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Yesterday was Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish New Year, which ends eight days from now with Yom Kippur. Between the two holidays, we focus our thoughts on repentance, and on returning to God.

An interesting thing about Judaism is that many of its essential themes were forged at a time of defeat and loss. The notion of a Covenant with a protective God certainly predated the sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. In fact, the idea of a patron God who resided in a temple and protected the kingdom was commonplace in the Bronze Age. I think the Judeans and Israelites endowed this with a bit more of a Utopian character than their neighbors, but the basic theology was not terribly different.

It was not until the destruction of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem and the exile of most Judeans to Babylonia that Judaism took on its distinctive character.

One must imagine people who had faced the individual fear, deprivation and loss of a long siege, had seen their agricultural land laid waste, their cities razed, and their God desecrated. Then they were shipped off to exile in Babylonia.

There, for some reason, rather than adopting the gods and customs of the Babylonians, they reconstructed their religion. Now, however, they had no place to carry out animal sacrifices and other rituals, no physical space for worship – no temple in which their God could live among them. They were forced to think about the non-ritual aspects of their religion.

More importantly, their experience challenged the fundamental concept of an inviolable sanctuary protected by an all-powerful deity who would provide eternal protection to the descendants of Abraham.

The religious thinkers of the Judeans reconciled the dilemma this way: They maintained the belief in an omnipotent God, but they incorporated the new idea of a people who could sin. The people could turn away from God, could incur God’s anger and punishment. By turning back to God, they could also earn God’s forgiveness.

The Prophetic writings, which most directly address the exilic situation, are full of expressions of this relationship between God and Israel. God is presented (in patriarchal fashion) as a jealous husband who punishes an unfaithful wife; as a farmer pruning away diseased vines; as a merchant sorting the good fruit from the bad.

In the process, and almost by accident, the nature of God’s existence is re-conceptualized. He is not just the most powerful among a pantheon of deities associated with various nations. Rather, he has power over all nations: he sends an army from afar to punish his unfaithful people. By the same construct, God can be present for the Judeans in Babylonia even though there is no temple. The temple in Jerusalem is thus proposed to have housed God’s Name – not God Himself, who is omnipresent and cannot reside in a physical structure.

In this way, I think, the notion of sin and redemption was forged. It has been of central importance to Judaism and to the religions derived from it, Christianity and Islam.

I will write a bit more in a future post about the resonance this has for me, especially in relation to biology and the medical arts.

I got up early this morning, to spend a little time reading and listening to the voices of Holocaust survivors, in observance of Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance for the Holocaust (Shoah). It begins today at sundown.

On the Holocaust Survivors site, you can view photos and hear accounts from survivors.

One is Eva Galler, born in Oleszyce, Poland. Her story is here.

The Nazis reached her town in 1941. Laws were made immediately to separate the Jews from the Poles, and to isolate them. Jews were ordered to wear identifying armbands. They were barred from working, except at hard labor assigned by the Nazis. Hunger was widespread.

Eva tells how neighbors turned against them:

We were not allowed to walk down the sidewalks, but had to walk down the middle of the street. The street in our town was not paved. When it rained it became a street of mud. Once my mother forgot and walked on the sidewalk. A young man walked by, a Ukrainian man who was a teacher. He had helped my brothers with their homework and had come to our house. He went and hit my mother when he saw her walking on the sidewalk. My mother came in and cried. She said, “If a German had done it, I would have said nothing. But this man should have been an intelligent person: he came into my house and I fed him.”

Isolation and impoverishment were just the first steps. In 1942 the Jews of Oleszyce were taken to the Lubaczow ghetto. As elsewhere, they were evicted and relocated with little protest from their neighbors.

The ghetto was the size of one city block for 7,000 people. We slept 28 people in a room that was about 12 by 15 feet. It was like a sardine box. People lived in attics, in basements, in the streets–all over. We were lucky to have a roof over our heads; not everyone did.

It was cold. In one corner there was a little iron stove but no fuel. We were not given enough to eat. The children looked through the garbage for food. There was not enough water to drink. There was one well in the backyard, but it would not produce enough water for everybody. To be sure to get water you had to get up in the middle of the night. Once I had a little water to wash myself, and my sister later washed herself in the same water.

Some people started to eat grass. They would swell up and die. Because of the unsanitary conditions people got lice and typhus. My brother Pinchas got night blindness from lack of vitamins. Every day a lot of people died.

In 1943, the police began to round people up in Lubaczow for deportation to the Belzac death camp. Eva’s family knew what happened at Belzac, becaue of a survivor who had made his way back to warn others. When the train started to leave the terminal, Eva’s father told the three oldest children to jump from the open windows, to escape.

She evaded the soldiers’ guns and found a gentile friend who hid her. Through the subsequent years, she survived by passing as a Pole.

She recalls the rest of her family disappearing as the train departed:

[audio:galler01.mp3]

We were a big family. We were eight children. I am the oldest of eight. When they took us to the trains to take to the death camp, I was seventeen years old and my youngest brother was three years old and I still hear him scream, “I want to live too.”

I offer a few lines from poet Charles Reznikoff:

Innocent people - men, women and children -
ordered from their beds in the dead of night
and carted through side streets so as not to disturb the Aryan citizens,
and then standing with their bundles in railroad yards
waiting for trains to take them -
where?
We who lived through those years finally knew.

In the present safety of America, we must ask ourselves: who is being carted down the side streets now while we sleep? In what acts are we complicit by failing to see, to hear, to remember and feel the suffering of those whom our leaders label “different, “enemy” or “threat”?

I was interested to find an essay by Rabbi Daniel Judson on the Jewish custom of covering the head. It’s in a book called Rituals and Practices of a Jewish Life.

Rabbi Judson explains that he began wearing a kippah while he was a hospital chaplain.

It started for very practical reasons. It would help patients identify me as the rabbi-chaplain. When I walked into the room of a patient whom I did not know and announced myself as the chaplain, I would unconsciously lower my head a little to let him or her see the kipah.

His decision to wear it outside the hospital provoked discomfort among his friends, even those with a strong Jewish identity. He relates that a date, a Jewish day school teacher, asked him if he was “really going to go outside wearing that thing on my head.”

For him, though, the self-consciousness associated with the public display of religiosity was worth it because this small, symbolic observance also evoked a different sort of consciousness:

I saw God in the faces of other subway passengers and at the bedside of every sick person. This is what it means to have yirat shemayim (to be in awe of God), to feel God’s presence and power in all places.

His story makes me appreciate my wife, my family, my friends and my patients - Jewish and Not - who accepted the yarmulkah that appeared on my head about a year ago with curiosity and respect, and without judgment.

My wife, especially. After all, the guy she married was barely even a practicing Jew, and a few years later, I’m possibly the only guy in the Berkshires running around with a kippah.

The really odd thing is that, when I started wearing it, I still wasn’t much of a practicing Jew. Why was I wearing it? I felt a strong impulse, which I couldn’t explain very well.

I wanted to be a good Jewish role model for my kids. Maybe I wanted to show that an anti-Zionist could also be a proud Jew; or maybe to make explicit what had been understood but never spoken throughout my childhood and adult life in rural Massachusetts: that I was a Jew “from somewhere else” in a community of Christians with generations on the land.

I also had this idea that I would, as the song says, “make my life a blessing” - that I would honor God by living a moral life and by displaying honesty and compassion in my daily acts.

Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, quoted in Rabbi Judson’s essay, describes wearing the kippah as transformative.

This was true for me, in a very practical sense. It’s made me more observant of Jewish law. You just cannot go into a restaurant wearing a yarmulkah, and order lobster.

Note: this may be the part where any Orthodox who happen upon this post gasp and choke a bit. I’m sorry. What can I say? I am coming from a place within Judaism that was quite distant from halakhah.

Wearing the kippah has prodded me to learn and observe Jewish law to an extent that I would never have imagined a few years back. This has resulted in another sort of transformation.

For most of my life, I basically did not believe in God. I love science, and I was always quite satisfied to understand the world in terms of physical structures and natural laws. I had no need at all to invoke a divine being or supernatural intervention to explain life.

The proposition was: I have no satisfactory intellectual formulation of God. Without one, I can’t believe in God - except by a sort of compartmentalization in which reality is one thing and faith is something else; and if I don’t believe God exists, there is no sense practicing rituals of worship.

Now I’d turn the proposition upside down. The more I relate to God, through observance, ritual and prayer, the more real God becomes to me. In relating to God, I am relating to something beyond knowing (by definition, beyond science, beyond our ability to describe or understand) .

This, I think, may be a central truth of Judaism: outward observance leads to faith (or, better: closeness to God), rather than the other way around.

Rachel at Velveteen Rabbi recently posted an account by Karen Armstrong, a former nun, about her first serious encounter with Judaism, a lunch meeting with one Hyam Maccaby. He expressed this concept very nicely:

“No official theology?” I repeated stupidly. “None at all? How can you be religious without a set of ideas — about God, salvation, and so on — as a basis?”

“We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy,” Hyam replied calmly, wiping his mouth and brushing a few crumbs off the table. “‘Right practice’ rather than ‘right belief.’ That’s all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it’s not important in the way you think. It’s just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible.”

Wearing a yarmulkah definitely evokes responses from people around you. Other Jews will recall their upbringing in Orthodox or mixed neighborhoods. I’ve learned a lot about Jewish customs from these conversations. I feel rather embarrassed that I - wearing the hat - sometimes know less about Jewish culture than they do.

In Springfield, I once had a police officer stop me on the street to tell me how much he respected the Jewish community. Expressions of support from Christians are very common and touching.

Occasionally the reaction is averse. One night, in the local convenience store, an older fellow hanging out behind the counter took one look at me and started expounding on Woody Allen and Jewish pornographers. I felt sorry for the young woman at the register, whom I know. I think the guy is her uncle or something. She was very embarrassed and couldn’t figure out how to shut him up.

Although it wasn’t my intent, I find that, by wearing the kippah, I am representing the Jewish People. For the most part, I feel proud of this, if somewhat unworthy.

Rabbi Judson quotes a 1965 sermon by Rabbi William Braude, a participant in the Reverend Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery. Although it was not the custom among Reformed rabbis at that time to wear a yarmulahe, he and another rabbi wore them to protect their heads from the sun. In the free and accepting spirit of the march, the practice caught on:

…all our colleagues who came to Selma throughout their stay there wore yarmulkes. And the Negroes (the term used then) took to the yarmulkes, (they) began wearing them and calling them freedom caps. Then the rabbis proceeded to bring in large supplies of yarmulkes, which they distributed to those on the freedom march… I learned later that they sent back for a thousand yarmulkes, but all the civil rights workers wanted to wear them.

The yarmulahe he wore transformed Rabbi Braude’s personal act of solidarity to one of solidarity between Jews and blacks - a wonderful story.

But there is another, less talked about element to wearing a kippah. Not all of what we Jews have done in the past few decades is as virtuous as our participation in the civil rights movement. The relationship between Jews and blacks has frayed significantly as Jews have gained wealth, left the inner cities, and turned away from social justice and toward Israel as our major political cause.

There is a growing Muslim presence here in the Berkshires, as there is all through the U.S. I teach residents at Berkshire Medical Center, many of whom are from Pakistan or Arab countries. Some of the local hotels and service stations are managed by Arab immigrants, and I have a few in my practice. I often wonder what they think of the kippah.

When I think of the poverty and misery we are currently inflicting on Gaza - of our comfortable settlements on stolen land - of the forgotten Palestinian villages and the waves of refugees - of the ugly, destructive wall going up across farms and olive groves in the West Bank, and everything it implies - I am not so proud to declare myself a Jew.

These actions were driven by fear and desire; by the mistaken idea that human power can protect us from harm. They could not have been carried out by people truly imbued with yirat shemiyim.

To me, the kippah conveys allegiance to something more powerful than countries, borders and politics.

Be that as it may, by wearing it, I communicate that I am a part of the people who committed these acts.

It seems important to me to live with this discomfort, to feel shame for the sins of my people as well as pride in our virtues.

In this way, too, the superficial observance is a prod to action.