Powerful Symbols

A Drash for Friday, 28 September 2012

Rabbi Don Levy

In the US Southern States, one often sees the Confederate Battle Flag, the ‘Stars and Bars.’ One sees it flying high and proud from flagpoles in the front yards of homes and businesses.  It’s also a prevalent image as a bumper or rear windscreen decorations on cars, or especially...pickup trucks, or ‘utes’ as you call them here in Australia.  Many citizens from outside the Southern States think of the flag as a symbol of racism  They believe it is an expression of a desire to return to the antebellum South especially in regard to black slavery and the oppression of African-Americans.  I’m not a Southerner myself, but I have had enough Southern friends and associates to understand that that, for most who fly the Stars and Bars, it has nothing to do with slavery or race in any way.  For most who cling to the flag, it is a symbol of Southern Pride.  An expression of fondness for an entire series of values, which Southerners believe their region epitomises.  Loyalty.  Hospitality.  Faith.  Honesty.  A simple life.  Yes, if you search long and far enough you’ll find an unrepentant advocate of slavery who likewise clings to the Battle Flag.  But for most Southerners, 160 years on from the Civil War and 60 years on from the Civil Rights movement’s heyday, it has to do with the positive values of Southern Culture which seem harder to find today.

            Symbols are powerful and motivating, both in positive and negative ways.  To most Christians the Cross is such a symbol.  To the Christian, the cross is a symbol of life itself – it reminds of the sacrifice of Jesus which, the believer holds, is necessary for us to experience redemption.  To a Jew of course, the Cross has been exactly the opposite – a symbol of death.  For most Jews, it is the symbol that emblazoned the banners of those who have persecuted us over the last 20 centuries.  For the Jew who knows a little of the history of the turn of the Common Era knows, the Cross on which Jesus of Nazareth met his death was just an example of how many thousands of Jews in the Land of Israel met their death at the hands of the Romans.  It was the Roman way of executing political prisoners, those whom they considered a threat to their hegemony.  There was no shortage of individuals whom the Romans considered to be such a threat; therefore the countryside was liberally littered with crucified Jews.

            So the Cross, like the Stars and Bars, is a symbol that can be either profoundly positive or devastatingly negative.  The cross is a symbol of life or death.  The Stars and Bars is a symbol of Southern Pride or Southern Shame.

            The Torah itself is indeed a powerful image.  We read publicly from a scroll, hand-written on animal skin by a skilled scribe using a quill.  Why not a printed and bound volume?  Because reading from a scroll, traditionally produced, gives a powerful sense of continuity.  The scroll itself is a symbol of the Torah’s legitimacy and centrality.

But probably the most prevalent, and powerful symbol of Judaism is the Magen David, the six-pointed Shield of David that is usually called, ‘the Star of David.’  Whenever I talk to groups of non-Jews, someone is bound to ask me:  What does the symbol of the Star of David mean?  If I’m being honest, I have to reply:  Eh!  Who Knows??!  But since a rabbi doesn’t give such an answer, I generally give an explanation found in Stern der Erlösung, The Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig’s magnum opus.   In the book, the early 20^th century philosopher sees the three points of the lower triangle as symbolising G-d, the universe, and the human being.  The three points of the upper triangle represent, to Rosenzweig, creation, revelation and redemption.  Anyway, it is a neat way to explain the picture, and I would be happy to spend a couple of Adult Education sessions in my upcoming Pardes series talking about it.  (See the announcement of this initiative in the October Gates of Peace newsletter, just published this week.)

            Dan Brown wrote a series of action-packed novels based on the premise that powerful symbols have motivated many evil acts.  His lead character, Robert Langdon, is a Harvard professor whose specialty is symbology.  I’ve enjoyed the Robert Langdon novels, although the film adaptations generally have not been well-received.  But to me, as a purveyor of the importance of religious symbology – at least in part – Brown’s work resonates powerfully with me.

            Symbology is not always visual; it can be literary as well.  This week’s Torah portion begins with words that sound unusual.  These words may seem opaque to the casual reader, but to one who understands and understands the symbology of words and phrases they are most powerful.

            The beginning of the portion is a poem that is usually referred to as The Song of Moses.  One could probably also call it The Swan Song of Moses, since it is his final utterance before we receive an account of his death.  It is one of two long poems in the Torah that are attributed to Moses, the other being the famous Song of the Sea, from Exodus chapter 15.  If Moses did indeed compose these poems, then he was most definitely a skilled poet.  Not as prolific as King David to be sure, but certainly no slouch with the use of the written word.  It would indicate that, despite his earlier protest about being asked to go to Pharaoh because he was a man unskilled with the use of words, Moses ultimately found his voice and became quite the orator.

            The Song of Moses opens with the following words:  Give ear, O heavens, let me speak / Let the earth hear the words I utter!  Of course, neither the heavens nor the earth literally has ears to hear.  But Moses’ phrases here conjure up a grand image of inanimate objects actually giving ear to hear the proclamation that follows.  It’s a way of saying:  The proclamation that follows is really important!  And that proclamation is the account of G-d’s love for Israel.  And the hope that Israel will accept G-d’s sovereignty and stop rebelling so readily.

            When you think about it, it is hard to imagine a more powerfully positive image than the People Israel living up to the lofty ideals transmitted to us through the Torah.  The opening of Moses’ Song, found in this week’s Torah portion, is a lovely way to introduce that image.  May the Torah’s power and loveliness inspire us to cleave to its values.  If we do, we shall bring untold Good into the world.  Amen.

Post-Holiday Letdown

A Drash for Saturday, 29 September 2012

Rabbi Don Levy

One time when my son, Eyal was less than a year old, I took him with me to the local shopping mall to stroll about and find a few things to purchase.  It was December and therefore very busy and festive at the mall.  Since I’ve never been through a Christmas season here in Australia, I don’t know how it compares.  But in America, Christmas is a very important season culturally.

            So I was pushing Eyal around in his perambulator, the proud new father, and a woman I passed looked and exclaimed:  Oh, what a beautiful baby!  How old is he?

            He’s six months old, I told the woman.

            Oh!  She gushed.  His first Christmas!  How wonderful!

I know what you’re thinking!  The Big, Bad Rabbi probably stared her down and said:  Madam, my son will not be celebrating Christmas!  But believe it or not, I held my tongue.  I smiled.   I Responded to the woman:  Yes, his first Christmas!  Then I continued my circuit of the mall, chuckling to myself.

Christmas.  Last night I was talking about symbols and their power over us.  In American life today, there are fewer symbols more powerful than Christmas.  The boughs of holly and tinsel.  The colourfully wrapped gifts.  The myriads of multi-colour flashing lights.  Santa Clause and his elves.  The baby Jesus in his manger, visited by the three wise kings from the east.  Okay, okay!  Don’t worry!  Your rabbi hasn’t gone over the ‘The Dark Side’ as it were.  But I grew up in America, where a religious festival has come to represent the national will.  As a Jewish boy growing up in New York, that most Jewish of cities, I couldn’t help singing a refrain of ‘Silent Night’ now and then.  It didn’t make me less Jewish.  Look, the most popular Christmas songs were composed by…Jewish songwriters!

I’ll be waiting to see if Christmas is as much of a Big Deal here in Australia, as it is in America.  I suspect not.

In the years when I served as a military chaplain, the Christmas season became an important part of my year.  Each unit on base – in the air force, each squadron – holds a unit Christmas Party.  Sometimes they call it a ‘Holiday Party’ lest Jews and other non-Christians feel somehow taken for granted.  But everybody knows it’s a Christmas party.  All the decorations, invariably, are red and green!  And there’s usually a grand entrance by Santa at some point in the party.  As the unit’s chaplain, I would be invited to give a prayer at the beginning of the festive evening.  Of course it wouldn’t be a Christian prayer – but it wouldn’t be a Jewish prayer either.  So, even though I was serving as a rabbi – as a Jewish chaplain – Christmas, somebody else’s holiday, was an important milestone in my year.

On several occasions, I even played Santa.  It was all good fun.

What was also an important factor in my work as a chaplain was the phenomenon of ‘Post-holiday Letdown.’  We chaplains used to talk about this and prepare for it by extending our January hours to be available for counselling.  We would visit units to deliver talks on dealing with disappointments in life.  Because many people feel a letdown after the holiday season.  Although there’s no statistical proof that suicide rates go up in January, there certainly is a statistical reality of depression and of filings for divorce.   It seems that many unhappy people, buoyed by the festiveness of the holidays, experience a sharp letdown when it’s ‘back to real life’ on the first of January.  Our counselling load was always higher at this time of year.  We were more likely than at any other time of the year to field middle-of-the-night, ‘I’m depressed’ calls during out rotations as duty chaplain.  For Christians generally, and especially for American Christians, the holidays in their totality are such an important symbol that it is quite normally to feel an acute sense of let-down when they’re over.

We’ve just finished going through two weeks of very important holy days.  I’m not trying to draw parallels between our High Holy Days and Christmas, G-d forbid, except in the sense that these days form an important season of the year for Jews.  And in the occasional sense of Post-holiday Letdown.

Post-holiday Letdown for Jews after Yom Kippur is not quite the same as the variant often felt by Christians in January.  After all, the tenor of our holy days is quite different.  It’s serious and reflective rather than festive.  But the similarities are there, because we attach a lot of expectation to our respective holidays.

Last night I mentioned Franz Rosenzweig, a German Jew of the early 20^th century who was an important Jewish philosopher of his age.  He wrote an important book called Stern der Erlösung – The Star of Redemption.  He saw Judaism, which its triangular relation between G-d, the universe and humanity, as a source of redemption.  His book was a watershed in modern Jewish philosophy.  There’s a well-known story about Rosenzweig, and as far as I know it’s entirely true – not apocryphal.

In Germany in the late 19^th century, when Rosenzweig was a student, a lot of promising young Jewish scholars in secular disciplines were converting to Christianity.  Not because of conviction of faith, so much as for a weak connection to Jewish faith and a desire to ‘fit in’ in the university.  Rosenzweig felt little pulling him back from becoming a Christian, and he was about to do so.  But meantime it was Yom Kippur, and he felt out of intellectual honesty that he owed his ancestral faith ‘one last chance.’  He attended a Yom Kippur evening service, and when he heard Kol Nidrei sung, he knew in his heart that he could not be anything other than a Jew.

Perhaps you had heard this story before, or perhaps you had heard some other, equally compelling story about how the sights and sounds of the holidays turned some Jew’s heart around.  Perhaps you go into these days with some great sense of expectation as to a spiritual uplift.  Perhaps, expecting such an uplift, you are disappointed if it does not come.

If you’re feeling any measure of this, I’m here today that it isn’t your fault.  On the other hand, it isn’t my fault either…  No it’s just part of the reality.

Hard as we might try to be affected by a powerful occasion, that affect does not always come.  We can’t force it.  But the hit-or-miss nature doesn’t call the process into question.  It just means that inspiration is elusive.  And we must therefore, sometimes search harder for it.  In a lifetime of prayer and communal worship, most of us can count sublime moments on the fingers of our hands.  But when they come, when the words and the sounds of the liturgy have the intended affect, one’s soul soars.  Those few moments happen when they happen; we can’t choose them.    This reality is the best argument for worshipping regularly.  Not just when one doesn’t have anything better to do, but religiously – what a concept! – every time one has an opportunity.

It is my hope that someone in the room felt an inspiration while I sang my heart out in Kol Nidrei.  Or Eyl Malei Rachamim.  Or when Sara sang Avinu Malkeinu.  Or Margaret Oseh Shalom.  But if onoe of these moment did it for you, please don’t think that you failed.  Or that we were singing off key.  It just wasn’t your moment.  If not, then G-d willing your moment will yet come.

Post-holiday letdown is as real to the Jew after Yom Kippur, as it is to the Christian after Christmas and New Year’s.  It shouldn’t lead us to neglect our respective festivals next year.  It should only serve to make us look for more opportunities to feel inspiration.  Through prayer.  Study.  Music.  Dance.  Whatever.  If we keep seeking, we will ultimately be rewarded for the effort.  And the reward makes the time and effort worthwhile.  Amen.