Yom Kippur With Morrie

Yom Kippur, 2000 by Harold M. Schulweis

When I put down the slender book Tuesdays With Morrie, I felt a double sadness. First, for the death of a courageous and good man whose life was ravaged by ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease. And I was saddened because I sensed that Judaism and the synagogue had lost Morrie and Morrie's children. Morrie was so unmistakably Jewish, and yet so far removed from Judaism; so close and yet so far.

I know Morrie Schwartz – not personally, I never met him. But I would know him anywhere. I know his neshamah and his mishpochah. It was as if Morrie were raised in my father's house, a child of East European immigrant Jews, secular, cultural, ethnic, Yiddishist, socialist Jews. When I thought of Morrie, I thought of my Papa and his friends.

Morrie and I were “lansman.” He was raised in my neighborhood, Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, in a one-bedroom apartment in a red brick building near an Italian beer garden. His stepmother, Eva, sang the same songs my mother sang. They were not religious songs. They were volkslieder, Yiddish secular folk songs, songs of the people. Most of the songs had a sweet soft sadness to them. It is a song about a destitute woman, hungry, and alone selling cigarettes in the rain and crying for support. The language sung and spoken between our parents was Yiddish. Yiddish was not simply another language like English or even Hebrew. Yiddish for the generation was Mama Loshen, the language created by European Jewry. Yiddish was the sweet soul of Yiddishkeit.

And Yiddishkeit was not Judaism as traditionally understood. Yiddishkeit was not the Judaism of the synagogue, or daily prayers or Sabbath observance, or ritual law or theological doctrine, or the Judaism of religious denominations like Orthodoxy, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist Judaism. Yiddishkeit was Jewishness; a world of ethics, ethnicity folk culture and idealism of die massen, the masses, the property of Proletarian Jews, not bourgeoises Jews.

Yiddishkeit was the way of "der poshiter yid", the common Jew, the simple Jew, "der arbater", the worker.

A synonym for Yiddishkeit was menschlichkeit, the ideal of humaneness, kindness and decency. The word I heard in my home most often was "yoisher" which means justice, usually social justice. And "mitzvah," which did not mean commandment as my Zayde taught, but "to do a mitzvah," to do the decent thing.

Morrie, like Papa, was raised in the era of depression. On his deathbed, Morrie still remembers looking for a job in the fur factory where his father worked. What he recalls as he enters the factory were walls closed in around him, a room dark and hot, the windows covered with filth, the machines churning like train wheels. The fur hairs flying, leaving a thickened air and the workers sewing their pelts together bent over their needles. And the boss marching up and down the rows, screaming for them to go faster.

Morrie Schwartz resolved that he would never allow himself to do any work that exploited someone else; never would he allow himself to make money off the sweat of others. Like Papa.

How many times had I heard that Yiddishized word pronounced "exploitazia.”

Yiddishkeit, the culture of Yiddish, was not of the synagogue but was expressed in Yiddish poetry, art, music that poured out its heart to comfort the underdog, the laborer, the exploited, the helpless. Yiddishist culture was reflected in the great Yiddish classics, the writings of Mendele Mocher Seforim, Shalom Aleichen and Y. L. Peretz and came into my home through the great Yiddish newspapers such as Der Tog,, the Morgan Journal, Der Forvetz and Yiddish plays written by Sholom Asch, Peretz Hirschbein, David Pinski, artists Maurice Schwartz, Muni Weisenfreud (Paul Muni), Ludwig Satz.

I had a dog. My dog was not called Rover or Spot. My dog was given a Yiddish name "Ropchik", named after a dog in one of the short stories of Shalom Aleichem. In that story, Ropchik was the smallest, weakest dog, the last to receive a scrap of meat from the butcher. All the other dogs beat him out. Ropchik represented the oppressed Jewish proletarian.

Papa didn't send me to Yeshivah to study with rabbis. My father, like Morrie's, had different heroes: Chayim Zhitlovsky, Karalnik, David Dubinsky, Sidney Hellman. Papa's heroes were not rabbis from the world of the Yeshivah and the synagogue. My father could never warm up to rabbis. Ironically, my father in later years had to suffer his son's attraction to the rabbinate. Forgive me, Papa.

I went to schula. Papa and his chaverim sent their children to Yiddish afternoon schula, whether associated with the Arbeter Farband, Shalom Aleichen, Arbeter ring, Yiddishist schools in which there were no classes in prayer or ritual law, or Mishnah or Gemorah. There was no God talk. Some Jews still get nervous when Senator Lieberman talks about God and faith. It's not Jewish.

Morrie considered himself an agnostic. He will have no traditional funeral. He instructed his family to have him cremated, and then added "Make sure they don't overcook me."

So filled with Jewish sensibilities, Morrie was so far from Judaism.

The author of the book recalls that when Ted Koppel, the TV host of ABC's "Nightline", interviewed Morrie, Morrie turned to Koppel, himself a Jew, and asked him, "Tell me something about faith." Koppel is nonplussed and answers rather stiffly, "I usually don't talk about such things with people I've only known a few minutes." But Morrie presses on:  "Ted, I'm dying and I don't have a lot of time here." Ted Koppel laughs and says, "All right then. Faith." …and then quotes a line from Marcus Aurelius. Now, I have nothing against Marcus Aurelius or against stoic philosophy, but that response struck me odd and revealing.

I thought about Morrie. Not only because he is such a loveable eccentric individual, but because there are tens of thousands of native born Jews like Morrie who call themselves secular, cultural, ethnic and ethical Jews, and who are so estranged from Judaism and the world of the synagogue. When in 1990 the Jewish Population Study was published, it recorded the response of a huge number of native born Jews (1.2 million) who when asked "What is your religion?" answered "none.” Morrie would never deny his Jewishness, but asked about his religion I think he would say "none.”

I love Morrie and his family – the tailors, peddlers, cloak makers, cigar workers, hat makers, painters and his friends. I love their compassion, their moral sensibility, their menschlekeit, their universalistic and humanistic outrage at injustice. But I was struck by the disconnection, the chasm between Yiddishkeit and Judaism, between moral sensibility and Jewish law, between conscience and Jewish belief, between the home and the synagogue.

And by the end of the book, I was saddened because I think that the synagogue bears some responsibility for the loss of Morrie. So I found myself talking to the author of the book and interrupting the reader. Didn't the synagogue ever teach Morrie the religious roots of his humanism, the theological foundations of his moral sensibility, the rootedness of Yiddishkeit in the soil of Judaism, the ethics of Jewish ritual? In the book, Morrie in his dying condition naturally spoke to his interviewer about death, dying and the funeral. Not a word about the Jewish connection, the sacred sources of your idealism. I jotted down all over the margins of the book, the Jewish moral wisdom that shape the collective Jewish conscience and affects the way Jews think, feel and act about dying. I wrote it down for Morrie's children —  the missing chapters. On the border of a page I wrote down a section from the Talmud in Moed Katan 27a. It begins this way:  

"Our rabbis taught:  Formerly, they used to carry food to the house of mourning, the rich in silver and gold baskets and the poor in baskets of willow twigs. But the poor felt ashamed. They therefore instituted the tradition that all should carry food to the mourners in baskets of twigs. Because of the honor of the poor.

“They used to serve drinks in the house of the mourners. The rich in white glass vessels, and the poor in colored glasses. But the poor felt shamed. So they instituted a tradition that all should be served drinks in colored glasses out of respect for the poor.

In former times, the custom was to uncover the face of the rich and cover the face of the poor, because the faces of the poor had turned livid during lives of drought. And the poor were shamed. Therefore, the law was instituted that all of the faces of the deceased were to be covered out of respect for the poor.

Formerly, the expense of taking the dead out to his burial fell hard upon his next of kin, so the next of kin abandoned the deceased and fled. Then Rabbi Rabban Gamliel ordered that he be buried in flaxen, linen vestments rather than in woolen vestments. Nowadays, all the world follows the practice of being buried in simple linen tachrichin so that the poor will not be shamed.”

This is the Jewish ethics of ritual law, and this is the ritual of ethics. Jewish law has a heart and the Jewish heart must be known to be cultivated.

Morrie speaks of death and the dignity of man. Did anyone in his Talmud Torah teach Morrie why the Jewish burial must take place as soon as possible, why ideally it should not be delayed? The quick burial is based on deep respect for humanity. It is called kavod ha–met, respect for the dignity of the human being. Did Morrie ever hear the rabbinic parable explaining the tradition of a quick burial?  In Deuteronomy 21 we read that if a man is found guilty and sentenced to death, "the body shall not hang all night. It is a reproach to God.  The body must be buried on the same day."

Why a reproach? A king once had a twin brother. And when the twin brother was apprehended and tried, found guilty and hanged on a tree, the people passed by and cried out, "The king is dead." Therefore, we do not let the body remain over night but bury the deceased immediately. For it is a desecration of the king.

This is the meaning of the audacious parable. The king is God, and God's twin brother is the human being. So when a human being dies and is unburied, God is defaced. So the funeral is not delayed in order to educate the people that human life is holy. "Der mensh iz heylig" – Human life is holier than the scroll of the Torah. That is the religious ground of Morrie's humanism.

Morrie may have heard that according to ritual law, the casket remains closed at the funeral. But why? Is it something you have to obey blindly because the rabbi said so?  The casket is closed because of deep religious Jewish humanism. When the casket is open and people pass by, we become spectators, voyeurs, and the deceased becomes an object, an “it,” a thing. The deceased is a nireh v'aino roeh, seen but not able to see. That is no honor to the person. That is a disrespect to the human being who must be honored in death as in life. That is the Jewish ritual of respect for human beings.

Morrie was not taught this way, not by schul and not by Hebrew School. Morrie was told what is to be done, when it is to be done, where it is to be done and how it is to be done, he was taught by fiat and quotation but not the moral and poetic "why" things are done. To know where, when, how but not why is to sever the soul's connection between law and ethics, between Halachah and humanness, between Yiddishkeit and Judaism. Morrie's children wonder why flowers are not prominently displayed. What does the tradition have against flowers?  They should know that the tradition encourages the mourner to honor the deceased by using that money for the living, to use it to add fragrance to the life of the poor or the sick. We honor the dead by elevating the living. We beautify the mitzvah by beautifying the life of the ignored.

Throughout the book, Morrie expresses his criticism of mindless materialism in our world. Where does that sensibility come from? It derives from the Bible's protest against the deification from the disgrace of worshiping the calf of gold in all its forms. It is translated into all kinds of ritual laws and customs.

The Shofar that is covered with gold is pasul. It is invalid because the sound of the Shevarim, the quavering notes that call for justice is not to be muffled by the gold mouthpiece on the Shofar.

The high priest must remove his vestments of silver and gold when he enters into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. He must put on plain linen clothes, lest you think that silver and gold can atone for transgression.

When on the festival of Shavuoth the first fruits are brought, they must not be brought in gold baskets but only in baskets of straw. God is not impressed with glitter.

On the eve of the Sabbath, the Jewish custom is to search one's clothing to remove any coins, because on the Sabbath we mean to break off our relations with the pocket.

Rabbi Israel Salanter taught his students the laws that deal with "blitztrop.” If you find a speck of blood in a fertilized egg, it is not proper to eat it. It is treif. He went on to explain to his students that this law applies to more than eggs. If you take money in which you find the blood of exploitation of workers, it is treif, it is prohibited.

Morrie didn't get it, because Morrie wasn't taught. The ethics of Yiddishkeit, of Jewish humanism, did not come out of the air. Jewish conscience is implanted in the ethics of ritual and the ritual of ethics. The philanthropy of the Jewish people is a cultivated conscience. Why were we trained as children to fast on Yom Kippur? We teach our children to fast to soften their hearts; not to punish their bodies, but to sensitize their souls. Our blessed children have lived lives without having to go a single day without food or drink. But they fast today not to diet the body, but to feel the pangs of hunger, the faintness that poverty visits on millions who go to bed without a meal.

We fast and we pray for clean hands and a clean heart. You cannot pray with filthy hands. Listen to our prophet Isaiah: "When you spread forth your hands I will hide My eyes from you. Your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean, put aside the evil of your doings before Mine eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow."  This is the ethics of ritual and canonized in the Bible and read in the Yom Kippur Haftorah, it is the ritual of ethic.

The sense of "rachmones", compassion of Yiddishkeit, did not originate in Spinoza, in Karl Marx, or Freidrich Engels or Ludwig Feuerbach. It came from the Torah, from the book of Exodus: "If you take your neighbor's clothes to pledge, you shall deliver it to him by the time the sun goes down –  for that is his only covering for his skin – "bameh yishkav.” How shall he sleep?

Morrie's Yiddish sense of universalism did not come from Marcus Aurelius or Immanuel Kant or Hegel. but from the conscience of Jewish people canonized in the prophets; from Malachi (2:10), the last of prophets in 5^th century BCE who declared, "Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another?" From the book of Job he heard, "Did not the One who made me in the womb make him?"

The passion for peace and reconciliation he learned not from Voltaire, but from Isaiah in the 8^th century BCE who, while Egypt and Assyria raged against Israel, spoke these words in the name of God:  "Blessed be My people Egypt, and the work of My hands Assyria, and Israel, Mine inheritance."

Yiddishkeit is the child of Judaism. And when it is orphaned, it is lost. Yiddishkeit was orphaned. I witnessed the terrible truth. Yiddishkeit had no staying power. It did not continue to the next generation. The Yiddish schools I attended died, the Yiddish theater I knew, the Yiddish press I read collapsed. Yiddishkeit was branches without roots, branches cut off from the soil of Judaism.

I mourn for Morrie. At Morrie's funeral there was no Kaddish, no El Moleh, no shivah, no minyan and no continuity. I meet Morrie's children and his children's children. They call themselves "cultural Jews," but it is a culture bereft of language, bereft of God, bereft of the holy days or holy months. It is a stomach culture, an occasional yearning for lox and bagels. Yiddishkeit has been reduced to a way of eating.

Morrie's children will not deny that they are Jews, but it is a Jewishness without knowledge or conviction or practice or passion. They are neither/nor Jews; neither believers or atheists, neither Zionists nor anti–Zionists, neither socialists nor capitalists. They are neither/nor Jews. It reminds me of Yiddish humor has it, they are a hybrid – a cross between a chicken and a rabbit – nisht ahin un nisht aher.

Where are they? They're not here. They are not members of the Jewish community. It's not their membership that I crave. I want their minds and their souls. I want their participation in one ethical action project, and in our Keruv adult education. I want their children in our Hebrew and Day School and in our Youth Program and in our Camp Ramah programs.

I want the branches and leaves to come to life, to connect with the poetry of Psalms and the passion of Jeremiah, and the wisdom of The Ethics of the Fathers and the logic of Talmud and the song of Hasidism. Morrie deserves a better end and his children deserve a better beginning.

That is the task of the synagogue to embrace them, that is in our program, project, to overcome the false either/or choices that ruptures our Jewish civilization.

• Either Yiddishkeit or Judaism
• Either ethics or ethnicity
• Either social action or prayer
• Either love of humanity or love of my people
• Either spirituality or Halachah.

The Jewish response is both/and. The Jewish response is oneness, wholeness; Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu, Adonai echad. 

Morrie's children belong here. Morrie belongs here. For him I recite Kaddish. For him I recite Yizkor.  Morrie's children belong here with us. I miss Morrie's children. There are millions of Jews missing from Judaism. We have to bring them in to join Yiddishkeit with Judaism,

• Humanism with Halachah
• Ethics with ethnicity
• Private prayer with public passion for justice

For Morrie and his children, the prophecy of Joel:  "Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old shall dream dreams, your young shall see visions."

For Morrie and his children, the last line of the last prophet Malachi:  “..and He shall turn the heart of the parents to the children and the heart of the children to their parents."

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