Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Yom Kippur, 1992

by Harold M. Schulweis

There are Talmudic debates about the correct number of sounds to be blown from the shofar, the shape of the shofar, whether curved or straight, and whether the shofar should be made of a ram's horn or of an antelope's horn. But in the village of Chelm, the debate was about the proper side through which the shofar should be blown, whether from the narrow side or from the wide side. This seemingly trivial question was brought by two Chelmites before the rabbi of Chelm for resolution. The Rabbi immediately saw that beneath the apparently minor dispute lay important issues of Jewish identity and character. As the rabbi put it, "Through what end you blow the shofar depends upon to what end you blow the shofar.

Those for whom Judaism appears too provincial blow the shofar from its broader side. They represent the cosmopolitan, humanitarian, global Jews who transpose their fidelities from particular community to humanity at large. Such a Jew was Isaac Deutscher, the socialist writer who called himself a "non-Jewish Jew.”  He wrote, "What does it mean for me to call myself a Jew? If it is not race, then what makes me a Jew? Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In either case, am I therefore a Jew? I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish tragedy as my own tragedy. Deutscher adds that for Jews like himself, "the greatest definer of Jewish identity has been Hitler.” 

My own teacher of philosophy, the late Sidney Hook, looking back at his reactions to the Holocaust and the struggle for the existence for the State of Israel, admits that while he never denied his Jewish origins, he did disapprove of what he thought to be "an excess of chauvinism.”  The rebellion for self-determination by other peoples' religions or ethnicities were enthusiastically supported, but Zionism was dismissed as an atavistic return to tribalism. Jewish interest was too was ethnocentric, too self-serving. The Jewish Russian novelist, David Bergelson, recalled, "I traded in my six-speared Jewish star for a five-starred Soviet star, and the sixth spear is stuck in my heart." For these internationalists, every resentment by a minority, black, brown, yellow, echoed a noble resonance. By contrast, Jewish anger sounded a whining, parochial cry. When Rosa Luxembourg, the Socialist internationalist leader, was asked by her fellow Jews to lend her support against Jewish anti-Semitism in Europe, she replied "Why do you persist in pestering me with your peculiar Judenschmerz? I feel more deeply for the wretches of the rubber plantation of Puto Maya, and the Negroes in Africa whose bodies are footballs for Europe's colonial exploitation." For Rosa, the wretches of Kishinev, the hapless victims of pogroms, were events too narrow on which to waste her tears. Such universalists opened their mouth wide around the larger side of the shofar. As one wit put it, when universalists write to their family they sign off their letters, "Send my best regards to Tante Sarah, Uncle Harry and to humanity-at-large."

For all their idealism, there is something naive, even irresponsible about the universalists. The desire to embrace humanity at large, to paraphrase Santayana, is like the ambition to speak in general without using any language in particular. For Jews, Judaism is the particular language through which the world may be addressed. If you seek to embrace everyone you will be left with no one. Nothing happens if you blow into the wide end. But if you blow into the narrow end the call of the shofar rings loud and true. Only if you understand and respect your own identity will you be able to respect the identity of others. There is wisdom in the biblical injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself." Before loving the world in general, begin with your neighbor, with those who live beside you. Charity, sympathy, philanthropy begins at home. It must not end at home, but it must have a home in which to begin. So the American philosopher Josiah Royce argues that when the spread of philanthropy and sympathy is not based on a personal loyalty of the individual to his own family and to his personal duties it becomes "notoriously a worthless abstraction.”  The alibi by the man who refuse to give charity to the indigent on the grounds that he gives nothing even to the poor of his own family illustrates the truth that there is nothing in the universal that is not in the particular.

DIBELIUS

Jews critical of pseudo-universalism frequently point out that if there is anything we Jews should have learned from Jewish history, particularly from the Holocaust, it is the truth: "Im ain anu lanu, mee lanu?  If we Jews are not for ourselves who will be for us?" They remind us that when Jews were caught in the vise of Nazism and Fascism, the world turned its back upon us. The borders of countries were closed, the windows and doors were closed, the churches studiously silent, the boats of frightened refugees turned back from the shores of Cuba and Miami into the mouths of the crematoria of Auschwitz. We owe the world nothing. "If we Jews are not for ourselves, who will be for us?"

For all its appeal, the sound emitted from that end is Jewishly contradictory and morally offensive. I experienced the moral contradiction in a visit to Germany, when I was invited by the German government to witness their democratic rehabilitation. I recall sitting in the palatial home of D. Otto Dibelius, the celebrated bishop of the Church of Berlin-Brandenburg. With a member of the German government serving as translator by my side, I asked him after the amenities of small talk, "Bishop Dibelius, you are a leader in the World Council of Churches and a man of great influence. May I ask you what you did to protect Jews during Kristallnacht? What did you do as a churchman, as a bishop, as a Christian, to help Jews who were pursued and persecuted?" The bishop began by talking of the confusion in the land, the turmoil and the many tasks that were set upon him. To my persistent questioning he turned to me, "I want you to understand, dear rabbi, that my first responsibility as a churchman was to my own church. My primary obligation was to protect the safety and security of the 'getaufte,' the baptized. Were I to oppose the policies of the German government towards your people, I would jeopardize the safety of my church and the security of my parish. You should understand that."

But I did not understand that at all. I reminded him that there were 45 million Protestants in Germany, that Goering died a Lutheran, and that Hitler died a Catholic. "Isn't it true that if you and your church colleagues had protested, had marched in the streets, had been willing to be jailed you would have been able to save millions of innocent human beings and a third of my people would not have been exterminated?" The bishop replied that he had helped Jews who had converted to Christianity. As for the others, they were not Christians, they were not baptized. I replied, "But doesn't that attitude run against the grain of Christian charity? Doesn't your response contradict the ideal of Christian self-sacrifice and the duty to save the lives of innocents? Where is Christian altruism in all of this?" I quoted something that the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had said:  Only those who cried out against the persecution of the innocent have the right to sing Gregorian chants. The bishop responded by repeating his ecclesiastical responsibilities to protect his own church. The bishop sounded his ram's horn from the narrow end.

Whenever I catch myself nodding in agreement with the argument that, “Since the world let us down, why should we be concerned with it?”  I hear Dibelius' voice. Can I demand of the bishop and the church a morality that I cannot or will not demand of the synagogue? Is the lesson the Holocaust taught that Jews should mind their own business, retreat into their own corporate concerns and blow from the narrow end of the shofar? Does the logic of the Holocaust lead us to conclude that since we were not helped, we will help no one else?

THE BURDEN IS TOO MUCH

"If we Jews are not for ourselves who will be for us?" confronts every thoughtful Jew, every Jewish organization, every synagogue, every social action committee. What should be on the Jewish agenda of the synagogue? What should the Ethical Actions Committee place on its agenda? There are important voices that counsel benign neglect. There are enough problems confronting Jews that they ought not to add to them the problems of other races, peoples, ethnicities, religions. Have we not enough on our plate? Concern with Ethiopian Jews and Syrian Jews and the 200,000 Jews in the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union, and the cause of Israel forever threatened by the murderous designs of Hussein and Asad and Kadafi and Arafat, and the ominous rise of anti-Semitism throughout Europe. Why do you pester us with the holocaust of others? Why do you call to our attention the intervention by the United States government supported by an opinion from the Supreme Court, of crowded boats filled with frightened Haitians turned back to death and dictatorship? Why do you remind us of the shock of the ship St. Louis, which in 1942 was packed with Jewish refugees seeking asylum here but a few miles from Miami?  Why do you add to the Jewish agenda the burden of Croatians and Muslims in Bosnia systematically tortured and killed? Tens of thousands of civilians shipped in sealed boxes to concentration camps, held without sanitation or adequate food, where many have been shot by masked men and their throats slit and their bodies mutilated, their children foraging for grass and nettles. Why do you burden the Jewish community with the one quarter of the children under age five in Somalia who have already died of starvation?

Surely, there must be a limit to our concern. There must be a restraint to sounding the warning sounds of the holocaust. In line with that sentiment, there are Jewish leaders who even object to the use of the word "holocaust" when referring to the torture and death camps in Bosnia. After all, the Serbs in their cruelty and horror are still not out to exterminate the entire Muslim nation. How dare we invoke Auschwitz in the same breath as we mention the camps of Omarska? We sympathize with their grief, but hasten to add that it is incomparable with our own. Inadvertently the comfort is accompanied by a sting. Comparisons are invidious, even consolations.

Every tragedy is sui generis. I understand the desire to retain the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust, and the revulsion with those revisionists who seek to deny the Holocaust. But the Bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg made it hard for me to join those who so zealously guard the claim of holocaust exclusivity that they feel compelled to qualify their consolation towards other bereaved victims. I cannot understand those who fear that the Holocaust will be forgotten by the world are upset by the applicability of our tragedy to those of others. To the contrary, the kinship of suffering, the felt relevance of the holocaust trauma for the tragedy of others, confirms the universal pertinence of the Jewish holocaust. "When a Jew is beaten down, it is mankind that falls to the ground," Franz Kafka averred. Instead of muting the sensed analogy with Auschwitz, we should recognize the role of the Holocaust as the world's central referent for human-caused atrocity. The language of "concentration camps" and "sealed boxcars" and the euphemisms of "ethnic cleansing" conjured up an image of the Holocaust that helped penetrate the somnolent conscience of the world.

AM I A JEW, OR A HUMAN BEING?

The metaphor of the narrow or wide end of the shofar turns up again and again. Through which side will the shofar be blown and heard? Is homelessness a Jewish concern or a human concern? Is hatred of other minorities a Jewish concern or a human concern? Is rebuilding Los Angeles' torn inner city a Jewish concern or a human concern?

I reject the formulation of the question. I heard it in the rationalization of the bishop "My church, or the unbaptized Jews.”  I reject the either/or option because it binds us to a false and shameful choice, as if the question were, "Am I a Jew or a human being? Do I owe my loyalties to my people or to humanity-at-large?" The dichotomous either/or is misleading and untrue to the noblest character of the Jewish tradition. There is a Jewish response to poverty, a Jewish response to homelessness, a Jewish response to prejudice, a Jewish response to hatred. That response derives from a unique sacred and secular literature, from four millennia of uniquely lived life. Like the Bible itself, authentic Jewish universalism begins at home but ends by becoming the treasure of the world.

There is a uniqueness in Jewish universalism. Passover, the Fourth of July, and Bastille Day all have family resemblances. But the Passover experience and its Jewish interpretations are profoundly different, and are grounded in a unique and particular experience with freedom and liberty. Similarly, the concern of Jews for the separation of church and state derives from the unique historic experience of a particular people under a variety of political situations.

The Talmud (Rosh Hashana 27a) offers criteria for a proper shofar. A shofar that has been split and then stuck together is not valid because it appears as two shofars. If a hole was made in the shofar and was stopped up again and now hinders its blowing, it is not a valid shofar. The voice is to be sounded from one whole shofar. As there is one God, one law, one humanity, one world, we cannot sound the voice with two shofroth. It is a perilous half truth to say, "If we Jews are not for ourselves, who will be for us?" What is missing is the second part of that belief, "V'im anu lanu, mah anu" — If we Jews are for ourselves alone, what are we?

On Rosh Hashana, we do not celebrate the birthday of the Jewish people, or the birth of the Jewish founder of the people. Jews celebrate the birthday of the universe and of humankind. "This day the world was called into being. This day the creatures of the universe stand in judgment." Jewish universalism is carved into the sacred texts of the Bible selected to be read aloud during the Days of Awe. Why else did the rabbis choose to read on the First Day of Rosh Hashana the story of Hagar the Egyptian and of her son, Ishmael, who are saved by the voice of the Angel, the voice of one God? Why else did the rabbis choose for the prophetical portion to be read on Yom Kippur the Book of Jonah, that repudiates the provincialism of Jonah who thinks that a Jewish prophet is to be concerned exclusively with Jews and with no others? The narcissism of Jonah, self-buried in the narrow womb of the whale, is repudiated. Jonah is not the ideal prophet. God chastises his provincialism. "Should I not have pity on Ninveh, that great city wherein are more than 120,000 people and also much cattle?" Jonah had forgotten Abraham who was blessed so that "In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."

What is to be said to those who argue, "The burden is too hard, it is hard enough to be a Jew … to be concerned with the whole universe is too much”?  We must answer in terms of revolutionary meaning and grandeur of monotheistic Judaism. Judaism is a faith co-extensive with the life of the universe. The name of the God we bless is King of the "universe," "Melech ha-olam.”  The traditional formulation of the blessing voices opposition to those who would make of "the life of the universe" a finite, parochial God.

VISITING THE VIRTUES OF THE PARENTS ON THE CHILDREN

Collective egoism, however rationalized, betrays the comprehensive largesse of Judaism. We make great demands upon ourselves and demands upon our children. We ask of them to study, to learn, to observe, to marry within their faith. I have no fear that we ask too much of Jews. My fear is that we ask so little. One of the characters in Eugene O'neill's plays says to her son, "All I want you to do is to take care of the store. Is that too much to ask of you?" The young man replied, "I cannot do that with my life because you ask so little." It is a sacrifice we demand of ourselves and our children, but as such it must be justified by superordinate spiritual purpose. Our children will not abandon Judaism because Judaism makes such great moral demands upon them. They may well abandon Judaism if we ask too little of them.

The split between Jewish particularity and Jewish universality betrays the wholeness of Jewish monotheism. You can blow the shofar properly only from the narrow side, but it is valid only if there is nothing that blocks the sound from going out into the world. Insulated, no one will hear the sound.

It requires courage to sound the shofar. It is not enough to hear the shofar in silence. Silence is not golden. Silence can be death. Long after the death of Stalin, Nakita Khrushchev harangued the presidium of the Soviet Union, denounced the corruption and terror of comrade Stalin. In the midst of Khrushchev's tirade someone asked, "And where were you during this time?" Khrushchev turned around and demanded, "Who said that?" No one answered. Then Khrushchev turned around and demanded, "Who said that?" No one answered. Then Khrushchev said, "That's where I was." Silence is admission. "Shetikah k'hodaah dami" (T. Yebamoth 87b).

We are a small people gifted with a grand vision. To be a Jew is to be involved with this world, and the whole world and through our own people. To be a Jew is to engage in heroic virtues. A Jew cannot be disengaged from the world. It is to live in a society responsibly and responsively. We have a large agenda and it will grow as we grow. We live in this society.

We are part of a community in which there are 10 million citizens who are unemployed, 35 million people who are in poverty, 40 million people who have no health insurance. One fifth of whose nation's children live below poverty level. Is this their concern or ours?

We are a world people with a world civilization. We cannot engage in everything, we cannot complete the imperfections of this world. But we are not free to do everything we can. Is Judaism too big, too wide, too broad, too deep, too large? That is its grandeur, its uniqueness, its passion, its excitement, its challenge. We are allies with God, co-creators and co-sanctifiers. Blow from the narrow side of the shofar into the ears of the world.

Listen to the psalms our ancestors chose to be read before the sounding of the shofar: "All ye people clap your hands, for God is the King over the whole earth. God rules over the nations. The princes of the people are gathered together with the people of the God of Abraham for God is the shield of the earth."

I note with chagrin that one million American Jews are not registered to vote, that one Jew in five is not registered to vote. Our immigrant parents knew that to vote was a moral duty. My grandfather and grandmother understood that to vote is not simply a civic obligation but a mitzvah of the highest order. The voting booth sanctuary was November's secular sukkah.

Most of the Jews who are not registered are not older people, but the younger people. The incidence of non-registration is especially pronounced among those under thirty five. "If we Jews are not for ourselves who will be for us? But if we Jews are only for ourselves, what are we?" Blow through the narrow end of the ram's horn and into the ears of the world and see to it that the shofar is not clogged.

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