Sunday, July 27, 2014

Lili Kalish, z"l

delivered July 27, 2014

Lili Kalish left this world Wednesday after 89 years in life.

Born in 1924 in Vinne, Slovakia, her life journey took her through a charmed childhood,

a war that stole from her family members, stability, and homes,

ultimately emigrating to the United States

where she soon met a nice Jewish boy from Queens and had a long, happy marriage of 63 years with her beloved Herbert,

who together built a new family in the United States-- having two sons, Martin and John, later expanding with  Martin’s wife Karen and John’s partner Sally, and with three grandchildren:  Diandra, Tom and Eleanna.

A family with extended its roots to the next generations.

Lili Kalish’s body gave way after an operation on Wednesday. It was an operation that she had chosen because, she, and Herbert, thought that this was the way to extend her life.

Ten years ago, it was an operation that probably would not have been performed on a nearly 90-year old person.  

Although the procedure went well, it was not meant to be.

Lili’s leaving us gives us this moment to reflect on the life Lili Kalish lived--and what the horrific circumstances she lived through before she was even 24 years old.
Lili was born in Vinne, Slovakia, in 1924, to Moric and Sari (Grossman) Friedman.  Her mother was the youngest of eleven siblings in the Leopold Grossman family, a large and multi-branched family, who helped Lili survive and like so many other large Jewish families lost many, many lives in the Shoah.

Moric and Sari had four children:  Elizabeth, Ludwig, Paul and Lili.  

Lili’s oldest sister, Elizabeth, born about 1916, married Deszo Keszner in 1938, and had two children.  In 1944, a smuggler was to take Elizabeth and her children from Hungary to Slovakia.  The smuggler refused to take Lili’s cousins. So Elizabeth and her two children stayed in Hungary and, in 1944, were deported where they perished in a concentration camp.  Her husband Deszo was in a labor camp and survived and would play an important role in Lili’s surviving the war.

Her eldest brother, Ludwig, was the one she always looked up to.  Ludwig was a prominent Zionist. In 1942 he was being smuggled on a train to Switzerland, hiding in a coal bin near the locomotive. On the Austrian side of the border with Switzerland, he and his friend were sniffed out by Germans with dogs.  Ludwig was sent to Theresienstadt.  In August 1944, he was taken on the last transport from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, where he perished.  

Lili’s other brother, Paul, went on an illegal ship to Israel, which was seized by the British. He was interned in Rhodesia. In about 1950 he left for Israel, the same year that Lili would marry Herbert.  Shortly after he left Rhodesia he died of a heart attack.

Lili survived, lived and prospered thanks to her innate wisdom, her ability to think on her feet, and through the help and aid of her large, extended family.

When she was three she went to live with her uncle Moritz Grossman and his wife Sari (Furth) Grossman in Secovce. Moritz had a good business and a nice home, and Lili thought that she apparently fitted in well because her aunt and uncle doted on her, ensuring that clothing and gloves were made for her.

From the beginning of the Nazi’s invasion of Slovakia, Lili refused to wear the yellow star.

With the war intensifying, Lili, now only 18, left Secovce by car with six other young women and one young man to go to a town near the Hungarian border.  There was a Jewish-owned vineyard whose caretaker was not Jewish, but he smuggled them across the border.

Like most smugglers he did not do it for love, but for money.

From April 1942 to August 1943 Lili stayed in a number of places, many of them relatives of the extended Grossman and Furth family who were residing in Hungary.

Lili’s brother-in-law Deszo Keszner was able to obtain false papers and ration tickets for her. Her name was now Alice Seltzer. No one ever asked Deszo where or how he got the papers.  Lili traveled by train using the false papers Deszo gave her.  Together they took the train, sitting apart as strangers, arriving at night to Lili’s sister’s Elizabeth apartment.

Lili stayed at there for about a week but feared that she would be recognized.  Soon, she then went to another place where there was a Furth relative, Piri Furth Weiz, who had a new baby, and was a teacher.

In Debrecen, Piri’s husband’s sister, Edo Weisz, met Lili at the train. They had never met, so they used a signal, carrying a magazine.  Lili stayed with Piri and Tibor Weisz for a school year, taking care of the house and baby. They owned the house which had three apartments, two of which were rented. One of the apartments was occupied by a Jewish family, but the other was not Jewish. Tibor’s brother was very well connected and knew when there would be hostile raids to round up illegals.

When those raids were happening, Lili would go to the park with the baby in the carriage; other times she hid in someone else’s apartment.

The first summer she was there, she went to Tokay, and stayed on a farm owned by the father of a woman who married into the Grossman family. She went there with other young relatives of the family, all of whom were legal residents of Hungary. Lily was the only illegal.

From this farm she went to Budapest to the apartment of Moritz and Margit Furth. Margit was Sari Furth Grossman’s (Lili’s aunt’s) sister. Margit worked as the secretary at the Dohanyi (Budapest’s great) synagogue, and was related to Sandor Epler, the president of the synagogue.

There were many people in the Budapest apartment: Margit and husband, plus their daughter and husband, and Margit’s adult son. The daughter worked in the Montessori nursery school, and she obtained a job for Lili there, where Lili was also able to live as part of her employment.

Still she stayed at the Furth apartment only for a few days because there were too many people there, and circumstances were precarious.  Lili was at the Montessori school for one or two months.

She returned to Debrecen to stay again with the Weisz family. This time, a niece of Piro Weisz, named Anna, had moved there in order to attend gymnasium. Up to that time Anna was at home, schooled by her parents in a very rural area of Hungary.  Lili and Anna took turns sleeping one on a sofa, and the other with two armchairs pushed together in the living room. She was there for most of the school year. It was then the summer of 1943.  She had survived in Hungary for more than a year as an illegal.

Lili’s Hungarian uncle Hermann Grossman found out that there was a new regulation that permitted a minor child without papers under the age of 15 to be claimed by a Hungarian citizen who was willing to be a guardian. For this, you needed a birth certificate.

Since Lili was 19, she needed a false one to be claimed.  Her Uncle Hermann found a Jewish woman willing to participate for money.

Somehow, Moritz Grossman in Secovce was able to get the birth certificate of a girl that had already been deported. Her name was Fanny Bernstein, age 14.

Lili now became Fanny Bernstein. This was the scheme cooked up to get keep her safe given her illegal status in Hungary, and by this time most people who were illegal in Hungary were getting caught. She returned to Budapest.

She again went to the Dohanyi synagogue and a messenger brought her and a much younger girl to the Magdalena Intern Camp in Budapest. She was there for three or four weeks until a detective interviewed her, and she remained there for another few weeks, until she was claimed by a Jewish woman who was a widow with two children.

Lili lived in the widow’s apartment, sleeping on a sofa in the living room. She had to report to the police station every week and stayed there until March 1944. Because of the German takeover of Hungary that month, Lili’s birth parents, the Friedmans, still living in Slovakia, recognized the danger, and arranged for a smuggler to bring Lili back to Slovakia.  

The Hermann Grossman family, with whom she had stayed during her time in Hungary, had four children.  Sensing the danger they asked Lili to take one child back to Slovakia.  Lili agreed to take the youngest, two year old Michael.
Soon after the German invasion of Hungary, Lili crossed the border with a smuggler and two year old Michael. Back in Slovakia she reunited with her birth parents.  Lili’s father was managing an estate in Slovakia near the border. Jews were under jeopardy and her father was upset that she was there with her 2-year-old cousin.  

Her father and mother were transported to the west which was the last time that Lili saw them in 1944.  

Once in Slovakia, she traveled to Secovce with two year old Michael. Somehow, Michael was taken off the bus on arrival in Secovce to be reunited with his parents.

Lili was completely illegal in Secovce for these two to three months, and then during her time in nearby Zilina for another three months.  The war front soon moved west, and all the Jews again had to flee or would be deported to the camps.

Lacking any identification Moritz, Sari, and Lili got on a civilian train.  Fortunately they were not stopped.  

They went to Hlohovec, arriving in late August or early September 1944.  At that time the Germans had entered Slovakia to put down the Slovak rebellion that had begun in late August.

Lili’s uncle Moritz had a contact of a Jewish man from Secovce who had funds and was willing to pay for Lili and her aunt and uncle to be hidden by the same farmer where he was hidden.

The hiding place was in a bunker near a house.  About nine Jews were already hiding there. After about three days the farmer betrayed the Jews hiding there.  He brought the guards and German soldiers, and they ordered everyone out.

Lili, Moritz and Sari were at the back.  It was dark. Lili told her aunt and uncle to stay still.   The three of them remained still.  Early the next morning they left-without being captured.

There was another possible safe place in Hlohovec.  Lili’s uncle Moritz did not trust the place but had no other choice. The contact was Sari’s half-brother, Josef Furth. Moritz had the address and a diagram of the possible safe house. This turned out to be the family’s rescuers, Frantisek and Kafka Sedlacek.

They went to the address. It was early morning (Lili later heard that Jews hiding in a nearby church steeple saw them).

There were two doors. They opened one door, and saw a German officer’s uniform on a chair, boots, and an open bed. They stepped back in shock, and the other door opened and a woman (Katka) beckoned us to come in. They closed the open door, and went into a kitchen.

Katka had been up early to do the laundry, and the German officer had been in the outhouse. His room had only the outside door, and was not connected to the rest of the house. Everyone else in the house was still asleep.

From the kitchen there was a door to her bedroom, and there was a small room off the bedroom. That room was about 6 feet by 10 feet. A platform made of wooden slats and straw was arranged for three persons to sleep on side by side on end, and a platform on the other end for Joska Furth to sleep.  In the center area was a bucket.  There was nothing else in the room.

Frantisek was a carpenter, and the day we arrived he started to build a wooden wall with clothing hangers to camouflage the opening to the room. This was completed in a day or two. The three of them stayed in that room with Josef (Joska) Furth for seven months.

They could not leave. To give you an idea of the depravity of the conditions, from their side, those in hiding could not open the wall.  To get food and remove waste, the wall could only be opened from the other side.  There was a tiny window at the top of the room that could not be opened. They had to be very quiet. It was miraculous that the German officer was in an isolated room, and never saw anything. He actually had Sunday dinner with the family in the kitchen.

Living conditions were severe. They only had subsistence food, and could wash very seldom in a basin that was brought in. By the time of liberation in April 1945 they all had fleas.

Hlohovec was liberated in late April 1945. When the Soviet troops arrived the family who sheltered them was in the basement. Lili’s and family were still in their hiding place. There was fighting for three days.

When the fighting stopped, some troops came to the basement door to search for possible resistance. Frantisek embraced them and called them ‘Kameraden,’ and they were ready to attack him, but he managed to explain that he was embracing the Soviets. They were then released from the hidden room.

They stayed only a few days after that. During the brief stay, Lili went with Katka to get some milk, and the farmer said they would not give Katka anything because they learned she had been hiding Jews. This incident prompted Lili and her relatives to leave as soon as possible. They managed to get a train to a town (Rimska Sobota) which took them to the east, toward Secovce, where a refugee center had been set up.

They obtained repatriation documents there.  Another family had taken over their apartment so they temporarily resided in another apartment for about a month, until they could reclaim their apartment, in Secovce.

In 1947 Lili, her parents gone, was formally adopted by Moritz and Sari.

They lived together in Secovce until February 1948. Then they went to Prague to emigrate to the USA. They procured a visa, and stayed in Prague about a week to get doctor’s examination.  They left Czechoslovakia on February 24, 1948,  traveling first by train to Belgium, then by boat and train to London. They stayed in London for two weeks, and then traveling by ship, either the Queen Mary or the Queen Elizabeth, to the USA, arrived in New York on March 10, 1948.

Lili was only 24 years old.

In the US, Moritz had a well-to-do brother, Isidor, who ran the  Grossman Clothing Co. in New York.  He paid for the three of them to come to the US.  Isidor helped his family secure housing in Manhattan at 405 East 72nd Street and provided work to both Moritz and Lili.

It was here, in this studio apartment on New York’s Upper East Side, a world away from the European horror, that Lili would meet the man who would spend the next 63 years of her life by her side.

Herbert's only first cousin was married to the son of a well known Orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn named Rabbi Schoenfeld. As luck would have it, Sari Grossman, Lili’s adoptive mother, was related to Rabbi Schoenfeld.  

Someone from Lili’s extended family showed Herb a picture of Lili.  And said, you might want to meet this girl.  Herb saw the picture and made the blind date.

He also says you never know what you are getting into with a blind date.  So Herbert drove his in from Queens-- waiting until Shabbos was over, because Moritz was religious.  On this Saturday night in early May he went up to the apartment on East 72nd street and met and talked Sari and Moritz, Lili’s adoptive parents.  When Lili and Herb went down to his car, the first thing Herb did was to grab a smoke to light before turning the engine on.  In one of the most stunning acts of class, at least in Herb’s eyes, Lili reached over and lit his cigarette. Herb thought "This girl is not only beautiful, she's romantic."  

For the date Lili looked exquisite.  Herb loved the way she talked so they want to Cafe Rouge, the best place that Herb could go, at the Hotel Pennsylvania. It was 1950, the big band era, and it was quite the night.

Both Herb and Lily felt strong emotions that night and it was not too long before Herb decided that this was the girl he would marry.

Just a few months later Herbert proposed.  Lili said yes, and they were married October 15, 1950 in NYC by Rabbi Schoenfeld.

They were very happy.

They got their first apartment in Queens, in Jackson Heights. Three years later their first born son Martin joined the family; followed by John in 1956.  By then the family had moved to Great Neck, on Long Island.  In 1957 Herb took another job in Connecticut and the family moved again.  In 1967 the family moved to New Jersey.  

It was here, while the boys were at boarding school, that Lili begin an important volunteer experience for her with the Millburn Short Hills Volunteer First Aid Rescue Squad.  For 15 years she was a dedicated volunteer, and found great fulfillment in being able to help other people.
In 1997, Lili and Herb moved to Manchester Center, Vermont, to be closer to Martin and his family.  

Both Herb and Lili enjoy being in Vermont. Throughout her life, Lili actively maintained friendships from all parts of her life--from the rescuers who hid them during the war to her fellow volunteers on the Millburn Rescue Squad.  She made a point of investing in her relationships.

Her children remember her for her domestic prowess, always offering more milk and bread.  During the war Lili became an accomplished knitter.  With her family, she would always knit sweaters, always thinking about whatever her children needed.  One of her grandchildren even got a “Cat in the Hat” hat hand made by Lili.

In one funny story--it was 1955 and Lili was finally learning to drive.  Herbert was teaching Lili in the family auto--and was telling her that she needed to depress the clutch to change gears.  A two-year-old Martin chimed in from the back seat “engage the clutch.”

For a woman of enormous accomplishment, Lili was modest throughout her days.  

Her life’s story is one where she overcame an insidious enemy in her younger days to come to the United States, find love, and build a family with her Herbert, her children, and grandchildren.  She found happiness and contentment in the United States.  She rebuilt her family.  She made sure that her husband, their children, their grandchildren--had what they needed.  

To survive what Lili survived, to love and be loved, to live a long life, and to leave the world on her own terms makes her life’s story remarkable and a blessing, that she was able to die, of old age, in a hospital, with her husband and son at her side and today instead of meeting the fate of so many in her family she is being lovingly said goodbye to by all of you who were her family and community.






Wednesday, July 9, 2014

On the American Studies Association Boycott of Academia in Israel

delivered December 27, 2013
Just when you thought Israel could not suffer any more low blows from her detractors comes word that the National Council of the American Studies Association (ASA) has announced an academic boycott of Israel.  The ASA is comprised of some 5,000 academics in various universities and colleges throughout the United States, all teaching in the humanities.  
This boycott immediately opened up the ASA to the ridicule of many universities in the United States--leading some of them, like Brandeis and Indiana University, to sever connections to the ASA.
Academic boycotts are rarely effective; ask those who have been boycotting Israel in England if they believe that they’ve moved the conversation forward.
Still, the ASA’s move is the first academic boycott declared in the United States.
Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic has written what I think is the best response to the ASA’s action:
One has to start somewhere, explained Curtis Marez, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the National Council of the American Studies Association (ASA), which had just announced an academic boycott of Israel. He was responding to a reporter’s sensible query about the justice of singling out Israel for punishment when many countries in this heartless world have human rights records that are significantly worse, and his chillingly casual words are a measure of the moral and intellectual vapidity of what the ASA proudly described as “an ethical stance.”
In a supporting document called “Answering Questions About the ASA Boycott from Department Chairs, Deans, Administrators,” the ASA instructs its members that its mission is to “make a positive contribution to human understanding” and “support diversity and equity” and “contribute to solving world problems” (there is no mention of scholarship, of course: these people long ago obliterated the distinction between academia and activism), but in truth only one “world problem,”only one problem of “human understanding,” exercises it, and it is the problem of the Palestinians.
They and they alone are the universal touchstone of decency. A few hours away from Palestine six million people are refugees in their own country, where they are being bombed by their government, and starving in the snow, and fighting polio;  but never mind them, they are not Israel’s victims, and it is the turpitude of the Jewish state, not the actually existing misery in the region and the world, that offends the ASA. Compared with Aleppo, Ramallah is San Diego. But one has to start somewhere.
It is true that one cannot care equally about everything, that an ethical action is always concrete and therefore selective. But the ethical quality of one’s action must be measured by one’s standard for selection; and if that standard is not first and foremost determined by an impartial assessment of suffering and need, so that one selects as the beneficiaries of one’s ethical energies not those who are most wretched but those whose wretchedness confirms one’s prior ideological and political preferences, then the halo is a fake.
Reading the ASA materials on its decision, I am immediately struck by the decidedly extra-ethical origins of its boycott. In another helpful document called “ASA Academic Boycott Resolution Frequently Asked Questions”—if the resolution is so clear in its reasons and its virtues, why is the ASA producing these agitprop crib sheets for its members?—I read that “Israeli academic institutions are part of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of the Zionist settler-colonial project.”
That is not anti-occupation, it is anti-Zionist; it is the foul diction of delegitimization, the old vocabulary of anti-Israel propaganda.
(It also ignores the fact that Israeli universities are where criticism of the occupation flourishes.) In the “Council Statement on the Academic Boycott of Israel,” I read that “in the last several decades, the ASA has welcomed scholarship that critically analyzes the U.S. state, its role domestically and abroad”: so this is not just the usual anti-Zionism, it is also the usual anti-Americanism. Of course Pakistan is also an ally of the United States whose military we support, and the Pakistani army is complicit in savagery beyond anything that any Palestinian is enduring—but terrorism (and certainly Muslim terrorism) does not interest such progressives. They are not empirically minded in their ethical commitments. They answer to higher promptings.
I also read, in the National Council’s statement, that “the ASA also has a history of critical engagement with the field of Native American and indigenous studies that has increasingly come to shape and influence the field.” What on earth has this to do with Israel and Palestine? The answer is, everything.
There is a comic dimension to this travesty of academic freedom. Lauding the ASA boycott for targeting institutions and not individuals, the saintly Jewish philosopher Judith Butler pointed out in The Nation that “the only request that is being made is that no institutional funding from Israeli institutions be used” for the travel expenses of Israeli scholars.
Just how important do these professors think they and their conferences are? But finally there is nothing funny about this. There are first principles at stake in this stunt. Butler instructed that an academic boycott “militates against the spirit of censorship and the practice of calumny that would cut off debate and engage in debased caricatures.” I suggest she put down her Levinas and pick up her Orwell. It is precisely the spirit of censorship, and of conformity of opinion, that animates a boycott of academic institutions. In a sterling letter to the ASA, a group of distinguished American scholars noted this, and protested that “scholars would be punished not because of what they believe—which would be bad enough—but simply because of who they are based on their nationality. ... This is discrimination pure and simple.”
For all the politicization of the ASA, it is indifferent to the politics of what it piously deplores. The occupation of the Palestinian territories is a political problem that requires a political solution. In the attempt to attain such a solution, the Palestinians are not inert victims or bystanders to their fate. They are historical actors; and their refusal to accept any of the plans for Palestinian statehood that have been proposed to them—the imperfection of the solution disturbs them more than the imperfection of the problem—is one of the reasons—one of the reasons—that they find themselves in a condition of such weakness. The Israeli settlement of the West Bank indeed must end; but even if it ends, Israel is a state by right with a perfectly understandable anxiety about its security.
“We do not support the boycott of Israel,” Mahmoud Abbas, in South Africa for Mandela’s funeral, declared. He supports only a “boycott [of] the products of the settlements.” “We have relations with Israel,” he added, “we have mutual recognition of Israel.” But who is Abu Mazen to speak for the Palestinians, compared with an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego?
I will conclude this week’s remarks with the words of one of my professors from rabbinical school who wrote on Facebook:  “Thank you, American Studies Association, for making studying the humanities even more irrelevant.”  Let us all hope that fervent discussion about the Israel and the actors in the Middle East will flourish its way to a solution that does not negate Israel or her right to exist.  

From Dr. King to Rabbi Prinz: The Power of the Prophetic Voice

delivered January 17, 2014


Monday we will commemorate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  


Dr. King, as a religious leader, often used the words of the prophets to dislodge people from their lethargy, much as the prophets did for the people around them in their day and age.  

Prophetic language, using the words of Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, is designed to “smash the human skull.”  Apathy and lethargy remain part of the human condition--and it fell to the prophets to stir humans from our de facto condition.


In fact Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech” given in 1963 King uses the utopian language of the prophet Isaiah, using the same words for comfort that we use in our Jewish tradition:


I have a dream that one day “every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”
Isaiah’s vision of a society perfected is how Dr. King compared to United States of 1963.  Isaiah’s original words were meant to comfort those displaced by the fall of the northern Kingdom of Israel in the early 700s BCE.


Prophetic texts like Isaiah’s are often repurposed.


In our tradition, for example, it is used annually on the first Shabbat after Tisha b’Av, the Jewish day of mourning.  The Shabbat is called the Shabbat of Comfort.  After three weeks of devastating prophetic words are read, we are given comfort by Isaiah’s words from so long ago.  In this context, we are reaffirming that the connection between the Jewish people and God remains in-tact.


Dr. King’s purpose in using the prophetic text was to fulfill a dream: a radical transformation of society.


As we refer to King as a modern-day prophet, there is another modern-day prophet who was Jewish, who spoke before King at the “I Have a Dream” speech, and did so in a particularly Jewish context.  


His name was Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who was born and ordained in Germany before World War Two and the rise of the National Socialists.  He left Germany in 1937--rather, he was kicked-out--and came to the United States where he became rabbi to what was a large Newark, New Jersey reform synagogue:  Temple B’nai Abraham.  He spent the rest of his career there.  Eventually he became president of the American Jewish Congress.  He, too, uses prophetic language to shake off the scourge of apathy and lethargy.  


In fact, it was Rabbi Prinz who proudly and Jewishly created the frame by introducing Dr. King’s famous speech.  In his native German accent he said this:


I speak to you as an American Jew.


As Americans we share the profound concern of millions of people about the shame and disgrace of inequality and injustice which make a mockery of the great American idea.


As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a two-fold experience -- one of the spirit and one of our history.


In the realm of the spirit, our fathers taught us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody's neighbor. Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man's dignity and integrity.


From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years we say:


Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe. Our modern history begins with a proclamation of emancipation.


It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.


When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem.


The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.


A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder.


America must not become a nation of onlookers.


America must not remain silent.


Not merely black America, but all of America.


It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.


Our children, yours and mine in every school across the land, each morning pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the republic for which it stands. They, the children, speak fervently and innocently of this land as the land of "liberty and justice for all."


The time, I believe, has come to work together - for it is not enough to hope together, and it is not enough to pray together, to work together that this children's oath, pronounced every morning from Maine to California, from North to South, may become a glorious, unshakeable reality in a morally renewed and united America.

From Isaiah to Dr. King to Rabbi Prinz to today:  our Jewish prophetic tradition exists to inspire us to step outside of ourselves, to engage with the world, to do what is in our power to create the world that should exist. These prophetic words exhort us to action.  

We should hear them, we should act on them.  






The Art of Presence

delivered January 24, 2014

David Brooks in the New York Times is often surprisingly compassionate.  

This week he expresses it in an column he penned called  “The Art of Presence.”  Brooks, who is Jewish, used his New York Times platform to share widely counsel that is universal, but also particularly Jewish.  

The Art of Presence is about remembering and being part of the life of people who have experienced trauma, usually the death of an important person to the individual.  

The Art of Presence is about being there--not just at the time of the trauma, but in the days, weeks, months, and yes, years after the trauma.

The Art of Presence is about being there, remembering, and being proactive.

We humans naturally want to be helpful at the time of trauma.  The most vivid example of this, to my mind, is when we gather to observe shiva after a death.  For those first few whirlwind moments from death to getting up from shiva, mourners are surrounded by family, friends, visitors, food.  It is like being part of the whirlwind.  Then shiva ends, the people leave, and the mourner is left with the sense of what just happened?  Where did everyone go?  Does anyone else remember?  It can be disconcerting, to say the least.

And what happens to us? We get diverted by our own lives.  One by one we drop off and the mourner finds herself, alone, still broken, which much healing remaining.

This is often made more complex by our not knowing what to say to the person who has experienced the loss.  So we choose to absent ourselves.

In his column, Brooks articulates how all of us can choose to be present for the long term for those who have experienced trauma.  

“Do be there.  Some people think that those who experience trauma need space to sort things through.  Assume the opposite: most people need presence.”  Brooks is right:  when an individual has suffered a loss, being alone in the aftermath can make it much, much worse.  This is especially true, as Brooks writes, for people with whom you thought you were friendly and who never show up to offer support at the time of the trauma or after.  

Many of us have no idea what to say other than “I’m sorry.”  Brooks notes that we fall back on words that are the antithesis of comfort when we try to make sense out of what happened by saying “it’s all for the best” or “she had a long life.”

It never is for the best.  It never makes sense.  And these words will ring hollow if you say them.  Even worse, they will offer no comfort.  Our Jewish tradition enjoins us from speaking to a mourner until we are spoken to first-- allowing our physical presence to be comfort enough, not burdening a mourner with another recitation of “what happened.”  

When people ask why or try to make sense of a tragedy, it is our responsibility only to acknowledge that they are answering questions for which there are no answers.  Those kind of questions are completely justified, just as having no answers for them is also completely justified.  

Why do we do so many of these things to others when we know if they were done to us how badly we would resent it?  I think it comes from a place of wanting to be helpful but without having the tools of knowing how to help, to seeing someone we care about overwhelmed, and that emotional chaos overwhelms us.

Another important point: when you are with the person don’t compare, ever.  The grief belongs to that person, the loss is unique.  Another person does not have it better or worse.  Comparisons never truly make a person feel better.

Never say “you’ll get over it.”  How do you know?  How can you presume what another person is feeling?  And saying “you’ll get over it” is among the least helpful things that you could say, ever.  Say only “There are no words.”  Here you are saying everything that needs to be said, with no judgments, no predictions, no guessing.

Brooks’s “Art of Presence” reminds us to bring food or meet needs without being asked to do so.  These signs of comfort are there when a person needs them most--when they are hungry, when they have an unmet need, say, for slippers and then slippers appear.

Brooks enjoins us to “be a builder.”  What he is saying is to be there for the long term. . .not only in the immediate aftermath of the trauma.  

Being present for another person understands that long after the initial shock a deep ache remains.  

It might be being alone on a Saturday night.  

It might be that former friends stop including you with other couples.  

It might be people stop calling, visiting.

It might be throughout the day when the person would speak with their loved one and the call is not there.  

As the person offering presence, we can never guess when the person will need us--so it is up to us to be there at all times when you or I would never think it would matter.  Cumulatively, it all matters.  The call, the visit, the invitation, the open ear.  

Human companionship is one of the only balms that works to reduce the deep hurt of losing a human being.

Make yourself known!  Do not leave them alone.

One would think that The Art of Presence would be second-nature to human beings.  It is not.  We do not always know what to do, what to say.  In using the New York Times, Brooks is doing us a great favor in reminding us, in real life terms, how important it is for us to bring our humanity to people when they are hurting.  

Scarlett Johansson and SodaStream: This is Controversial?

delivered February 7, 2014

Scarlett Johansson starred in a commercial for SodaStream during last week’s Super Bowl.  

Normally being paid to be a spokesperson for a company is not controversial--unless the company happens to be SodaStream, located in the Mishor Adumim industrial park located fifteen minutes from central Jerusalem next to one of the largest settlement blocs Ma’aleh Adumim.  

This is an area that is likely to be incorporated into Israel into any future deal for a two-state solution.

Johansson, Jewish, 29, a celebrity, was featured in the commercial that was both pro-environment, pro-health (e.g. soda without high fructose corn syrup and reusable bottles), and a not-so-subtle slap at Pepsi and Coca Cola, the behemoths of the carbonated beverage world.

Fox made SodaStream cut the remark about Pepsi and Coke given the massive amounts of revenue derived from those companies advertising during NFL games throughout the year.  Still, that part of the controversy was subsumed by the bigger one about the plant’s location.

The controversy behind the commercial is about

  • the physical location of this plant, in an area that was once home to multiple Palestinian villages;

  • its central geography which could impact having a Palestinian state with contiguous borders;

  • and the overall sense in the overheated debate over this land that Ms. Johansson,

  • the former celebrity ambassador for Oxfam, should have turned down the offer to be SodaStream’s first celebrity spokesperson.

On the other hand, the current owners of SodaStream are not the original owners.  They bought the company with the plant already existing at Mishor Adumim.  

As an employer, the company employs hundreds of Palestinian workers from surrounding communities.  

The Forward notes that “Some 250 Palestinians applauded SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum loudly when he gave a speech on the plant floor urging them to ignore the political attacks on the facility.  
The CEO reassured the workers about the jobs and said he wanted to bring ‘more and more hands’ into the factory as SodaStream grows. ‘We are making history for the Palestinian people and the Israeli people.’”  

The article goes on to note that because of the company’s growth, it now employs 500 Palestinians out of some 1,300 workers, up from 160 Palestinians in December 2010.

Herein is the crux of the issue:  a successful company, that is employing hundreds of Palestinians, is located on disputed land.  

The company itself is expanding, including a new facility in the Negev, which is a part of Israel that is undisputed by the international community.

What is undisputed is that the company built this facility in a national priority area that offers government tax breaks, just as the facility under development in the Negev is also located in a national priority area, eligible for tax incentives.  This is similar to what our own state governments do to draw manufacturing to their states.  Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, the list goes on and on.

SodaStream’s CEO Daniel Birnbaum notes that the company does business in 40 countries worldwide and said, “If a Palestinian state comes into being, as is the aim of current US-brokered talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, SodaStream will also be happy to stay and pay its taxes to the new Palestinian state.”

And what about the commercial?  It is in English, it ran during the Super Bowl, and it featured an American celebrity.  It was clearly developed with an audience in mind:  the American soda consuming public.

Irrespective where SodaStream is manufactured, or the politics involved, many of us today have SodaStream products in our homes, just like the Keurig K-Cup machines.  They are convenient, inexpensive to use, and cut down on cans and bottles.

One can only hope that this commercial will lead to increased sales for SodaStream in our country.  And no matter what Scarlett Johansson was paid to be the celebrity spokesperson, her willingness to do so should be applauded because as she strengthens SodaStream’s sales, she strengthens the economic underpinnings that will drive the path toward resolution of entrenched enmity between peoples who have much more in common and who will benefit mightily when propaganda is replaced with cooperation.