I do however have in my possession a copy of John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality, which I am hoping to get to later this summer. But even that is not such a new book, just something I’ve been meaning to read for thirty years or so.)

All that being the case, I was surprised to note the degree to which I found myself emotionally caught up in the excitement this week surrounding the discovery of a subatomic particle that may well turn out to be the elusive Higgs boson. (And to describe the aforementioned boson as “elusive” is really to say almost nothing at all given the number of the world’s very brightest people who have spent the last several decades searching for some trace of its actual existence.) It played a crucial role in Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons, where it appeared as the source of the mysterious antimatter that was about to blow up the Vatican, but no effort was made to go further by explaining what a Higgs boson actually is. Nor, needless to say, did the book, or Ron Howard’s subsequent movie for that matter, make it obvious why should anyone in real life who doesn’t teach physics for a living should care. (If you were in the Vatican as it was about to explode, you would obviously care. But that’s just the point: absent the possibility of being blown up by it to smithereens, why would any of us outside of movie land or book land care about the elusive Higgs boson. That’s the question no one tried to answer.)

The first part, the “Higgs” part, is easy to explain: Higgs is Peter Higgs, a Scottish physicist now eighty-three years old but only thirty-five back in 1964 when he wrote and published a groundbreaking paper in which he posited the existence of the subatomic particle he imagined would have to exist to explain why particles have mass at all. Are you lost yet? I myself can’t quite seize it—and certainly not in all its technical detail—but the point seems to be that the existence of matter itself constitutes a puzzle for physicists. Who knew? Existence—the physical existence of real things made of molecules fashioned of atoms constituted of electrons and neutrons and protons, just as they taught me in eleventh grade—feels so real, so firm, so basic that it’s hard to see it as enigmatic. And, besides, what would be the alternative?

So it turns out that nothing is as clear as it feels at first. There are lots of alternatives. For one thing, my teacher (it also turns out) left out a lot of stuff. There are the three major –ons mentioned above, but there is also a whole class of even tinier—and we’re talking really, really tiny here—particles labelled sub-atomic that also have a role to play in the existence of things, particles like quarks and leptons that I didn’t learn anything at all about in eleventh grade because they hadn’t been identified or named back then. But the question—the really big question—regarding all these incredible little things is not whether they exist but why they do, why they exist garbed in matter at all. Indeed, if all these sub-atomic particles exist merely as energy, then it makes sense (sort of) to ask why they don’t just spend their time shooting around the universe at the speed of light. Indeed, one of the basic assumptions of physicists is that electromagnetic forces shouldn’t and don’t need mass to work. Yet these particles do indeed have mass and so something, somehow, must be giving it to them and for some reason. That is the question Professor Higgs was trying to answer back in 1963. And it was his answer—his specific answer—that scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, called CERN after its French initials, seemed almost confident they had almost certainly confirmed when, just a few days ago, they managed to use their Large Hadron Collider (a hadron is another subatomic particle) to smash two protons into each other, in effect blowing up two unimaginably tiny things into their even tinier constituent bits and seeing what landed on the collider’s floor.

The big question is why anyone should care, why I myself care. Among the many books on the subject I haven’t read is Leon Lederman’s bestseller from a few years ago, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Now I’m slightly sorry I didn’t. Perhaps the title put me off. Or maybe I was still unsure—the book came out almost twenty years ago—if science and religion could co-exist peacefully, if intellectual and spiritual integrity could possibly complement each other in the same human breast. Or possibly I just wasn’t sufficiently impressed by the author’s Nobel Prize in physics. Whatever, I didn’t read it. But now that I have read all about the events of the last couple of days in Geneva, I’m sorry I’m as little well-read in science, and particularly in physics, as I am. I’d like to read more. From my current vantage point, however, God does seem to have much to do with it.

The Bible begins, as every Religious School child knows, with the story of the creation of the universe. But the first part of the story is not quite as clear as it could be, nor is it ever told precisely as written. The opening lines, for example, will appear this way in my forthcoming translation of the Torah:
When God set to creating the sky and the earth, the latter was awash in soupy, undifferentiated nothingness. (Indeed, there was nothing but darkness covering the limitless depths when the spirit of God first danced across the dark water.) And yet, when God said “Let there be light,” there actually was light. And God, finding this light appealing, moved forward and, after willing that it be distinct from the primordial darkness it had partially replaced, named it “day” to distinguish it from the darkness God named “night.” And so it was on the very edge of existence that there was a first day, one consisting of nighttime and daylight.

That’s a bit of a loose translation, but it captures the heart of the matter, I hope, nicely: on the first of all days, God confronted the sludge of undifferentiated reality completely shrouded in darkness and then, possessed of the urge to create, created light and willed that it alternate with darkness to create time, or some semblance of ongoing time characterized by the ongoing alternation of day and night.

But of the origin of the primordial sludge that God would eventually separate out into heaven and earth, and into dry land and sea, the Bible says nothing, just as it also says nothing of the origin of God. Scripture thus leaves us with the sense that what existed before existence merely was, that it existed as the stuff of reality before God willed reality itself to exist. (It’s not a contest, but I’m relieved to see that I can make as little sense writing about the Bible as I can writing about particle physics. It’s a gift!) But, seriously, the notion that before existence existed, before all that is e’re was, before the Creator set to creating, there was something…and that the study of that something can lead us not to haughtiness or to self-absorbedness, but to reverence—that is where particle physics and theology meet.

The thought that scientists are coming ever closer—and perhaps have actually identified—the force within the universe that is responsible for the existence of physical reality does not fill me with theological dread. If anything, I find it increasingly peculiar for people to respond to great scientific advances, be they in the fields of medicine, cosmology, anthropology, astronomy, or physics, with spiritual nervousness. The scientists at CERN themselves are not sure if they’ve found the Higgs boson or merely some “Higgslike” particle that acts in the way Higgs imagined his elusive boson would. In matters such as these, even the most “certain” conclusions must always be considered tentative. But that too is as it should be. God, as I never seem to tire of stressing when I preach, is by definition beyond the ken of human beings. And, as a result, whatever we know of God, or claim to know of God, must too be considered tentative and theoretical. We can try to know. We can ruminate productively about all sorts of unknowable things. We can even hope that we are coming ever closer to the truth, not ever more distant from it. But to confuse arrogance with piety is as ridiculous in the religious context as it is in the realm of scientific research.

The Bible begins with God surveying nothingness and willing that it be something. To understand that notion, though, requires some facility in understanding what the notion of reality absent existence could possibly mean. The CERN scientists have merely—merely!—taken a giant step forward towards a reasonable, demonstrable explanation. Why would any person possessed of faith in God find that off-putting or upsetting? I have no idea!

Chasing the Dream

It’s been an up-and-down sort of week, and that’s not even starting in with the Supreme Court ruling about the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act. (I’ll write about that on another occasion when I’ve had more of a chance to digest the implications of the court’s ruling.)

On the down side, a German court in Cologne ruled that the circumcision of boys brings them “grievous bodily harm” and that, therefore, anyone who circumcises an infant risks arrest for assault. (More on this in weeks to come. The Jewish and Muslim communities did not take the news kindly) The Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, apparently acting with the approval of his Ashkenazi counterpart, publicly referred to me and my colleagues as “destroyers and saboteurs of Judaism” whose sole wish in life—or at least whose sole professional wish—is to “uproot the fundamental principles of the Torah” and thus actively to be working to “destroy the vineyards of the Lord of Hosts.” (He was responding to the decision by the Israeli government actually to pay the salaries of some few non-Orthodox rabbis who serve in remote, rabbinically underserved regions of the country, just as it pays the salaries of countless Orthodox rabbis who serve in every imaginable capacity throughout Israel. The Rabbinical Assembly of Israel, led by my colleague Rabbi Mauricio Balter, responded by filing a police complaint against Rabbi Amar accusing him—not at all unreasonably, in my opinion, given the shrill, angry tenor of the rabbi’s call for activism in the face of incipient pluralism—of inciting others to violence against him, and his and my colleagues in Israel.) The first vice-president of Iran, Mohammed Reza Rahimi, formally blamed the entire international drug trade on Jews and Zionists, whom he also noted, just a bit disconnectedly, were also responsible for the Russian Revolution of 1917. A man wearing a giant Elmo suit spent a few days in Times Square and Central Park delivering rabidly anti-Semitic speeches to the passers-by in which, among other things, he suggested they immerse themselves in the four volumes of Henry Ford’s viciously anti-Jewish pamphlets published together as “The International Jew.” (The police finally stepped in not to arrest faux Elmo, but merely to prevent him from polluting public space with his hate-filled venom. Elmo, for those of you too old to have watched Sesame Street as children and who haven’t watched with your own children or grandchildren, is the monster with red fur known for his famous disinclination ever to refer to himself in the first person. The actual Elmo is cranky, but not at all bigoted.) It’s been that kind of week!

On the up side of things, Joan and I bought a refrigerator. We also bought a washing machine and a dryer. Under normal circumstances, this would hardly be newsworthy. (The purchase was made without reference to circumcision, the Russian Revolution, the international drug trade, Henry Ford, the president’s health care initiative, or the Israeli chief rabbinate. Nor was I wearing an Elmo suit at the time of the purchase.) Nonetheless, it was a big moment for Joan and for me. And I thought I would wrap up this year of letter-writing to you all by telling you why.

One of the secrets of happy marriages that I always try to remember to share with my brides and grooms when we meet before their weddings is the concept of the shared dream. All sorts of compatibility issues sink marriages all the time, but the one area that seems to me the most essential to future happiness is the ability of a couple to project their commonly held hopes into the future, then to agree to travel together to the emerald city…and to subjugate less important projects to the sense of productive movement towards a great common goal. That lends marriage a sense of purpose, as well as a dynamic sense of motion forward…and that, in my opinion, is what differentiates marriage from even the finest and most satisfying friendships.

Somewhere along the way, Joan and I began to wonder what, if anything, we were going someday to leave to our children. Clearly, it is not going to be a fortune of money. And, yes, we talked and still do talk about one day composing a kind of ethical will stating clearly what we’ve learned of life and what we’ve come to value above all else, and what lessons we therefore wish to bequeath to our descendants as our moral legacy to them. But we also developed the idea of wanting to tie our family to Israel in a way that would transcend mere allegiance to the Zionist ideal, and which would constitute a kind of physically real link between our family and the Land of Israel (and the people of Israel and the State of Israel) that would say by its very existence how we view the world and our place in it. For a long time, this idea percolated around, taking on different guises and permutations as we moved forward through the years of our married life together. And then, about a decade ago, we finally concluded that what we want to leave our children—aside from a huge amount of what I heard someone refer to the other day as “non-electronic books” and some more and less valuable tchotchkes we’ve acquired or inherited along the way—was a home in Israel, and specifically one in Jerusalem.

We talked about it forever, unable to decide if we should wait until everybody’s out of college before attempting this or whether it made more sense to dive in right then and there before we lost our nerve all together. We stumbled down different paths as we tested our resolve to see if we really meant it and then, in 2005, as Israel was withdrawing from Gaza while we were actually present in Israel, it struck us that the moment had come. How did we know? I have no idea. Prices were low. We didn’t have anything else to do that week. We found ourselves standing next to the local RE/MAX office on Herzl Street in downtown Jerusalem. We went in. Tentatively, we started talking. We got cold feet repeatedly as we shlepped along after our agent, a nice woman originally from Holland, from apartment to apartment. And then, once all the flats we were seeing started looking alike, we just chose the one that appealed to us the most and made an offer. To our shock, it was accepted. (Who would have made that offer if we really thought it was going to be accepted? It was really just to keep the agent from thinking we were wasting her time! Or was it?) And so, reluctantly but also very proudly, we became property owners in Israel.

In Israel, apartments are sold without appliances. That didn’t matter, because the tenants who have lived there ever since we bought have all had their own appliances. But now the time has come for us to set foot into our own apartment a mere eight years after last being there. And that’s why, after diligently saving up for this move forward towards our shared dream, we bought a fridge the other day, and a washing machine and a dryer. We were shopping in Israel via internet and phone. Joan did an excellent job on the phone with the salesman when we finally made contact. I hovered in the background trying to think of a way to express the concept of a “self-defrosting freezer” in Hebrew. I came up with an idea, but it proved unnecessary: by the time I was ready to express myself, she was all done. This was all probably for the best. And the salesman’s English, it turned out, was fine. And he surely knew more about freezers, self-defrosting and otherwise, than I do!

And so that’s where we’re going this July: to our apartment in Jerusalem. So far, we own no furniture. The place has no bookcases. (This won’t be much of an issue—there are also no books.) But, at least so far, we do own a fridge, a washing machine, and a dryer. The rest will come too. (There’s an IKEA in Netanya we expect to get to know well.) And eventually we will have a flat to call our own that we can actually spend time in. And that will begin, we both hope, the beginning of a chapter in our family’s life that will eventually become permanent and provide a living, breathing link to Israel for us and for our descendants.

We endlessly reference the inviolate bond between the people of Israel, the God of Israel, and the land of Israel in our prayers. Some of the phrases that express that idea are so familiar that we almost have to force ourselves to consider them carefully and to ask ourselves what they imply regarding the future of the Jewish people. I’d like to explore some of these questions in more detail with you in the future, but this summer is turning out to be a season of practical things for Joan and me. We’re thinking of buying a television. We’re definitely going to buy a couch. (What good is a TV without a couch?) We’ve been saving up for a long time and now we’re going to take a leap forward in making real, even just a little bit, this dream that Joan and I have come to share. If you’re in Jerusalem in July, come by! We have a fridge. We’ll have a couch. We have a very nice balcony. We’ll make coffee!

Rethinking Same-Sex Marriage

A few weeks ago I mentioned from the bimah that I wanted to re-open the discussion of same-sex marriage at Shelter Rock. Partially, I’m only being practical: now that same-sex marriage is legal in New York State, it is only a matter of time before we are approached by a gay couple interested in making their wedding in our sanctuary and it is only prudent for the community to develop its stance on the issue before we are confronted with specific people who ask a simple question and would like a simple answer in response. But I am also responding to recent developments within our Conservative Movement, and specifically to the approval on May 31 by the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly of a responsum by Rabbis Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel Nevins, and Avram I. Reisner that suggests various ways in which same-sex unions could be solemnized in a way in keeping both with spirit and the letter of the halakhah.

It’s a complicated issue and I find myself impatient with people who insist otherwise: no matter where anyone stands on the issue, it seems—to say the very least—naïve to describe the Dorff-Nevins-Reisner responsum as anything but revolutionary. And, as should be the case with all dramatic steps forward any given society or group within society takes, the revolutionary nature of the proposal demands that we move forward warily and cautiously, carefully considering the implications and possible ramifications inherent in taking any of the paths that suddenly lie open before us.
Many Shelter Rockers have expressed themselves to me on the topic already, including people who feel very strongly on both sides of the issue. And, of course, they are not alone: the question of the reasonableness and legality of same-sex unions is already a major policy issue in the presidential campaign and will no doubt continue to engage all sorts of people, gay and straight, for the foreseeable future. It even seems likely that the Supreme Court will eventually become involved as well. So we’re not alone at Shelter Rock in feeling challenged to formulate an opinion on the matter in general, and a formal policy for our congregation in specific.

Before I express myself in more detail on the issues that I consider worthy of debate in this regard, I would like to suggest we abandon several lines of discussion that regularly, at least in my opinion, distract people from considering the actual issue that rests at the heart of the matter.

Of these, the least productive is basing the discussion on the question of whether there should be gay people in the world. To my way of thinking, one of the givens of the conversation has to be that there are gay people in the world and that the issue at hand is therefore whether they should or should not be entitled to marry, not whether the world would be a better or a less good place if people had less varied tastes in sexual matters. What kind of a discussion would that be to have anyway? More to the point, I think it is reasonable to suppose that there has always been a percentage of the population that, constrained from self-defining openly or not, has always been homosexual. And I think that even despite the confusing fact that the word “homosexuality” itself was only devised in the nineteenth century and that no classical language, including ancient Hebrew, has a word to denote the concept of what moderns call “homosexuality” or a name to label people moderns would reference as “homosexuals.” I’ve read a few books about the history of human sexuality that have attempted to explain why a feature of human society that strikes moderns as so self-evident and obvious somehow resisted categorization for centuries, but I haven’t found any of what I’ve read to be especially convincing. Still, the question before us cannot be whether it was wise or unwise for God to have made different varieties of human sexual orientation, but merely whether or not we wish to offer the possibility of long-term, faithful relationships respected in law and by society to people for whom heterosexual marriage is not an option.

The next red herring I think we should abandon is the ever-popular argument that we should endorse same-sex marriage because homosexuality is not a life-style choice that gay people make, but something hard-wired that can be resisted and repressed, but not materially altered through the sheer force of active decision-making. That surely is true, I’m sure, but it isn’t relevant because there are all sorts of behavioral patterns that people clearly do not choose, but that we as a society specifically do choose not to legitimize or endorse. So to say that gay people should be allowed to marry because they didn’t choose to be gay seems to be a pointless argument, something that would only make sense if it were part of a larger argument justifying all behavior to which those who engage in it are honestly drawn. The legitimacy of same-sex marriage cannot therefore be allowed to rise or fall on the question of whether people can choose their sexual orientation.

And, finally, I think we should agree not to allow the discussion to center on the famous verse from Leviticus that prohibits a man from lying with another man “in the manner of men lying with women.” Over the years, there have been many efforts to explicate those words along many different avenues of interpretation, but the simplest explanation is simply to take them to prohibit the kind of intercourse between men that is the most obviously analogous to the most common form of sexual intimacy between men and women. Discussing whether the Torah chose wisely in forbidding that single act also seems to me a pointless discussion: observant gay men will observe the law and others will not, just as observant heterosexual couples obey laws delimiting their own intimate lives even though other couples do not. But to take that thought and argue that that prohibition of Leviticus ipso facto makes ridiculous the question of same-sex marriage being legitimate seems a dramatic overstatement of the situation. One could, after all, argue just to the contrary: that by including in its list of sexual prohibitions one single one that affects male-male couples the Torah is in effect saying to gay couples, or at least to male ones, that they too are invited to find a path forward to spiritual communion with the God of Israel through fidelity to the laws of the Torah.

By omitting all the above-mentioned lines of argumentation from the discussion, we are, I think, left with two relatively simple questions before us.

The first—whether we do or do not wish to endorse the rights of Jewish gay people to enter into permanent, monogamous relationships in synagogue ceremonies that will bind them together as loyal partners and loving spouses—is the easier of the two to answer. Since I myself grew up wanting very much one day to marry, to have children, to live in a dignified, loving home, and to be a respected member of our Jewish community, it doesn’t seem at all odd to me that other people, and specifically other Jewish people, would want those same things in their lives. If anything, actually, it seems peculiar for me to imagine people wanting anything less from life. Nor does the fact that a specific individual might be gay seem relevant in any meaningful way in this context: what could sexual orientation have to do, really, with the desire to live in a dignified relationship characterized by loyalty and respected by the community as binding and real?

The second question—how exactly gay people can marry without the concept of marriage itself being altered in the process beyond recognition—is the more vexing. And it is this specific question that the Dorff-Nevins-Reisner responsum addressed. It is a complicated piece of writing. (If you are reading the electronic version of this letter, you can access the responsum in its entirety by clicking here.) But the broad strokes, at least to me, are as compelling as the details: the authors have come up with a way formally and respectfully to solemnize the commitment of same-sex couples to each other by sidestepping entirely the issue of whether the Torah’s concept of kiddushin between a man and a woman can be expanded to include same non-heterosexual couples. It sounds so simple when put in those terms. But, in my opinion, the responsum displays courage and originality most of all because of that specific aspect of its authors’ efforts.

In our American Jewish culture, we informally refer to kiddushin, the sanctification of a couple’s relationship through formal ritual, as marriage and the ceremony that establishes it as a wedding. For example, we call a couple’s rings “wedding bands,” or “wedding rings,” not kiddushin bands or rings. We refer to the k’tubbah as a marriage certificate, even though it has to do only with kiddushin and not with the “real” marriage that follows. We refer to the chuppah as a wedding canopy, although what takes place beneath it is kiddushin, not marriage per se. But it was the clever insight of Rabbis Dorff, Nevins, and Reisner to realize that kiddushin is merely the Torah’s way of preparing the path for couples on their way to nissu’in, to marriage, by requiring them to renounce other partners, to pledge their troth to each other absolutely and unconditionally, and by requiring them publicly to announce their intention to live together as married spouses. And, therefore, that—and here is the truly innovative part—it should be possible to consider other paths forward for other couples to follow on their way to marriage as loving, committed spouses. Wasting time worrying about whether the definition of kiddushin can reasonably be expanded to include same-sex couples is a debate from which no definitive answer seems likely ever to emerge. The authors of the responsum, therefore, had the idea of simply leaving the question unanswered, then of making the whole issue an irrelevancy by proposing alternate kinds of arrangements that can just as reasonably and reliably lead forward to marriage. The responsum then moves on specifically to suggest a number of such paths.

In another posting, I hope to describe those paths to you in detail. None is perfect. All have things to recommend them and not to recommend them. Basically, though, they are all variations on the same theme and what they all do have in common is the desire to create an unassailably legal context in which same-sex couples may formalize their commitment to each other against a background of fidelity, dignity, mutuality, and reciprocity—the same foundation stones upon which any successful heterosexual marriage will also be based. None requires the officiant or the participant to violate any principle of halakhah or to ignore any of the foundational principles of our Jewish faith. None requires any halakhic doubletalk or any complicated rationalization to sound cogent. And, more to the point, none has at its core anything other than the simple desire to deliver to same-sex couples a simple series of messages. We accept you as you are. We respect you for your commitment to each other. We find nothing peculiar in your desire to live out your lives in dignified, loving relationships. And we welcome you unambiguously and warmly as members of our community. When it comes down to it, which of us would not want all of our children, gay and straight, to hear that message reverberating in their ears loud and clear as the chart their course forward through life?

Fathers and Sons

I’ve never been a huge fan of Father’s Day, a sentiment I believe I inherited (not inappropriately) from my own father. Maybe it feels like a wan add-on to our extensive American list of sort-of-holidays because its history is so brief: Father’s Day only received its “official” status in 1972 when President Nixon granted it federal recognition more than sixty years after it was first proposed to the world by (of all people in all places) the leadership of the YMCA in Spokane, Washington. So I myself am older than Father’s Day! (Mother’s Day is a whole different thing, by the way, and a lot older: it was proclaimed as a holiday by President Wilson in 1914 after first having been conceived of as a “Mothers’ Day for Peace” by Julia Ward Howe, the activist author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in 1872 and then unofficially promoted by, of all ancient institutions, Wannamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia.) But when I think more carefully about the whole thing, I realize that my disinclination to embrace Father’s Day too vigorously or enthusiastically (or, to continue the thought, to impose any specific obligations on my children to embrace it with vigor or enthusiasm) has to do not with the history of the day or with its relationship to Mother’s Day (or to Richard Nixon), but with the complexity of the father/child relationship and the inherent peculiarity of using pre-written greeting cards to suggest sentiments that are hard even to formulate at all, let alone to sum up in a few italicized lines of third-rate doggerel. Also, I have more than enough neckties as it is.

Or maybe I’m being unduly harsh here. I had a father. I am a father. Why shouldn’t I get a card once a year from my various offspring acknowledging my shared, yet indispensable, responsibility for their existence? So what if it’s a bit perfunctory? Better perfunct than defunct! And yet…I still find the whole father/child thing mysterious and complicated, something that resists summing up with a phone call and, although this part has blissfully fallen away, a bottle of Old Spice.

Just lately, although not specifically in preparation to write to you this week, I’ve been reading a surprising number of books about fathers and sons. The mother (so to speak) of such books, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, I read in college and recall as being essentially about the way fathers and sons are both incapable of stepping far enough away from their biological relationship to accept each other “just” as men. (The book, if I recall correctly, opens with a young man returning home to discover that his father has undertaken a tawdry affair with one of his housekeepers, a young woman with whom he has already produced a child, a “new” baby brother for his already-grown-up son, Arkady.) I don’t recall liking the book that much, although I liked other books by Turgenev, especially Asya and The Nest of the Gentry, and even went so far during one of my trips to the former Soviet Union to make a kind of literary pilgrimage to Spasskoye Lutavinovo, Turgenev’s great estate in southern Russia. (I also made a similar trip to Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana, very faithfully reproduced in the 2009 movie The Last Station starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, which I found far more stirring and interesting than Spasskoye. But, then again, I find Tolstoy’s books themselves far more stirring and interesting than Turgenev’s!)

Far more to the point, however, are the three books I’ve just completed reading. About Bernd Wollschläger’s book, A German Life, I wrote last week. Detailing his own complicated journey to Judaism against the background of his even more complicated relationship to his father, a decorated Wehrmacht officer, the book is really as much about fathers and sons as it is about Germans and Jews. As I wrote then, I liked the book very much and recommend it to people interested in both topics. (What’s the word for the convergence of several totally distinct events in a context related in some specific yet peripheral way to each of them? For what it’s worth, Bernd Wollschläger’s father received his Iron Cross—which medal Hitler himself pinned on his chest—for his personal bravery on the Eastern Front in the 1943 Battle for Oryol, which Russian city was both the city of Turgenev’s birth in 1818 and the city in which I personally spent a long month in 1990 enrolled in the Intourist Russian Language Institute there.)

But I wish to write today more about the other two books I’ve just recently completed: Noah Hawley’s The Good Father and William Landay’s Defending Jacob. I found both books engaging to the point of being engrossing. They’re similar in some ways, but distinct in others. But they will both appeal both to readers who have or had parents, or who are parents…but men will read this book differently, I think, than will women.

Hawley’s book is essentially about a man who loves his son intensely without knowing much about him. Is that the story of all fathers, the authors appears to be asking subtly: are all men who father sons doomed to loving them without really understanding them once they grow past childhood or even being able to fathom who they are or what they have become? Are we all that blind when it comes to those we love? Or is there something specific in the relationship of fathers and sons that makes it impossible for either to see the other party clearly? (Is it the same for mother and daughters? Hawley doesn’t go there and neither will I. But the question of whether the issue here is the same-genderedness of fathers and son or whether it is their specific maleness that is in play is key.) The book, at any rate, begins with a scene that we all know from our worst nightmares: we are having the most normal of days when suddenly a policeman comes to the door with the information that a child of ours has been arrested and charged with a horrific crime. I won’t say more because the book is too good for me to risk ruining it for you by giving too much away. But I will say that the book operates on two levels: the narrative one following the storyline along to its shocking conclusion (and inviting you time and time again to think you see what’s coming next only to be completely wrong), and the psychological level on which the book is not about the tale being told but about the author’s understanding of what it means to be a father, what it means to be a son. The father in question has an ex-wife, the mother of the son in question, and a second wife, the mother of that older son’s two much younger twin brothers. And within the warp and woof of that slightly complicated, but ultimately ordinary, family structure lies the lion’s share of what the book has ultimately to offer its readers, particularly regarding the nature of the relationship between fathers and sons. I was very taken by the book. Despite one single plot twist that I found irritatingly improbable, the book was satisfying and sobering: the former because it’s a very good story about the intertwined impossibilities of holding on and letting go, and the latter because it left me uncomfortably focused on the part of the emotional iceberg of family life that no one ever sees and most prefer simply to ignore. The short version is that I liked the book and I think my readers will too.

The second book, William Landay’s Defending Jacob, is also about a father and his son. To be fair, the son has a mother who plays a key role in much of the book. So this is not a book almost solely about fathers and sons in the same way Noah Hawley’s book is. But at the heart of Landay’s book too is the perplexing image of a father who loves his son, yet who turns out to know almost nothing about him. The books have their nightmarish premise in common as well: life is normal until it’s not, until the cop comes to the door with the news that the boy you thought you knew has been accused of doing something unimaginably bad. You leap to the boy’s defense, obviously. Both dads do, in fact, in both books. And the back story behind the narrative line in both books is about the degree to which fathers know their sons well and also don’t know them at all. The twist in Defending Jacob is that the father himself works as a public prosecutor, therefore as a legal professional who is supposed to be good at seeing things as they are, who is paid by the state (or rather the commonwealth, the story being set in Massachusetts) to know guilty parties when he sees them and adequately to demonstrate their guilt to juries beyond a reasonable doubt. And so, slowly, as the policemen and the lawyers do their jobs, the truth does emerge, or some version of it does. (This is true in both books.) I won’t give the plot away here either so as not to ruin the story for you, but the experience of watching these two fathers, the doctor in The Good Father and the lawyer in Defending Jacob, slowly realize how impossible it is to know another person truly well and eventually come to understand that that thought applies, if anything, even more meaningfully when the other person in the equation is someone you love wholly and absolutely in the manner of parents loving their children—that experience is what makes both these books worth your time to read and to savor. The final plot twist is unexpected to the point, I thought, of being unbelievable. But the book itself is great and I recommend it without reservation.

I have no specific plans for Father’s Day. I suppose I’ll hear from my kids. I might even get a meal out of it, or a necktie. Or just the meal. Maybe some cards. I’ll let you know. What I’d really like, though, is a few quiet hours to read…and then a nice meal with my descendants. Maybe I’ll give Turgenev another chance!

A German Life

In the unlikely event that Shelter Rock ever runs a contest to see which of us has made the acquaintance of the most German converts to Judaism, I think I’ll probably win. In fact, I’m sure I will. For one thing, most of us find the idea itself that a citizen of the nation Daniel Jonah Goldhagen famously damned as “Hitler’s willing executioners” could willingly embrace Judaism as a ger tzedek—that is, as a righteous proselyte eager to seek his or her spiritual destiny as a lately-arrived but nonetheless bona fide member of the House of Israel—that idea will strike most as beyond peculiar. For another, one doesn’t find these people just anywhere. You have to know where to look!

A good place to look, actually, is Heidelberg, where I spent two years teaching in the Institute of Jewish Studies in the mid-1980s. Most of my students were “regular” Gentiles—mostly Lutheran types either headed into the ministry and interested in Judaism as part of their spiritual education as faithful Christians or else more secular souls drawn to Jewish study as a way of coming to terms with the legacy of the Shoah, a legacy that weighs (at least for some) no less heavily on the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators than it does on the descendants of the victims. And some were “regular” Jewish people: the children of Jewish parents, raised in Jewish homes, studying something else in Heidelberg (usually medicine or law) and interested in taking advantage of the existence of the Hochschule (and the presence in town of people such as myself) to take some courses in Jewish history or Jewish literature. But there were also present a small number of people enrolled at the Institute as part of their studies towards conversion to Judaism as well as some who had already completed their conversions and were simply eager to learn more. We had students from all over Europe in the school, but the converts, future and present, were all Germans who had gone far beyond being “interested” in Judaism and who either had chosen or were hoping to choose Judaism as their spiritual path in life. It seems unlikely in the extreme that any of them will ever read this, but I won’t identify them by name anyway lest I contravene our custom of never singling out converts in public.

They were, to say the least, an odd lot. P., for example, was not only a German, but (this was before the reunification of Germany in 1990) an East German of what he himself labelled as “ancient peasant stock” who had fled across the border and sought asylum in West Germany, then found his way into a synagogue and had eventually adopted a religious lifestyle, willingly undergoing b’rit milah and adopting a strict regimen of religious observance. L. was the daughter of not one but two Lutheran pastors, both of them prominent in the church hierarchy and neither even slightly connected to Jews or to Judaism. Certainly neither was descended from Jews. But L. found her way to Israel as a teenager, spoke openly (at least to me, but I think also to others) about the way she could feel destiny drawing her forward for the first time when she made her first visit to Jerusalem and particularly to the Western Wall, and easily about the way adopting Judaism made it tolerable for her to think of herself as a German. M. was the grandson of a guard who served at Maidanek, the death camp near Lublin. He knew his grandfather well, I recall him saying—of the 1,037 SS officers who perpetrated their unspeakable crimes there, a grand total of 170 were prosecuted after the war—but only learned what Maidanek was when he was a teenager, which experience led him too to Israel, where he volunteered on a kibbutz for six months. As a result of that experience, he came home intent on embracing Judaism…and certain, so he said, that he was not merely doing so as a way vicariously of atoning for his grandfather’s sins but, in a more positive vein, as a way of responding constructively to the horrors of the past by doing his part to preserve the religion of the murdered. (I remembering not feeling at all sure that that was a very good reason actually to convert to Judaism. But he seemed intent and clear-minded regarding the reasonableness of what had become his life mission. I lost track of him after we left Germany, so cannot say whether he reached his goal. A little bit, I hope he did.)

All of this sounds odder in the telling than it was in the hearing. I’ve lost touch with all of these people, actually, although I find myself from time to time wondering what happened to them. Perhaps they’re on Facebook! But I write about them today not to announce my intention to hunt for them, but as a way of introducing to you all a book I’ve just read, something that I think you would all find interesting and inspiring.

The book is called A German Life: Against All Odds, Change Is Possible, and it was written by Dr. Bernd Wollschläger, today a family physician in Miami, but formerly a medic in the IDF, and before that the troubled German son of a Wehrmacht general on whose chest Hitler himself pinned the Knight’s Cross on January 12, 1942 for bravery in battle on the Eastern Front. (Since the public display of Nazi symbols is forbidden by Germany law, the author’s father could only wear his medal at home once the war ended. What it meant for the young Bernd to have to spend every Christmas Eve at home with his father wearing a medal awarded to him personally by Hitler with a tiny swastika where the arms of the cross meet is one of the most personal, deeply introspective passages in the book, one you will not quickly forget.) It is an odd book in many ways, and in some ways a flawed one. (It seems odd, for instance, for a man as involved in contemporary Germany history as the author to confuse Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. Nor does it behoove a married man, and a religious Jew at that, to describe his pre-marital affairs in quite as much detail as he does.) Still, the book is moving and very interesting. I recommend it to you all wholeheartedly.

I read the book almost accidentally: Si Seidel, a long-time Shelter Rocker, shared with me an on-line clip he came across featuring the author speaking in a Boca Raton synagogue on Yom Hashoah. (If you are reading this electronically, you can access the clip by clicking here.) Just sitting and listening to the man speak was a riveting experience that led me to do just a bit more research. When I found his book for sale—the book is available on amazon.com and all the other on-line sites—I resolved to read it and, if it was as powerful as his remarks were, to recommend it to you.

In the past, it’s been the rare book by a post-war German grappling with his or her nation’s past that I’ve found totally successful. (I’ve generally found such books to teeter back and forth between self-serving and self-righteous, neither of which attitudes I find especially appealing.) But Bernd Wollschläger’s book is different. (If you look for it on-line, spell his last name Wollschlaeger and it will pop right up on your screen.) For one thing, the author writes totally guilelessly and openly, describing his relationship with his parents, but particularly with his father, painfully and very movingly. That the author himself clearly seems to understand his relationship with his father to constitute the background for his decision to embrace Judaism as a ger tzedek is itself unusually insightful, but that he trusts his readers to understand nuances that are generally glossed over in this kind of book—and particularly books written in English for non-Germans—is even more impressive. Wollschläger’s father, for example, was not a member of the Nazi party. Nor does the author hold back from describing the contempt in which his father held the S.S.—whom he looked down on as less than “real” soldiers assigned to foul clean-up work that no true German soldier would undertake after the Wehrmacht, the “real” army, had successfully secured some new territory for the ever-expanding Reich. Nor does he hold back from describing his father as a principled man brought low in life not by his regrets regarding his wartime record but by something as prosaic as alcoholism. What emerges is a complicated portrait of a complicated man and his long-suffering wife. You won’t like his father. But, even despite yourself, you will feel for him…and for his predicament in life and for his inability successfully to break with his own past and for his ultimately failed relationship with his only son.

Throughout the book, the author drops hints regarding the possibility of his mother being of Jewish ancestry. He himself clearly does not know if her dark, guarded comments in that direction were true. Nor does he even know if he understood her properly when she made occasional vague comments that could have meant what he himself obviously hopes they did mean. Yet the author appears specifically to have chosen not to pursue that line of ancestral research, although it seems odd—at least a little—that he hasn’t. But, as noted above, it is precisely in the author’s guilelessness that the books’ power, and also its charm, lie. Wollschläger seems unwilling to dissemble, clearly aware that the book’s power has to rest in his willingness to write openly even about things that most people in his situation would hide or at least prefer to omit. The chapters covering his initial trip to Israel, in the course of which he was shown around not only by an appealing Jewish girl doing her army service on Kibbutz Yahel, about sixty miles north of Eilat, but also by an angry Palestinian young man from Abu Ghosh, an Arab town just west of Jerusalem on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, are very successful. Most moving of all is his description—also unguarded and very openly written—of his encounter with an old man at the Wall who seems just for a fleeting moment to be able to peer into the author’s soul and who tells him something that, for once to mean the words literally, changes his life.

Jews born into the faith tend to find the whole concept of conversion slightly mysterious, as though embracing Judaism were the equivalent of signing up for a lifetime of obsessive insecurity about the present and worry about the future. That being the case, it would do readers so-mystified to read this book, which is as stirring and encouraging as it is frankly written. The traditional High Holiday liturgy never seems to tire of reiterating that the gates of repentance are never closed, that t’shuvah, return, is always possible. We say it. And mostly, even, we mean it. But to read Bernd Wollschläger’s story is to be reminded that that truth is not only applicable to specific instances of wrongdoing or moral miscalculation, but to life itself: the ability to chart one’s destiny in life specifically along the lines of one’s own moral consciousness and to pursue a path forward in life that, for all it may constitute a total break with one’s own past, is solely and absolutely a path of one’s own making, and to do with specifically without reference to one’s own past or one’s family’s history—that is the deepest of all lessons readers will take from this book. I enjoyed it immensely and I think my readers will too!