Rabbi Mark H. Levin, DHL

Kol Nidre Rabbi Mark H. Levin, DHL Congregation Beth Torah September 25, 2012

THIS VERY NIGHT, Erev Kol Nidrei in 1935, exactly 77 years ago to the day, these words, written by Rabbi Leo Baeck, leader of the German Jewish community and official representative of the Jewish community to the Nazi government, were read in every synagogue in Germany:

We Stand Before Our God Rabbi Leo Baeck

In this hour all Israel stands before God, the judge and the forgiver.

In his presence, let us all examine our ways, our deeds, and what we have failed to do.

Where we transgressed let us openly confess: “We have sinned!” / And, determined to return to God, let us pray: “Forgive us.”

We stand before our God.

With the same fervor with which we confess our sins, the sins of the individual and the sins of the community, do we, in indignation and abhorrence, express our contempt for the lies concerning us and the defamation of our religion and its testimonies.

We have trust in our faith and in our future.

Who made known to the world the mystery of the Eternal, the one God?

Who imparted to the world the comprehension of purity of conduct and purity of family life?

Who taught the world respect for man, created in the image of God? 1 Who spoke of the commandment of righteousness, of social justice? …

Our history is a history of nobility of soul, of human dignity. ..

These heroic lines, raising the dignity and spirits of Jews all over Germany, were delivered after the Nuremberg laws virtually enslaved Germany's Jews. They took great courage. Baeck and his assistant were arrested the next day, and only international pressure was able to secure their release.

Baeck ended up in the Theresienstadt Concentration camp, where by day the rabbi over 50 years old pulled a garbage wagon like a mule. At night Rabbi Baeck organized courses in western philosophy, teaching from memory, but surrounded by filth, the great philosophers: nobility amidst horror and indignity. Baeck had refused to leave Germany, though he saved many others. When I think of true religion, I think of Leo Baeck. During the Nazi horror, Baeck upheld the dignity of all human beings. Dr. Leo Baeck is my model of what it means to live the truly religious life.

What enabled Baeck’s religiosity amidst overwhelming human degradation?

Immediately after the war, suffering in its shadow, Rabbi Baeck wrote about Theresienstadt Concentration Camp: each [prisoner] had received his transport number. That was now his characteristic feature, was the first and most important sign of his existence. It officially ousted his name and it threatened inwardly to oust his self. That was the mental fight everyone had to keep up, to see in himself and in his fellow man not only a transport number. It was the fight for the name, one's own and the other's; the fight for individuality, the secret being, one's own and the other's. Much, perhaps everything, depended on whether one stood this test, that the individual in one remained alive as an individual and continued to recognize the individual in the other." (Days of Sorrow and Pain, Baker, p. 287)

The Nazis attempted to remove our human dignity, because to recognize the individual humanity in another person sustains her very life.

On April 9th, 1945 after a trumped up trial, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and 5 others involved in the conspiracies to kill Adolf Hitler were executed. Bonhoeffer risked everything for 12 years, through four attempts to kill Hitler, founding and leading a seminary opposing Hitler, calling his church to choose between their God and the Nazi state. Bonhoeffer heroically defended the dignity of all humans: 2 Like Baeck, Bonhoeffer wrote in the shadow of Nazi suffering: Transcendence is not the infinite, unattainable tasks, but the neighbour within reach in any given situation. God in human form! (Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945, Ferdinand Schlingenziepen, pp. 353-4)

Like Rabbi Baeck, Rev. Bonhoeffer lived his life and theology as an integrated whole, absolutely devoted to decision and action. Reading his biography I discovered the heroic activities he led to save Jews against insurmountable odds.

Pastor Andre Trocme, in Le Chambon Sur Lignon, France, imported Jews to his town in order to save them. He opposed the Vichy French Nazi government every step of the way. They imported Jews since they had few in town, and saved thousands. When one person of his life-saving cohort was interviewed, he said: Things had to be done, that's all, and we happened to be there to do them. You must understand that it was the most natural thing in the world to help these people."

My friends: such righteousness defines religion. In every instance: true religion begins with personal encounter, looking the other in the eyes. True religion preserves the dignity of the other. Put differently: You don’t reason from religion to goodness. Goodness begets religion. Knowing the good, we ultimately make sense out of why some choose life for others, choose to do what is good and right, even if it means Nazi Concentration camps or the hangman's noose for themselves.

The power within authentic personal encounter generates goodness. It is seeing your own pain reflected in the eyes of another. It is empathizing with the heroes on United Airlines flight 93 over Shanksville, Pennsylvania who determined their manner of death trying to save themselves and others, who made ultimate sacrifices for goodness, that are the truly religious, even if they cannot tell us why they chose what they did. To be religious is not debates over where we display the Ten Commandments, it's whether we observe the Ten Commandments. Religious is not praying in school; it’s making sure students are fed so they gain the dignity of education. whether a man hears a woman's voice, as in Israel today; it's whether a man treats that woman with dignity. We need to recognize true religiosity, and call it by name, and stop calling those people RELIGIOUS who permit children to be abused, call for the murder of Arabs, or who blow up other people in God's name. Religious people see God within every human being, and grant dignity to God's image in humanity.

Anthropologists Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske report universal, cross-cultural moral categories. Experiments have been done that demonstrate innate human revulsion at 3 harming an innocent person. To harm someone directly, you must overcome that revulsion. Current Harvard psychological research demonstrates that visual connection to victims, seeing a real person, raises our moral response to them.

In November 1938, 14 year old Erich Billig illegally crossed the river into Switzerland from the Austrian border, and was allowed to stay by a quiet Swiss official named Paul Gruninger, the Chief of Police in St. Gallen. Gruninger lost his position and never worked again as a result of this act of kindness. The man who dismissed Gruninger, who enforced the rules of immigration into Switzerland, Heinrich Rothman, when himself confronted by real people at a border, two adults with 2 cute children, could not bring himself to deport them. Nonetheless Rothman hypocritically expelled and ruined the life of Paul Gruninger for not deporting Erich Billig. (Beautiful Souls, Eyal Press, Farrar Strauss Geroux 2012, p. 29)

From this we learn 2 things: it is easier to harm an innocent person if 1) someone else above you will accept responsibility, and 2) if you do not have to face the victim directly.

Why does the Torah command us non-specifically, "Do what is good and right in the eyes of the Lord?" To enable us to preserve human dignity, even acting in opposition to a nation's law, as did Baeck, Bonhoeffer, Trocme, and Gruninger. All of them directly worked with the people they saved. True religion preserves the dignity of every human being.

A rabbi who knew and lived this, who exemplified dignity in every action everyday was ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Aryeh Levine of Jerusalem. The first Chief Rabbi of Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook, could find no one to visit prisoners in the British prison at Latrun. These were real criminals, not Jewish revolutionaries. The British wanted a commitment every Shabbat and holy day from a rabbi. Rabbi Kook asked, knowing that Reb Aryeh would not turn him down, and he was not disappointed.

But that was the least of it. Every Friday Reb Aryeh visited lepers in Israel, Arabs and Jews were in the colony together, in squalid circumstances. No one had visited in decades. Reb Aryeh started going regularly. Reb Aryeh accompanied the Jewish insurrectionists, mostly secular, who were hung by the British, ministering to them and their families at their last moments. Even on Shabbat he took the names of prisoners who wanted to be remembered to their families, memorized the names, and walked all over Jerusalem to bring the greetings that very day, even working late into the night.

And why do I mention this at all? Because truly you are wonderful people. I see you involved in one another's lives in so many ways: bringing food to homes when someone is

4 sick, attending shiva services for people; helping out getting people medical care; trying to get jobs for those out of work.

But we live in a country in which evil is perpetrated anonymously. Why do you think that during the Bush presidency the press could not print pictures of soldiers' caskets returning from Iraq? Because the Bush administration knew full well the nightly pictures of young soldiers returning home in body bags from Vietnam fed the movement against the Vietnam war. The heart feels what the eyes see.

What do Americans think of the outsourcing of military imprisonment and torture, rendering, to secret bases outside of the United States? What do we do with those prisoners who are yet to be tried in Guantanamo, like Mohammed Jawad? People say to me: well, if it protects us, why not? And I say, "But some of those people are innocent of any crime, caught up in the swirl of arrests, like Jawad." And then I hear in reply about collateral damage. Well, I wonder what Eric Billig and Paul Gruninger: one whose life was saved and the other whose life was ruined, think of the idea of collateral damage? Collateral damage means some lives don't matter, equivalent to the garbage Rabbi Baeck hauled away. What of Andre and Magda Trocme, who put their lives on the line to save Jews they never met, whom they invited to their town, whom they saved simply to preserve their own dignity and the dignity of human beings. Our military is killing people anonymously with drones, controlled from outposts in Colorado and Florida according to the newspapers, without any possible face-to-face contact. I do not oppose using drones. I fear the moral consequences to us of the increasing number of areas in which we depersonalize real people. Friends: the military kills in our names, and we have removed ourselves. Most of us never served. We waged war without raising our taxes. There are no consequences for the normal middle class household when our government is out there killing in our name. So we don't care. It's just wrong. But more than that: it’s dangerous.

You know, if physically we are what we eat, then morally we are what we do. Think what you like; preach what may. Morality is the sum of our actions.

Reb Aryeh Levine did everything face to face. Day and night, his bright smile brought joy in person to the downtrodden and persecuted. By contrast: We have Facebook. Stephen Marche wrote, "Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society…” (The Atlantic, Is Facebook Making Us Lonely, May 2012, p. 60ff.)

5 We humans are relentlessly messy creatures. Much of life is undignified. Bodily functions and fluids abound. Our natural state is hungry to fill multiple appetites we may not even be willing to admit we possess and often refuse to discuss. We maneuver to protect ourselves from shame and embarrassment, guilt and suffering of all sorts. We may not admit the truth to our best friends, or even, most sadly, to ourselves. And yet, God commands us to preserve the dignity of every human being, God’s own image. Dignity helps us preserve life others and our own. Reb Aryeh Levine, like Magda and Rev. Andre Trocme; like Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rabbi Leo Baeck, the AUTHENTICALLY RELIGIOUS PEOPLE realized in the midst of humanity's great degradation, that to be truly human you must not avert your eyes but look into the soul-suffering of the other. So much today encourages us to turn our eyes away.

My friends: the people you are sitting next to are human beings: frightened to be known, just like you; insecure, just like you; fearful of dying, just like you. Seventy years ago an entire government set out to destroy us. One of the means of murder was to rob us of our dignity. Today, through indifference, we are doing it to ourselves. Our increasing anonymity robs us of our innate human dignity.

As Rabbi Baeck wrote after Theresienstadt: Much, perhaps everything, depended on whether one stood this test: that the individual in one remained alive as an individual and continued to recognize the individual in the other.

Friends: BE TRULY RELIGIOUS. Take the risk. See the other; see your same pain in their eyes. Our lives are not even endangered. We can do this! Grant the dignity of truly seeing the other, the image of God, in each and every human encounter. You will truly save a human soul, the image of God in the world. More than that: you will save yourself from degradation of your spirit, and lift yourself up to the noble creature God intended you to be.