| Weekly Teaching Parashat Toldot
November 25th, 2011 My Jewish ancestors did not gaze upon the Statue of Liberty when they first arrived in America. Their arrival in America pre-dated that of Lady Liberty, when they first came here from Cologne, Germany in 1828. They settled in New Orleans and were actively engaged in that city's vibrant Jewish community. After my great-grandmother Caroline's first husband Jacob died, she moved to New York City, where she met and married my great-grandfather, a widower named Leopold Rosenthal. Their only child, Sidney, was my grandfather.
Sidney met and married a Scots-Irish Protestant girl named Ethel Nock, who - at the urging of my great-grandparents -- underwent an Orthodox Jewish conversion just prior to her wedding in 1926. Ethel promptly changed her name to Esther, and gave birth to four children, two sons and two daughters. But somewhere between my grandparents' and my father's generation, our family connection to Judaism melted into the American melting pot. No one is really sure how it happened. Some relatives say that it was because of my grandmother's conversion: her own family disowned her, and my grandfather's family never really accepted her, even after she converted. Because of this sense of alienation, there was no extended family with whom to celebrate the Jewish holidays or share in lifecycle rituals. Their family became a family unto itself, without a connection to its generations, and by the time we were fully American, we had lost all of our sense of being Jewish.
By the time I was born, my father, along with all of his siblings, had chosen to marry someone who wasn't Jewish. Like my sister and all of my cousins, I was raised Catholic, and educated in parochial schools. But of all of the eleven cousins who grew up in our warm, loving family, I was the only one who was constantly, naggingly intrigued by our last name, and as a child, felt as if I was constantly being asked, mostly by my schoolmates and teachers, whether or not I was Jewish. In some strange way, the word "Jewish" took hold in my heart like a stubborn seedling. And to my surprise, that seedling first flowered in 1983, at the bar mitzvah of my oldest and dearest childhood friend. I still remember walking into the synagogue's sanctuary, and hearing the cantor chanting the prayers in Hebrew. Something inside me breathed and bloomed. It was a feeling of sanctity I had never known in church; had never known anywhere.
When I arrived at the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust for my first job interview, I knew I was in a place - like that first moment in the synagogue - that would change my life. I had spent many years trying to figure out where my religious path was taking me. I knew that I wasn't supposed to be Catholic - that much was certain. But I had never found a Jewish home where I felt truly welcome - until I found myself at the Museum.
I had spent many years in college studying the Holocaust, reading the testimony of survivors, feeling myself drawn in to every element of this era of history. It wasn't that I felt personally connected to the Holocaust; after all, my family had left Germany more than a century before it happened. Instead, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt: my family had lived in America, in relative safety and prosperity, only to lose their sense of faith identity. It made me think about those who had been tortured and murdered because they were Jewish, those who had been willing to suffer and die because of their faith. It made me wonder what had happened to my own family - and what I could do to reconnect to our lost tradition.
The Museum was the first place that I felt I could ask myself what it would mean to be Jewish. What it would mean to pick up the threads of this five thousand year old tradition - threads that had become too worn and broken to support the weight of my own family history - and weave into it the story of my Catholic upbringing, and the idea, I felt, that maybe I had a Jewish soul that had gotten lost on its way somewhere else, and it was time for me to find my way home. And the Museum was my guidebook. As I traveled through the collection, time and time again, as a member of the Museum's Communications team, I began to feel more and more at home with the story of my Jewish heritage. I experienced the gift of hearing many survivor testimonies, and the feeling of being entrusted with these sacred stories of the past. But what ultimately moved and motivated me, beyond anything else, was the sense of how Jewish life continued on after the Shoah, thriving and moving forward and celebrating every blessing. I found that it would be possible - even in spite of the sense of alienation and abandonment of my family's own Judaism - for me to identify with the faith and resilience that had kept some sacred spark of Jewish connection alive in me.
When I traveled to the Museum two weeks ago, with my new Temple Sholom and Sholom Center family, I was so pleased and proud to show my new friends around my first Jewish home, the place that ultimately led me to formally convert to Judaism in 2002. It is a place I cherish and love so much that I set the plot of my first novel, The Bookseller's Sonnets, within the walls of the Museum. As a testament to its powerful and compelling message, I, too, wanted to create a story that would bear witness - not only for my own family's history, but also because of the privilege I have had to stand in sacred witness to the countless unforgettable survivor testimonies I have heard.
During our Museum visit, we heard the testimony of Bronia Brandman, whose courageous and heartfelt story of survival brought every person in the room to tears. Bronia and I had met many years earlier, when I coordinated a photo shoot of her in the Garden of Stones, the Andy Goldsworthy installation of granite boulders implanted with dwarf oak trees that serves as the Museum's memorial garden. The oak trees are meant, someday, to break the boulders apart, as their roots and trunks grow stronger. It is meant to symbolize the triumph of life over tragedy. Bronia's indomitable spirit, her energy, and her love of life and joy in Judaism left every person moved and uplifted. Even with all of the sadness contained in Bronia's story, one cannot help but be transformed by hearing about her courage, and witnessing the light in her eyes as she shares her story. Like the tree that will someday break the stone, her story has touched thousands of people, breaking through the shell of fear and cynicism with which many people sometimes approach stories of the Holocaust. And it is truly a blessing that her book, The Girl Who Survived, recently published by Scholastic and available on Amazon, will have the opportunity to touch even more lives.
From the Garden of Stones, it is merely a turn of the head in the direction of the wind, and one is in the presence of the timeless view of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the symbol of freedom for so many who came to this country escaping tyranny and terror. But for me, the Statue of Liberty is a vision that is always twinned with the words that adorn the walls of Jerusalem stone at the Museum's entrance: "Never forget," it reads in Hebrew. "There is hope for your future."
Our faith and the faith of our ancestors has always been a precious and fragile thread that binds generation to generation. At times, that thread has been severed by an inhumane enemy; at others, it has been willfully destroyed by those who would see us disappear. And at other times still, it has simply unraveled. But it is that thread of ancient wisdom, contained in centuries of prayers and poems and songs, which has somehow kept that our tradition and our people unbroken for nearly five thousand years. In a land where we can choose any hope and any future, I have been gifted with the blessing of belonging to a loving, embracing Interfaith family, from which I have emerged to honor both my ancestors' past and a radiant Jewish future, and in which I have been blessed to choose my faith journey, and the eternal hope of an eternal people. And for that blessing, on this Thanksgiving -- this most Jewish of American holidays -- I am most grateful of all.
Shabbat shalom,
Andi Rosenthal |
