Today’s
parsha: Vayetze. "And he went out” begins with Jacob running,
fleeing, from Canaan to escape his brother Esau who wants to kill him for
taking the birthright and the blessing of the first born. So, Jacob goes back to the old country, to
his mother’s family, in Haran. On the
way he has the extraordinary dream of a ladder with its feet on the ground and
it’s top extending into the Heavens.
Then comes the story of Jacob’s marriage to Rachel and Leah, the birth
of 12 children, success as a shepherd, the decision to return home… a great
story.
Our parashah
this morning begins with Jacob running, fleeing, having just receiving a
blessing and birthright from his father, Isaac, so I want to begin today with a
story about a modern Isaac--a Itzhak Perman story.
Childhood
polio left Itzhak Perlman able to walk only with braces on both legs and
crutches. In the middle of a violin
concerto, one of the strings on his violins snapped with a rifle-like popping
noise that filled the entire auditorium.
The orchestra stopped playing, the audience held their breath. The assumption was that he would have to put
his braces back on, pick up his crutches, and leave the stage for a new violin
or replace the string. But after brief
pause, Perlman set his violin under his chin and signaled to the conductor to
begin.
He
used only three strings, instantaneously transposing the music from the missing
string onto the three strings he had left.
When
the performance and the piece was over, the audience was stunned into silence.
No one moved, or barely breathed. They just sat there awed by what had
happened, unbelievable and yet they had seen it and heard it, The sweat had
poured from him and Pearlman was dripping wet, sitting in his chair, violin and
bow in one hand, dazed. After minutes the audience exploded, they leap to their
feet in ecstatic appreciation. The musicians banged on their music stands and
stomped their feet. It went on it seemed forever. Itzhak bowed from his chair,
his eyes somewhat glassy and shining. Then he gestured for a microphone. The
crowd was immediately quiet. He addressed the audience saying: You know,
sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make
with what you have left.[1]
Frankly, that is a very Jewish response: making the most of what you have left.
Centuries
ago, during the reign of Aniochus IV, the Jews of Judea were prohibited from
reading Torah. So, according to legend,
they began the practice of reading a section from the prophets instead, but
they very cleverly chose sections that would remind the congregation of the
themes that would have appeared in the Torah portion for that Shabbat. They made the most of what they had
left.
Throughout
history we Jews have become masters of the art of making the best of what we
have left. According to traditional
legend, that’s how the reading of the Haftorah began.
Parshat
Vayetzey 2200 years ago – the year 165 BCE.
The Assyrian Greek King Antiochus IV who controlled the land of Israel
prohibited Jews from reading Torah. At
this time, during the month of Kislev, the Maccabees were leading a rebellion
against him, but they hadn’t yet been successful. There wasn’t a Hanukkah… yet.
Jews
were prohibited from reading Torah, so when they gathered in the synagogue,
they read a section from the prophets that reminded them of the Torah reading
and taught important lessons that were similar.
Consider
the theme of the Haftorah – that things are not so bad as once before – you
haven’t been driven from your land, you haven’t had to leave as Jacob did, as
the Israelites did when they went into Egypt, but you might be forced out if
you’re not ready to fight for it. That’s
what the Haftorah might have conveyed at the time of the Maccabees when it was
first introduced as a substitute for the Torah reading. The opening words: Vayivra
Ya’akov. Jacob had to flee….
The
truth is that throughout history we Jews
have become masters of the art of making the best of what we have left. Today is Kristallnacht,
which recalls Nov. 9, 1938, when the Nazis burned 191 synagogues and 815 Jewish
businesses, murdered scores of people, and rounded up 30,00 Jews to be carted
off to concentration camps. For
historians, this marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
Earlier
this week on Wednesday the 7th graders heard from Evelyn Pike Rubin. Perhaps some of you know Evelyn and have
heard her story before. But I’ll share
some highlights:
Evelyn
is now 83, but she was born in Bresslau, Germany just before Hitler came into power, only remembers Germany as
one led by the Nazis.
Her parents were proud Germans and
Orthodox Jews. Her father was a veteran of World War I and had been a French
prisoner of war. By the time her parents met and married in 1929, her mother
owned a successful paper and twine business with dozens of salesman traveling
throughout Germany.
After the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, German
anti-Semitism escalated. Jews were restricted from schools, parks, and many
restaurants and businesses. As a result Evelyn could not continue her swimming
and ice skating lessons. She wrote about in her book Ghetto Shanghai saying, "it
was a very strange feeling since the other children were being allowed to go
in, and I didn’t think I looked different from anybody else. All of a sudden I
was not allowed to participate."
By 1935, the family started looking
to leave Germany, but was turned away by several countries, including Brazil
Cuba, England and the United States. They knew that the Japanese-controlled
Shanghai was an open city, but still held out hope for an American visa.
Rubin's father had been born in a city that was now part of Poland and the
family couldn't be placed on the German immigration quota, which would have
guaranteed almost immediate immigration to the United States.
On November 9 and 10, 1938, -- 75 years ago
--- during Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) synagogues
were burned all over Germany. Jewish shops were shattered, and thousands of
Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Evelyn was only
7 years old when her father hid in his Christian landlord’s attic, but was
later arrested while trying to fetch Evelyn from a friend’s home. He was sent
to the Buchenwald concentration camp for three weeks. Evelyn remembers asking
her mother what a concentration camp was. She was told it was like a prison. "I wondered why my father was
in prison; he didn’t do anything wrong. My mother explained to me, '[it was]
because he’s Jewish.' I could not understand what was wrong with being Jewish.
I was brought up to be a proud Jew. We were different from the other Germans
because of the way we observed, but we were German the same as they were
German. Unfortunately, not everybody looked at it that way."
In 1939, at the age of eight, her family fled
Germany to the only refuge available to them—Shanghai, China. She attended the
Shanghai Jewish School, a British-run Jewish school. As Evelyn tells it, "I went to school with Polish
Jews, with Russian Jews, with Hungarian Jews, with Jews from Iraq who were born
in Shanghai. For us kids, we were all the same. Of course, for those of us
coming from Europe, we did have one thing in common because none of us spoke
English. We all had to learn a foreign language together. Maybe that’s what
made for the camaraderie. My Shanghai classmates and I still correspond and
remain in touch to this day. I have very good memories of our school days
together."
Evelyn & her family made the most
of what they had left.
As Elie Wiesel has affirmed - "[In describing the Nazi
Holocaust] there are no words. Words have become obstacles rather than vehicles
in trying to conjure up the horror. And yet, we try and go on trying, to make
meaning from the chaos."
As a
people - we Jews survived, and made the
best of what we had left—Israel was born, Jewish life rebuilt and
revitalized.
When
Israel was born in the partition in November 1947—Jews got only part of the
Biblical land of their dreams. Jews in
Israel made the most of what they had left.
Monday
is Veteran’s Day. Those who served our
country over the years surely sacrificed a lot, and came home from war to make the most they had left.
But
there’s one last point to ponder: Making
the best with what you have left is not simply settling for less—it’s doing
what Itzhak Perlman did—turning a loss into a triumph. That’s the challenge represented by the
Haftarah and History--For us as Jews and Americans and for all people. If we accept that challenge then we can walk
onto life’s stage with dignity, with confidence and hope for the future.
[1] As
reported in the Houston Chronicle on February 10, 2001. While Snopes.com calls the story false, it
has been repeated in many places. The
story even inspired a book of poetry called
The
Broken String by Grace Schulman.
