Shabbat-O-Gram for November 1: All Roads Lead to Anatevka

Shabbat-O-Gram 

 

  Lauren Redniss speaking to TBE Sisterhood about her creative journey and her outstanding work, which bridges the divide between journalism and art.

See the just-released trailer for the film RADIOACTIVE, based on Lauren's book, starring Rosamund Pike

See more photos from our fall album

Click here for my Yom Kippur sermons (text and audio)

Click here for my Rosh Hashanah sermons (text and audio)

Shabbat Shalom

I want to begin with a reminder of what I discussed last week - the eerie, jarring and sudden fall of one of our Torah scrolls from its perch in our ark, at a time when no one was near it - it had been returned to that spot a couple of minutes before.

The sound of that Torah hitting the ground seemed designed to knock us from complacency and to recognize that "it is a Tree of Life," but only if we "hold fast to it."  

How does one "make good" from this disruption?  Fasting for forty days, from sunrise to sunset, is a commonly cited remedy.  In some cases.  But I proposed something different.  Let's have at least forty people in the congregation donate the monetary equivalent of one day's worth of meals to a recognized charity fighting hunger and poverty. 

Around 850 million people around the world go hungry every day, according to a 2017 study by the United Nations.  So let us turn our trauma into a hungry family's blessing.

Between now and next week, please consider making a donation to one of the charities listed below - or another one of your choice that addresses hunger - and let me know when you have done it.  We can go beyond forty donations, naturally (and I hope we will), but we need at least forty to put things in balance again.

I am happy to say that we are nearly halfway to our goal.  Nearly 20 have made donations since the call went out.  But we need more.  Please consider making a donation to one of the charities listed below - or another one of your choice that addresses hunger - and let me know when you have done it.  We can go beyond forty donations, naturally (and I hope we will), but we need at least forty to put things in balance again.

- Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger

- Buzzfeed - 17 Charities for Hunger

- Yad Ezra: Feeding Israel's Hungry

- Yad Eliezer: Breaking the Cycle of Poverty in Israel

- Feeding America

- Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County

- Person to Person in Darien

- Three Square - UJF program providing 3 square meals to needy children

- Heifer International

- World Food Programme

- The Hunger Project

- Meals on Wheels America

- No Kid Hungry

- Save the Children

- Feeding Pets of the Homeless

- Freedom from Hunger

An Extra Neshama

There is a belief that on Shabbat we gain an added measure of spirituality, a neshama yetera, literally an "added soul."  Well, this Friday night that adage will take on new meaning.  The great Neshama Carlebach will join us at services, to sing and to speak - and she will bring added soulfulness, as she does wherever she goes.  At Saturday night's cabaret (BYOB), that soulfulness will increase all the more.  See the flyer below. And on Sunday morning at 11, find out about the Jews of Cuba from the professor who will be escorting our group there this March, Stephen Berk.  It's free and open to the public, and includes brunch.  Thanks to James and Elissa Hyman for their sponsorship of that event, and to sisterhood for helping to bring Neshama Carlebach here.

Balfour Day

Nov. 2 is Balfour Day, commemorating the date in 1917 when Lord Balfour wrote this letter: 

 

 Commentary on the text of the letter

Other resource material on the declaration

All Roads Lead to Anatevka - "Fiddler" and Ukraine

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles - Trailer

I had the chance to watch the documentary Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles, at this week's Jewish Film Festival. I highly recommend it.  The documentary explores the numerous ways this immortal musical touches on key aspects of the human experience - from parental love to the fear of displacement - exploring its resonance for Japanese and Africans as well as for American Jews.  Contrary to the common assertion that the show is dated, overly nostalgic and kitschy, a closer look reveals layers of depth worthy of Shakespeare.  There is nothing kitschy about it.  It was strangely comforting to learn that the first reviews for Fiddler's initial Detroit tryout were horrible - or they would have been had the local newspapers not been on strike that week, keeping that bad buzz off the streets and giving Jerome Robbins time to make numerous improvements.  Once it got to New York, opening night reviews were also far from perfect (though the New York Times called the character of Tevye "one of the most glowing creations in the history of musical theater").

The documentary premiered in August, but it was completed long before President Trump asked the White House operator to "get me Zelensky" on the now infamous day of July 25. No one had yet heard the names of former Ukrainian Jews named Vindman, Fruman and Parnas.  Yet, Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles concludes with a scene that now appears uncannily ironic and strikingly  poignant in the post-July 25 world.  

Like Fiddler the musical's final scene, the documentary closes by zooming in on the little Ukrainian shtetl of Anatevka.  In Fiddler times, when Shalom Aleichem wrote his Tevye stories, Ukraine (then called "the" Ukraine) was the epicenter of the Pale of Settlement where Jews were allowed to reside during the latter part of the Czarist era.  You can see the Pale in the map below.  The late 18th century partitions of Poland had brought approximately 900,000 Jews into Russia, where the government immediately confined them to a region in the western part of the Russian empire. There shtetls flourished - for a time - and the Jewish population ballooned.

 

Shalom Aleichem was born in a cluster of Ukrainian shtetls that included a very real town called Hnativka - just about 20 miles west of Kiev (or, as it's pronounced these days by savvy correspondents, Keev).   The expulsion of early 20th century Jews from Anatevka has gained new relevance to Ukrainians who are now being forced from their homes in the east, where Russians have been waging war for the past several years.  Refugees are refugees, and the message of Fiddler has become increasingly universal at a time when Putin-inspired ethnic cleansing has become all the rage, from Syria to Crimea to...Trumpian America.  But the documentary shows in it's final scenes that Jews are returning to Anatevka and rebuilding there.  Jewish refugees from the contested eastern provinces are constructing a new town in an old place.  And that is where the documentary ends.

But that's not where this story ends.  We all have seen over the past few weeks just how much the Ukrainian and Jewish stories inter-mesh, and how it all comes back to refugees - people like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian (really, Soviet)-born Jew who came to America at age three with his dad and twin brother. He came by way of Italy, following the over-ground railroad that the Soviet Jewry movement created to bring Jews to freedom.  He was three at the time and he has grown into an exemplary American, like so many Soviet-born Jews I am proud to know.  His journey is briefly described in a video clip unearthed this week:

Vindman as a young boy in @KenBurns "The Statue of Liberty"

On the other side of the spectrum, some Jews also with Ukrainian roots have not lived such model lives - people like Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.  As news of their indictment spread, so did a video of them carousing with their buddy Rudolf Giuliani, with Fruman crowing that "Anatevka is the best place in the world."

Why Anatevka?  

The Forward reported last week that the video was posted to a Facebook group for American Friends of Anatevka.  American Friends is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on whose board Parnas and Fruman serve.  As the Forward states, "The charity's job is not, as one might suspect, to bankroll productions of Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock's opus, but to support a real-life Anatevka built near Kiev."  JTA gives more details on the project, highlighting the role of a Ukrainian rabbi Giuliani has befriended.  Reading about these characters makes me wonder whether Tevye's grandkids - were they real - would be suing to extricate their hometown's reputation from the swamp.

That Anatekva is very close to the real Hnativka, the real shtetl that was fictionalized by Shalom Aleichem, the place that has sparked hope over the past half century in the eyes of millions who have found themselves displaced, evicted or simply lost in an increasingly untethered world.  No wonder it is such a short verbal leap from Hnativka to Hatikva.

While Lev and Igor are supporting a vision of Anatevka as a haven for Jewish refugees, their associate Rudy has been doing his best create lots more of them, by strengthening Putin's hand in the east.  Meanwhile, Vindman has displayed particular sensitivity to the need to support Ukraine and stabilize that eastern frontier against the brutal territorial ambitions of Russia.   See p.3 of Vindman's opening statement for this week's testimony, on the geopolitical importance of Ukraine. He asserts that American steadfast support for Ukrainian independence is the only thing preventing a much larger humanitarian crisis on that same border.  Far from being the manifesto of a dual-loyalist, as some crackpot conspiracy theorists have asserted, that opening statement comes directly from the heart of a former refugee, a Jewish refugee, one who cares about the stranger because he has seen Egypt.  He has known slavery and he has known what it means to bask in the shadow of Lady Liberty.  

We even have the Ken Burns footage to prove it.

The fact that Zelensky too has Jewish roots has essentially turned this whole Trump-Ukraine episode into a Jewish morality tale writ large.

Reviewer Peter Stein writes, regarding the Fiddler documentary, "The shtetl of Anatevka has come to stand in for every homeland left behind."  Jewish history has made us into experts on leaving places behind - and occasionally returning - but always caring for the wanderers.  That expertise is coming to the fore once again during this decisive moment for Ukraine and America.

Nancy Pelosi may well be right that "all roads lead to Putin." But if they do, they intersect in Anatevka.

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

My Father’s Chupah (NY Jewish Week)

                      See reactions to this article on the blog of the Jewish Outreach Institute

My Father's Chupah

by Joshua Hammerman

Special To The Jewish Week

The questioner was an African-American high school student — not Jewish — playing the role of Tevye’s daughter Chava in an astonishingly multicultural production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” one that brought together more than 100 students of all ages from 24 private and public schools in my modern Anatevka. Thanks to my son Dan, cast as Nachum the Beggar, I was asked to be the show’s rabbinic adviser.

“Rabbi, why does Tevye act like his daughter is dead when she marries someone who isn’t Jewish? Is that what Jews do?”

I had just watched them rehearse the wedding scene and couldn’t help but be struck by the irony of a Catholic Tevye and a Catholic Golda serenading their African-American and Asian daughters with “Sunrise, Sunset,” while a Hispanic rabbi, a recent immigrant from Colombia, performed the ceremony; and lurking in the background, a Jewish Cossack waited for his cue to wreak havoc on this bucolic scene.

At the center of the stage was the very symbol of Jewish continuity, the wedding canopy — and not just any canopy, but my father’s small, faded, linen chupah, off-white with gold tassels, embroidered gold flowers on the sides and a simple Jewish star on top. The four stubby wooden poles covered with peeling gold cloth give it a kitschy look, like something rescued from a Catskills catering hall, last seen in faded photos alongside the chopped liver and gefilte fish. My father, a cantor, had used this chupah for small, private weddings before stashing it in the attic sometime before his sudden death 30 years ago. There it remained in a crumpled pile until my mother and I rediscovered it when we were packing up the house. I had it cleaned and pressed and since then my father’s chupah has graced a number of weddings that I’ve performed.

But up until that moment when I sat there watching this “Fiddler” rehearsal, only Jews had stood underneath it.

A Catholic Tevye? Sounds crazy, no? Imagine a production of “1776” performed by Iranian mullahs, “Hair” by octogenarians or “Rent” by Republicans. But somehow, this all-school “Fiddler” worked. This dizzying production challenged some of my deepest-held convictions, forcing me to play a Tevye-like role in a 21st-century sequel, prodding me to calibrate what God might expect of us in an age of radical global shrinkage and swiftly dissolving boundaries.

Tevye, the Shalom Aleichem character, would never have allowed this Tevye, the Trinity Catholic student, to marry his fictional daughters. And the majority of the actors playing the daughters would themselves have been banned from standing under the chupahs of the real life shtetls where those fiddlers fiddled.But there they were, at center stage, standing under mine.

The cast members peppered me with detailed questions about lighting candles, kissing mezuzahs, and spitting to ward off the evil eye. I sensed from this very diverse group of students a desire to wrap their arms around their characters and make them their own. They wondered why it was seen as so radical for girls to dance with boys and whether Yenta still exists (“J-Date,” I replied). Somehow this production of “Fiddler” made perfect sense to them; and because of that it began to make sense to me as well, as it likely would have to Shalom Aleichem himself, a man who embraced life’s absurdities, saying, “No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you.”

The chupah has long been a great symbol of both exclusivity and inclusivity. It represents the home — the Jewish home — that the couple will build together. In the Bible, the term connotes the private chamber where the marriage was consummated; today it still marks that sacred space reserved for bride and groom alone.

But it’s also said to be modeled after Abraham’s tent, which had open walls and welcomed all comers, dissolving boundaries between private and public, promoting an inclusiveness that is both intimate and ultimate.

Back in the ’60s, the closest my father came to officiating at intermarriage was something involving fans of the Red Sox and Yankees. As a justice of the peace, he often performed small weddings in my home, both for Jewish and non-Jewish couples. I was too young at the time to care which of these weddings were of the shotgun variety; my curiosity was limited by the bifurcated universe I inhabited, preoccupied with one question only: Jewish or goyish? If the guy wore a yarmulke, bingo! A Jewish wedding! Chalk up another one for our team!

But the chupah was always the most definitive clue. When my dad took it out of the closet, I knew it would be a Jewish ceremony. When he did not, it was not. Life was very simple back then.

But not anymore.

Do Jews still mourn with sackcloth and ashes when their kids intermarry?

No, I told Chava. No one does that anymore. Even Tevye wouldn’t, if he were alive today. I explained, as sensitively as possible, how Jews have always seen immortality less in terms of their own souls’ ascent to heaven as in their children and grandchildren carrying on the faith. But Jews also want to be welcoming, like Abraham was.

Would I sit shiva for my child if he married out? Would I officiate at his wedding?
No and no.

But would I celebrate?

In the words of the immortal dairyman: I’ll tell you... I don’t know.

But I know that, like Abraham, I will love anyone who comes into my home with an unconditional, unbounded love. I’ll do it because it is precisely that kind of love that will bring renewed vitality to the Jewish people and eternal relevance to the Jewish message.

And I’ll do it because, as I’m sure Tevye would agree, loving our neighbor is a tradition; for it reminds us who we are and what God expects us to do.

Stamford and Anatevka: Our Little Village

That ringing you heard at about 9 this morning was the sound of a gaggle of worried parents calling their realtors, considering a flight from Stamford, after reading the headline story in today's Advocate about yesterday's tension at Westhill High School, which led to six arrests.

You want to hear about tension? I witnessed a full fledged riot yesterday afternoon, as hundreds of Stamford school students fled for their lives, not from mere gang members, but bloodthirsty Cossacks bent on killing, evicting and generally destroying a centuries-old way of life.

Of course, what I saw wasn't really happening. It was a rehearsal for the all-school performance of "Fiddler on the Roof," which will be presented at the Rippowam Middle School next month. Students from every school in the city are in the cast (full disclosure: including my son Dan), both public and private schools are represented, including parochial and day schools, a hundred of them on a single stage, kids from all religious and ethnic backgrounds and all ages. This production is, in a word: fantastic. It also demonstrates what is absolutely fantastic about Stamford and why those frightful families would be horribly mistaken to flee.

More full disclosure: both my kids have attended Westhill and thrived there, socially and academically. They have been able to go as far as they wished to push themselves (with a little parental nudge from time to time) and most of their teachers have challenged them to do just that. They and their friends are getting into the very best colleges; but more importantly, they are being prepared for life, real life, in an atmosphere that is far more nurturing than it is tense.

When I picked Dan up at school yesterday and asked him about the police presence, he had no idea that there had even been an incident.

The school is not without its faults - the entire school system has faults. Incidents involving violence cannot be taken lightly. But leave here? Leave a town that has farmland, city and sea, with bustling restaurants, fascinating neighborhoods, balloon parades and Jerry Springer?

But I digress. Because I want to tell you more about Anatevka.

I went to the "Fiddler" rehearsal yesterday at the invitation of the organizers, as the cast's official rabbinic advisor. It turns out that the kids wanted to know something about the little world they were inhabiting on stage and the tragi-comic characters they were portraying. I came in expecting a few simple questions about what "mazal tov" means or why we light candles on the Sabbath. I was overwhelmed at the sophistication and depth of their questions.

I began with a brief overview of the tumultuous period when the play takes place, those decades just before and after the turn of the 20th century, when Jews living in the Eastern European Pale of Settlement under Czarist rule. I explained that this was a time of jarring change, of modernization confronting traditional societies, that most Jews were confined to shtetls, living among themselves. The cultural mix was extremely rich and diverse in the shtetl, with religious Jews mingling with socialists (hello, Perchik!), secularists and Zionists. But most, like Tevye, simply struggled to get by on their wits and their wisdom.

Things got turned upside down in 1881, when Czar Alexander II was assassinated. The Jews were blamed. We discussed what the word "scapegoat" means and why the Russian government found the Jews to be a convenient victim around which they could bolster their flagging popularity. This led to anti Jewish rioting known as pogroms, featuring murder, maiming and eviction, leading to a mass immigration of 2 million Jews to America by 1920.

I pointed out to the kids the great historical irony that, had these 2 million not come to America in the early 20th century, they and their children would likely have been killed in the Holocaust that followed a few decades later. Some would call it the miracle of Jewish survival. Since all of my grandparents were among those huddled masses, I'm not one to dispute that point.

May God bless and thank the Czar... for kicking out 2 million Jews!

But "Fiddler" would not be so universally adored were it only about the Jewish experience. I sensed from this very diverse group of students a desire to wrap their arms around these characters and make them their own. So they had lots of questions. It got to the point where the director said "last question" about a dozen times, and even then, kids came up to me after they were dismissed. Bear in mind that I was the only thing standing between a long day of school and rehearsals, and their dinner. When finally it was time to leave, we agreed that I'd respond to any other queries via e-mail.

They asked relatively simple questions, like why people kiss the mezuzah on the doorpost or spit three times to ward off the evil eye. And then there were tough ones. Why did the family sit shiva for the daughter who married a non Jew? I explained, as sensitively as possible, the emotions that were behind such an action, and how Jews have always seen immortality less in terms of their own souls' ascent to heaven as in their children and subsequent generations carrying on the faith.

Whew!

Then another toughie: Why weren't girls and boys allowed to dance together in the wedding scene? Keep in mind that these questions were being asked, in large part, by cast members who are not Jewish. In the play itself, Tevye expects the audience to have only simple questions about matters like "why we keep our heads covered and why we wear these little prayer shawls." Evidently, the students of Stamford schools are far more curious and more sophisticated than the typical Broadway crowd of the mid 1960s.

And less afraid to ask.

I paused for a moment and decided not to get into a detailed discussion of the subject of sexual contact (for more details, see my recent posting Ask the rabbi: Does my hand have a disease?") Definitely not the right place for that. So I just talked about how traditional people of all faiths are concerned about modesty; for Jews, that meant very little contact between boys and girls until marriage.

They asked whether Yenta the matchmaker still exists. Yes, I said, only now she's got a new name: J-date (which of course they had no idea about, so I added, "or E-Harmony"). Someone asked whether rabbis are revered as much now as they were then. I smirked knowingly at a few Jewish parents in attendance, said something like "If only!" and spoke of how the prime role is - and was - to be a teacher and as such to be respected because of the teachings we represent.

Then it occurred to me. These kids come from as many backgrounds as there probably were on the boat that brought my grandparents over, from Minsk and Smorgon and wherever (you can find your own ancestors at http://www.ellisisland.org/search/search_new.asp ). What an experience, for them to be in this show together. How amazing, for Tevye to be bemoaning intermarriage when one of his five daughters is African American, another is Asian - and he's Catholic! How incredible, that despite these confusing mixed messages, somehow this production of "Fiddler" makes perfect sense, to them, to a Jew with a traditional background like me, and maybe it would have even to Shalom Aleichem himself, a man who embraced life's messy absurdities, saying, "No matter how bad things get you got to go on living, even if it kills you."

One of the youngest cast members is the fiddler (he fits the requirements to play from that roof: small, agile and talented). He asked me about the symbolism of the fiddle. I mentioned that Jews have long gravitated to that instrument, including several of the world's most famous violinists. Maybe because it's music comes closest to a human cry. The emphasis there is on both words: "human" and "cry." Balancing that song of life in a world so shaky is no easy trick. Which is why we love these characters so much.

The original Tevye of the Shalom Aleichem books suffered much more than his watered down Broadway version. A daughter actually converts out of the faith and another child commits suicide. Novelist Dara Horn noted how her students came to see this literary Tevye as "a model for the Jewish people—because of his talent for “rolling with the punches,” because of his reservoir of inner strength, and because of his unique ability, woven from modern irony and sacred text, to forge meaning out of the absurdity that is so often the Jewish condition. In navigating a new world where being Jewish or even American can mean being a living target, Tevye, whose world was no less absurd, became their guide. Quoting the Mishnah, a Rabbinic text, Tevye often said, “You live regardless of your own will.” Tevye’s “translation”? “A person’s life is never pointless.”"

The Jewish condition is in fact the human condition. But in order to understand that, you need to live in a place where you are exposed to the widest possible variations of the human. You need to breathe the air of difference. That rarely can happen in a gated community, or in some of the towns nearby where homogenity is the rule. You can't put on a play like "Fiddler" in Stepford. You can only do it in a place like Stamford.

But in our little village of Anatevka, everyone of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a simple, pleasant tune without breaking his neck. It isn't easy. Why do we stay up there if it's so dangerous? I'll tell you, I don't know, but it's a tradition!"

Are we talking about a roof in Anatevka - or the cafeteria at Westhill?

Only in a place like Stamford can this play resonate so full-throatedly, despite all the seeming contradictions and inconsistencies. I cannot imagine having brought up my kids anywhere else.

A Catholic Tevye kissing a mezuzah? Sounds crazy, no?