CUSTOMARILY, Denvers Rabbi Shlomo Twerski of blessed memory attracted to his Shabbos table a wide variety of seekers and guests. The seekers in the 1960s were varied indeed, and one Shabbos in 1968 was no exception. When Shabbos was over, I came into the Twerski home, after the guests had emptied out and Rabbi Twerski was just getting up from the table. He seemed mentally exhausted from all of the Shabbos discussions with his guests. He let out a sigh and said, I have been speaking many languages. Now I wonder if I still know my own.
I feel somewhat the same, having just returned from a Passover spent in Israel and Switzerland. Sometimes the languages thrown at me were just that, German, French and other tongues I do not speak. Sometimes the languages were more subtle, yet the gaps they highlighted seemed especially sharp precisely for their subtlety. It is no surprise when a stranger challenges your preconceptions. It is quite something else when, to all appearances, someone you think is just like you comes across as very different. From potential friends more than strangers, my ways of looking at the world were challenged and expanded. I wonder whether I still know my own language, and even whether I should.
Where to start?
With Dov Rosenberg, an attorney and father of 12 children who speaks seven languages and reads an eighth, who rides to shul on a bicycle, his shtreimel perched on his head, in Zurich?
With Rabbi Shlomo Ganz, a few decades younger, who dances wildly to the Western Wall, very much the hip rabbi, specializing in bringing joy to families who want a Bar Mitzvah that is unique?
With the architectonic mosaic of field and city, of home and skyscraper a few right angles that sum up the story of the return of the Jewish people to their land that blaze in color and seem to leap through the window of a jet crossing from sea to shore, about to land at Ben Gurion Airport?
With the immeasurably smaller yet eternal black-and-white, unadorned calligraphy in the most beautiful Torah scroll I have ever seen, a borrowed one, chanted impromptu by a leader of High Holiday services in Denmark, now visiting Israel, praying in a drab classroom filled on the second day of Passover?
I HAVE long interacted with these types of Jews and pieces of Jewish history. But they came at me at once, squeezed into a few days, their edge accentuated by the semi-stupor of my jet lag, combined with an opposite crescendo of the Passover holiday. At our second seder in Israel second seder? that itself is language ajar in Israel we were joined by Dr. Eddie Billowitz of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He asked:
Why four cups of wine? It is well known that they correspond to the four expressions of redemption in the book of Exodus. That explains the number four, but why wine? Why not four apples, for example? Dr. Billowitz said in the name of the late Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach: Wine changes a person. After each cup of wine at the seder, we should be different, we should change. We drink four cups of wine to help our understanding of freedom grow.
New surroundings change you, and so they did, even though we have been with our children in Ramat Bet Shemesh, Israel, and in Zurich, Switzerland, before. What we had not done is to crowd the experiences, accordion-like, to jump from one country to the next, from one culture to the next, not to mention from the familiar family faces to that of the newborn, Michel Yehudah, 12 days old. Many languages indeed, figurative and literal.
ONE image stands out. I am walking from shul back to our children’s apartment in Ramat Bet Shemesh. It is a very short walk. But in front of me are two brothers, roughly four- and two-years old. The four-year-old has his hand draped around the shoulder of his little brother. He keeps his hand gently yet firmly around his little brother. Two boys. In unison. In sync. The one protecting the other. It is precious. I keep following them, past our childrens apartment, since Shabbos has just ended and the large, roaring buses are about to make their appearance. Let me just follow the boys home, wherever that might be, though no doubt they have walked this way safely before.
At one point the older brother must sense my presence and turns around momentarily and gives me a look. It is a look that doesnt even need to say: Who are you? Dont you know, we are fine? Perfectly OK? I keep following. For a few seconds the older brother drops his hand, then picks up his younger brothers hand, and they keep walking, hand in hand, until finally they turn into an apartment building, safe at last. They were not talking to each other the whole time. Some language needs no words.
America struggles with the increased use of Spanish. Can a country work if it uses more than one language? That would be considered a foolish question in Switzerland, parts of which speaks German, parts French and parts Italian. I am told that in the Swiss parliament all three languages are freely used, with representatives from each region using their own language, with simultaneous translations (though most citizens seem to speak at least two of the three languages). Thus, a short train ride from Zurich to Lausanne and then to Montreaux provides a language chop. As we begin the train ride, from Zurich, the signs are all in German, just like the spoken language; then, about 90 minutes out of Zurich, the signs are all in French, likewise the spoken language.
On our way to Montreaux, we stop in Lausanne, curious to know whether there is a synagogue there. At the information booth at the main train station we learn that, yes, there is a synagogue, not far way. We begin a trek up a hill. Along this downtown street are fairly indistinguished hotels and other stores. We keep watching the street signs to know when we’ve reached the synagogue. We gaze up at a sign, and behold its the right one. Suddenly, in a flash, towering over us across the street, looms a magnificent synagogue, its Jewish star unmistakable, large and proud, its lines and colors simple and elegant. A very small Jewish population in a Swiss city known for its history World War I was officially ended here supports a synagogue that stands out, one might even say pops out, amidst the commonplace. The sight and size of this synagogue also bespeak a language that needs no words.
Thats before we even gaze rightward, down to Lake Geneva, less than a mile away. There is no way to describe the beauty of the mountains that surround it. Though not as high above sea level as the Rocky Mountains, the mountains around Lake Geneva seem much higher, for they jut up from ground without warning. No foothills here. No gradual climb, as in the Rockies. They tower above and around you, embracing the large lake stretching for miles at their base. Gray clouds alternatively mask and reveal the peaks. Again, no words.
AS outsized as the Swiss mountains, as unexpected as the influx of breathtaking countryside from Zurich to Montreaux, which often seems so perfectly laid out and colored as to project a doll house quality, was the Bar Mitzvah of Lee Ratson. He is the son of Sheryl Stein and Moshe Ratson, Sheryl of the English language and Moshe of the Hebrew language, and Lee of both. Long time friends of my mother Miriam Goldberg, Sheryl and Moshe wanted their sons Bar Mitzvah to be an experience of Jewish identity and pride in the Jewish state.
Since a Bar Mitzvah occurs only once in a childs lifetime, why rush it? The service at the Western Wall, two days before Passover, began not as a service at all. For an hour maybe even 90 minutes all the attendees were dancing and singing, shofars were sounded, and the entire plaza of the Western Wall was traversed, beginning back at the Dung Gate. Only after this did the service began, all under the enthusiastic, indeed charismatic,leadership of Rabbi Ganz.
Draped in tefilin, Lee said his blessing over the Torah with so much singing before and after that it might just as well have been Simchas Torah. What then, go home? Or to a meal? No! Rather to the Kotel tunnels, to guided tours for the entire assemblage (some 80 people) of the excavations alongside that part of the Western Wall visible to the naked eye.
Let the first act of the Bar Mitzvah boy be an affirmation of his heritage.
The tunnels reveal that only a small part of the Western Wall has been seen for centuries. The much larger remainder of the Wall has been covered over by centuries of homes and refuse. The latter has been painstakingly cleared away by Israeli authorities since 1967, revealing steep drops, arches and mikvehs from the ancient Temple and later times.
The excavations have also revealed a single stone, estimated to weigh11,000 tons!, leaving one gaping in wonder, searching for words to explain how such a stone was quarried, moved, lifted and set in place, long before the world knew of electricity and cranes.
Hours after the Bar Mitzvah began, and just as the tunnel tours concluded, the Bar Mitzvah boy exited, only to find himself standing right in front of a car holding no less a personage than the Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Amar. This was not planned. Intrepid, Lee Ratson approached and asked to be blessed. Exuding charm and good wishes, Rabbi Amar acceded. Holy words.
On Sunday night, the onset of the third day of Passover, at the Bar Mitzvah boys party, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehillath Jeshurun addressed the Bar Mitzvah boy in both Hebrew and English. The Hebrew was not for the benefit of Moshes extended Israeli family. It sprung from the education Lee received at the congregations Ramaz school, which believes its students should speak the language, both ancient and reborn, of the Jewish people.
I was impressed by how much Rabbi Lookstein had prepared for this Bar Mitzvah. He did not rely on his knowledge of the family. He spoke to Lee’s teachers and gathered information from many sources.
The bottom line: Rabbi Lookstein observed that Lee is both a bundle of fun, well liked by peers and adults, always ready to have a good time and to help others do the same and also a terrific student, a serious thinker who asks good questions.
Rabbi Lookstein observed that the family could have sought any number of venues in Manhattan for a Bar Mitzvah party, but chose to come to Jerusalem instead. For this Bar Mitzvah, Lees parents sought the language of eternity.
I DIDNT know it at the time, but the language I was searching for how to express the uniqueness of the Kotel tunnels would be revealed to me days later in a place I did not even know I was going to visit: the Chillon Castle in Montreaux, Switzerland.
When the train brought us from Lausanne to Montreaux, we took a boat ride on Lake Geneva. Again, the breathtaking mountains, plus our daughter saying something about a castle coming into sight. We disembarked and soon discovered that Chillon Castle is one of the major tourist attractions in Switzerland, and with good reason.
I lost track of how many rooms and levels this castle contains. A dungeon for prisoners. Rooms for supplies, for feasts, for sleeping. Rooms for weapons and self-defense. Not to mention the courtyards and the moat.
Somehow, being in that castle, seeing how each of its rooms was carefully designed and constructed, I finally grasped lessons of history that I had encountered amply in books. If a principalitys entire government could be contained in a single castle, that put into perspective what from the size of the USA can seem like petty, medieval squabbles over minute pieces of territory. If the leadership of a regime can be contained in a building occupying no more than a couple of acres, I understood how, without modern transportation and weaponry, it can be exceedingly difficult to control and to defend even small tracts of territory. Chillon Castle made clear that those medieval battles over seeming nothings, those interlocking dynastic families, those obsessions with rank and privilege and feudal armor, were the staples of government and stability in that pre-modern period.
Hundreds of people visit this castle daily. The Swiss government has invested millions in restoring and maintaining it the same as with the tunnels alongside the Western Wall. Yet, notwithstanding their similarities in masonry and antiquity, why did the tunnels feel so different? It was not just that they were small and claustrophobic while the castle had living space, not just that one tourist site was in Europe and the other in the Middle East, not just that French was the language spoken in the area of the castle, and Hebrew in the area of the Wall.
The difference was this: One is a tourist site, a piece of history, a relic of the past, with the language spoken there an incidental; while the other, while also a tourist site and a piece of history, is primarily not that. It is a living entity, a locale of intense holiness and international contention, imbued with contemporary meaning and not mere historical memory, its language hardly an incidental. Indeed, the Hebrew language of the Wall is endemic to it, of the essence. At the castle, one looks backward. So too at the Western Wall, but there one is also fixed firmly in the present and propelled into the future.
WHERE to end?
With the memory of the beautiful and delicious beginning of Pesach that our daughter-law-Batya (with Mattis help) made for us in Israel less than two weeks after she gave birth, and with the meticulous and delicious end of Pesach that our daughter Shana (with Levs help) made for us in Switzerland?
With the memory of children and grandchildren sitting around the seder table in the land of Israel, as I thought that here, truly, is the personal re-experience of the Exodus from Egypt?
With the memory of the prayer leader in a small chasidic shtibl in Zurich, a total stranger with whom I could not converse in any case, who somehow accessed that deepest part of the soul that feels itself surprisingly, overwhelmingly, standing in the Divine Presence?
With the memory of the kaleidoscope of Europe distilled into one person, a guest at a meal on the last day of Passover, who was born in East Germany, who speaks Polish, practices psychiatry in English and German, and whose grandparents live in Sudan?
With the memory of the inevitable small world story, foreshadowed by Denvers Dr. Isaac Teitelbaum, who told me before I left that he was planning on visiting a first cousin in Zurich he hadnt seen in decades and who, of course, I bumped into on the street?
Or with the memory of walking home from shul after the end of Pesach, minding my own business yet identifiable as Jewish by my dress, flinching from the language known only too well by Jews for millennia, language thrown at me from a young male youth in a passing car, Sieg Heil, brother!
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
