Mass attendance and Eucharistic adoration and religious images and the rosary and fasts and the liturgical calendar and the daily office can, to be sure, become a servitude motivated only by dull duty or, worse, by lazy superstition. But when they are used rightly, these disciplines do offer peace and abundance by giving us something to do with the parts of our minds and emotions that are normally given to fuss and strain and noise and thus allowing us to be quiet and attend to the ripple of the Spirit deep down in our roots. I imagine that for observant Jews the task of obeying the Law’s myriad demands works in much the same way, by keeping their attention focused on God. Six hundred and thirteen mitzvahs demand constant alertness, leaving no space for inattention or sloppiness or indifference.
Of course, I could be quite wrong; maybe the mechanism whereby the deep waters of the Torah are drawn up to swell the fruits of human peace and patience and goodness and joy is quite different. So I will leave the last word on the subject to my husband, a scholar of some very esoteric bits of Jewish and Christian antiquity. “Judaism’s supposed to be legalistic,” he says. “That’s how it works. Duh.”
9
Darkness and the Triumph of Light
Obedience to the Torah, which energizes every detail of my Jewish friends’ lives, does not feel at all to them like sterile slavery to the letter of the Law. But these images of Judaism as servile and sterile, images that are derived from uninformed readings of the Gospels and of Paul, have persisted in the Christian mind for centuries. They are not the only negative images, not the only misunderstandings that have distorted Christians’ and others’ views of Judaism.
In the Middle Ages there was the blood libel: the rumor, used to incite persecution, about secret Jewish ceremonies that involved the blood of Christian children. There was the notion, stemming from the sociopolitical outworkings of the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on usury, of Jews as avaricious and unscrupulous. There are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a document first disseminated in nineteenth century Russia by anti-Semitic agents of the czar and purportedly exposing a Jewish plot to attain world domination. Centuries of suspicion and persecution and hatred, fueled by these and other distortions, culminated in the last century with the murder of six million Jews, among them the parents and grandparents of people I know. And it isn’t over. There are still people out there who would like to wipe all Jews from the face of the earth.
Lauren Winner writes about her “holocaust fantasies”— about what she would do if
the rules of exclusion, the rules that say Jews can’t do this or that, hold elected office or work in certain professions, those rules start happening, and then violence and other terrible cruelties start happening . . . and spiral and spin . . . and I am somewhere dark and there is mud and there are trains and it is raining.1
I think about this too, at one remove. What would I do if the unimaginable happened, and justice and order started disintegrating, and new, sinister powers turned their eyes toward the Jews? Could I be like Corrie ten Boom, Dietrich Bonhoffer, Oskar Schindler, Chiune Sugihara, and many, many others—the Jews call them hasidei umos haolam, the righteous among the Gentiles—who risked everything to shelter neighbors and strangers from the grim, terrifying darkness that loomed over them all? Could I risk my own life and the lives of my children for our friends, for justice, for God?
Nothing in my very sheltered life suggests that I have the makings of a hero. So would I be like Peter, who, when the chips were down, chose to abandon his friend to save his own skin? Would I be like the Hutus in Rwanda or the Christian Serbs in Bosnia, who, after living for generations in harmony with their Tutsi or Muslim neighbors, surrendered their souls to a sudden nightmare of hatred and brutality and turned against them? Like the Germans and Poles who stood by and watched what was done to the Jews and did nothing and said nothing?
I don’t know what I would do. But I know that even if I failed horribly, if the whole world failed, the Jews would still survive. They will survive whatever fresh terrors the world may yet have in store. The confidence that God will keep his promises has been strengthened rather than undermined, for religious Jews, by the fire they have passed through. To be Jewish today means to be constantly aware and vigilant (to be human today should mean the same), but my friends’ vigilance is combined with and deepened by pride, strength, and a commitment to celebration. Jewish festivals, Adina tells me, have a common theme: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.”And although we are in some sense part of the “they”—the Gentile world that has been, for millennia, a constant threat and worse to the Jews—we often get to go along and eat too.
Among the festivals of the Jewish calendar, it is probably Hanukkah, along with Pesach, of which Christians are most aware. Hanukkah commemorates a miracle of light at a dark moment in history. In 165 BC, Israel was under the control of the vast Greek Empire, and the Syrians who controlled the region were aggressively trying to force their subjects to assimilate into the dominant culture. Some Jews were content to adopt Greek language and dress and customs up to a certain point, but there were also stiff-necked conservatives, in the grand tradition of Nehemiah, who angrily resisted all foreign influence. When the Syrian ruler Antiochus Epiphanes ordered the desecration of the Temple, suspicion and resistance erupted into open rebellion, led by a radical known as Judah Maccabeus. (The full account in the book of Maccabbees is a terrific story, stirringly told.) The rebels succeeded in retaking Jerusalem and rededicating the Temple.
As the story goes, they found that almost all the sacred oil used in the Temple menorah had been desecrated. Only one bottle was still sealed, but it contained enough for only one day, and it would take eight days to prepare new oil. The oil in the bottle lasted eight days, and now at Hanukkah Jews light nine-branched menorahs in commemoration of the miracle. Sometimes we get invited to watch. Every member of the family—even the two-year-olds—gets to light their own menorah and say the special blessings. If you have seven or eight kids, then that’s a lot of light on the last day when all the candles are lit. There are special foods and presents and games with spinning tops called dreidels, and a good time is had by all.
Hanukkah is fun, but it is not a particularly important part of the Jewish calendar. However, it falls in December, right around the time Christians are decorating trees and wrapping presents; and partly because of this it has become (along with Passover) one of the festivals observed by Jews who don’t pay much attention to being Jewish the rest of the year—just as Christmas and Easter bring out a lot of people who don’t set foot in a Church the rest of the year. It’s ironic, really. Hanukkah celebrates the heroically stubborn refusal of Jews to give way to foreign influence, to budge an inch from their fidelity to their roots or the Law that is their bond to God. But for many Jews who live in a predominately Christian culture, it has come to function as an alternative to Christmas, an excuse to do something with decorations and presents and lights so you can be properly Jewish without cheating the kids.
Or so I’m told. But, of course, this is not true of our neighbors, who, as usual, are blithely indifferent to what Christians are up to. The Orthodox do not suffer from Santa envy; Christmas is “not for Jews,” and that’s the end of that. It has to be said that the kids do get rather excited about the Christmas tree; let’s face it, if you’re four years old and your friend’s living room suddenly sprouts a ten-foot conifer covered in colored lights and shiny balls, it doesn’t matter how Jewish you are—you’re going to get excited. And then there’s the issue of our manger scene. It’s one of those infinitely expandable ones (you start out with Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus and a scattering of angels and shepherds, and then you add a couple of camels and a little drummer boy one year, an elephant and some wise men the next), and our children adore it and play with it constantly. Last year I came into the living room to find Dovid running round and round the coffee table holding baby Jesus and the angel over his yarmulke-clad head, hotly pursued by our Adam and a tyran
nosaur who evidently had sinister intentions with regard to the infant Savior. Adam was roaring, “I will eat the baby all up!”And Dovid was yelling, “No, I will save the baby!” I contemplated the scene briefly, then backed into the kitchen and let them get on with it.
In the spring, there’s Purim, which also commemorates a triumph of Jewish courage and determination over foreign hostility. The story is set in the Persian Empire. Haman, the wonderfully loathsome villain, is second-in-command to the sleazy, lecherous, drunk King Ahasuerus and has used his influence to plan an attack on the Jews in Persia. One Jew, a minor palace official named Mordecai, has bruised Haman’s vast and fragile ego by refusing to grovel to him the way everybody else does, and Haman will not rest until all the Jews in Persia have been slaughtered. The date set for the massacre is drawing near. But unbeknownst to everyone,Ahasuerus’s young queen Esther is a Jew—in fact, Mordecai’s cousin—and she manages to turn the tables on Haman and save her people. The story, recorded in the book of Esther, is delightful, told with great humor and panache. The author goes to town on the portraits of the nastiness and depravity of the Persian Empire, in which the members of the Jewish community live uneasily, and of the deliciously despicable Haman, whose ego he first inflates then punctures with gleeful wit, leaving Haman utterly humiliated before he is killed.
The story is also rather spicy. Esther is faithful and ingenious and daring, but that is not why she becomes queen. At the start of the story, Ahasuerus dumps his queen in a fit of temper because she coolly declines to be put on display before a palace full of drunk men. He needs to replace her, so beautiful virgins are hauled into the harem and subjected to six months of beauty treatments—surely manicures and eyebrow waxing, and probably lessons on how to address an ambassador and wave graciously and use a fish fork and all the other things queens need to know.
Then they get to meet the king, one at a time. “In the evening she went in; then in the morning she came back” (Esther 2:14). They get to use props. “When the girl went in to the king, she was given whatever she asked for to take with her from the harem to the king’s palace,” the text says (Esther 2:13). I once asked my class what they thought that might mean, and a bright-eyed freshman, bless her innocent little heart, said, “Something to help the king get to know her? Like maybe a girl might bring a painting she had done or a poem she had written?” Sure, honey. You and I both know that there was a closet in that harem full of the ancient-Persian equivalent of fur-lined handcuffs or hot cinnamon oil (or whatever—I must confess I’m not much of an expert on the twenty-first century versions either). Every girl had a favorite prop and a specialty of her own. But Esther, our heroine, doesn’t take anything. And she, alone and unaided by feathers or high-heeled boots, is the one the king chooses to be his queen. Enough said. Fortunately, in addition to being exceptionally talented in the only area that matters to her piggish new husband, Esther has brains and nerve and class, and she uses them to save her people.
The celebration of Purim is rather like Halloween in reverse. Kids, and the grown-ups who are inclined, dress up in costume and go from door to door distributing, rather than demanding, little packets of goodies. Ahuva, who has an offbeat sense of humor and can do anything with a needle, makes costumes for the whole family every year. When I was just getting to know her, she invited me to come and see that year’s creations. I knocked on the door in the morning, and Yaakov, who has dark olive skin and big brown eyes with unending eyelashes, opened it. He was wearing a long, narrow white robe and a pointy white hat. He looked at me. I looked at him. He was doubtless thinking, Why is this strange lady standing at my door and staring at me? I was thinking, Oh my! The Ku Klux Klan? I know Ahuva’s a bit wacky, but that’s really too much. Before I could collect myself, the rest of the kids came crowding to the door. They were all wearing long, narrow robes and pointy hats. Alisa’s were red; Dina’s, blue; Simcha’s, brown; Yaffa’s, yellow. Crayons. What a relief. Since then they’ve been toy soldiers, clowns, and fishermen. But the crayons are still my favorite. One Purim in her wild youth, Ahuva was a pregnant nun.
Then in the evening they drink; if they obey the instructions in the Talmud, they drink until they get Mordecai and Haman muddled up. And the lads go out and raise hell—or they think they do. The spectacle of Orthodox teenagers bent on raising hell is quite hilarious; Orthodox Jews (by comparison to the Catholic kids I teach, or probably in comparison to anyone you care to mention except conceivably the Amish) are very bad indeed at being rowdy, loutish, and antisocial. When I pointed this out to Ahuva, she looked mildly put out and insisted that the teenage boys do get very drunk and behave very badly indeed. She has no clue. None. And that’s a good thing.
Sukkot is our family favorite. It is a considerably more important part of the Jewish calendar than Hanukkah and Purim because, unlike them, it is ordained in the Torah and remembers a fundamental part of the story of the covenant: the forty years after the Exodus during which the Jews lived alone in the wilderness with God while the scars of slavery faded and they grew strong enough to take possession of the Promised Land. Leviticus 23:42–43 directs, “You shall live in booths for seven days . . . so that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.”
So late every fall, in remembrance of the forty years in the wilderness, our neighbors’ yards sprout little plywood huts with bamboo or branches laid on the top as roofs. Our first time in a sukkah came a few years ago, when the Levys moved in five doors down one cold, wet October and had to prepare for Sukkot before they were properly unpacked and settled in. Yisroel, who had been told that our house was the place to go for tools and guy things, came over to borrow a spade so he could level a spot for the sukkah in their steep, bumpy, overgrown yard. Glen, spotting an opportunity to be neighborly and get muddy all at once (two of his favorite things), went with him and came back several hours later as muddy as he could have wished, smelling distinctly of whisky, and bearing an invitation for dinner.
The girls were beside themselves with excitement, in large part because they assumed they would get to wear their new party dresses (I don’t know where they learned to get so excited about dressing up: not from their mother, that’s for sure) and were incensed when I stuffed them into woolly tights, boots, and three layers of sweaters. Their indignation evaporated into delight when we arrived and walked through the living room, through the dining room, through the kitchen, out the back door, through the dark chilly yard, and into the sukkah. It didn’t, I imagine, look particularly like the original desert booths, being well furnished with folding chairs, paper chains, and crayon drawings. By Torah law, however, sukkahs cannot be weatherproof—the roof has to be made of natural materials, and you have to be able to see the stars. If the starlight can make it in, so can the rain.
That night it was satisfyingly chilly, but the rain held off just long enough for everyone to do justice to the dinner and for the kids to sing a couple of raucous rounds of “Who Knows One?” a sort of Jewish “Twelve Days of Christmas” except louder and accompanied with energetic gestures and sound effects as it builds on itself from “Who knows one? I know one!” up to “Who knows twelve? I know twelve! Twelve are the tribes of Israel, eleven are the stars in Yosef ’s dream, ten are the holy commandments,” all the way back down to, at the top of your lungs, “One is Hashem! One is Hashem! One is Hashem! In the heavens and the earth.” (Hashem means “the Name” and is used in everyday conversation to replace Adonai, which is used in prayers to replace YHWH, the sacred name that God revealed to Moses and that Jews absolutely do not utter, ever. Neither do I, for that matter.)
It would have been hard enough to tear the kids away from the party with Glen’s help. This evening it was nearly impossible. By the time it became evident that we had about ten minutes before the children completely fell to pieces, he and the men were surrounded by open books and half-empty glasses, deep into a theological conver
sation and a bottle, and he really didn’t want to leave. I finally pried them all away, and rather than trekking mud into the house for no reason, we walked down the alley to our dark, empty backyard.
By now we more or less take it for granted that we will spend time in a sukkah every year, that someone will bring us little packets of candy at Purim, and that come Hanukkah we will leave our tree for an evening and go watch candles being lit. These celebrations have become part of our year just as Shabbos has become part of our week—a counterpoint playing softly under the melody of the Church’s calendar, creating unexpected and poignant harmonies. But the emotional heart of these festivals, celebrations of survival against overwhelming odds, will always remain closed to me. I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to belong to a people who have been, and still are, the object of vicious hatred. I cannot conceive of what it must be like to learn about the Holocaust for the first time and know that evil was turned against you, your family, and your whole world. It’s not something I’ve discussed with my friends. How exactly are you supposed to start a conversation like that? “Mmm, lovely cookies; you must give me the recipe. And tell me, what’s it feel like to have relatives who were experimented on and murdered like animals?” I wish they would tell me about it, because I think I ought to try to understand, even if only a little. But the subject is not mine to raise.
Although Jewish suffering is alien to me, I do feel very comfortable joining in Jewish celebration. Not just because my neighbors are kind and invite us and the food is as good as the company, but because what they are celebrating is God’s fidelity to his promises, and our faith rests on that too. Sometimes—if truth be told, quite often—it seems to me preposterous to believe that love will in the end triumph over death, that Christ will return and heal the world. It doesn’t make any sense. But neither does it make any sense that there are menorahs and sukkahs and crowds of noisy kids in costume on my block. It defies all conceivable logic that a tiny nation like Israel should have survived, while civilizations and empires have arisen, triumphed, and crumbled into oblivion. But in defiance of logic, here they are, a blessing to the nations and a blessing to me, and when they invite me to celebrate their crazy victories over history, I’m there with all my heart.
Strangers and Neighbors Page 8