Revelation and Relationship (in Bethlehem and Warsaw)
Revelation and Relationship (in Bethlehem and Warsaw)
We have days to go until Shavuot is upon us – Z’man Matan Torateinu, the Time of the Giving of Our Torah. In celebration of the giving of the Torah, our tradition mandates two special readings - one, we’ll read as our Torah portion on the first day, and the other, as the megillah, the special scroll, for the second.
The first is of course the story of Sinai. There is thunder and lightning. A great shofar is sounded. The people of Israel stand, terrified, at the foot of the mountain. And law is given. Ten specific sayings, in fact, which are displayed in synagogues in the likeness of the tablets on which they were written. And in contrast with Sinai’s drama and commandments, we also read Megillat Rut, the Book of Ruth. This is a soft kind of story. A story about love transcending boundaries. A story about family devotion. A story, actually, about devotion to another person leading a young woman to devote herself to the land, traditions, and God of a foreign people. It is the story which our rabbis base the concept of conversion on. Ruth says “your people shall be my people, and your God my God”, and from that we understand what it means for someone from Moab, or anywhere else, to choose Torah: not in a vacuum, but in conjunction with human relationship and community, in a context of a life that would have been easier otherwise, simply because it was the right thing for Ruth even if it wasn’t the obvious choice.
There is sometimes a discomfort around conversion. I think we do it well in this community - I certainly hope we do - but it is nonetheless true that the place of conversion is highly politicised, to the point that Jews who have converted are sometimes made to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. Sometimes - in contradiction to the halakhah, I might add - that attitude is deliberate. And I think much of that discomfort and politicisation around conversion comes from the fact that the existence of the modern Ruth prompts a question that many are not prepared to answer. The question: are you sure that you would choose this? Would you work hard to take hold of this, if it was not handed to you? What value do you really place on this?
I do think that is the discomfort. But to be clear, I think it is a paradoxical kind of discomfort, because in our world, it is possible to walk away. We would not need to leave our homeland for it; there are no mediaeval or modern ghetto walls confining us. Our tradition is one of obligation, of law and covenant, but... we are still choosing, to turn up, to engage, to understand ourselves as obligated and part of something bigger than ourselves.
Perhaps it is a different quality of choice. Perhaps it feels more passive, or more comfortable. And so that question that Ruth presents - the question presented by the conversion student - would you choose this, in my shoes - becomes a kind of unintentional emotional challenge.
For another emotional challenge. Out of Bethlehem and Sinai. Let me take you, just briefly, to the Jews of Warsaw.
Something is happening in this generation in Warsaw. Something which is neither the Israelites at Sinai, becoming obligated through a covenant with the whole people, nor Ruth walking to Bethlehem and choosing to obligate herself.
This is Jewish life picking itself up again; this last week, on our New London trip, we encountered two thriving congregations made up largely of Jews who came back.
And I don’t mean that they ever physically left the land, or that these individuals personally left Jewish identity behind. But there is a generation of Jews who grew up unaware of their religious inheritance, until someone was on a deathbed or someone had left the world, and were told they were Jewish as if it was a family secret that needed to be protected. After the war, after the Shoah, many remaining Jews hid their identities to the extent that their own children and grandchildren grew up without knowing.
The truth is, Angela had told me about this phenomenon when we were preparing for our journey, and I’ve heard the occasional story of someone learning they are Jewish after the death of a grandparent. But the scale of the situation was unimaginable to me. The work of Warsaw’s rabbis, Rabbi Michael Shudrich and Rabbi Stas Wojciechowicz, is so heavily involved in untangling these statuses, in doing giyyur l’chumra (conversion rituals for unclear statuses), and similar conversions where the status is clear but is not matrilineal. And that’s not even touching on how emotionally complex this all must be. We had Shabbat dinner with the head of the JCC, Maria Kos, who told us how the JCC is the first touch-point, constantly, for people who walk in a little dazed and confused and saying: I think I might be Jewish.
We davened on Friday morning at the Nozyk Synagogue, the orthodox congregation in the only physical synagogue still standing in Warsaw, with a fairly strong minyan for a workday. Rabbi Shudrich told us later that most of his congregants in that room did not grow up aware that they were Jewish. He told us a particular story about one of the men in the minyan. He and his now wife met and fell in love as teenagers. She discovered her Jewish roots in her early twenties, when they were already married, and then went to the Jewish Historical Institute to find out more. By the time she returned, it was with the news that not only was she Jewish, but her husband was Jewish, too. Surprise! But the really breathtaking moment of that story is that those two teenagers, who met and fell in love, had bonded over the shared political beliefs of Neo-Nazism. And then there they were, deradicalised, and returned to our community.
Their choice, the choice of so many of the Jews of Warsaw, is not about whether they want to be in or out. It cannot be captured in a dichotomy as simple as “inness” and “outness”. It is about returning to something that was lost. It is about recognising one’s own inheritance and, despite having every reason to not see the value of it, or even to see it as courting danger, choosing it all over again anyway.
Since we are talking about obligation, I think it’s worth knowing that our tradition does have a way of handling these situations without simply labelling people as failing to fulfil commandments. There is a legal category, originating in the Talmud, called the tinok shenishba, the infant who was captured, who was subsequently raised outside of the community. The bottom line is that we cannot hold people as obligated to a law they were given no opportunity to understand. But I think it’s a striking category to consider in Warsaw, because these are stories of those children bringing themselves back home.
(And I must add, I just must, that I do not blame the parents and grandparents who chose to walk away. I cannot say that I would not do the same. Anyone who has not lived through what they lived through cannot say that they would not do the same. But that generational trauma in relationship with the Jewish people is a deep fracture, and these grandchildren have sacred and difficult work to do in their returning.)
So there we have three models: Sinai, the giving of Torah law and obligation (in which God is active and we the people are passive); Ruth, who follows Naomi to a foreign land and casts her lot with the Jewish people out of love, who obligates herself through devotion; and the secretly-Jewish grandchildren of Warsaw, who have uncovered a heritage, a spiritual inheritance and a worldwide family, and have chosen to take themselves back to Jewish life despite knowing well that it is safer to remain hidden.
They are, none of them, a perfect model. They are each extraordinary. But I do think they each teach us something about what it means to be in the constant process of choosing to engage with our tradition.
Sinai and Ruth are put into conversation by Shavuot directly, as a reminder that the Torah is about both law and love. And for me, this year, my experience of the return of the Warsaw community from behind closed doors presents a heavy and beautiful reminder. That revelation can be divine, but it can also be a human process of rediscovery. That this holiday of relevation is just as much about relationship. That the story of Sinai is not simply a historical reminder of the giving of the Torah, but truly, it is about what it means to turn up: what it means to continually choose to turn up, with one another and for one another, with God and for God, with ourselves and for ourselves.
When it comes to us very soon, I wish you a joyous festival of revelation and relationship.
And for now: Shabbat shalom.
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