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Today is Yom HaShoah, whose formal name is Yom Hazikaron LaShoah Velag’vurah — Remembrance Day of the Holocaust and Heroism.
It’s a heartbreaking day each year it comes up, commemorating the Holocaust, the state-sponsored, systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators, as well as commemorating the acts of resistance — both armed resistance, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on Pesah in 1943; and spiritual resistance, holding on to one’s dignity in the face of horrifying conditions — with which the Jewish people responded.
The Holocaust was the murderous culmination of a toxic blend of antisemitism and authoritarianism, in which a democratically-elected demagogue was able to bend all of a modern republic’s institutions to his will, shatter previous constitutional constraints, and channel societal feelings of disenfranchisement and prejudice, scapegoating the Jewish people as the source of society’s ills, ultimately resulting in efforts to exterminate European Jewry, two-thirds of whom were eventually murdered.
We carry this memory with us always, in part to remember the unique ways in which anti-Jewish feelings have traveled through time, forming part of the fabric of Western society since antiquity, since the earliest texts that blame Jews for the death of Jesus, working their way into the unconscious of societies to this day, in which Jews continue to be seen as conspirators angling for power, ancient blood libel tropes transferred onto today’s Jews. This memorial also helps us hold onto the memories of living under authoritarian regimes, and the danger that poses to Jews and to others in our society who would be scapegoated. To all of this we say firmly, never again.
We lit a yahrzeit candle in our household last night on the eve of Yom HaShoah, and one can also offer this prayer of remembrance or attend this Sunday’s upcoming 61st Annual Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony.
Sending love on this heartbreaking day of remembrance.
I also want to share the D’var Torah I delivered this past Shabbat on a far more — I hope — nourishing topic: what does it mean to tend to one’s inner and outer lives, together.
So with my daughters, Nina and Lila, getting a bit older, three years old and nearly six years old now, respectively, I’ve begun to find the smallest pockets of time, perhaps half hour chunks at a time, to do something I used to love to do more often, and that’s watch movies.
So there I am watching movies I’ve missed over the past couple of years in little half hour chunks on my phone, and I come across a scene from the movie Maestro, a biography of the renowned Jewish conductor and composer, Leonard Bernstein.
Sitting next to his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, around whom the movie also centers, Bernstein is asked by an interviewer about the big difference in the life of Composer Bernstein and Conductor Bernstein. (For classical music novices like me, it’s perhaps worth sharing that composers are those who, yes, compose the music, writing the melodies and the rhythms, conceiving of which instruments will play which parts, while the conductor facilitates the performance of it, bringing the musicians together as a team, bringing the music to life. It’s increasingly rare, though by no means unheard of, that an artist would be both composer and conductor.)
Here’s is Bernstein’s answer, at least as translated through the performance of the actor who depicts him, Bradley Cooper — who, by the way, speaking of multitaskers, also directed and co-wrote the film — on the difference between the life of composing and conducting:
“I suppose there is a personality difference,” he says, “which occurs between any composer, or any creator, versus any performer. “Any performer,” he says, “leads a kind of public life, an extrovert life —” interacting, connecting, collaborating. “Whereas a creative person,” at least in this framework, he says, “sits alone in a great studio that you see here and writes all by himself and communicates with the world in a very private way, and lives a rather grand inner life, rather than a grand outer life.”
Now, of course this is an oversimplification, which Bernstein would fully concede, and yet I think it’s instructive about different elements of our lives that, according to Jewish tradition, we are invited to cultivate.
As a rabbi, I concede this example struck home with me in a pretty direct way: my work sometimes does break down into spheres that track Bernstein’s, and really the interviewer’s, schema: one moment I am deeply enmeshed in community — leading a service, teaching a class, taking part in a board or committee meeting —and another moment my work is profoundly private — setting aside time to pray; writing; turning off the notifications on my phone; turning on “do not disturb” — trying to go deep within myself to connect with God, to study Torah, or to find other modes of reflection.
And yet I don’t think the depth of these spheres should be reserved for rabbis or for “creative” figures like Bernstein. It’s true there is some degree of labor specialization in our society — there are builders and entertainers; lawmakers and caretakers. We specialize in certain fields, in the home or in the workplace, that facilitate each of our contributing to society as a whole, and each of those contributions need to be valued.
But that doesn’t mean each of us don’t need some degree of, as Bernstein put it, a grand inner life and a grand outer life.
Judaism makes space for this. In the classic Jewish statement from Pirkei Avot, the teachings of our ancestors, we read:
Shimon the righteous used to say,
the world stands upon three things:
Torah, Worship, and Acts of Lovingkindess.
Shimon hatzadik hayah omer:
Al sh’loshah d’varim ha’olam omed
Al haTorah v’al ha’Avodah v’al G’milut hasadim
שִׁמְעוֹן הַצַדִיק הָיָה אוֹמֵר
עַל שְׁלשָׁה דְבָרִים הָעוֹלָם עוֹמֵד
עַל הַתוֹרָה וְעַל הָעֲבוֹדָה וְעַל גְמִילוּת חֲסָדִים
Let’s take those in reverse order. G’milut hasadim — Acts of lovingkindness. In a sense, this is our grand outer life. This is conducting. This is where we are out in the world, interacting with others, performing acts of love and kindness to one another, whether it’s directly through our work, the partnerships we facilitate, the services we provide, or the ways in which we go out of our way for a neighbor, a family member, a customer, a co-worker, a friend. Judaism recognizes that we need to mix it up in community, to bring ourselves to the outer world, participating in it in all the ways we can. Our grand outer life.
But working backwards, we also have avodah, worship, prayer, intentionally drawing close to the Divine. I don’t want to draw too strong of a dichotomy; of course all of those things can happen in public life, too. But I don’t want us to neglect our inner lives, either. Each of us, this tradition suggests, can have profound inner lives, as a foundation from which we can act in the world. Each of us, Jewish tradition suggests, have stirrings in our soul, that we need to quiet everything else out to listen to — and the inner voice we hear as a part of that inner life may very well be the voice of God.
Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad. Listen, you who wrestle with God, Yisrael, YHVH is our God, the source of all being — a source of all being which is one. We each have this invitation to listen to the stirrings of our soul, to cultivate this grand inner life, quieting the noise, connecting through a portal deep within our souls to the divine within us, around us, and beyond us, responding to it as we hear ourselves called. A grand inner life which we pair with our grand outer life.
Torah is, in some respects, the symbiosis of the two. For while we can certainly study Torah on our own, learn on our own — I do it often — Jewish tradition really calls on us to do Torah study in havruta, an Aramaic word meaning friendship or companionship, and which refers to the practice of studying in pairs or, by extension, in community. I say this is a symbiosis of the two, because on the one hand it’s a deeply reflective act, focusing on inner life, what we hold and reflect on inside of ourselves; but on the other hand, it’s done best when done in community. I hope we feel that way when it happens each Saturday morning in this community, when each student — and we’re all students — builds off of one of the previous comments, the previous interpretations of the week’s Torah portion, in our discussion — building off each comment’s relevance for our own lives, enriching our own souls.
So Leonard Bernstein had a grand inner life and grand outer life, but he’s not the only one who gets to. Judaism is in many ways a system which enables, even demands, empowers, each of us to have grand inner lives and grand outer lives, ultimately breaking down the barrier between the two, but cultivating time for both.
Shabbat is, of course, another intersection between the two, on the one hand the recognition that our inner life needs tending to, that we need to quiet everything down and not worry only about what we produce and contribute, but also to put a pause on our worrying, letting our soul saturate in the eternal. Meanwhile of course, one of the primary modalities for the soul’s enrichment on Shabbat is community, gathering as we are now to sing, to pray, to learn, fulfilling the grand vision of our inner and outer lives in order to facilitate the world’s redemption.
Ken Yehi Ratzon, may it be so.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi K.
