This Shabbat-O-Gram is
sponsored by Claudia Lubin,
in honor of her daughter
Bailee becoming Bat Mitzvah this Shabbat
Mazal tov to Bailee and
family! Also, read the divrei Torah from last week’s b’nai mitzvah: Rebecca
Morgenthaler on Rosh Hodesh Kislev and Hudson
Price on Toldot. Last week, honoring the foodiest portion of the
Torah (Toldot) and the grand opening of Stamford’s Trader Joes, we conducted
hallah taste tests both at our main service and at Tot Shabbat. Hallot
from Beldotti’s, Fairway, Stop and Shop and the new Trader Joe’s were judged
for freshness, density, sweetness, egginess, softness, symmetric
appearance, artistry of the braiding, size, shininess, crunchiness of crust,
and last but not least, French-toastability. The winner from Tot Shabbat
was Fairway and at the main service... (drumroll) Trader Joe’s!
This Shabbat morning we’ll
be hearing from an eyewitness to Kristallnacht, Walter Wertheim, father of
TBE’s Fran Ginsburg. And don't forget next week's scholar in residence,
Dr. Jeremy Benstein from Tel Aviv's heschel Center, speaking on
"Sustainability as a Jewish Issue." See the full schedule at
the bottom of this O-Gram.
TBE Israel Adventure:
INFORMATIONAL MEETING DEC. 15
Come to an informational
meeting on Sunday, Dec, 15, from noon to one. Check out our
interactive itinerary and other information. Please RSVP to me at rabbi@tbe.org to RSVP or if you have
any questions. Things are shaping up for us to have a very nice, diverse group.
PEW REPORT
For those unable to watch
my panel conversation on Shalom TV regarding the PEW Report, you can watch it online here.
You can also read the survey.
CLIMATE CHANGE
ENDGAME - STEWARDSHIP SUMMIT
I was honored to be a
panelist at the grand plenary roundtable of yesterday’s Interfaith Climate
Stewardship Summit in Hartford. See
news coverage of the event, and
here alsoTV
coverage here. About 200 people
of many faith backgrounds exchanged ideas on how best to address what Thomas Berry has
called, “The great work of our times.” Our solar panel project has
attracted lots of interest, not just statewide but nationally, and that became
apparent to me yesterday. As more houses of worship (and others) follow
our lead, the impact of our mitzvah to save the earth increases exponentially.
But there is so much more urgent work to do, in order to preserve what
was called aptly “the integrity of Creation.” For in fact we are undoing
Creation right now, something unprecedented in human history. Just this
week, the
World Meteorological Organizationrevealed that greenhouse gasses have
reached record levels. The most recent revelation is the oceans are more
acidic now than at any time over the past 300 million years, a trend that could
lead to a
mass extinction of key species.
For the latest on this
urgent topic of climate change, see these
downloadable fact sheets. If you are interested in seeing just how much the
consensus has grown regarding the urgency of addressing climate change, see the Yale Project
on Climate Change Communication. You can also download the Skeptical Science app to
convince those holdouts on the fringes that this is not a political issue any
more, but an urgent call based on scientific consensus. It is also a moral
issue. We have reached what one speaker called “the climate change
endgame.” The rest of the world is waiting for us to wake up - even China
is now recognizing the folly of its ways and the damage that they've done to
their surroundings.
THANKSGIVUKKAH IS
COMING TO TOWN
See “The
Thankgivukkah Dilemma,” in which I ask what will happen this year AFTER the
final candle is lit. Also see the
cultural origins of the dreidel, a Hanukkah
E-Lesson - A Public or Private Observance? and my Hanukkah
Sourcebook, filled with information about the festival.
WOMEN IN ISRAEL:
TAKING OUR PLACE
On the occasion of the
25th anniversary of the Women of the Wall, this
supplement was distributed in
newspapers across Israel today. It is part of a special effort the New Israel
Fund is making to broaden the debate about women's rights and religious
pluralism. Too much of the discussion in Israel is dominated by extremists.
Their response is to demonstrate the depth of support for the notion that women
should be full partners in modern Jewish life.
KRISTALLNACHT’S 75TH -
CLINKING GLASSES IN BERLIN
On this eve of the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht,
The New York Times reports a surge in anti-Semitism in Europe.
That may be true, but a city in Europe stands out as perhaps the one most
hospitable to Jews, and it is, irony of ironies, Berlin.
The renaissance of Jewish
life in Berlin has become one of the most astounding stories of the post
Holocaust generation. No one could have imagined that just seventy
five years after Kristallnacht marked the beginning of the last
chapter for German Jewry, a new chapter would yet be written. It would
have been unfathomable even a few years ago that Berlin would become the
European city most welcoming to Jews and a magnet for Jewish
tourism and immigration. On Kristallnacht weekend in Berlin this
year, there will be lots of glass clinking at bars, but the only conceivable
glass breaking involving Jews would have to come under a huppah.
The ultimate irony is the plethora
of Israeli immigrants, who have left a state designed to protect them from
the very evil that was propagated by those living in their new home town. The
Israeli presence can be felt at nightclubs, artistic venues and schools
according to a 2011 JTA
article. “You just hear Hebrew really often today, and it would have been
really exotic five years ago,” said Nirit Bialer, who works on youth exchange
programs between Germany and Israel.
This subject was discussed
in a recent edition of “The
Promised Podcast,” one of my favorite sources for provocative
Israel-related banter. I can understand why this ex-flux of Israelis to
Berlin would be disturbing. But I believe that the Jewish renaissance there
should be seen as the ultimate poke in the eye to the Nazis, not as a stiff
challenge to Zionism. After all, the fact of Israeli emigration is
nothing new, and while it annoys many, it does not reduce by one iota the
legitimacy and importance of there being a Jewish state. One could argue
that Jews would not be able to move back to Berlin, or other former graveyards
like Warsaw and Cracow, were it not for the continued existence of a Jewish
state that “has their back.” Israel bolsters our confidence and pride no
matter where Jews live, be it in the shadow of the Reichstag or of the Freedom
Tower.
Columnist Jeffrey Goldberg
recently told an audience at TBE a moving tale of how he took his son to Berlin
and together they worked on his bar mitzvah speech in, of all places, the house
of the Wannsee Conference, the very spot where the Final Solution was drawn
up. That is the ultimate thumb in Hitler’s eye, much like the annual
March of the Living, where Jewish teens whoop it up in the shadows of the gas
chambers. Imagine an Olympic village at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
Some may consider it distasteful for teens to be trading pins and phone numbers
as on Spring Break, right there where Mengele pointed to the right or the
left. I found it exhilarating.
The continued shifting of
Jewish population centers is hardly a new phenomenon. What’s new is
that most Jews are not fleeing anti-Semitism, but moving about this shrinking
world freely, looking for economic opportunity and personal adventure.
Thanks to the wisdom of the ancient rabbis, the Judaism they bring with them is
eminently portable and adaptable. Since there are few places on earth
where Jews have not been persecuted, to rule out settling in places marked by
prior Jewish victimization would be to rule out most of the populated planet -
and most of Israel too.
The return to the land of Israel
was the ultimate vindication of Jewish destiny. We no longer wail at the
Kotel, but the dismantled stones of the temple, tossed from the building by
Roman soldiers, still litter the street. The same imperative that
drove Israelis back to the Etzion
bloc after the Six Day War is
what drives Jewish life back to the streets of Poland and Germany. And
just as the blood of 240 massacred Jews crying from the Etzion earth would not
allow any Israeli government to declare Efrat “Judenrein” in any final status
agreement (though compromises will need to be made elsewhere), neither should
the Final Solution have the final say on the fate of Jews in Berlin.
Ezekiel’s dry bones are
metaphor that doesn't just presage the return to Zion, it envisions a national
return to life - and that return can take place anywhere Jews have died simply
because they were Jews. Everything we do reinforces that message.
When a loved one dies, the first thing we do after leaving the cemetery is go
home and eat. Eating is the ultimate reaffirmation of life in the face of
death. So is clinking glasses at a Berlin bar.
The return to Berlin is
not a negation of Zionism; it is an affirmation of the Jewish revival that
Zionism has engendered. It is the ultimate celebration of the Jewish
spirit that simply refuses to die. Anywhere.
Shabbat Shalom!
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