Love & Inheritance II: What do we love? - A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Morning 5785
10/04/2024 07:39:29 AM
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On the third floor of Vienna’s Leopold Museum of Modern Art is a display of forty-eight photographic portraits. They show the men and women who, before the First World War, helped bring that city and the world into the modern age.
Of those forty-eight, twenty-six are Jewish. They include Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, Karl Landsteiner, who won a Nobel Prize for distinguishing the blood groups, the noted economist Otto Neurath, Kathe Leichter, also an economist and advocate for women’s rights, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schonberg who would revolutionize music, Franz Kafka who would do the same for literature, dramatists and novelists like Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Werfel, the labor leader Victor Adler, the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, the photographer Dora Kallmus and philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Buber.
Though not intended as such, the display is a testament to the transformative power of the Jewish mind. Released from its ghettos a mere century earlier, Jewish genius had profoundly impacted every aspect of European intellectual and cultural life. Jews were helping to create the modern, liberal world: a world built on the principles of freedom of thought and expression, of human rights and equality of opportunity.
But among all those portraits, there is one that should give us pause. It shows an attorney and journalist with a distinctive, heavy, black beard and mustache. In 1895 this man watched as Vienna - home to a large and thriving Jewish community - handed power to the virulently antisemitic Christian Social Party.
Later he recorded the scene as that party’s leader, Karl Lueger, soon to be Vienna’s mayor, appeared before a large crowd: “Wild cheering,” he wrote. “Women waving white kerchiefs from the windows. The police held the people back. A man next to me said with loving fervor … ‘That is our Fuhrer.’” “More than all the declamation and abuse,” continued Theodor Herzl, “these few words told me how deeply anti-Semitism is rooted in the heart of the people.”
What Herzl saw more clearly and more presciently than anyone else, was that the liberal world order Jews were helping to create would ultimately unleash the deep-seated antisemitism in a society. In other words, the more people were free, the more they would use that freedom to give vent to their hatred of Jews. And that hatred would ultimately destroy that liberal society, because such intolerance is the very negation of liberalism. He believed that the only cure for it was to take the Jews out of Europe and into a state of their own.
Fifty years later, Herzl’s photograph would adorn the wall before which David Ben-Gurion stood as he declared the existence of a Jewish state called Israel. At that time Vienna, which in Herzl's day was home to 150,000 Jews, and which had grown to 200,000 on the eve of World War II, now had barely 3000 remaining. And, as Herzl had predicted half a century earlier, it wasn’t just the Jews that had been brought to the brink of destruction. The liberal world order they had helped to create lay in smoldering ruins as well.
Terri and I visited Vienna along with Budapest and Prague in July. We did so just a few weeks after returning from our second trip to Israel this now past year. All those trips - in the context of Israel’s war against Hamas, the protests on college campuses, and the general explosion of antisemitism both here and around the world - got me ruminating, obsessing really, on where we are as a people, where we have come from, and where we are heading.
Last night I spoke of a d’var Torah written by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks several years ago. His subject was inheritance and, using contrasting stories of Biblical Israelites who gain or lose their inheritance in the Promised Land, he came to this teaching: What we love, we inherit. What we fail to love, we lose. This lesson strikes me as encapsulating the struggle that October 7 and all that has followed in its wake has unleashed. What do we love? What do we want to claim as our inheritance?
This, to me, is an especially apt question with regard to our European trip - particularly our time in Vienna. The trip was organized by YIVO - The Yiddish Scientific Institute. YIVO was founded in 1925 in what was then called Vilna in Poland and is now Vilnius in Lithuania. For fifteen years YIVO documented and formalized the Yiddish language which was then at its literary peak, until the Nazis forced their relocation to New York. If you ask someone engaged with YIVO what do they love and what do they want to pass on as an inheritance, they will likely tell you the Yiddish language and the Eastern European Jewish culture.
This is indeed a worthy inheritance. The culture they seek to preserve is the culmination of a thousand years of Jewish history. It's the great achievement of the Jewish people in the time between the fall of the Second Temple and the birth of modern Zionism 1800 years later. And it's the inheritance that was handed to most of us as American Jews.
The folks with whom we traveled to Central Europe have an inspiring dedication to this inheritance. Many of them were members of the YIVO board of trustees or were otherwise intimately connected with the organization. Most spoke a good deal of Yiddish and some were quite fluent in the language. Among them was a lovely, gracious woman, about my age, and her daughter. This woman’s joy in the Yiddish language was palpable. The sound of it brought the broadest smile to her face. At the Shabbat - or should I say Shabbos - dinner we shared together, she led or joined in the singing of Yiddish songs, and she would have gone on doing so as long as people could think of more.
Her delight in all things Yiddish was infectious, and her daughter proved Rabbi Sacks’s point that inheritance comes from love. Neither mother nor daughter are particularly religious, so for her Bat Mitzvah, instead of reading Torah, the daughter read a story by one of her favorite Yiddish writers in its original language. More powerfully, this young woman had tattooed at the base of her neck the Yiddish words “mir zaynen doh.” They are the last words of a song written by an inmate of the Vilna Ghetto that has become an anthem for Holocaust survivors. They mean “we are here,” and they are sung with defiance. This woman’s tattoo is not merely an act of defiance, but also one of pride and of love. All three of those powerful emotions animate her Yiddish inheritance.
And yet, to what extent that love of Yiddish nurtures a living Jewish inheritance is unclear to me. I found it curious, for instance, that I could spend eleven days with twenty Jews and never discuss the ongoing war in Israel or even the frightening rise of antisemitism around the world.
More startling to me was our trip itinerary. We spent three days each in Prague and Budapest which were filled with Jewish history. But we spent four days in Vienna which had considerably less. I asked our tour organizer why we were spending the most time in the least Jewish of the three cities. “I suggested otherwise,” was his reply, “but the people from YIVO wanted it this way. They love Vienna.”
I didn’t love Vienna. For me, the tone of our stay in the Austrian capital was set by our first stop: the Heldenplatz - the Heroes Plaza outside the Hofburg Palace. I had an eerie feeling as soon as we walked through the passageway leading into that vast, open space, and as soon as our guide started talking, I understood why. Before us stood the palace balcony from which Hitler announced the Anschluss - Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. On that day, the plaza in which I was standing was filled with a quarter million ecstatic Austrians, cheering their Fuhrer.
The next day we visited a synagogue where the security was tighter than any airport through which I’ve traveled. Then we toured the Vienna Jewish Museum where a line of glass cases displayed what remains of all the synagogues destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom, which was particularly brutal in that city. The rest of our ample time there was spent listening to Mozart, eating strudel and visiting art galleries that contained paintings stolen from their Jewish owners - something the Viennese people wouldn’t acknowledge until fifty years after the fact.
But that wasn’t what our traveling companions seemed to see. What I came to appreciate was that the Vienna the YIVO folks love is the one remembered and romanticized on the third floor of the Leopold Museum. They love and they wish to inherit the Vienna that, for a very brief time, was pointing toward liberalism and modernity; the Vienna where the likes of Jews such as Freud and Mahler could live and thrive among their Christian counterparts, and surrounded by the music of Mozart, the art of Klimt, and the fading glories of the Hapsburg Empire. But that Vienna, if it ever existed, died a long time ago. It was murdered by the antisemitism that had always been there, and that I am convinced is still lurking, just below its modern, enlightened surface.
Where my traveling companions looked at Vienna and saw a well-ordered ring of palaces and parks, of museums and music, all I saw were ghosts. But I didn’t see Jewish ghosts. I saw the ghosts of Herzl’s crowd cheering Karl Lueger. I saw the ghosts in the Heldenplatz cheering Adolf Hitler. Everywhere I turned in Vienna, I saw ghosts. And I know I saw the city more clearly than those who saw none.
Rabbi Sacks teaches that what we love is what we inherit. Our inheritance helps define us, telling both ourselves and others who we are, where we have come from, and what we value. Twenty-six of forty-eight portraits on the third floor of the Leopold Museum demonstrate the outsized influence that Judaism once had in creating the Vienna that so many of my traveling companions dearly love. That would make a worthy inheritance for any Jew who values the genius of our people in creating this modern world of ours. And yet, a small line of display cases in the dark archives of a different museum shows all that remains of the Jewish world from which those twenty-six came. That I think is our real Viennese inheritance. And if it is, then maybe we need to ask ourselves if we really know what to love.
Fri, November 8 2024
7 Cheshvan 5785
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