Planting a Seed

Tonight I am going to depart from my usual practice of speaking about the Torah portion for the week. Nor am I going to tie my sermon into a holiday or events on the world stage. Instead, this week I was inspired by our Bar Mitzvah,  Q.   Q’s project consisted of selling seeds in order to raise money for the Humane Society and for animal shelters. In selling the seeds he wants to encourage us all to eat healthy, save the planet and be kind to animals.  

I am not going to talk about eating healthy, saving the planet, or being kind to animals, worthy as those subjects may be!  But before I talk to you about a subject that touches on Q's project, I need to tell you about Masada. I am sure some of us have visited Masada, the ancient stone fortress in Israel, sitting on a tall, rocky mesa, high above the Dead Sea. It is a must-see sight on anybody’s first visit to Israel. Masada was built as a palace, and a fortress, for King Herod, in the latter part of the first century BCE.  It overlooks the Judean desert on one side and the Dead Sea on the other side. When you gaze over the desert from the heights of Masada, you might wonder how Herod could ever maintain a palace there. Nothing grows in the area as the terrain is arid, rocky and it barely rains. According to the historian Josephus, Herod had to import food and water -- peaches, figs, olives, almonds, wine, and birds for meat, to feed his court. In 70 CE a group of Jews who were part of a rebellion against Rome made their final stand at Masada. Rather than being taken captive and enslaved by the Roman army, they committed mass suicide. Masada remained uninhabited since that time – a forgotten, desolate, barren and isolated site.

When archeologists excavated the site in 1963, they discovered something that touches on Jonathan’s project. They discovered a jar buried in the ground containing the seeds of a date palm. Who knows why someone would bury the pits of a date palm in a jar in the ground, but there it was. The scientists examined the seeds with carbon 14. The palm seeds dated from between 155 BCE. And 64 CE. The archeologists took the 2000 year old seeds to Bar Ilan University in Haifa and stuck them in a researcher’s drawer, where they remained for 40 years.

Now the date palm was a very important crop in ancient Israel. When the Torah describes the Land of Israel as “a land flowing with milk and honey” the “honey” that it refers to is not bee honey, but the sweet taste of the fruit of the date palm. Roman emperors and noblemen demanded the Judean date for their tables. This ancient fruit was used as a laxative and aphrodisiac, for treating heart disease, lung problems, weakened memory, and possibly symptoms of cancer and depression.

The fruit was praised in song and poetry – Tsadik Katamar Yifrach – the righteous shall flourish like a date palm, say the psalms. The Judean date palm became a symbol of the Jewish nation. Ancient Jewish coins have been found that are engraved with images of the date palm. When the Roman emperor Vespasian wanted to commemorate his conquest of Judea, he minted a coin depicting a weeping woman beneath a date palm. But this species of date palm, so coveted by the Romans and so praised by the poets, a symbol of the Jewish state, became extinct by the time of the crusades.

Along comes, Dr. Elaine Solowey, an agricultural expert at the Arava Institute in the Negev, whose job includes finding new, useful crops that can survive the harsh, dry Middle East climate. In 2005, on Tu Bishvat, the New Year of the Trees, she planted the three date palm seeds that had languished for so many years in the researcher’s drawer at Bar Ilan. I imagine that she must have felt utterly surprised, and delighted when one of those seeds sprouted!  She nurtured the seedling and by 2015 it was 10 feet tall. Along the way she discovered that it was a BOY! 

Yes, date palms come in both male and female genders, and it takes a male and a female to reproduce. Dr. Solowey named the palm Methuselah, after the person who lived the longest life in the Bible. Methusalah – the palm, not the person -- was able to pollinate a wild female of a different species. The female palm produced dates! But Dr. Solowey would need a female of the same ancient species to be pollinated by Methuselah in order to re-produce the exact kind of dates that were eaten by Herod in his palace in Masada. She has planted other ancient seeds of the Judean Palm and two of them that have sprouted are female. She hopes that someday she will know exactly what kind of dates they ate in ancient times in the Land of Israel and what they tasted like. Her long term goal is to have a grove of ancient Judean date palms --A veritable Jurassic Park of the Palm!

One could say that the sprouting of this ancient seed is a metaphor for the rebirth of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Just as this ancient seed, long dormant, was brought to life in our own time, so, our ancient people, long exiled from our land, has become young again through the birth of the modern State of Israel. The seed of that rebirth lay waiting for centuries in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people. Once the energy trapped in those seeds was able to be released, it transformed the land, and its inhabitants, and indeed all world Jewry, in a stunningly brief period of time.

Or, we could say that the sprouting of that seed is a metaphor for the seeds we try to plant in every boy and girl who is educated at Congregation Beth Shalom, and who stands before us for their bar and bat mitzvah. Sometimes those seeds too lie dormant for a long time and are brought to life again in unexpected ways at unexpected times. We hope that as they journey through life, our students will tend to those seeds and cause them to grow and flourish.

Shabbat Shalom

For Mother's Day and Yom Yerushalayim

This coming Sunday we have two special days on the calendar. This Sunday, of course, we celebrate Mother’s Day. That, everyone knows. But this Sunday also marks the newest of Jewish holidays, Jerusalem Day. Jerusalem Day celebrates the re-unification of the City of Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty after the Six Day War in 1967. So, of course, the topic of this sermon is going to be Mother’s Day – in Jerusalem!

The first Mother’s Day in Jerusalem was proclaimed in 1947 to be celebrated in April. It was proposed by Sara Herzog, wife of then chief rabbi Isaac Herzog, who was president of an organization that helped women after childbirth. In 1951, the City of Haifa proclaimed their own Mother’s Day. This Mother’s Day was to be celebrated during Chanukah. This date was chosen because of its link to the story of Hannah. As told in the Book of the Maccabees, Antiochus arrested Hannah’s and her seven sons and tried to force the sons to eat pork to prove their obedience to the King. They defiantly refused to do so and each was put to death. The King then appealed to Hannah to convince her youngest son to comply with the King’s command, yet she refused to do so, urging him instead to follow the path of his brothers. Thus all her sons were put to death in a single day, yet Hannah bore it bravely, trusting in G-d.

Later that year, there was another proposal for Mother’s Day. This was to be held on the first of Adar, the anniversary of the death of Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah.  Already in her 70’s, she had run the Israel part of Youth Aliyah, which rescued 30,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. Henrietta Szold would personally meet the ships of the children who came to Israel without their parents. Of course, many of them would never see their parents again. These children referred to her as “imah”, or “mama”.

So for a period of time, Israel had three Mother’s Days. One was a traditional Mother’s Day connected to the experience of giving birth, celebrated in April. One was celebrated during Chanukah and connected to Hannah, who lost seven children. The other was celebrated in March in honor of Henrietta Szold, who never married and had no biological children.

I can understand the symbolism for evoking Hannah on Mother’s Day. After all, 1951 was only three years after the War for Independence, in which one percent of the Israeli population at the time was killed – over 6000 soldiers. There were a lot of grieving mothers in Israel at the time, and identifying Mother’s Day with the courageous Hannah, who sacrificed so much, made a great deal of sense. On the other hand, in celebrating Mother’s Day on Henrietta Szold’s yahrzeit, Israelis were implicitly rejecting a purely biological definition of motherhood and honoring all women who have contributed to building the future.

In the early 1990s, responding to the changing nature of the nuclear family, Israel changed the name of the holiday from “Mother’s Day” to “Family Day”. As a 2011 news report put it, Family Day recognizes that “all combinations of families are welcomed with love: children with two mothers, or two fathers, or single-parent families — all are part of the celebration…” But “Family Day” has never really caught on in Israel, and there is a budding movement to return to the celebration of a Mother’s Day of some kind.

 Chaim Weitzman, who was to become the first President of the State of Israel, even used Mother’s Day to advance the argument for a Jewish State in what was then Palestine.  The story goes that a British gentleman said to him: “Dr. Weitzman, what do you need to start a Jewish country for in that God-forsaken corner of the Middle East?  Why don’t you take your Jews - who evidently need some refuge from persecution - and take them to Argentina or Uganda or the Canary Islands or someplace else?  What do you need Palestine for?”  And Weitzman said to the man: “You may be right, but before I answer you, let me ask you a question.  I understand that every year on Mother’s Day and on a good many other occasions during the year, you drive all the way across the city of London in order to visit your mother at the nursing home where she lives.  There are lots of other old ladies in London.  Why don’t you visit some other woman who lives closer instead of visiting your mother?”

Just as we can never find a substitute for or forget our own mothers, so, we can never find a substitute for or forget that this small slice of land in the Middle East is our Jewish ancestral land. “If I forget Thee, O Jerusalem, May my right hand lose its power” goes the Psalm. Let us remember our mothers on Mother’s Day this Sunday, and let us remember Jerusalem as well.  To that let us say, AMEN.

Coming Home -- In Honor of Israel's 70th Birthday

Today, the 5^th of Iyar on the Jewish calendar, marks the 70^th birthday of the State of Israel. As we know,  for almost 2000 years the Jewish people had been praying for G-d to return us to Zion, “to gather those who are dispersed across the four corners of the earth and lead us upright to our land,” in the words of our prayers. We were never sure how this improbable event was going to happen, although it seemed like it called for miracle, the kind of miracle, with signs and wonders, with which we understood G-d brought us out of Egypt. But there were no miracles, at least not the type of supernatural Divine intervention that seemed the only way the Jewish people would ever return to the Holy Land as a sovereign, independent nation. Rather, Israel became a state through hard work, intelligence, determination, faith, sacrifice and courage.  Those same qualities continue to sustain Israel in a world that is largely unsympathetic to her continuing struggle for survival in a hostile Middle East.

Once the State of Israel was established, many Jews from around the world heeded the call of return. Tonight I want to tell you the story of one person who left his home to live in Israel. When Rabbi Riskin and his family went to live in Israel in 1983 he was the rabbi of the Lincoln Square Synagogue, a prominent Modern Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Rabbi Riskin, his wife and four young children left their comfortable life in New York City and took up residence in Efrat, an Israeli settlement a 40 minute drive south of Jerusalem. A Rabbi Riskin tells it, when he and his family arrived there were no paved roads in Efrat, no private telephones, and only one public pay telephone that generally didn’t work. During that first winter, his family was often without heat or electricity. Not only that, but after a few months Rabbi Riskin realized that he had no clear way of earning money to support his family! Whatever he had thought he was going to do to earn money had not worked out!

Rabbi Riskin writes that he began to think he had made a big mistake, leaving his position as the rabbi of a prestigious synagogue in New York City and moving with his family to this primitive outpost on the West Bank. Just as he was worrying about this, someone knocked at his door. It was the man in charge of security for Efrat, telling him it was his turn to stand guard at the gates of the settlement.

His partner for that night was a fellow resident of Efrat named Yossi. Yossi asked Rabbi Riskin where he was from, and Rabbi Riskin began reminiscing about his life in New York and his decision to move to with his family to Israel. As he talked, Rabbi Riskin began to long for those good old days when he was financially secure and comfortably domiciled. Then Rabbi Riskin asked Yossi about his life before he came to Israel.

“Believe it or not,” said Yossi, “I grew up in Holland as a Christian. As a child I went to Church every Sunday with my mother and father. In 1967, when I was a young high schooler, I read in the newspaper about Israel’s amazing victory in the Six Day War. From that day on, I became very interested in Israel. When I had to write my senior paper for High School graduation, I wrote it on Israel. In Holland, after you graduate High School, everybody has to join the army. Everyone in the army is expected to talk to a member of the clergy of some kind. Even though I was a Christian, I chose to talk to a rabbi. Then I began to learn Hebrew.

“One day at home I was practicing the Grace after Meals in Hebrew, and I noticed my mother mouthing the words of this prayer. I asked her how she knew the prayer. She told me that before the Second World War she worked as a nanny for a Jewish family, and they would recite this prayer. That is how she said she knew it.

“I was nineteen years old when the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973. All of the kibbutz members in Israel were fighting in the war, and a call went out for volunteers to come to Israel to harvest the fruits and vegetable that would otherwise rot in the fields. I was sent with three Christian friends to a kibbutz. I fell in love with the land and the people. I picked up Hebrew easily, and began to read about Jewish history and about Judaism. I started to keep kosher and observe Shabbat. Someone from the Kibbutz suggested that I might want to convert to Judaism. There were conversion classes at a nearby kibbutz, and I began to attend them.

“After an intensive period of Jewish study, I was ready to convert to Judaism. But I was only 19 years old, and so, before I did something that momentous, I decided to call my parents and tell them about my decision. My mother fainted when she heard the news. When she revived and was able speak she told me that I did not have to convert to Judaism. I was already Jewish, she told me, because …….. she was Jewish."

Yossi’s mother then told him the secret she had kept from him all of his life. Yossi’s grandfather had been the cantor in the main synagogue in the town where she grew up. Like every other Jewish family in the town, hers was caught up in the Holocaust. Yossi’s mother survived the concentration camp she was in, but her parents and siblings did not survive. She swore that if she were to ever have children, or blessed to have grandchildren, they would never go through such a horrible experience. “If there was one Holocaust, there could be another Holocaust,” she explained to Yossi. So she became a Christian. The only person who knew about her Jewish background was Yossi’s father. “But,” said Yossi’s mother, “If you wish to rejoin the religion of my parents and their parents, May the G-d in whom I can no longer believe bless you and keep you.”

Rabbi Riskin writes that when he heard this story, he knew that he had made the right decision to live in Israel -- despite the unpaved roads, lack of electricity, and other inconveniences. The words that Moses spoke to the Israelites 3500 years ago came back to him, “You will be scattered to the ends of the heavens, for there the Lord your G-d will gather you, and from there he will take you up… and return you to the land of your ancestors.”

Rabbi Riskin knew he had truly come home.

Shabbat Shalom

Building Bridges

The ancient Romans regarded bridge building as a sacred pursuit. The position of bridge builder was an important one in ancient Rome, a city which spanned the holy Tiber River and was in need of bridges to unite the city. The ancient Romans called their priest the “pontifex” which means bridge builder. The word “Pontiff” comes from this ancient Roman word. Indeed, in much of Christianity, the clergy is the bridge between G-d and the laity. Just as a bridge unites that which nature divides, so in the Roman Catholic faith the Pontiff is the person whose role it is to bring together the divine and the human.

This week in our Torah portion, we read about the ordination of Aaron and his sons into the priesthood. In Jewish life, it was the “Kohen” or priest, who was originally the bridge between the Divine and the human. The sacrifice was the means, with the priest as mediator, by which  the connection between the worshiper and G-d was made. But when the Temple was destroyed the sacrifice could no longer be offered, and the priest lost his function as bridge between the Kadosh Barukh Hu and the Jewish people. It was not a person who took the Kohen’s place, but rather an act – the mitzvah. It became the performance of the mitzvah, both ethical and ritual, that would from now on bridge the gap between the Jewish people and G-d. In fact, the very word mitzvah comes from the three letter Hebrew root, tzadi-vav-tof, which means “to connect” or “to unite”.

Last Sunday evening Middy and I attended the opening of an art exhibition at St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Downers Grove. The exhibition was titled “Beyond Bridges.” It featured the works of 21 Arab, Persian and Jewish artists from 11 countries representing Islam, Christianity and Judaism. I was asked to represent the Jewish community at the event and to give some opening comments for the exhibit.  

The 21 works of art on display were originally part of a larger exhibition that showcased in Paris, Cairo, London, Metz, Germany, New York City, Spokane and Portland. Through a variety of medium these artists urge us to focus on what we have in common with one another. The goal of the exhibition it to encourage us to look at ways we can honor and respect cultural and religious diversity.

It seemed fitting that this exhibit opened in our area on the week that we remembered the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary once described Dr. King’s message as “like the voice of the prophets of Israel.” Dr. King was a bridge builder. He called “for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation …… a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men.”

Coincidentally, yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel. The Nazis burned the bridges between Jews and their neighbors so that the Jewish people of Europe found themselves on an island, isolated and alone. Once isolated, “a Jew” was defined as less than human. Then they were brutally and summarily exterminated. To paraphrase Heinrich Heine, first they burned bridges, then they burned books, then they burned people.

Aaron Elster, who died this week, was a survivor of the Holocaust. He was born in Poland in 1931 and in 1942, at the age of 11, went into hiding with a Polish family for the duration of the war. In 1947 he immigrated to the United States. He settled in Chicago and became a prominent member of the Chicagoland Jewish Community. He was an active member of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and often spoke to community groups about the lessons of the Holocaust. . He also spoke to children.  He said that when he told his story to children, he hoped they would take away two ideas.  “First, [that] you must believe in yourself. You must trust that you are stronger and smarter than you think you are. Second….. that prejudice and intolerance against others can lead to another Holocaust. As the decision makers of tomorrow children must understand the consequences of indifference and hate. They must not be bystanders, they must always be proactive and have the courage to speak up and care."

The stranger is one of the most vulnerable people in any society, and the Torah places a special emphasis on caring about him. According to Rabbi Eliezer in the Talmud the Torah “warns against the wronging of the stranger in thirty-six places; other say, in forty-six places.” Whatever the exact number of times, the Torah is challenging us to build a future world where everybody would feel at home, and nobody would be a stranger.

Art events like “Beyond Bridges”, and all events designed to increase understanding between people of different faith and cultures, are attempts to bridge the chasm that separates us and makes us strangers to one another. In building bridges, we lay the foundation for a future where another Holocaust could never happen, to anyone.

Building bridges between faiths and between people -- Can there be a greater mitzvah in life than that?

Shabbat Shalom

Parasha Vayikra "Food, Glorious Food"

This evening, in honor of the start of the Book of Leviticus in our annual Torah reading, I am going to talk about food. Food, you ask? We thought the Book of Leviticus is about sacrifices and the laws of purity! But, what are sacrifices if not food? All ancient peoples worshipped their gods by providing sacrifices to them. They imagined they were feeding their hungry gods. The Jewish people also sacrificed to the G-d of Israel, but not to provide food to satisfy G-d’s hunger. Rather, the Torah tells us that G-d was pleased with the aroma of the cooking food. Rashi reminds us that this metaphor means that a sacrifice performed with the proper intention and the proper ritual would be as pleasing to G-d as a pleasant aroma would be pleasing to a human being.

What do you think is the most Jewish of foods?  Perhaps for some of you Challah is the most Jewish food. As we know it is a reminder of the manna that G-d sent to sustain the Jewish people in the wilderness. It also graces our tables on Friday nights and festivals. Each week the priests of the Temple would place loaves of bread on the table in front of the ark. Surely the challah is the most Jewish of foods. This week I learned something about the origins of Challah, and this led me to conclude that Challah is not the most Jewish food. The braided bread that we call Challah was invented by the women of the Teutonic tribes of what is now Germany. They used to offer the braids of their own hair to a German goddess. In order to preserve their own braids they began offering the goddess a braided bread instead. German Jews of the 15^th century adopted this custom of braided bread, using it for the bread placed on the Sabbath table each week. The custom of using a braided bread for Sabbath eventually spread all over Europe. It turns out that the name of the Teutonic goddess to whom the bread was offered was “Holle”, from which the name “Challah” comes from.

Knowing this, I cannot accept that “Challah” is the most Jewish of foods. 

Surely, then, the most Jewish food is chicken soup! After all for generations Jews have enjoyed chicken soup at Passover Seders, Rosh HaShannah dinners and Friday night meals.  But chicken soup was invented by the Chinese around the time when chickens were domesticated -- between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. True, the Chinese are the most Jewish of the non-Jews, which is why one finds Chinese restaurants packed with our people on Christmas day! The medieval rabbi and physician Maimonides learned from Chinese and Greek texts about the medicinal properties of chicken soup. In his book, “On the Causes of Symptoms”, Maimonides recommends chicken soup to “neutralize body constitution”. He also recommends it for the treatment of asthma and leprosy. Known by some in our day as “The Jewish Penicillin”, chicken soup is prescribed as a treatment for anything from the common cold to a broken heart. I don’t know about you but, given the Chinese connection, I am not sure I would pick chicken soup as the most Jewish of foods -- although it surely lifts the spirits warms the heart.

 For me personally the most Jewish of foods is……….. the eggplant! The eggplant originated in India and was brought to Spain by the Arabs. There it became a dietary staple of Sephardic Jewry, much like the potato would become the staple of Eastern European Jewry. When the Jews were expelled from Spain, the eggplant and its recipes went with them.  The Jews then spread their love of eggplant dishes throughout the Mediterranean countries where they settled.

There are three reasons I think the eggplant is the most Jewish of foods. First, it went into exile with the Jewish people when we were expelled from Spain and took root in other countries, just like us. Second, the eggplant was considered poisonous in much of Europe and was not consumed, thereby suffering the same kind of undeserved discrimination as the Jewish people. Third, did you know that the eggplant is a berry? To the blueberry and the raspberry, the strawberry and the blackberry, the eggplant must look like a very odd berry indeed. The eggplant is the outsider of the berry family, the berry that is different.

Another reason I choose the eggplant as the most Jewish of foods is that Jews composed songs to the eggplant. For example there is the Ladino song “Si Savesh la Buena Djente” in which an eggplant and a tomato battle it out for supremacy. Then there is the song “Siete Modos de Guisar la Berenjenas”—Seven Ways to Cook Eggplant. This song is actually a shortened version of a Ladino poem describing 35 ways to cook eggplants. It goes like this:

Siete modos de de guisados/se guisa la berenjena
La primera que la guise  /es la vava de Elena
Ya la hace bocadicos  /y la mete en una cena
Esta comida la llaman  /comida de berenjena

There are seven different ways to cook eggplant.
The first recipe is that of Elena’s grandmother.
She cuts it into bite-sized pieces and serves it for supper
and this meal is called a dish of eggplant.

Chorus: Ah, my Uncle Cerasi, how he likes to drink wine/ Wine wine wine – lots of it he feels fine

La segunda que la guise  /es la mujer del Shamas /La cavaca por arientro
y la hinchi d’aromat /Esta comida la llaman /la comida la dolma

The second kind is that of the shammas’s wife.
She hollows it out and fills it with herbs.
This meal is called a dish of dolmá.(stuffed vegetables).

Follow this link for a version of this song. I think you will like it 

Siete Modos de Guisar la Berenjenas

To that we say – be-te-a-von --- Bon Apetit!  And Shabbat Shalom

Parasha Vayahel Pekudai "Raising the Roof"

This week’s Torah portion finds us at the end of the Book of Exodus. Moses returns from his audience with G-d on Mount Sinai with a set of instructions on how to build the Mishkan – the portable sanctuary that the Jewish people will take with them as they leave Mt. Sinai and travel to the Land of Israel. 

Israelites Camped around the Tabernacle John W. Kelchner

 G-d has commanded Moses to build this House of G-d so that G-d can have a physical if symbolic presence among the people of Israel. There is a great deal of material needed to build the Mishkan – gold and silver and copper, fine linen and goat hair, acacia wood and ram skins, anointing oil and precious stones, planks and bars and posts and sockets to hold up the tent, pegs and chords material to sew the sacred clothing that Aaron and his sons must wear to fulfill their duties.  The Mishkan was to be built with voluntary contributions – whatever people wanted to give toward its construction, they gave. If they wanted to work on building the Mishkan, they volunteered their time, without getting paid. And, the people gave. They gave so much that Moses had to tell them to stop giving – they had given enough!

The Jewish people were very proud of their first building when it was finally completed. They had an eight day celebration to inaugurate the Mishkan. Several hundred years later King Solomon would build the first permanent Temple in Jerusalem, which would stand for some 400 years before it was destroyed by the Babylonians. That Temple in Jerusalem would be rebuilt, and would last another 500 years before being destroyed by the Romans.  After that, Jews would build synagogues wherever they lived.

Model of the Second Temple destroyed by Rome in 70 CE

Jewish communities spread all over North Africa, Asia and Western and Eastern Europe and wherever Jews settled, they built Houses of G-d. The oldest synagogue in the United States, build in 1677, can still be visited in Newport, Rhode Island. But only a handful of Jews lived in the United States in 1677. Over half the Jews in the world at that time lived in Poland. In fact, it is estimated that 70% of Jews alive today, almost 9 million people, are descended from Jews who once lived in Polish territories. Poland had hundreds of magnificent wooden synagogues.

But with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, those that were still standing were burned to the ground.

Fortunately, we do know what some of these synagogues looked like inside. In 1890, a Polish architect named Karol Maszkowski documented a wooden synagogue that stood in a town called, Gwodziec. Just before World War l a Vienese researcher named Alois Breier made drawings, photographs and color studies of the interior of that synagogue. We also have this 1897 painting of the interior of a different wooden synagogue by an artist named Isador Kaufman.

 So although these synagogues were all destroyed, we do have a good idea of the elaborate style of their interiors. They were covered from floor to ceiling with the texts of prayers, zodiac signs, messianic symbols and pictures of animals, both familiar and mythical.

That is where things stood until 2004, when Rick and Laura Brown of Handshouse Studio began to study the wooden synagogues of Poland. Rick and Laura, who are neither Jewish nor Polish, founded Handshouse in Norwell, Massachusetts two years earlier. Handshouse is a non-profit educational institution that teaches history through the reconstruction of large historical objects. They decided to recreate the ceiling and bima of the Gwodziec synagogue. Just as in the time of the building of the Mishkan, the construction was done by volunteers – in this case hundreds of college students from eleven countries around the world. For a period of twelve weeks over two summers they painstakingly built the roof structure of the synagogue, in Poland, under the guidance of master timber framers, using the tools, techniques and materials of the 18^th century.

 The following year painting workshops were held in eight cities in Poland where hundreds of student volunteers worked side by side with an international team of historians, architects, artisans and artists to reproduce the paintings on the ceiling of the synagogue. 

The timber framing and ceiling panels were then dismantled, numbered and taken by truck to Warsaw, Poland. Weighing more than 25 tons, they were reassembled, hoisted into place and suspended by cables in the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, a new Museum opened in 2013 that documents the thousand year history of Polish Jewry.

This museum will be our first stop on our Congregation Beth Shalom Jewish Roots Journey to Europe next October.

The Torah tells us that G-d endowed an Israelite man named Bezalel with a divine spirit of skill, ability and knowledge of every kind of craft to supervise the building of the Mishkan. An inscription on the painted ceiling of the Gwozdiec synagogue reads, "See, all this was made by hand, for the glory of G-d and the glory of the community, by the artist Yitzchak, son of Rabbi Yehuda Leyb ha-Cohen from the holy community of Jaryczow in the year 1729. This is my handiwork in which I glory”. The artist could hardly have foreseen the future of the community in which he once lived, nor the couple from Massachusetts who would someday resurrect his work for all of us to admire.

[The story of the reconstruction of the Gwozdiec synagogue ceiling is told in the film "Raise the Roof". http://www.polishsynagogue.com/about-the-film/ ]

Shabbat Shalom

Shabbat Shekalim -- Little Boxes

This week’s prophetic portion is NOT about mystical visions of G-d experienced by the prophets. It is not about dire warnings of prophets for the people of Israel to repent or face punishment from G-d. This week’s prophetic portion is NOT about a prophet bring hope and comfort to the oppressed Jewish people. No, this week’s Haftorah portion is much more prosaic than those lofty subjects. This week’s Haftorah portion is about building maintenance. It is about fixing a leaky roof and a crumbling foundation, about repairing drafty windows and plastering cracked porticos.

The year is 813 BCE. Solomon’s Temple is about 140 years old, and is showing some wear and tear. King Jehoash, who was only seven years old when he ascended to the throne in Jerusalem, wants to raise money to repair the Temple. So he tells the priests who run the Temple that they should make the repairs out of donations that they receive from their benefactors – those who give contributions to the priests. Apparently this idea does not go over so well with the priests, because several years later when the King inspects the Temple, he finds that no repairs have been made at all!  The King then tries another tactic. He instructs craftsmen to make a chest and bore a hole in its lid. He places the chest at the entrance of the Temple, and stations guards at it. Whenever a person coming into the Temple wants to make a donation, that person would hand it to the guards, and the guards would place it through the hole in the lid and into the chest. When the guards see that there is a lot of money in the chest, the High Priest and the royal scribe would empty the chest, count the money, and deliver it directly to the general contractor in charge of the Temple repairs. He, in turn would pay the carpenters, masons, stonecutters and other laborers for their work in repairing the Temple.

Behold,  the first written account of a Tzedaka Box!  No longer chests with holes bored in the lids, these small boxes have been a feature in Jewish life ever since. In many Jewish homes it is the custom to put money into a Tzedaka box before the lighting of the Shabbat and holiday candles. It is certainly a wonderful way of teaching children the value of the mitzvah of giving Tzedaka. In keeping with the idea of Hiddur Mitzvah, or adorning or beautifying a mitzvah, many Tzedakah boxes are themselves works of art. I can’t think of a better way of reinforcing the value of giving to our children than making this part of a family’s Friday night ritual.

Perhaps the most well-known Tzedaka box is the Jewish National Fund’s “Blue Box”. Blue boxes were once found in every home and Jewish classroom from the United States to Russia. The idea to collect money for Israel through a Tzedaka box came soon after the establishment of the Jewish National Fund by the 5^th Zionist conference in 1901. A bank clerk, Haim Kleinman from Galicia placed a box in a prominent place in his office with the words, “Eretz Yisrael” – for the Land of Israel – on it. He wrote a letter to the Zionist newspaper in Vienna, Die Welt, saying that he had raised a remarkable sum through donations to the Zionist cause in this way. He further suggested that the Jewish National Fund follow suit and distribute Tzedaka boxes in homes and offices. The blue box has become not only a way to collect money for Israel, but it serves as a powerful symbol of the connection between Israel and the Jewish people worldwide.

Since that time other good causes have taken it upon themselves to distribute Tzedaka boxes with their own names written on the box. I want to conclude tonight’s sermon by sharing a true story by Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins. He writes that a prominent rabbi in Boston was attending a housewarming of a wealthy couple in his congregation. People were oohing and aaahing at the unusual pieces of furniture in the living room, the original pieces of artwork that were placed throughout the house, even the gold-plated bathroom tissue dispenser in the restroom. The homeowners noted that they had paid top-dollar to the best interior decorator in the Boston area, but it had been well worth it.

After about an hour, the elderly mother of the hostess, who lived with her daughter, motioned to the rabbi to come with her. They left their posh surroundings and climbed the steps to the second floor, where she had her bedroom. As they entered the bedroom, the woman pointed her finger toward the windowsill. The rabbi was astonished by what he saw.

The woman did not point to a rare piece of furniture or to a valuable antique. Arrayed on the windowsill were two rows of tin Tzedakah boxes – “pushkes” in Yiddish – for every imaginable charitable cause. There were boxes for hospitals, for orphanages, for yeshivahs, for women’s shelters, for children who were blind, for the deaf – for every single Jewish institution she could find that distributed boxes for charity.  

“Now this”, said the woman proudly, “THIS is interior decorating”.

Shabbat Shalom