"The Mystery of Jewish Survival"

Rosh Hashanah 5764
September 27, 2003
Rabbi Jeremy Barras

It was usually whispers in quiet back alleyways, never quite so overt. But on that day in 1894 in Paris, it was not so. For immediately following the declaration of guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Theodore Herzl heard Frenchman screaming "A mort les juifs -- Death to the Jews!" Until that dismal winter afternoon, Herzl felt at home in France, safe and secure. He had viewed the French as progressive and civilized, interested in pursuing the rights of all men. On that day, as he heard anti-Semitic remarks flowing so freely from Parisian lips, his sense of safety and security was shattered. The Jews of France had made much progress in their effort to live freely and undisturbed, but clearly it was not enough. On that day, Herzl realized that the adversaries of Jewish survival had not yet been silenced.

The miracle of our little people, that never conquered the world, never erected pyramids or empires, is that the Jewish people continue to link together an unbroken chain of historical continuity. We have outlasted those that have tried to wipe us from the face of the earth - and time after time we emerge with a thirst for life.

From the very beginning there was something special about the Jew - a uniqueness that guaranteed we would not be buried alongside the Romans or Babylonians in the cemetery of obsolete cultures, and a determination to protect the eternal status that God guaranteed to Abraham - "I will maintain My covenant between Me and you, and your offspring to come, as an everlasting covenant throughout the ages." According to our tradition, Judaism is unique among all other religions because it is the only religion that was revealed to the entire nation at the same time. The Midrash teaches that when we received the Torah at Sinai, the soul of every Jew stood in the presence of the thunder and lightning - every Jew witnessed God's presence, and every Jew said, "Na-aseh v'nishma - We will do and we will obey." And every Jew understood that as long as they found favor in the eyes of God, they would be protected.

Ever since revelation at Sinai, we have been a people who have attached ourselves to God's formula for morality and decency, obedience and justice. Today, as we observe Rosh Hashanah, we link ourselves to the countless generations who approached God on this day seeking to tap into the immense spiritual potential that this sacred hour provides. This commandment of celebrating the New Year has persevered not because of culture or custom. Many pagan customs with more flare have gone by the wayside because their message was corrupt or immoral. But the Jewish people, even under the greatest stresses, have always found in our God a benevolent protector whose commandments dictated a way of life unmistakable in its beauty.

There is a story in the Book of Daniel that illustrates how our people maintained their faith even under the threat of oppression. In the year 606 BCE, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon erected a statue of his likeness and ordered that all his subjects bow down to the statue. When it was reported to him that three young Jewish men refused to bow down to the statue, he ordered that they be brought before him at once. These Jewish men, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, were brought before him and they explained to the king that their religion forbade them to bow to statues. When the king heard this, he was enraged and demanded that if they would not bow down to him, he would throw them into a burning furnace. They replied to him that under no circumstances could they disrespect their God by bowing down to another image. They were then hurled into the furnace by the king's soldiers - but like the burning bush that Moses encountered in the wilderness, the three young men were unscathed by the fire. The king was shocked. He subsequently had them removed, and in the presence of his court, praised the God of the three courageous Jewish men. But there is more to the story of our survival than our unbreakable faith in the Divine. Twenty five hundred years ago, the Israelites wandered out of Egypt - we were weary, but excited. We ventured into a hostile wilderness armed only with our faith in God. We were courageous - we trusted in each other as we crossed triumphantly into the Promised Land. But even when we finally arrived, the persecutors did not cease. Jerusalem was conquered time and again by foreign invaders until eventually our people were fully driven from our land. And this time, we would not return home for another 2000 years.

We would then be driven in and out of other lands as well. In fact it is difficult to find a country where Jews have not exiled from at one time or another.

In 12th century France, the French monarchy decided it could no longer stand a people who refused to accept Jesus as Lord. It was the same story in England when our people were expelled in 1290, and in Spain in 1492, and in Portugal a few years after that. And it was a similar story in Italy fifty years later when certain of our enemies schemed to rid Rome of "non-believers." They brought up an evil report against the Talmud, our sacred Scripture, to the pope, Julius III. They said, "There is a certain Talmud widely spread among the Jews and its laws are diverse from those of all peoples. It disregards your messiah and it ill befits the Pope to suffer it." The impetuous Julius became very angry and his fury raged within him and he said, "Get hold of it and let it be burnt." No sooner had the command left his lips than the officers went forth, rushing out in haste, and entered the houses of the Jews. They took every book they found there into the city-square and burnt them on the Sabbath day, on the festival of the New Year in the year 5314.

The persecution of our ancestors is certainly well documented. Our enemies have outnumbered us, they have been encouraged by their leaders to rise up against us, and they have been persuaded by others to fear us. Ironically though, it was Israel's very suffering that made us need God more than any other people. One would expect Jews to have become atheists.

Certainly one would not have expected what occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto on this day in 1942. Gershon Sirota, the famous Polish cantor, had become a broken and despondent man. Yet on that Rosh Hashanah, as he stood on a makeshift bimah, his booming voice miraculously returned. The congregation listened in wonder and amazement, and many an eye ran with tears. For those few incredible moments, the joy of loving and worshipping God replaced the suffering and pain that were otherwise inescapable. Over the course of history, few have been more afflicted that we - Yet again and again, we have been the revealers and the champions of God.

Out of the depths, we cried unto God and God answered us. We have indeed walked through the valley of the shadow of death, but there we have found the staff of God to lead and comfort us. Like Job robbed of his treasure, bereaved of his children, driven apart from men like a leper, we could yet cry, "I know my redeemer lives." Sadly, taking suffering away from Israel's history is like taking away from a mountain the rocks that were molded by volcanic fury. Israel's very posture of despair becomes a posture of prayer. Persecution, like a raging storm, cleared the atmosphere and allowed the Jew to catch a vision of the divine. We are fortunate today that we are removed from oppression and persecution, and are free to worship freely and at peace. "Being Jewish" does not require suffering. Yet our survival is not without ongoing challenges. In a report published earlier this month as part of the National Jewish Population Survey, it was reported that the number of American Jews has drop ped by 5% in the past decade and a half. We might guess what some of the reasons for this decline are - a rise in intermarriages, increasing numbers of unaffiliated Jews, and the low birth rate of American Jewish couples (although you would hardly notice if you visited to Temple Beth El's Religious School). But despite the success of our religious school, we must face the facts. 60% of Jewish households in this country do not affiliate with a temple, 40% do not contribute tzedakah to Jewish causes, 47% of our young adults are marrying non-Jews, and only 35% of us have ever visited Israel. All of these factors are cause for concern.

Our obligations today - giving tzedakah, raising our children as Jews, supporting and traveling to Israel (even in these difficult times), nourishing our individual identities with Jewish culture, hardly compare to the sacrifice the three young men in the Book of Daniel were willing to make. Today our greatest adversaries are not external. Instead, what threatens us today the most is - ourselves.

Today Jews are accepted in almost every place that we live. And because we are, we find it easy to assimilate, to join in with the masses, and to forget our religious background and faith in God. The numbers of this recent survey are frightening and unsettling. That we are diluting Judaism ourselves after our ancestors endured four thousand years of survival and persecution so that we one day could live freely and at peace, is dumbfounding. That we are not passing on to future generations the
marvelous traditions, culture, and beliefs of our faith should be unsettling to us all.

There was once a rabbi who stood on the pulpit during Rosh Hashanah, and told the congregation this story: A Jewish father and mother in Germany in 1933 were faced with the difficult decision of whether or not to send their young eight year old son on his own to England to escape Nazi brutality. They could only afford to send one family member. They finally decided to send their son off to live with an uncle in London, and the boy would never hear from his parents again. However, a few months after he arrived in England, a large package arrived for the boy from Germany. It was from his parents.

The rabbi then told the congregation, "I was that young boy - and the Torah behind me in that ark is the contents of the package I received all those years ago from my father. Now I ask you, "What are you going to pass on to your children?"

We must strive today to remember that we are Jewish, not just at the High Holy Days, not just when we need the Temple, but every second of every day. Our children are not Jewish only when they are in religious school. They are Jewish when they are playing soccer, they are Jewish when they are at ballet, they are Jewish when they are taking violin lessons. And we are all Jewish when we are working day in and day out in our places of business. Being Jewish has as much to do with our values as it does our performance of ritual. Being Jewish must be our very way of life!

We have a duty to those who came before us and to those who will come after us. We have an obligation to ensure that Judaism will continue to defy the odds of logic and that we will remain God's eternal people. And because those obligations rest on our shoulders, because we must pass Torah on to our children, we stand before God this year at this sacred hour and assure Him that we shall succeed in reversing any trend that diverts Jews from acting "Jewish." I always find it interesting when I see Jews reading books like "Judaism for Dummies" or the "Idiots Guide to Judaism." Somewhere along the way, the people reading those books were denied, or they denied themselves, a proper Jewish education. And eventually they realize that they would in fact like to know something about their religion. It is that realization, that spiritual curiosity that eventually tracks down each one of us. And when it does, when we can no longer stand to feel like an outsider looking in to our own religion - when we demand from ourselves a deeper understanding of our culture and religion, then we can begin to combat the threats that would otherwise destroy us. The Jewish people have suffered tremendously in our effort to preserve our religion and culture. We have endured 2000 years of exile and dispersion to the four corners of the earth. But while they were gone, during those 2000 years of yearning for Zion and maintaining faith in our Divine ruler, we did not assimilate totally into other cultures. We persevered even in foreign lands. And when the forces of evil exceeded their threshold and decided to wipe our people away from the face of the earth once and for all, we Jews emerged stronger and more determined than ever. The incredible tale of survival for which the Jew tells was once explained by Mark Twain: "The Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, and faded to dream stuff and passed away. The Greeks and the Romans followed and made a vast noise and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time. But it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all. Beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew. All other forces pass, but the Jew remains."

Today that Jew who accomplished all of those feats, that Jew who survived exile and oppression, that Jew who continually nurtured a glorious faith and culture, today that Jew is us. It is now our turn to defy the odds of logic and to ensure that Judaism will be vibrant and in tact as we pass it along to the next generation. Many have doubted that we would even arrive this far. And yet we continue to worship God and rejoice in our culture as Jews have for centuries. Just as Moses passed the Torah to Joshua who passed it to the elders and prophets, so do we each and every Shabbat pass along the Torah to a new Bar/Bat Mitzvah. Here in Charlotte and around the world Torah continues to be transmitted and celebrated, and Judaism continues to thrive.

There was once a sign in a General Motors plant that read: "According to the theory of aerodynamics, and as can readily be proven by wind tunnel experiments, the Bumble Bee is unable to fly. This is because the size of its wings in relation to the size of its body makes flying impossible. But the Bumble Bee, being unacquainted with these scientific truths, goes ahead and flies anyway and even manages to gather a little honey along the way.

So too it is with our Jewish people. Many mightier nations have come and gone - but armed with the laws and guidance of the Torah, we manage to defy the ages, even producing some honey of our own along the way.

May God continue to watch over the Jewish people, and let us continue to sing on this and every New Year with all our might, "Am Yisrael Chai!" The people of Israel shall endure forever.

Ken Yehi Ratzon - Let it be God's will. Amen