TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary, Zoom Video and Screen Shots: Jules Alexander on Bamidbar

 

In This Moment: Names and Numbers; Davening for Dummies; The Human Jerusalem; CSI Bamidbar

In This Moment  Shabbat Shalom! Mazal tov to Jackson Goichman, who becomes Bar Mitzvah this Shabbat morning. Our TBE family is delighted for him and his family. We also wish a hearty Mazal Tov to Sylvan Pomerantz, who will be celebrating a special Bar Mitzvah anniversary this Shabbat. We also wish Mazal Tov to our Kesher Beth El 7th graders (some of whom are photographed above), who graduated this week, and to all those who are moving up and moving on in their studies, wherever they may be. Names and Numbers This week's portion of Bamidbar contains something very rare in the Bible: a census. Jackson will discuss why that is the case in his d'var Torah tomorrow, but suffice to say that Judaism looks down on reducing human beings to numbers. When David did an unauthorized (and Satan-inspired, no less) census in 1 Chronicles 21, it was displeasing to God and led to a great calamity. But it's not like we never quantify. Jews have been creating ranking lists for centuries. In chapter five of tractate Avot alone, there are nine top 10 lists. And, in an interesting twist to what is typically (and often distastefully) done, here the rabbis rank their congregants. (So what type of learner are you? A sieve, a funnel, a sponge or a strainer?). The ancient sages didn't find metrics inherently abhorrent; they were just wary of falling under their sway, which is so tempting, because math is so clean and real life is so messy. But we are the people who personally experienced the dehumanization of having our individuality reduced to tattooed digits on the arm. And now, with artificial intelligence threatening to shatter the final barriers distinguishing the real from the artificial, the vast complexity of humanness from a pile of 1's and 0's, it is worth heeding the biblical lesson that we should quantify people only when absolutely necessary. I've always been attracted to the notion expressed most prevalently in Martin Buber's I and Thou (see the complete pdf here) that human beings must never be relegated to the world of things. It has been a lodestar of my personal philosophy, ever since I studied Buber's writings in college. The moment you reduce a person to a number (e.g "She's an '8'!" "He's a million dollar donor!" "They're a 4.0 student!"), the one whose value is reduced by this objectifying transaction - is you. Today is Jerusalem Day. As Haviv Rettig Gur writes in today's Times of Israel, we need to get back to Jerusalem's human story in celebrating its unification in 1967, rather than provocative and incendiary demonstrations of domination, as the annual flag parade through the Muslim Quarter has become. He writes, "The first Jerusalem Day (in '67) meant different things to different people. But at its core, it was for most Jewish Israelis a celebration of a sudden lifting of the great burden of fear, a discovery of one’s own power not yet sullied by the use of that power." Sarah Tuttle Singer elaborates in this Facebook post: Davening for Dummies A hallmark of my approach has always been to see each individual as being on their own spiritual journey, going at their own pace. So prayer needed to become a welcoming, intimate, and personal experience. At services, I always wanted prayer to be accessible but while never watered down, authentic but never automatic. It needed to invite us in rather than cast us aside. That's a neat trick to pull off, given the language gap for so many. But through the creation of supplements and the acquisition of increasingly user-friendly prayer books, along with experimental service formats, we were able to pull it off. We even had a section of our website dedicated to increasing comfort level at morning minyan, called Minyan Mastery. Below is an article I wrote for Moment Magazine in 1996, the keynote for a favorite adult ed series here, Davening for Dummies: Ever notice how dumb we've all become -- and how proud we are of it? Maybe it began with that famous internal memo of President Clinton's '92 campaign staff, "It's the economy, stupid," or maybe it's just that we've hit the point of overload in absorption of new technologies. Just as we figured out the microwave, along came the VCR; then the computer invaded the household; then we discovered that the rest of the world was having a great time in a strange place known as "on line." With each innovation, we know that we must conquer our techno-phobias or risk becoming social dinosaurs. But at least we have company. Bookstore shelves are now filled with titles like "DOS for Dummies," "Finances for Dummies," even "Sex for Dummies," (and I thought some things still came instinctively). In the same spirit, I'm holding a seminar in my synagogue entitled, "Davening for Dummies." We the utterly incompetent have come gliding out of the closet, now liberated to admit our inadequacies, and it is comforting to know that everyone feels the same way. The rest of the world is just now catching up to the Jewish people, because we have declared our ineptitude for centuries. Moses felt entirely unworthy of his weighty responsibilities, as, it seems, has every Jewish leader since him, at least until Bibi Netanyahu. Anyone who has ever set foot in a synagogue on Shabbat morning has, at some point in his life, sat next to Joe the Super-Davener and felt like a complete idiot. We're very good at encouraging self-inflicted degradation, only we are taught to call it humility. This attitude prevails in my profession. Even the greatest of my seminary professors used to shrink at the mere mention of a sage of the previous generation; my classmates and I were expected to abase ourselves in a similar manner, at least in public. But one does not have to proclaim unworthiness in order to honor one's teachers; the Torah instructs us to rise before our elders, not to lie prostrate in their presence. Rabbis dutifully pass down this insecurity to our own students. The little secret that our congregants don't know is that, while they are standing in front of us terrified that we heard them mispronounce "Yitgadal," we're shaking in our boots at the prospect of blowing the Bar Mitzvah boy's middle name or misquoting a talmudic aphorism and having our professors yell at us in our dreams. It's not just about people: even our greatest city has an inferiority complex. With all the fuss about Jerusalem this year, we still pray for the restoration of its former glory, as if all of Teddy Kollek's efforts were mere window dressing. Even the grand Jerusalem of Temple times, which our sages claimed possessed nine tenths of the world's beauty, wasn't good enough. In rabbinic literature the earthly Jerusalem has a celestial counterpart, and it is the heavenly Jerusalem that God will inhabit first. For us, this problem stems in part from the pervasive feeling that our parents were "more Jewish" than us, simply for their having lived one generation closer to the cultural milieu of the idealized "old country." But it is also traceable to that messianic itch that has denied Jews the chance ever to be totally satisfied with things as they are. Some would call this in-bred perfectionism healthy, better for the world if not for our own mental well-being. That itch has propelled us to great accomplishments (often to spite our demanding parents and teachers, rather than to please them), but it is also at the root of our alienation and an impetus for assimilation. "Avinu Malkenu, remember that we are but dust," is the mantra we'll repeat so often during the upcoming High Holidays, that most ego-deflating of seasons. But we forget that the Torah instructs us not merely to love our neighbor, but to love ourselves as well. We neglect the other side of the equation: we're lowly, but for our sake the world was created. Ironically, although we come out of the High Holidays thinking that Judaism is all gloom and doom, most of us actually feel very good about ourselves at the services, because those prayers are so familiar to us. It's the one time each year when everyone can be Joe the Super-Davener, with added relish, since the original Shabbat-variety Joe, now vastly outnumbered and self-conscious, shuckles (sways) timidly in his corner. If only we could feel so at home at services the other days of the year. Which brings me back to "Davening for Dummies." Inadequacy loves company, and the Microsoft age has presented us with a "window" of opportunity. Yes, we're dummies, but so is everyone else, so we don't have to feel so bad about it. The key to stemming the tide of assimilation is not to dilute Judaism or reduce the level of Hebrew at our services, but rather to pump up self-esteem by diminishing the stigma associated with Jewish illiteracy. People grapple with foreign subject matter all the time, at museums or at the opera, and they come out inspired, humbled perhaps, but hungry for more. We've got to make sure that they come out of shul feeling equally uplifted, in spite of the gaps in their knowledge, else they spend the next Shabbat searching for God back at Lincoln Center. A practical suggestion: I recommend that every rabbi intentionally blow it at some very visible time -- how about Rosh Hashanah -- and then admit the mistake, proudly. Not only will the experience emancipate the leader from his own fear of failure, it will make the congregation feel a hundred times better about itself -- and probably lead to an increase in service attendance and a contract extension. People struggle with machines all day; it's refreshing when they see a real human being on the pulpit. As for the rest of us, when we look at Joe the Super-Davener sitting next to us, measure him not by the intensity of his shuckling, but rather by a more sophisticated tool, the mensch-o-meter. Does he help us find the page and not make us feel dumb in the process? Does he even say hello? When we forget to stand for Kedusha and he gives us that stare, remember that there's a good reason why he's shaking so much. Let's just feel good about being Jewish. Let's wake up each morning, look in the mirror and say, "I can pray the way I want. I love my neighbor and I love myself. Gosh darn it, I'm a good Jew." Join us tonight at 7 as our ongoing Introduction to Judaism series focuses on, you guessed it, prayer. I guarantee that no one will be shaking in their boots. As a sneak preview for tonight's session, you can check out our study materials here and here. And below, see my Davenology 101 guide to exploring prayers in four dimensions, and at the bottom, a thematic outline of the Friday evening service and a glossary of prayer and synagogue terms. Recommended Reading Sunday's front page with the headline, "Noa, You Are Phenomenal," a take on Noa Kirel's third-place winning song, "Unicorn," The headline on the bottom indicates that a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian factions in Gaza was being tested (and thus far it has held). Today's Israel Front Pages Haaretz (English) Jerusalem Post Yediot Achronot (So here are some numbers for you number crunchers!) No One Participates in Politics More than Atheists (Substack) The last forty years of politics and religion has been focused squarely on the ascendancy of the Religious Right. But I think that era of religion and politics is rapidly coming to a close. The Religious Right is no longer a primarily religious movement - it’s one about cultural conservativism and nearly blind support for the GOP with few trappings of any real religiosity behind it. Here’s what I believe to be the emerging narrative of the next several decades: the rise of atheism and their unbelievably high level of political engagement in recent electoral politics. Let me put it plainly: atheists are the most politically active group in American politics today and the Democrats (and some Republicans) ignore them at their own peril. (Some more numbers!) Poll: Religious attendance is shrinking but those who remain are happy (RNS) For 25th year, State Department reports on threats, triumphs in religious freedom (RNS) - The report, which assesses conditions in 199 countries, also looks at policies and laws, including those about blasphemy and apostasy, that ‘criminalize religious expression.’ Florida rejects Holocaust education textbooks in clampdown on ‘woke’ instruction (JTA) The operation that proved Israel can unite, deter and maintain legitimacy (YNet) The Changing Meaning of Sefirat Ha-Omer (Lehrhaus) - How a set of springtime mourning rituals may have originated as celebratory customs. Recounting the Census: A Military Force of 5,500 (not 603,550) Men (TheTorah) - We have witnessed a resurgence in attempts to interpret the census data from Numbers in a way that reduces their numbers significantly. Professor Joshua Berman, for instance, offered a suggestion along these lines in his recent Mosaic essay “Was there an Exodus?” The following piece by Ben Katz is part of this trend. Elon Musk says George Soros ‘hates humanity’ and likens him to a comic book villain Holocaust survivor (JTA) How to Celebrate Shavuot (which begins next Thursday night) Miracles and Madness: Israel at 75 (D Gordis - The Free Press) - How did the Jewish people manage to pull this off after two in every three European Jews had been slaughtered? What does he consider Israel’s greatest achievement? Its greatest failure? In light of ongoing political turmoil, what does Gordis expect a 100th year to look like? When Canines Were in the Land (Jewish Review of Books) - “If a Jew has a dog, either the dog is no dog or the Jew is no Jew.” With the possible exception of ultra-Orthodox Jews, this old proverb no longer holds, but it’s worth remembering that the reconciliation between Jews and dogs is relatively recent. There is a story to be told here, and Rudolphina Menzel, who was a great “canine pioneer,” both as a scientist and as a Zionist, is a large part of it. Parsha Packets for Bamidbar a portion full of numbers, names and lists A Collection of Famous Jewish Lists Does Jewish Law Permit Taking a Census? Stand Up and Be Counted - Public displays of Jewishness in an increasingly invasive world. CSI Bamidbar: A Biblical Whodunit - Solve this murder mystery based on the opening of this week's portion. Tune in Shabbat morning to see who done it! Numbers and Names - For Bamidbar and Jerusalem Day Join us for our Intro to Judaism class on Prayer and Synagogue Geography. Here are the supplementary materials for this topic. "Feast on" these in advance. Prayer Packet 1 Prayer Packet 2 A Thematic Outline of the Friday Evening Service Share This Email   Share This Email   Share This Email Temple Beth El 350 Roxbury Road Stamford, Connecticut 06902 203-322-6901 | www.tbe.org    A Conservative, Inclusive, Spiritual Community

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From the Rabbi's Bunker: May 21: Praying for Monotony, Perspectives on Happiness and Gratitude; Jerusalem Day

From the Rabbi's Bunker

& Shabbat-O-Gram

Thank you to the Jewish Historical Society for hosting my book talk and launching of "Embracing Auschwitz: Forging a Vibrant, Life-Affirming Judaism that Takes the Holocaust Seriously."  Listen to the talk, and order the book here  (it is currently out of stock on Amazon, but returning soon!). See a review from Reform Judaism below... --------

Shabbat Shalom from the Bunker - and Happy Jerusalem Day!

16th century German map depicting Jerusalem as the center of the world

Celebrate Jerusalem Day by taking a 360 degree virtual tour, or Click here to see our Jerusalem info packet, including an annotated time-line, maps explaining ancient history and current events, Biblical and Talmudic sources, as well as poetry and art. Or take a look at two thousand years of Jerusalem customs (did you know that Jerusalem is mentioned 850 times in the Bible?).  Or read these five immortal Jerusalem poems by Yehuda Amichai.  Or all of the above!

 

I'm looking forward to joining with Cantor Katie and Jami Fener for our pre-havdalah program on Sat. evening at 6:30.  I'll be reading the book in the photo above, and I can't wait to see how it turns out!  Join Beth Styles and me this evening at 6 for Kabbalat Shabbat, and tomorrow morning I'll be leading services from back in the sanctuary once again, by popular demand. See the Torah reading and commentary from our Humash for Parashat Bamidbar and Shabbat Machar Hodesh here.  On Sunday, which is Rosh Hodesh for the new month of Sivan - we will have a mincha (afternoon) service at 1, as our weekly "Healing and Hangout" is transitioning to a pure afternoon service, the same as we currently have on Mon-Fri.

Praying for Monotony

 

Even as our state is inching toward "opening up" in some sectors, this eternal Groundhog Day continues to repeat itself day after day, week after week - and that's if we are lucky.  In a sense, we are praying for monotony, hoping to wake up the next day feeling exactly the same as we felt the day before, wishing for as little drama to enter our lives as possible.  

As a religious institution, one might facetiously say that we have an advantage in preparing people for a time like this.  We are experts at monotony!  Just look at our services! :)  Same prayers, every week, and in some cases, every day, and in some cases, multiple times a day. That has often been the critique of our more traditional services, especially, such as Shabbat morning's. But last week we saw that people really had missed that monotony.  They "flocked" to our Zoom room as I returned to the sanctuary, and when I took out the Torah, people were visibly moved.  I know I was.  It was like being reunited with an old friend. Somehow, the rhythm that has anchored my entire life, which had been ruptured by Covid-29, was being restored.

I saw some received advice from a church in Illinois.

It can start to feel like we're stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for the return of "real" life. A tiredness creeps in. We slowly start to slip away from normal habits. However, as unreal as the current reality feels, we need to remember that this is real life, and each moment has meaning.

For over 1500 years, in monasteries around the world, monks and nuns have taken vows to essentially live their whole lives in quarantine. They live, work, eat, pray, and sleep within the same walls their whole life. How do they stay sane? They follow a routine of prayer, work, and communal time that serves as the backbone of their life. They strive to stay present with God in the moment, offering up even the smallest tasks and frustrations to God out of love.

As we continue the long vigil, waiting for the day we can celebrate together again as a community, we should each ask ourselves: what is a simple sacred ritual I can take up every day and offer to God out of love? What can we do to stay awake and remain present with Him in the moment without worry about the future?

Keep it simple, remain faithful, and stay awake.

Sounds like good advice.  Let your life hum to the rhythm of daily ritual - whether it involves exercise, yoga, reading or - pray tell - prayer.  Find what grounds you. In Judaism, there are lots of options available.  Life is only monotonous if we allow it to be.

Boredom is just a state of mind.

Some More Memorial Day Holiday Weekend Reading & Listening

BONDS OF LIFE - Stories memorializing some Jews who have died during the Covid-19 crisis.

Rabbi Gittelsohn's Iwo Jima Sermon  - A rabbi's eulogy for World War II heroes became famous after a bigoted attempt to ban it.

What Jewish tradition says about cats, dogs and other companion animals.

Netanyahu Trial to Open Sunday (JPost)

Poems about Loneliness and Solitude (Poetry Foundation) Poetry offers solace for the lonely and a positive perspective on being alone).

Doing the Math: What's a Human Life Worth? (my article on R.N.S)

Text study from tractate Avot on Social Justice (Religious Action Committee)

"What Comes Next?" A podcast conversation between Rick Jacobs (Union for Reform Judaism), Jacob Blumenthal (Rabbinical Assembly / United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism), and Yehuda Kurtzer (Shalom Hartman Institute).

NEXT WEEK IS SHAVUOT

Two Exciting Zoom Learning Opportunities...

We are partnering in an exciting coast to coast All Night study session with the Rabbinical Assembly. Check out the list of congregations here. View the full schedule for the night here. Also see a library of pre-recorded sessions and study guides available for use anytime to prepare for and observe Shavuot. 

And on Wednesday, May 27, the Stamford Board of Rabbis will be leading a series of pre-Shavuot seminars (a "Pre-kun"). Mine is at noon.

 

Click here access info and the full schedule of classes 

Holiday Guide to Shavuot (Religious Action Center)

The Idiot's Guide to Shavuot

Perspectives on Happiness and Gratitude

Thank you to Dr Kareem Adeeb for sharing this with me

 

Days of Gratitude - Disruption. Social distancing. Loss, and grief. The morning that we woke up to today is not the same one we did even a month ago.

And yet there is (somewhere, sometimes) what to be grateful for: technology that keeps us connected, doctors on the front lines, educators supporting our children, friends telling us they see us, food that nourishes us, the natural world around us,
our inner strength and beliefs. 

We start our day with it. Modeh Ani. Thank you. This is Jewish wisdom at its best.  Days of Gratitude is an invitation to partake in an international, week-long, daily expression of gratitude. From May 22-30, culminating on the Festival of Shavuot, this website will be updated daily and will feature a rotating menu of activities and prompts designed to help you and those around you share gratitude. You can do this on your own, among family and friends, within communities and organizations, and across the broader, global community. Each day we will focus our gratitude on a different question and explore ways to express it.

How to Pray for Happiness (Rabbi Evan Moffic, MyJewishLearning)

Should we pray for happiness? On the face it, of course we should. Who doesn't want to be happy?

But something about word "happiness" strikes Jews in the wrong way. There's the old joke about the Jewish telegram: "Start worrying...details to follow." Our default is often guilt rather than happiness. It is as if we have been programmed to see anxiety around every corner, to be more comfortable in the familiar "oy" over the risky "joy."

Happiness is also an odd English word. It comes from the Middle English 

hap, as in happenstance and haphazard. This origin suggests that a happy life is a result of randomness and luck. Prayer has nothing to do with it.

In our consumerist culture, happiness is also frequently confused with pleasure, and praying for pleasure can feel self-indulgent. But happiness and pleasure are different.

Pleasure is short-term, like getting a massage or eating a sumptuous meal. Happiness is long-lasting. It is flourishing, which is a word preferred by the founder of the scientific study of happiness, Professor Martin Seligman. According to Seligman, flourishing contains five key components: positive emotion, engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment. An easy way to remember them is the acronym PERMA.

The Jewish happiness prayer, as we will see below, promotes flourishing. It is the happiness experienced through a life of meaning and purpose.

What is the happiness prayer? It is a series of verses from the Mishna we recite as part of the morning worship service. It is found in many prayer books as part of the traditional series of morning blessings.  Here it is:

 

I have translated as follows:

These are the deeds with infinite benefits.

A person enjoys their fruit in this world,

and in the world to come. Guide me in embracing these sacred practices:

Honor those who gave me life

Practice kindness

Learn Constantly

Invite others into my home

Be there when others need me

Celebrate life's sacred moments

Support others during times of loss

Pray with intention

Forgive those who hurt me and seek forgiveness where I have others

Commit to constant growth.

This translation is not literal. For a few of the practices, I chose to convey the value expressed in the specific practice itself. For example, the Hebrew phrase that literally means "provide for a bride" I have rendered as "celebrating life's sacred moments." Providing for a bride reflects the importance of marking sacred moments with ritual, and these moments are not limited to weddings. Today they include anniversaries, baby namings, even graduations. Finding ways to participate in and create communal celebrations around those life events makes us happier.

The academic discipline of positive psychology has reinforced the message of the happiness prayer. Indeed, even though the rabbis who wrote this prayer were not familiar with positive psychology, their teachings intuit it. The actions this prayer calls upon us to take fit squarely within the PERMA framework noted earlier.

For example, celebrating life's sacred moments incorporates positive emotions, relationships, and meaning. Praying with intention is a act of engagement, and prayer itself encompasses a worldview that life has meaning. Knowing how to pray - the words, the rhythm, the melodies - gives us a feeling of accomplishment. When we look at the Eilu Devarim prayer as a guide to happiness, we can see each of its practices as an expression of some aspect of PERMA.

Saying the prayer also promotes happiness in other ways. First, it pushes us outside of ourselves. Almost all of the ten practices involve other people. Inviting others into our lives, practicing kindness, and comforting mourners, are just the most direct examples. The rabbis understood the seeming paradox that focusing on others more than ourselves makes us happier. As Victor Frankl put, "the door to happiness opens outward."

Frankl's observation helps us see a second source of happiness in this prayer. It roots us in a religious worldview. Its opening verses remind us that we are reading more than a list of good deeds. They are a series of practices that echo through eternity. We feel their effects in this world and in the world to come.

Put differently, embracing a religious worldview makes us happier. We can speculate on why this is true. But I suspect part of the reason is that faith is a mindset that pushes us - in some cases, even obliges us - to do things that may not feel great in the short term, but that enhance our lives in the long term. These are the things we do that we can look back on a year later and feel happy to have done.

Every year, I fast on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. To do so is a commandment found in the Torah and has been a Jewish tradition for more than 4,000 years. Since I am working all day - delivering sermons and leading my congregation in eight hours of prayer - fasting is the last thing I want to do. Yet it enhances my experience of the day and my connection to others. It does not feel pleasurable in the moment. But when I look back, I know I experienced the power of the day.

This is the kind of commitment faith has always nurtured, and ignoring the role of faith in the search for happiness is like going to search for a treasure and throwing away an old map leading directly to it. The Eilu Devarim prayer is such a map. May it guide us on our journey.

Rabbi Evan Moffic is the spiritual leader of Congregation Solel in Highland Park, IL. He is the author of the "The Happiness Prayer: Ancient Jewish Wisdom for the Best Way to Live Today."

Book Review: Embracing Auschwitz

BY JOSHUA HAMMERMAN

REVIEW BY:  RABBI JACK RIEMER

  

I have a cynical friend who claims that there have been more books written about the Holocaust than there were people who perished in it. That is, no doubt, an exaggeration, but it is true that most of the books on this subject sound very much alike. Joshua Hammerman's Embracing Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press) deserves our attention because it is by far the most original book on this subject that has come along in a great many years.

It acknowledges right up front that this was the darkest time in all of human history, but it affirms that this generation can achieve new visions of faith and strength - and even joy - out of a confrontation with it. And I don't know of anyone who has said anything like that before.

He tells what he learned the first time that he was on a bus with a group of teenagers on the way to the hell-on-earth that was Auschwitz. He expected them to be feeling an overwhelming sense of dread, but when he looked around, he saw that these kids were trading their school pins and their sweatshirts and displaying an astonishing amount of teenage hormones... and he realized that they were the ultimate repudiation of the Nazis' intentions.

Right there, right on the way to the center of the valley of the shadow of death, these kids were expressing the excitement of life, and they were thereby demonstrating that the Final Solution was not so final after all.

And it is here that Hammerman offers his boldest idea, an idea that offends us when we first hear it, an idea to which our first reaction is that this is something that goes beyond the boundary of what a Jew can say. He proposes that there are now two Torahs that we must learn how to live with: the Torah of Sinai and the Torah of Auschwitz, and that each has validity, and each has lessons to teach us.

A Torah of Auschwitz? Is that phrase not the ultimate oxymoron? Surely, we can take pride and give honor to those who wrote poetry and composed songs even in the bowels of Hell without using a phrase like this one.

Surely we can stand in awe of those who shared their scraps of food, and those who held seders in secret, and those who escaped by crawling through sewers, and those who somehow preserved a bit of their humanity in that most inhuman of all places, without calling that world a place of Torah.

How can we talk of a Torah of Auschwitz? Is not such a phrase a desecration and a perversion of the whole Jewish tradition, which stands on the Torah of Sinai?

And yet, Hammerman declares that our perception of God, of ourselves, and of our purpose in the world will be transformed when we begin to see them through the prism of Auschwitz. The Torah of Sinai has not been abrogated, but we will understand it differently in confrontation with one that is sometimes much harsher and sometimes much gentler: the Torah of Auschwitz.

The rest of this book is a description of some of the ways in which these two Torahs differ and yet are intertwined. Hammerman tells us how he and his traveling companions found once-abandoned synagogues all over Eastern Europe now rebuilt with the names of every single person in their community who was killed by their Nazis inscribed upon their walls.

In some cemeteries, they found tombstones that had been overturned and desecrated with swastikas, but in others they saw tombstones that have been restored and repaired so that the names that are inscribed on them will not be lost.

They remembered the words of Simon Wiesenthal, who said that he envied those who were fortunate enough to have graves instead of just being thrown into rivers or into ditches. And he envied even more those that had sunflowers planted on their graves, because the sunflower is known in European folklore as the flower that remembers.

Hammerman recounts that the young people on this trip came away from this experience with the determination to be sunflowers to the next generation. He says that when you listen to a witness, you become a witness. 

And so these young people resolved that when they came to Yad Vashem they would look up the names of these people in the archives, so that, when they got home, they could tell their congregations the stories of their lives, and not just their deaths.

Hammerman finishes this account of all the different collections of names that they saw wherever they went with this turnabout on one of the mitzvahs that is found in the Torah of Sinai. When they came to Berlin, they saw bricks on the sidewalks that you could stumble over, and therefore could not help but notice. These bricks are called stolpersteine, which literally means, "stumbling stones." Each one is inscribed with the name of the person who once lived here, who was taken away to his death from here, a name that must not be forgotten.

The Torah of Sinai says that you must not put a stumbling block before the blind, for if you do, you may cause him to fall. The Torah of Auschwitz says the very opposite: that stumbling blocks make people look down and see the names of those whose names they would rather not see.

The Torah of Auschwitz says that you must put a stumbling block before those who want to pretend they are blind so that they will have to come to terms with what happened here. And then it goes one step further, saying that it is a mitzvah to put a stumbling block before those who want to pretend that they are blind to suffering - not only then and there but here and now as well.

You will not be the same after you have read this disturbing book. It will force you to see God as the One who was with us in Auschwitz, who suffers with us, and who needs us.

Brace yourself to read a book that is sometimes painful, sometimes funny, and often inspiring. Brace yourself so that you can acquire a whole new perspective on who we are and what our purpose is. Brace yourself, even though you will put this book down many times along the way and wish that it were wrong. Brace yourself because you will learn that we are all survivors and that perhaps God is too.

---

Rabbi Jack Riemer is the author of Finding God in Unexpected Places and The Day I Met My Father Isaac at the Supermarket.

Shalom from the Bunker,

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman