A Soulful Journey

Throughout history the Jewish people have feared that they were the last generation.  Afraid that they would be the last link in Jewish civilization,  Abraham started the process when he complained, "What can You give me seeing that I am childless?" (Genesis 15:2) He thought himself to be the first and last Jew.  -Sam Rawidowicz, Israel, The Ever Dying People We are the eternal people.

“It must be clear to everybody …that the new century does not open under very favorable auspices for Judaism… Our scriptures are the constant object of attack, our history is questioned, and its morality is declared to be an inferior sort. Worst of all is that attitude of the younger generation, who if not directly hostile, are by dint of mere ignorance sadly indifferent to everything Jewish, and in capable of taking the place of their parents in the synagogue… They are bound to end in that cold critical attitude toward Judaism in terminating and drifting away from it all together.”  - Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism , 1901 The more things change the more they remain the same.  And after all this time, we are still here.

“To save the world the apostle had to suffer in and for it, appear before the magistrates, subvert empires.   To redeem the Jewish people the rabbi had to enter into, share and reshape the life of the community, deliberately to eschew the politics of nations and patiently to submit to empires.”   - Jacob Neusner Two thousand years of exile and wandering ended in 1948 when finally we could govern ourselves.

Written by Leslie Fiedler, Fiedler of the Roof is a book that tells an unfolding tragedy.   He began his life with the deep-seated belief that the world could become whole, one.   He favored a world community where all differences would be erased.   He   carried this out in his own family.   He married a non-Jew and his eight children also married gentiles.   None of his grandchildren are Jews.   He speaks of two holocausts; one committed by Hitler and the Nazis and the other a secret one which he, and others like him, perpetrated against themselves.   We can weep as we read his confession.   “There is no one to say Kaddish for me when I die.   I am not just a minimal Jew; my Judaism is nearly non-existent as I have only recently become aware, it is a terminal one as well, the last of a 4,000 year line.”

"Yiddishkeit, not Judaism, was what really mattered to my mother and her friends."   - Michele Guinness

"I am not much of a Zionist-at least not in the way Einstein is,   even though I am one of the curators of the Hebrew University in Palestine. I recognized the great emotional force, though, of the Jewish center in the world and thought it would be a rallying point for Jewish ideals.   I was afraid for a while, though, that Zionism would become the occasion for a revival of the old religion, but I have been assured by people who have been there that all the Jews are you religious. Which is a good thing.” -Sigmund Freud, 1935

“Do you flee from the shadows of the giants of your century, the great ones whose light blind the eye and whose faults numb the heart?   They fill you with hurt, with anger, with awe, do they not, these giants?   They make ashes out of great ideas, do they not?   Do you flee to pagan worlds remote from the civilization of your teachers – to test their teachings?   To escape their visions, their echoes, and the shadows that lie between what they are and what they teach?   How far will you flee?”   - Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights Do not run from you.

What does it mean to be engaged in life? "Judaism did not turn heavenward and create in heaven an eternal habitation of souls.  It found 'eternal life' on earth, by strengthening the social feeling in the individual by making him regard himself not as an isolated being with an existence bounded by birth and death, but as a part of a larger whole, as a limb of the social body...I live for the sake of the member.  I die to make room for new individuals, who will mould the community afresh and not allow it to stagnate and remain forever in one position.  When the individual thus values the community as his own life, and strives after its happiness as though it were his individual well being, he finds satisfaction, and no longer feels so keenly the bitterness of his individual existence, because he sees the end for which he lives and suffers." - Achad`HaAm