All of it: Gevurah

April 26, 2015 Irwin Keller

I was honored to offer the invocation for the Sonoma County Yom Hashoah Commemoration on April 19:

Good afternoon. Shalom aleykhem.

We meet here today, as we do every year, to remember, to reflect. To honor those we’ve lost and those we are blessed to have among us. To crack open our hearts to all who were subjected to the ordeal of the Shoah and all who have lived in its wake, trying to repair the irreparable.

This year we have been asked to give special attention to the quality of gevurah, the strength, the heroism, of our people and others who shared their fate. We will honor resistance, whether large or small, whether organized or impulsive. We will honor the non-Jews who could, perhaps, have tiptoed through, but instead risked their lives to help. All of these acts: gevurah.

But in Judaim the concept of gevurah is even broader than those descriptions. We use the word to mean strength, but it is not always an obvious kind of strength. In our mystical tradition, certain qualities are associated with particular biblical figures. And you might expect gevurah to be represented by Moses or Joshua or Deborah or even Judah Maccabee. But no. The poster child for gevurah is Isaac. Isaac, whose big moment in Torah is not the tumbling of walls or the parting of waters. It is being bound to a rock while someone more powerful raises a hand to kill him.

This story from Torah is etched into our psyches. But it is short on detail. We don’t know if Isaac struggled. If he bargained. If he strained against the fetters or quietly tried to untie them. We don’t know if Isaac prayed or planned or just made peace. Or if he simply didn’t know what to do. Still, our tradition chooses him to represent this quality that we call gevurah.

And he is a good choice for it. Because sometimes your heroism lies in strength of arms. And sometimes your hands are tied. Sometimes your endurance, your presence, is all you have to offer.

As a people we call ourselves Israel – Jacob. But in the Shoah we were, so often, Isaac. Our hands were tied. We were bound, staring up at the knife or closing our eyes against it. Our world of options shrank to tiny choices, all of which had unspeakably grave consequences. Turn left or right. Leave by yourself now or with loved ones next week. Step to the front of the line, or hang back. Speak up for another, or play it safe today in the hope of making a difference tomorrow. In an impossible situation, every choice, every action, including just holding tight: gevurah.

At Chanukah time we sing Mi y’mallel g’vurot Yisrael. Who can count the g’vurot, the heroic deeds of our people? If we look deeply to the impossible world of the Shoah, a world of action and restraint and endurance, then our people’s acts of gevurah would number millions upon millions upon millions.

So today let us honor our acts and our limitations. Our strength and our fragility. Let us honor those who rebelled and those who resisted. Those who hid and those who hid them. Those who escaped and those who could not. Let us honor those whose strength was in the fight. And those whose strength was in enduring. And those whose strength was taken from them. All of them. All of it. Gevurah.

Fire, and the Prairie

April 17, 2015 Irwin Keller

We drove ten blocks south to the old Oak Woods Cemetery. We looked at its burial mound of Confederate prisoners upon which someone had scornfully (I presume) placed an empty bottle of Southern Comfort. And then we looked for graves of trailblazers who rest there. Ida B. Wells, the radical turn-of-the-century African-American journalist; Jesse Owens, the African-American runner whose prowess shamed Hitler at the 1936 Olympics; and Hyde Park's own Harold Washington, Chicago's first black and first progressive mayor, whose ethos made possible gay rights in that city, and whose election so rocked the world that while I was on a 1983 visit to Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia, the mere mention that I came from Chicago, which would have once produced an Al Capone pantomime, now elicited the amused observation, Ah, Chicago. Negri Burgermeister.

A Ghost of Shtetl Future

February 6, 2015 Irwin Keller

But being a ghost here seems fitting... There are no more Jews in Krinek. Not a single one, as far as anyone knows. In 1941 they were corralled into a long, narrow ghetto running along the river from the town center to Gabarska Street, where the Jewish tanneries stood. And a year later the Jews were gone altogether and Krynki became a ghost town.

The Re-Vision Weekly

December 6, 2014 Irwin Keller

This week in the realm of holy potential, the president issued an Executive Order on Immigration, reminding everyone that they had mostly all once been strangers in a strange land. Congress responded by passing a Welcome Wagon law, setting up checkpoints near borders. When immigrants are stopped, agents provide them with trail mix and water and a list of services, including schools, health clinics, housing options, job training and upcoming cultural events.

Learnings from YiddishLand (Parashat Toldot)

November 21, 2014 Irwin Keller

Maybe it's not nostalgia that's the driving force here. It is more a kind of longing to repair something that's broken, to fill in something that's missing. And something is definitely missing for us. There is some kind of transmission that we would have had from our tribe that we didn't get. One disruption of transmission happened when our ancestors arrived, traumatized, on this continent and decided never to speak of the Old Country. Another disruption happened when the next generation used Yiddish as the secret code for the adults instead of as the secret code for the whole family. Another disruption in transmission came when we, our younger selves, decided we didn't want or need any of that Jewish stuff anyway.