Blogroll | Congregation Darchei Noam

The blue of her eyes reminded me of the color of a vast Russian sky.  She emerged, radiant, from the living waters of the small pool.  I had been asked by a colleague to serve as a witness at this unique conversion, due to my ability to speak Ludmilla’s mother tongue. The officiating rabbis needed an interpreter as well as a rabbi.  I filled both criteria…

My new friend was seventy-nine years old. Born near Moscow to a Russian Christian family, she had witnessed the rise of communism, Stalin’s purges, and World War II.  As a young woman, Ludmilla had trained as a nurse, and at the beginning of the Second World War, she had been assigned to a Moscow hospital to treat and care for the numerous wounded soldiers who were brought in from the battlefields. 

Yosief was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in the Carpathian region.  Later in his youth, he was drafted into the Soviet army.  During the war, a bomb went off, killing several of his friends, but Yosief was lucky and was only wounded. The young Russian nurse Ludmilla had been assigned to his floor.  The small piece of metal that made its way into Yosief’s chest was not the only thing that settled near his heart for life.  She nursed him to wellness.

After the war, they married and Ludmilla followed Yosief to his home in the Carpathians. Ludmilla told me of her first meeting with Yosief’s mother: “I was not sure what his mother would she think of me. I was hesitant but the woman opened the door to us, it is me she embraced first. ‘If you love her, she said, and then I love her too’.”  It was a dangerous period in the Soviet Jewish life.  Rabbis were arrested and sent away, study houses were closed. Ludmilla held onto Jewish life by the whisper of blessings, a recipe or two…

Ludmilla was educated, and her Russian flowed with grace: “From Yosief’s mother I learned to light Shabbat candles. My mother in-law taught me what animals are permitted. Together, Yosief and I skipped work on the Day of Atonement and fasted in secret. I loved her for her kindness, her wonderful mind, and her love of her Judaism”.

Years later, Ludmillah would tell me “It is the movement of her hands over the candles that I remember. Next to her I felt that I too was Jewish.”As a rabbi at the Beit Din, I had to ask a question:  “Why now?” Why was the conversion ceremony so important to her? She was silent for a moment, then sighed and responded: “I chose a Jewish destiny when I married my husband, and now that life is coming to a close, I want to be buried next to him as a Jew. This is the least I can do after the life we shared together.”

I have officiated at over 100 conversions in my Rabbinic career. Ludmilla’s story is a true story, one that took place 13 years ago in 2002, and was played out again just recently, on September 18^th of this year, when I officiated at a conversion at Leo Baeck’s Mikvah on Atkinson Road. This story’s cardinal message was also true 2300 years ago when Ruth fell in love with her mother-in-law Naomi, and left the land of Moab for Bethlehem.  It is her famous words, after the death of her husband, which serve as a foundation to conversion in our tradition, “Do not urge me to leave you, to go away from joining you. For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people and your God, my God. Where you die will I die and there will I be buried. I vow before God that nothing but death could part me from you” (Ruth 1:16-17). Over the years, I have observed and learned from my students that the road to choosing a Jewish life is usually inspired by someone Jewish who models Judaism in a way that makes a non-Jewish person want to be a Jew. 

According to the Jewish Outreach Institute, and through my own observations, the majority of liberal Jewish households will have at least one non-Jewish person present at Jewish celebrations. What Judaism will these people see modeled for them? Is it worth emulating or taking as a tradition of their own? I do not make assumptions or state any ambition that every person in a non-Jewish home needs to convert or has to be converted. But for those non-Jewish individuals – our family members, our friends – choosing to live among Jewish people, and participate in Jewish life, what model will guide them? Do yours and my homes represent and convey a Judaism worth emulating? In my observations there are three major themes that repeat in choosing Judaism as a chosen path:  Warmth of family, Jewish obsession with learning and ideas, and love of the community.   We all have our own stories of familial warmth, and we have heard the stories of those beautiful connections to their Jewish families of people who have chosen to join the Jewish religion. Today, I’d like to focus on these two other themes: learning and community.

Part One: Study of Talmud, Torah and Jewish Text and pursuit of intellectual fulfillment…

The love and obsession with Jewish learning goes back to several millenniums. According to our Torah even the King is commanded to study sacred text, which he, himself, must write. The two greatest biblical figures, King David and King Solomon, were both authors. Tradition attributes the Book of Psalms to David and the Song of Songs to Solomon. It is not enough to be statesmen. You must be a scholar and a poet.

Even heaven is a library: according to the Talmud, three different books are opened in heaven on Rosh Hashanah: one book for the names of very righteous, another for those of the very wicked, and the third for the rest of us “in between”.

No one should be without a book, not even God.  There is a Rabbinic idea that the Holy One studies Torah in the heaven’s heights. Not only that, but the Holy One uses our sacred text! God consults the books and only then creates the world. In our sages’ minds, even the All Knowing One is a student. Even for a great Jewish mind like Maimonides, a most exemplary rationalist, Jewish learning is another form of prayer.

It is that preoccupation with learning that has allowed us to move from land to land, country to country, while maintaining our peoplehood. In the houses of study, Yeshivot, a good discussion and question was praised over good answers. It was the search for knowledge, engagement in discussion, that produced generations of Jews for whom, pre-1948, learning was the land of belonging.

But even in the place of their own for our people, even in the Jewish State, the love of learning is paramount to Jewish identity. If you visit David Ben Gurion’s house in Tel Aviv, you will see that, while the ground floor is spartan to the point of austerity, the first floor is a single vast library of papers, periodicals and 20,000 books. He had another 4000 or so in Sde Boker. 

We are commanded to question everything; tradition, Torah and even God. It is a profoundly Biblical concept: 

Just like Jacob wrestling with an Angel, we wrestle with ideas.

Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When he perceived that he could not overcome Jacob, …The angel said “Let me go, for dawn has broken”. But Jacob responded; “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”…. “No longer will it be said that your name is Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with the Divine….” And the angel blessed Jacob, with the new name – Israel. (Genesis 32:25-30)

These words inspired generations of Jews to search out learning; both Jewish and secular.

Louise Brandeis was the first Jewish person to serve on the United States Supreme Court. In 1916, President Wilson nominated Brandeis as a Justice of the Supreme Court, precipitating a contest over confirmation in the Senate that lasted over four months. The nomination to the Court was so deeply innovative. As one person remarked, “the nominee was a Jew and he was a lawyer of a Reformist band”.

Brandeis especially admired one of his uncles Louis Dembitz, a scholarly lawyer and author in Louisville, sometimes known as “the Jewish scholar of the South” who was to become a follower of Theodore Herzl. In honour of his uncle, Brandeis changed his middle name from David to Dembitz.

A passionate Zionist, Louis Brandeis, brought his influence to bear on then President Woodrow Wilson’s administration during the negotiations leading up to the Balfour Declaration, which called for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” in 1917.

 Louis Brandeis’s career and learning began at Harvard and did not have easy beginnings, although it wasn’t the curriculum that made his journey so difficult. It was not easy to be a Jew at Harvard at the beginning of the 20^th Century. Some of his fellow students said to him: “It’s practical; being a Jew will hold you back,  Brandeis. You can go much farther if you give it up.”  Brandeis listened, but never responded.

By his final year of law school, Brandeis’s preeminence could no longer be denied. Jewish or not, he was invited to join the honour society.  It was an electric moment – the first time that this exclusive society had accepted a Jew. On the evening of the official induction, the room was hushed; the atmosphere was thick. All eyes were on Brandeis as he walked to the lectern. Slowly he looked around the room.

“I am sorry” he said “that I was born a Jew”. The room went silent… he began again. “I am sorry”, he said, “that I was born a Jew, but only because I wish I had the privilege of choosing Judaism on my own.”

When the quiet had grown uncomfortable, members of the exclusive Harvard honour society began to stand. However, they didn’t walk out. Instead, awed by Brandeis’s conviction and strength of character, and his unequivocal choice, the members of the society gave the honoree a standing ovation.

We have many Jewish people who happen to be educated. What we need are educated people who are passionate about being Jewish.

Can we model the love of Jewish ideas and our history to someone else Jew or not a Jew. Can we draw these amazing concepts and thought from the books on our shelves? Can that love inspire?

Part Two: The Global Jewish Community...

There are three main reasons why my students have been drawn to the Jewish path; the warmth of the Jewish home, love of Jewish learning, and love of the community and deep connection to the shared destiny of the Jewish people.

Martin Buber, a major thinker and theologian of the 20^th Century wrote a wonderful observation about our people and his passionate sense of shared destiny when he observed their struggle as they tried to make it out of Eastern Europe between two wars.

“Those people out there – the miserable, stopped people dragging their feet, peddling their wares from village to village, not knowing where tomorrow’s livelihood will come from nor why they should go on living… every one of us will feel: these people are part of myself... My soul is not by the side of my people; my people is my soul.  When I was a child I read an old Jewish tale I could not understand.  It said no more than this: ‘Outside the gates of Rome there sits a leprous beggar, waiting. He is the Messiah’. Then I came upon an old man whom I asked: ‘What is he waiting for?’ And the old man gave me an answer I did not understand at the time, an answer I learned to understand only much later. He said: ‘He waits for you.’

It is because of that connectedness, because of that feeling, that Darchei Noam made their commitment to Jewish community of Ukraine. The particular place in mind is a small town of Chemlnitzky.  On our trip to Ukraine, in 2013, we forged a very close relationship with that Jewish community. At the best of times, the Ukrainian economy is struggling, but as a war unfolded the funds for heat, meals and Jewish education have been necessary. In the spring, we launched an Afikoman appeal and gathered funds for this community. It took almost an adventure to get the funds there, but we did it and secured Shabbat meals and home visits for our sister community. When the Jews of Chmelnitzky  sent us a video about their community, the songs we shared and the sound of a Jewish violin left Western Ukraine and headed straight into our hearts here in Toronto. 

We do not stop with the Jewish community alone, here at Darchei Noam, one can think of the work our members do for First Interfaith Out of the Cold, the tireless advocacy on issues of affordable housing and poverty alleviation, and other social justice causes.

The Jewish holidays are a time of rejoicing and a time of nostalgia and longing. It is the time of the year when the loss of a loved one is more obvious, more central and their absence is overwhelming.

In her Rosh Hashanah message Rachel Frenkel, the mother of Naftali Frenkel, one of the teens’ murdered in the beginning of July this year in Israel sounded strong and soft, grateful and kind.

This slender woman in the deep red beret spoke:

“What happened after the kidnapping is that we discovered we were not alone…During those terrible days we received phone calls from all over the world; Cape Town, Kathmandu, Europe, Australia…. What we experience was something extraordinary. We felt were part of something huge, part of a people, part of a family…. In July we went searching for the boys and discovered ourselves.

During those days someone said on the phone; I am not an affiliated Jew, but I have to tell you, I feel very affiliated now!!!”

This love and connectedness did not narrow Rachel Frenkel, but inspired her. It inspired and intensified her compassion for the mother of Mohammed al-Khadr, a Muslim boy murdered the same week. “I understand Mohammed’s mother and her terrible pain…the shedding of innocent blood is against morality, is against Torah and the foundation of the lives our boys.”

A quote comes to mind, although I can’t recall the source. It comes to us from one of the Chassidic masters. It goes something like this: An old teacher facing a young Jewish man came to him with a problem. After listening to the young  mans’ story, the teacher said; “Hershelle: if there is no compassion, why be a Jew?”

Not too long before  his death Albert Einstein wrote “My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human tie...The Pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence – these are the features of Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.” 

This Rosh Hashanah

This Rosh Hashanah, across North America, our homes will be filled with people from all walks of life.  We can no longer rely on our Jewish ancestry to define who we are. We are kindly observed by people who come into our Jewish lives and, naturally, they are open to learning? Who are you they ask us? Why do you hold so dear this and that?

What conclusions will they draw about our Judaism? What Judaism are we modeling to them? Judaism of kindness and warmth? Thoughtful ideas? A Judaism that loves learning? Appreciates its history? A Judaism with love and concern for Israel? Is it a Judaism where social justice is the underpinning to every holiday and celebration?

Is it possible, that decades down the road, there will be a person who will want to claim Judaism as part of their heritage as a result of knowing you as a Jew and the Judaism that you brought to them?

I would like to thank all of you with whom I was honored to walk the path towards the Jewish doors, both those who chose to take our tradition as their own and those who walked it as part of the family. On the behalf of our people: “Thank you for your trust, your care and your Jewish passion.’

To all at Darchei Noam who partner in creation of Jewish atmosphere of warmth, Jewish learning, God’s partnership in the search for social justice these celebrations are yours.  

To all of you who modeled Judaism worth emulating, may this feels as a great reward to you.

Being a Jew means living with warmth and love for people around you, being a Jew means wrestling with ideas and your Jewish intellect, being a Jew means deep concern and appreciation of the State of Israel, its beauty and complexity. Being a Jew means living with hope.

Shanah Tovah

Rabbi Tina Grimberg is the Rabbi of Congregation Darchei Noam.