as delivered 10-8-2011
Atem nitzavim hayom
Oops. I'm sorry, that was my bar mitzvah portion. The last time, I
think, that I spoke from this pulpit.
Here it is:
as delivered 10-8-2011
Reminiscences about Rabbi Eugene J. Sack
Temple Beth Elohim October 8, 2011
Robert D. Sack
Thanks very much to Rabbi Bachman for his invitation to talk to you for a
while about your late Rabbi, my father, Eugene Sack. I would like to think that
this is also an opportunity, partly through a transcript of these remarks, to talk to
my children and theirs about their grand and great-grand-dad -- and their grand
and great-grand mother too.
But a few observations first. It seems plain enough that the commandment I
have been asked to fulfil this Yom Kippur afternoon is to "Honor my father and
my mother." Well, what about my mother?
While I was growing up -- I don't know if it's changed -- the rabbinate, like
the corner candy store, was something of a mom and pop operation. Either or
both of my parents had to be minding the store until the last customer had left – or
so it seemed to a young son. But when the time comes to recognize The Rabbi, it
seems, it's nearly always about him and his role in the family enterprise; not so
much about her.
2
My mother, Sylvia, was indeed a remarkable woman whose life was as
much wrapped up in this institution as was my father's. Again, to the young son, it
seemed as though Beth Elohim had seven sisterhoods with at least one meeting for
every night of the week.
My father would have wanted me to recognize her and her service -- and his
love and respect for her -- first; and I do so for him and his children and
grandchildren now. Much more about my mom at another time.
Second, my father was a towering figure in my life, largely because, after
all, he was my father. I remember enough about his life to keep you here until
Chanukah. But I didn't and don't really know all that much about my parents'
relationship with the congregation. I did not stay awake nights, as my father did,
after a rough board meeting. And unlike my mother, I wasn't part of management.
Third, this is all told through the eyes of Rabbi Sack's son, much of it, the
eyes of his very young son. I warn you that there will be far more in these remarks
about me than any speaker about another should ever allow. But, then, I am not
talking about "another," I'm talking about my father.
Now, as I have been told -- and I admit to a bit of reconstruction, in the
secular sense, here:
3
My father was born Yehuda Sack in Gloversville, upstate New York, on
November 11, 1912. To put that in some perspective, Armistice Day, now
celebrated as Veteran's Day -- the end the First World War on the 11th hour of the
11th day of the 11th month of 1918 -- was his sixth birthday. This November 11
would have been his 99th.
He was the second of two children of Lithuanian immigrants. His father
Alter arrived at Ellis Island in August 1904 at the age of 20.
Parenthetically, "Alter" was translated for me as"old" or "old one." When
my grandfather was a child, a diphtheria epidemic raged through the village in
which his family lived. His superstitious parents changed his name from whatever
it was to "Alter," in hopes of fooling the Angel of Death into thinking that he was
an old man. He was indeed spared from the epidemic. The ruse seems to have
worked.
As you might guess from the name Gloversville, my grandfather was a
skilled glove cutter. My grandmother, who died a year or so before I was born,
gave birth to my father in my grandparents' house in a working class
neighborhood. It was not terribly far from the glove factory to and from which my
grandfather walked every day. My grandfather's sister owned the two-family
house next door, where she and her husband raised three children of their own.
4
Across a field and about a block away ran Cayadutta Creek, known,
descriptively, as "stink creek"-because-of the effluent flow from the upstream
tanneries. There was a short-line railway that ran along it, carrying raw materials
one way and finished products the other, blowing its horn for level crossings
beginning early each morning. And during World War II , it was joined in an
early morning serenade by a factory whistle summoning young neighborhood
women, including two of my father's next door cousins, to work in a factory
around the corner in which batteries for naval vessels were fabricated.
The house on Washburn Street. How clearly I remember the entire family
huddled around a huge radio in the dining room of the house in April 1945
listening to the first reports of the death of President Roosevelt. My grandfather
and his second wife lived in that house until his death in the early 1960's.
Gloversville's Jewish community, which is and was considerable, was
sometimes referred to as the Shtetl in the Adirondacks. Its members lived, as they
had in Eastern Europe, in isolation from their Christian neighbors. The language
of the community was Yiddish. My father himself didn't begin to speak English
until he was four and a half.
His parents gave him the English name Julius, and sent him off to the local
public school for kindergarten. The school was run by transplanted New England
5
school marms, but his kindergarten teacher was a very young, red-headed woman
named Miss O'Brien. Her first order of business was to change his name, from the
much too prissy Julius, to Eugene -- also, incidentally, a good Irish name. His
mother didn't much care, and Eugene he was. Julius remained his middle name.
Those first years in a village public-school had an enormous impact on him.
He later compared it to entering a darkened room and having this magical woman,
his teacher, "throw open the blinds" and let in the light and the air. He said, "I had
entered a new world and it was called America."
His grandfather – my great grandfather – was a milkman, selling and
delivering dairy products door to door from a horse and wagon. By the time I
began visiting the house as a boy, my great grandfather and the horse were gone,
but the wagon and shed in the back yard, thick with cobwebs, were still there
After English became, in effect, my father's native tongue, but while he was
still in elementary school, he was awakened in the wee hours every morning so
that he could accompany his Yiddish-only-speaking grandfather to pick up milk
from local farms, which were owned mostly by Irish immigrants. My father was
the translator.
He described the occasions on which his grandfather and an Irish farmer
whom he had befriended leaned against the farmer's fence, talking. They
6
reminisced in different languages -- through my father -- about "the old country"
as though their old countries hadn't been half a continent apart. That's the point, I
think. They were not far apart at all.
My father skipped a grade or two, graduating from Gloversville High
School in 1928 – at the ripe old age of nearly 16. A local Jewish magnate named
Littauer provided the necessary funds to send my father to a joint program
between the University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
Although he didn't talk about it as often, in Gloversville he had had an intense
Orthodox Jewish education too. His first year at the University he got the highest
grade in his class -- in what subject? English.
He was clearly a believer in science and progress. He told me that while at
the University of Cincinnati, he flirted with the idea of becoming a chemist,
instead of a Rabbi. When he found himself cleaning out test tubes and beakers
long after the last of his classmates had finished, leaving him alone in the
laboratory, he decided chemistry was a mistake. Despite fears that becoming a
Rabbi would require him to repeatedly avow the existence of God to his
congregation while abandoning his own personal search for God, he pursued a
career in the Rabbinate.
7
You probably know that HUC is (or at least then was) located on something
of a cliff overlooking the City of Cincinnati. It was reachable from downtown by
funicular. My father used to croon a mock fight song he would sing with his HUC
buddies. All I remember about it is the line referring to Hebrew Union College as
having been built "on the biggest bluff on earth."
My father's sister, two years older than he, attended Hunter College here in
New York. Her roommate was one Sylvia Irene Rivlin -- Enter my mother. She
and he married and she moved to join him in Cincinnati in 1934.
After his ordination two years later, their first pulpit was in Topeka, Kansas.
There he took psychology classes at the renowned Menninger clinic, named for a
prominent family of psychiatrists, whose approach to mental illness was referred
to as "a mixture of Freud and friendliness." At a class or two there, my dad
acquired a life-long belief that if Freud wasn't entirely right, he sure was close to
some great truths.
Two Topeka sermons, reported to me much later, remain in family lore.
They arose out of his deep concern about the clouds of war-and-hatred scudding
across much of the world.
He gave one of them some months after the Italian conquest of Ethiopia,
then called Abyssinia. The Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, was by then in
8
exile. All that remains of this sermon in living memory is its last line. "You are
not alone. We are with you Haile Selassie!" Amen.
In the other sermon, he used Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red
Death” to capture his view of the American predicament. You remember the
story.
The red plague grips a town in Spain. The nobility repairs to Prince
Prospero’s great castellated abbey on a hill overlooking the town, there to live life
to the full in isolated splendor, while the plague passed.
One night, the Prince holds a masquerade ball in the seven public rooms of
the great house. The first six of them are each decorated and lit in a different color:
Blue, purple, green, and so on. The seventh is all black, illuminated by the red
light of a chandelier. As a large clock in that last black room chimes midnight, a
mysterious figure in a bloody shroud, wearing the mask of a corpse, appears in the
first, blue room. It then traipses slowly through the apartments. In the last, black
one, the Prince, in fury, draws a dagger to attack the figure ... but he falls dead
before it instead. One by one, each guest then dies in agony. The phantom, it
turns out, is no person or thing, but the Red death itself. The tale ends: "And
Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
9
The point was, of course, that as the plague of fascism spread, we
Americans could not retire to our abbey on the hill, enjoying ourselves in wait for
it to spend itself. If we did, the plague would surely destroy us all.
***
After a short stay in Topeka, my parents moved to Philadelphia, where he
became a junior Rabbi at the venerable Temple Rodeph Sholem. Still a young
man himself, he was drawn to youth work, particularly to the establishment of a
national Reform Jewish youth group. The National Federation of Temple Youth,
now known by its nifty initials as NFTY, still thrives, at least according to its
website.
Two crucial events occurred in the several years after the move: In
September 1939, Hitler's tanks rolled into Poland, beginning the long, long
nightmare of World War II. And the following month, I was born.
Then: December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor.... My father volunteered to serve as
an Army chaplain, and we -- me not yet three -- were all on the move.
He was -- and therefore we were -- first stationed at Camp Wh as delivered 108-2011 eeler near Macon, Georgia. Hard to forget my father's injury, however
slight, in a bus and car collision fatal to the automobile driver. He would show off
10
his minor bruises and abrasions to house guests. I meanwhile amused myself, but
perhaps not the guests, by taking my toy car, repeatedly throwing it up as high as I
could above the living room fire place, shouting: "Catastrophe!"
Some months later he received his official orders from the War Department
to report to San Francisco to be shipped overseas. When I deliberately tore up
those orders, my parents became unaccountably overwrought. I assured them I
had no idea what they were. That didn't seem to help.
We traveled together to the West Coast. My father was an officer, a First
Lieutenant or even a Captain by then. So it wasn't exactly a troop train. Parents in
a lower berth; me in an upper. Cool.
Somewhere in mid-trip, they and I were in the club car of a Union Pacific
express, heading west out of Ogden Utah, crossing the trestle over The Great Salt
Lake. My dad took me out to the observation balcony in the rear. But a conductor
immediately hustled us back inside. The specter of spies or saboteurs.
Observation-car balconies were off-limits for "the duration," to use a term that was
sadly common then.
"The duration."
11
My Mom and I stayed with my father's sister and her family in Oakland. He
visited us there from his San Francisco base about once a week. One morning,
having spent a day or two with us, he left on the inter-urban across the Bay Bridge
to his base. Standing by my mother -- I, in tears, waved goodbye. And we didn't
see him again for eighteen months.
His overseas experiences are a book unto themselves. He spent much of his
time in the jungles of New Guinea, fortunately after most of the Japanese troops
had left. The Congregation's archives contain a collection of some of his
correspondence from that era.
While trying to minister to his soldiers, he had to face the fact that, although
he was the Jewish chaplain for the base, Orthodox Jews didn't think of him as
much of a Jew, let alone much of a Rabbi. The experience left him shaken:
doubting both himself and his calling.
But the happier -- and happily more often told -- story was about his prePassover 1944 trip to a port down the coast from his base, there to pick up wine,
matzo, and other paraphernalia for the Seder -- especially about his travails in
getting it all back to his troops by sea. He spent the entire two day voyage sitting
on the case of wine to protect it.
12
With the wine safe, the Seder was a huge success. It seemed even to attract
a number of soldiers who didn't look the least bit Jewish.
My father's tour of duty came to an end with the onset of dysentery in mid
1944. After hospitalization in Brisbane, he was shipped home.
***
While my father was away, my mother and I stayed in Oakland and Palo
Alto for some months. We then moved to Brooklyn -- you've heard of it -- to live
with her parents, two sisters, a brother in law and a cousin. The latter portion of
the stay was in a newly purchased house on East 16th street. There we received
regular letters from my father, each censored and photocopied before the copies
arrived in Brooklyn many weeks later. Looked a lot like Swiss cheese. I have
never liked censorship.
How vividly I recall the night late in 1944 when my father came home to the
house he had never seen on East 16th Street; the odd and wonderful feeling of his
stubble on my cheek, when he retrieved me, shyly hiding under a blanket on my
bed, and gave me a kiss.
After a brief rehabilitory stay in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, he was
stationed at the huge Army base in Fort Knox, Kentucky. That was our next stop.
13
We were there during the Summer of '45 at the time of VE day; the Bomb;
VJ day -- the end of the war. My father ministered to the Jewish troops; my
mother was saved at death's door by an early version of Penicillin; lightly guarded
Italian prisoners-of-war sauntered down the streets collecting refuse, while they
sang in apparent relief that they were here and not there; B-26's took off and
landed from an adjacent Army Air Corps field; one of them crash-landed near my
school one morning, all aboard unhurt. And then there was me, entertaining
myself in the lobby of the nondenominational chapel during Saturday morning
services, seeing how many flies I could send to their reward by snapping a prayer
book closed faster than they could fly away.
I'd also tell you the story about how my father saved me from the big black
snake on a weekend picnic, and how the MP with the big black gun then shot the
big black snake dead, but that's too scary.
***
Remembering the time, I acknowledge that there is much justifiable debate
about the wisdom of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But
during August of 1945, I drew a celebratory if crude image of a big bomb with an
"A" inscribed on it. Whatever the Bomb meant to the world, to history, or to the
14
people killed and maimed and their survivors, I know what it meant to me and to
us: that, at long last, we were going home. "The duration" ... was over.
***
Back then to Philadelphia, where we lived in a drafty Quonset hut for a
while before finding more substantial lodging. My father returned to his role as a
junior Rabbi at Rodeph Sholem
Just six months later, though -- that's sixty-five years and a bit ago -- my
father accepted an appointment as Rabbi here, junior to the renowned Dr. Isaac
Landman. We returned to the house on East 16th Street, where my parents then
lived for some 25 years thereafter. That was where my brother was born, thus
cleverly avoiding the war years, and from whence in 1956, I sallied forth to
college in upstate New York. Upon Dr. Landman's early and untimely death later
in 1946, my father succeeded him as the senior -- indeed the only -- rabbi.
It will surprise you not at all that the first congregational crisis I can recall
involved -- money. Upwardly mobile congregants were moving out of Brooklyn,
and they weren't being replaced on temple rolls. Growth was a necessity, while
the mortgage was going unpaid.
15
Catching up with that mortgage was crucial and fund raising efforts were
undertaken. Prominent among them was the production and performance in the
Temple House of what purported to be an original musical called "It Happened on
Eighth Avenue." Who all was involved I do not remember, but there is no doubt
that one of my aunts, a piano teacher by trade, participated in the musical
preparation, another aunt wrote many of the lyrics, and my uncle -- a commercial
artist -- did much of the art decoration. His name was Al Roffman. A careful
perusal of my father's portrait hanging in the Temple House will reveal that it was
painted by the self-same Al Roffman. As I said, being a Rabbi is a family affair.
An odd related recollection: Trustee Jeanette Marx, with the $400 take
from a fund-raising event. She let me hold the whole bundle for a few seconds. It
felt good. It is a wonder that I didn't find myself later in life, in the world of
finance -- or maybe in jail.
Whether the familial efforts had any material effect on the mortgage is not
clear. But it was paid and the congregation began to grow.
***
16
I venture to suggest that the post-war years for members of this
congregation, for American Reform Jews and their Rabbis, for my father -- were
unique and difficult.
To illustrate. There was an evening in the late 40's – not many years after
my father's return from the war -- after our return from Fort Knox, and the close
proximity of a military runway to our house-- when I lay trying to sleep. I had a
lack of success that characterized my efforts then and ever since.
If the winds were from the east, the LaGuardia landing pattern passed right
over the house A plane droned overhead. To me, every plane could be an enemy
bomber heading for Manhattan or the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Troubled, I walked
downstairs to the living room where my mother and father sat talking quietly with
one another.
I was obviously seeking comfort. But for some forgotten reason, I asked my
father, "Daddy, what would have happened if we had lost the war?" He said,
"Well, first of all, you and Mommy and I would all be dead." Yes, I suppose I
knew that, but the words hang heavily on me still.
It seems to me that during those immediate post-war years there were two
emotionally overwhelming images fighting each other inside of each of us: The
17
Jews of America and the Jews of Europe; the Jews who stormed the beaches of
Normandy and crossed the Rhine; and the Jews of Europe herded into the Nazi
death camps and butchered. There was my father, the Jewish Army chaplain, with
bible and rifle, fighting and winning a war, and there was what he would have
been, as he reminded me that night long ago, had his family remained in Lithuania.
Beth Elohim was formed as a congregation of the German Jews typically in
the forefront of the American Reform movement. As you probably know, its first
services a century and a half ago were in Hebrew and German, not Hebrew and
English. When my parents arrived it was indeed, the congregation of Steinbrink,
Marks, Schwartz, Klein and Kriegel, albeit with a tradition of welcoming rabbis
who, like my father, were from or had roots in Eastern Europe.
The Congregation was largely native born; I don't remember -- emphasis on
"remember" -- European refugees, or even strong foreign accents, among the
congregants. The only accent I remember is that of the Sexton, Adam
Bildzicewitz, the Temple Sexton who lived an apartment on the top floor of the
Temple House across the street, who was a Polish Catholic immigrant. My
impression is that by and large, they the congregants had been too long out of
Europe to have had close family slaughtered in the camps; they were not
18
themselves Holocaust survivors. All my grandparents were odd beneficiaries of
turn of the century Eastern European anti-Semitism: They and all of their families
left back then or soon thereafter, mostly for America.
In the late 40's, for us: America in general, and Brooklyn in particular -adding perhaps Long or Manhattan Islands -- were the Promised Land.
I learned in reading the Wikipedia entry for Beth Elohim several weeks ago
that before the founding of the state of Israel, at least, the congregation and much
of Reformed Judaism was anti-Zionist. My father was. Rabbi Landman was. As
Wikipedia points out, Landman was a founder in 1942 of a Jewish Farm Colony in
Utah, doubtless reflecting this point of view. You remember Michael Chabon's
2007 book, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, a retrospective speculation on the
very real but stillborn pre-War plans to resettle European Jews in Alaska.
I remember very little explicit discussion of Zionism with my father or
anyone else. And I know too little of the complex subject to discuss it further
here. But it is worth pointing out that the Reform Jews of Beth Elohim hardly
denied their Jewishness: They embraced it. My father was a rabbi until the day he
died, and the congregants were committed members of the Jewish community.
The breadth and depth of their agony about World Jewry in general and European
19
Jewry in particular cannot be overstated. And they avidly followed the events in
the Middle East, and raised money for the cause. But they identified first with
American Jews; they had good reason to dread being anything else.
When my father died in 1999, more than 50 years after the war, we buried
him in my mother's family plot in Queens. His gravestone -- the English part -reads: Eugene J. Sack, Husband, Father, Rabbi, Teacher, Patriot. His gratitude
and his felt need to repay America helped define him.
***
And then there were the goings on in Temple. The bar mitzvahs -- every
other week even today someone hears my name, makes the connection, and two
sentences later states proudly, that "he"-- my father -- "bar mitzvahed" me -- or
more correctly "he presided over my bar mitzvah."
No bat mitzvahs then. Sorry.
There were the other shabas services (not shabat then; also sorry). The first
cantors – or more properly "cantorial soloists," a term perhaps coined by my father
– were Paul Kane and Richard Harvey. They were professional opera singers not
professional cantors.
20
Richard presided for many years until his sudden death in the late '70s. Just
before the two of them would emerge on the pulpit twice each week, he would put
his arm on my father's shoulder, and urge him on. "Coraggio!", he said, Italian,
and therefore opera, for "Courage!"
Friday night services, unsurprisingly, enjoyed modest attendance – with
one colossal exception. My father was an inveterate reader, and his sabbath
sermons often consisted of book reviews. One day in 1953 the temple bulletin
carried a notice that the following Friday evening Rabbi Sack would preach on
Alfred Kinsey's recently published book, "Sexual Behavior of the Human Female."
The night came and this sanctuary was, I was told, packed to the rafters. I don't
think he was ever again able to match the scale of that success.
And then: High Holiday services. The strains of the Kol Nidre; the torahs
decked out in holiday white, the secular sermons for Rosh Hashanah; the religious
ones for Yom Kippur. His dear friend from the chaplaincy, Rabbi Aryeh Lev, who
worked a second pulpit when the services spilled across into the temple house
ballroom. When my father couldn't find a student or a cantor to sound the shofar,
he did it himself. Incidentally, I think that was quite different from "blowing his
own horn."
21
As I suspect is the case for many pulpit rabbis, though, it was not the pulpit
that he loved best: What made it all worthwhile for him were:
First, education. He thought that everything that a synagogue did was about
teaching and learning; and that the young were the most important students
because they were eager, and open, and able -- and would be a conduit to later
generations of Jews. The religious school, its teachers and its curricula, were his
first order of business and always his first concern.
Speaking of the high holidays, there is the oft-repeated tale about his talking
to a class of first or second graders in their classroom about the Succah that was
being built on the pulpit across the street. Do you know what is on the Succah? he
asked. One little girl eagerly raised her hand and said: "Rotten fruit?"
Second, there were the celebratory and pastoral occasions. Weddings, visits
to sick congregants, condolence calls, and funerals. There he found his highest
and best use: the Rabbi's ability to be of help and comfort to people in the most
important and often most difficult of days. His intense interest in people, his
compassion, combined with his familiarity with and abiding respect for tradition
and his role as a representative of that tradition, gave him his greatest sense of
purpose.
22
He was often moved. Sometimes he came home to share those feelings with
us insofar, of course, as they were his to share. Hard not to remember the sudden
death of congregants' young daughter: Call her Becky Rubin. A somewhat
troubled, but bright and spirited girl of about 12. She died, I think I remember,
after running away from home to the family's country house, where she was
accidentally overcome by gas fumes.
The funeral was on a splendid, sparkling Spring day. My father told us that
as, at graveside, he read the mourner's Kaddish, he was just certain that the branch
of a nearby apple tree in full flower, he saw Becky looking down on the gathering
of her family and friends, with a broad grin on her face.
***
And this: Perhaps you know the lawyer Leonard Garment, at least by
reputation. Originally, a Brooklynite. A member of the old Nixon Mudge firm,
and of the Nixon administration, of which he was a prominent survivor. A sinceretired Washington lawyer of high renown and repute.
In 1997 he published and I read his memoir,"Crazy Rhythm." In the latter
part of the book he recounts the sad tale of his first wife's suicide in a run-down
Boston hotel, the many weeks in which her body went unidentified because of
23
miscommunication between the Boston and New York police departments, the
eventual arrival of news of her death.
Mr. Garment wrote this about the funeral:
The funeral was small, a handful of relatives and close
friends, quiet, uncomfortable, dry-eyed. No remarks by
loved ones. The rabbi furnished by the funeral parlor, a
total stranger, gave a brief eulogy, based on
conversations with family and friends, that was
surprisingly appropriate. He ended with some lines that
he said were among Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
favorites when she was dying of tuberculosis: "Not a tear
must o're her fall. He giveth his beloved sleep." This
produced the day's only touch of open emotion.
Reading that, I contacted Len immediately. "That stranger," I told him, "was my
father."
***
And then there were the weddings. My father thought
them so full of joy and hope.
24
As a judge, I have the occasional privilege and pleasure of performing
weddings myself. It's particularly fun for me because I get to play dress-up in my
daddy's robes and do what daddy used to do. Talk about Sigmund Freud.
My father said it well in his ceremony and I intone it, with attribution,
whenever I'm doing the performing. He said:
In every love there is a dream of the future, a hope for
the future and also a fear and trembling for the future.
Love carries with it, [in addition to joy,] a faith in the
beloved, a faith in one's self, a faith in the future that is
wiser than reason knows, more than experience
teaches.... It is [your love for and devotion to each other]
that turns [that] fear into the courage to [conquer] the
tensions and trials [of your life].
***
Yes, controversially, my father performed intermarriages – else Anne
and I would have had to be married in city hall, or worse, by a judge. Part of that
decision was, again, his belief that American Jews were required by their very
25
Jewishness to treat non-Jews as equally holy, whatever the reason not to do so had
been elsewhere.
But more to the point, I expect, in the case of others, not Anne and
me, the couple were often in a tough spot with their families. He could, and
therefore wanted, to help. Ultimately, I think, he just couldn't bring himself to say
no.
But he did have one qualification which I found puzzling: The couple
had to first affirm that they planned to bring their children up as Jews.
It seemed peculiar to me for several reasons, the most obvious of
which was this: If that wasn't actually their plan, all they had to do to pass the test
was to lie. But in retrospect, perhaps it made sense. By that simple requirement
he helped dissuade couples from being married in the Jewish tradition unless -- for
whatever reason -- it was genuinely important to them to do so. And if it was, he
was there.
And yes, my father had an answer to the recurring question: What is
the meaning of the traditional breaking of the glass at the end of every Jewish
wedding ceremony. He explained to me that it represents the physical end of the
bride's virginity.
26
The ending of the bride's virginity? I guess that might be regarded
today as somewhere among bad taste, politically incorrect, and incomprehensible.
But I do love to hear modern Rabbis offer other explanations. My personal
favorite is that "It represents the destruction of the temple." I can hardly restrain
myself. "So why," I ask, "does everyone cheer"?
Like it or not, I find my father's answer hopelessly persuasive. In the
end, though, it is probably better not to ask. Just enjoy it. As my wife Anne, a
recent convert to the faith, points out: The breaking of the glass is wonderful
anyhow. Her best (and now my best) way to explain it is analogize it to a modern
American baseball game and, she says, the familiar invocation: "Play Ball!"
***
Every opinion has at least one footnote. Here's one now: Just this
past Tuesday -- four days ago --my daughter Deborah reminded me that she has
transferred to a CD -- audio tapes of a series of interviews of my father that she
conducted in early March 1991. At his request, a copy of the tapes were later sent
to HUC for their archives. Just on Wednesday evening, I began to listen to them.
Wow! Perhaps an amendment to these remarks will soon follow.
***
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Finally this afternoon, I share with you some of my father's wit and
yes wisdom. I have had a tendency to repeat these stories endlessly to my
children, what is now an army of my elite present and former law clerks, and in
public every chance I get. Here are eight examples chosen pretty much at random:
On Religion
Once, while I was in law school and rather serious, he began to talk to
me with a twinkle in his voice if not his eye.
"Bob," said the Rabbi to his son. "I have invented a new religion."
"You have what?" I said.
"I have invented a religion. Ask yourself," he said, "What is it that
rules everything in life?"
"Luck," he said, answering his own question, "Luck governs
everything. From the moment of conception -- when one sperm and not another
fertilizes an egg -- to the means and instant of your death, chance is everything.
" So," he said, "I am inventing a new religion. It will be devoted to
the worship of luck.
"By the way," he said, its "house of worship will be, of course, a
casino. And I," my father told me, "as the clergyman -- I will be The House."
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***
On Orthodoxy or Fundamentalism
In a sermon, quoting The Wall Street Journal in turn quoting someone
else: It is a system that has all the answers, but permits no questions.
On the Tenth Commandment
He did not think that Jews, unlike Jimmy Carter, believe that a person
can "sin in his [or her] heart." It is actions that are or are not sinful, not thoughts.
He therefore thought the Tenth Commandment against covetousness to be, if you'll
excuse me, a bit "un-Jewish." He summed up the general rule for me when I was
maybe twelve this way: "You can hate your brother, but you can't hit your
brother."
On Gossip
While on vacation from college:
He asked me rhetorically, "You know Mrs. [let's call her] Bernstein?"
referring to a congregant around the corner.
"Sure." Indeed she was the neighborhood gossip, most often seen
chattering away at her front stoop with friends and neighbors, apparently without
pause to take a breath.
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"She's a liar." He said. And I was flabbergasted.
"She's what? How can you possibly say that?" I asked, not at all
rhetorically.
"Well, he said, there just isn't that much truth."
[By the way, I think he would easily apply that analysis to today's
blogs: There just isn't that much truth.]
***
On Judging Others
My parents, and I - then nineteen - were visiting the Top of the Mark
in San Francisco. On seeing two naval officers overtly pick up two prostitutes in
front of the hotel and walk into the hotel with them, arm in arm, I snickered. My
father looked at me disapprovingly
"Don't ever make such a judgment, he said, until you've first spent six
months at sea."
On Open Mindedness and Compassion
I found myself correctly quoted in that Wikipedia entry as having
referred to my father as "The most open-minded person I've ever known." He was
that. But he was also compassionate. He once said that there was no form of
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human behavior that he couldn't, on at least some level, understand. He
immediately qualified that, though, by the phrase: "except cruelty." That, to him,
was entirely incomprehensible.
On Leaving Middle Age
I used to dream that I was flying. Now I dream I am walking.
And on Old Age
"I have Sinsheimer's Disease," he said (before he suffered a
debilitating surgery-induced stroke). "What's that?" I asked. "That," he explained,
"is when you just can't remember the word 'Alzheimer'."
***
I can't tell you how grateful I am for this opportunity to talk about my
dad, whose spirit still inhabits -- dare I say haunts -- the sanctuaries and hallways
of Beth Elohim,
Thank you.
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