Day 5 - Auschwitz

May 29, 2008
כ"ד אייר תשס"ח

Of all the days in our itinerary, this is the one that I dread the most: Auschwitz. I arrive not knowing what to expect of my emotions. What will I feel? Will I cry? Scream? Stand silently? And why the dread? Isn’t my visit a living testimony to the failure of Hitler, his accomplices, his “students,” and his bystanders?

The visit to Auschwitz is divided into four parts:

A tour of Auschwitz I – the forced labor camp initially used for political prisoners. This portion of the tour must be led by a Polish tour guide certified by the Auschwitz governing body.

Lunch.

A tour of Auschwitz II – Birkenau – the death camp where over 1,000,000 Jews were ruthlessly and methodically exterminated.

A Memorial Ceremony – put together by members of our group.

As our bus pulls up to the “Visitor’s Center,” I am stunned by the number of tour buses and cars that fill the lot. While it just sounds wrong, the fact is that Auschwitz is filled today. There are a few “tour” groups, a Jewish youth group from South America, and a lot of Catholic Poles. On this day, a prominent Catholic Cleric, Father Maximilian Kolbe, a martyr, is being sainted. Kolbe was first brought to Auschwitz because he helped hide and clothe 2,000 Jews in his friary. When another man was selected to be shot, along with nine others, as reprisal for one man trying to escape, Father Kolbe volunteered himself in place of the man and was promptly murdered by the Nazis. As a Jew and as a Jewish educator, I struggled, and will continue to struggle with the question of the differing narratives of the Shoah. There were, I am told, many clerics within the Church who acted like Kolbe and many who hid and saved Jews. We don’t hear those narratives often enough. And yet, I cannot help but also ask about the narrative of the silence, complicity and in many cases the outright anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church during the Shoah.




Just outside the main entrance to the visitor’s center at Auschwitz I, there are several small “fast food” stands or huts. You can buy hamburgers, pizza, ice cream, and flowers. There are the equivalent of “souvenir stands” selling books and photos and God only knows what else. There are those in the world who accuse the Jews, us, of exploiting the Shoah, of creating a Holocaust Industry. I can tell you that there is a THRIVING Holocaust industry in Poland, but it is not the Jews that are involved.






From the women who gets her 60 zloty for “protecting” the Jewish cemetery, to the guy with the “Ghetto Souvenir” stand at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (I am not making this up and the photo that will be posted on the blog is entirely authentic) to our guide, “Tomasz,” who gets paid for what I have no idea, to the “fast food” stands, and the tour bus companies, and the hotels that host the March of the Living groups all the while Poles complain that we see only the Shoah sites and nothing else, to the hotels that proudly advertise “Auschwitz” tours, everyone is making a personal Zloty from the mass murder and attempted eradication of European Jewry.

I am bothered by the way life just goes on here in Poland. As Warsaw was rebuilt from its ashes, monuments, small and large, were erected to leave some historical record of the events surrounding the ghetto-ization, deportation, and destruction of Polish Jewry. And around these monuments, a city was rebuilt, buildings added, parks established. How long did it take, I wonder, for the citizens of Warsaw to become desensitized to everything, the plaques, the monuments, the memorials, enough that they would walk their dogs past and not notice, or sit and talk with friends, or picnic in Treblinka, or to nap in the grass next to one of the mass latrines at

Auschwitz – Birkenau, where the “lucky few “ who were not sent directly to extermination and cremation, were worked to death through forced labor, disease and starvation? How does such a thing happen? Is it callousness? Anti-Semitism? Hatred? Or the defense mechanism needed to get by when you choose to live in the traffic pattern or Auschwitz or Warsaw or Krakow or Kielce or Tykocin or…or…or…or?




Robert points out that there is something oddly disturbing about the speech pattern of our guide. It is clipped, precise, cold, and lacks any use of the work “the.” It sounds something like this: “Prisoners arrive, are taken to register, are given uniforms. Zey are zen taken to barrack. Zey sleep on floor, on straw, have five toilets for hundredz of people.” This is just a small sample. The Polish-English sounds frighteningly German. It is even more disconcerting when she deals with numbers. She is a somewhat sympathetic figure who shares with us her personal family story which included a family member, an uncle I believe, who was killed at Auschwitz I. As is often the case in our classes and on this trip there is too much to do and not enough time. We rush through Auschwitz I, through the barracks, the “medical ward,” to the death wall where the Polish clerics are just finishing celebrating their service.

Our next stop is personally the most difficult of all: the original, experimental Gas Chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz I. Our Polish guide invites us to enter. That’s right – she invites us to voluntarily enter the prototype Gas Chamber. My feet are suddenly leaden. I DO NOT want to enter. Seeing it from the outside is enough. The limitations of human understanding are such that I cannot comprehend the terror a person would surely have experienced at the moment they realized that rather than a shower, they were to be gassed to death. And since I know that I cannot comprehend that terror, standing inside will not add to my understanding. I will not feel what they felt. I want to make a small protest, to refrain from entering. But in the end, I am a good boy and I force myself to acquiesce to the request.

I am cold. Standing inside the Gas Chamber, our Polish Guide, with her clipped, German accented English, describes the process of what happened here, again never using the word “the.” From the cold room of the gassing we move to the reconstructed crematorium where we are once again given a precise description of how things worked. And with each passing moment, the inner cold is balanced by burning hot anger. I remind myself that each Jewish step I take here is witness to the Nazi failure. But all I really want is…out.



Fortunately, we finish our time at Auschwitz I. We walk past the “book store” and the “coffee shop” and out of the gates of the camp. Lunch Time. It is a little bizarre to move so quickly from forced labor and starvation to LUNCH but that is exactly what we do. There are lots of groups picnicking just outside the fences of Auschwitz I: Polish families with children about Amalya’s age (6), a Jewish youth group from Uruguay, where the boys, when they aren’t’ focusing on the girls, are running around with Israeli flags on their backs like capes, etc. Most members of our group choose to sit outside. I cannot. I go back to the bus…

The bus. It is hot inside and I shvitz up a storm, but I cannot picnic here. In my mind, I decide that the bus is like a mikvah – a ritual bath. It is a sealed space of purity in this place that is inherently impure. And I start to wonder: “If I am this angry now, how will I feel at Birkenau?” It doesn’t take long to find out as we quickly end lunch and drive the three kilometers from the “Political Prisoner Camp” of Auschwitz I to the Death Camp of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. We pull up to the entrance, exactly as it stood some sixty years ago, right where the trains would pull in and the selection would happen. Once again, my body turns cold, freezing cold. Any happiness left in my body is gone. I wonder if J.K. Rowling visited here, experienced this feeling, and then create the Dementor characters, the guardians of Azkhaban prison, for this is a soul-less, joy-less place.

We walk through the gates and stand on the tracks that brought hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths and then quickly make our way to the few remaining dormitory shacks left standing. Barns really, they are, in and of themselves, terrifying places. As we walk, I hear a train in the distance. At first, I think I am imagining the sound, that perhaps my mind is just playing tricks on me. But it is not and my heart skips a beat. My eyes meet those of one of my classmates. Her look asks, “Am I really hearing trains?” And my look back says yes. Her eyes well up with tears. I give a reassuring look as if to say “Remember, we are still here. We won.”

It is simply impossible to grasp the enormity of the Death Camp that is Birkenau. Since at any given time there were 100,000 people kept alive to keep the camp running, there were huge numbers of these barn-like dormitories where, on both the men’s and women’s sides, there were triple bunk beds. The men’s buildings were board-and-batten construction while the women’s buildings were made of brick, which gave no more protection from the elements than did the board-and-batten. Here we see a group of smiling German tourists looking for someone to take a smiling photo and the guy in my photo, “Napping at Auschwitz”. Only a few of the male barns remain intact. Of all the rest of the buildings, only the chimney stacks remain, standing in silence, the last remnants of the huge machine that was the “living section” of Birkenau. We walk down the tracks from the “live” section to the area of the Gas Chambers and crematoria, where most arrivals were immediately sent. It is eerily silent. Only the ruins of the crematoria remain along with a massive memorial to the victims of Birkenau. We conclude our visit with stops at two euphemistically named areas: Canada and the Sauna.

Canada, as it was called, was the area where property looted from the Jews was kept and sorted. There is virtually nothing left of the storehouses. The Sauna, however, was entirely reconstructed. At this complex, these who were to live for at least a little while were registered, tattooed, de-loused, showered off and uniformed. One of our classmates notes that when we entered, we walked on a raised plexi-glass surface rather than on the concrete floor as if to say “You do not tread on the place where the victims walked.” It reinforced, as she noted, the fact that we could walk through the same Sauna, but we could never fully fathom the experience, which is the case, of course. We conduct our ceremony in the Sauna in front of a wall of photographs taken from the pockets of victims and then we make our way out of Birkenau.

Waiting to board the bus, I watch an old woman, ninety years old at minimum, ride by us, by Auschwitz II – Birkenau, on her bicycle either oblivious to the death camp to her right or simply desensitized to it. Many say we cannot judge people who lived in this area at this time, that we cannot understand what the war was like, and, thus, the choices they faced. And yet, I wondered what this woman did sixty plus years ago:

Did she go for a daily bike ride past the “Ir ha-Harega” - "The City of Death" as Bialik once wrote about Kishinev after the Pogrom – during the Shoah?

And if she did, did she notice the stench of death emanating from the typhus-filled mass latrines or the smell of roasting flesh coming from the crematoria?

Is it really possible that she could not have noticed?

And if she did notice, what did she think:

Better them than me?

Good bye and good riddance?

What a shame but what can I do?

I will never know, but the image of the oblivious old woman riding her bike past Birkenau will forever be seared into my memory as will the stark, standing chimneys, silent testimonials to evil incarnate, to negligent disregard for life, for humanity, to the silent bystander and to the Jewish worlds destroyed by Hitler, the Nazis, and their sympathizers.

Leaving

I am overwhelmed.

In just two hours, the van will be here to pick us up.

Very soon, I will be living the words of Yehuda Halevi:

אני במערב ולבי במזרח

I cannot describe the depth of joy I feel that we had this year here in Israel nor the depth of sadness, sorrow, I feel as we prepare to leave.

To be in this land, to feel the kedushah, to be the majority, to aspire to a life of kedushah in eretz kodshenu, to feel whole, integrated, Shalem, is life.

To all those who made this such an incredible year for Becca, Elan, Mira, Amalya and Me, all I can say is thank you.

We will miss you and look forward to returning very soon, והמבין יבין .

There is so much more to write but I cannot, not now. Maybe after the kids are at camp.



תם ולא לשלם!

Poland Journal - Day 4 - Krakow

My apologies for the long break in completing my Poland entries. I needed to be away from the material for a while as it was anger inducing. Thanks for your patience.

May 28, 2008
כ"ג אייר תשס"ח

We spend most of the day on the bus on the way to Krakow. There, we are to visit the old Jewish quarter and several old, restored synagogues. The Jewish community of Krakow today numbers some 200 souls. In the months before the Shoah, there were some 60,000 Jews in Krakow. There is nostalgia here for the Jews. It appears in the Hebrew and Yiddish signage all around the Kazmierz area – the historic Jewish section of town. In all honesty, it feels a bit like what the Jewish Quarter of the Poland exhibit at Epcot would feel like if it existed.

Prior to our arrival, we stop in Kielce. Kielce is famous for nothing Jewishly except for the fact that it is the one place where a pogrom took place AFTER the end of the Shoah and the end of World War II. That’s right – after virtually all of Polish Jewry was annihilated, while the world just started to grasp the enormity of the final solution, the residents of Kielce felt it necessary to murder forty or more Jews based on a classic anti-Semitic canard – the blood libel.

Before arriving in Krakow, we visit another Jewish cemetery desecrated by the Nazis and restored as a memorial monument. An old Polish woman, at least eighty years of age, wearing a crucifix, comes to meet us. The privilege of paying respects to desecrated Jews graves cost our group 60 zloty or about $30. The “fee” supposedly goes to maintain the site, but the way cash payment is made betrays any sense of “good” as it is palmed from our polish docent, “Tomasz” to the woman. Profiteering. I am nauseous.

The old city of Krakow is beautiful and for a short time, I can imagine myself returning to this quaint but cosmopolitan place, until we reach the craft market. On the one hand, the market looks like just about any other fold art festival: wood carvings, jewelry, etc. There is, however, one particular art form specific to this region: the Jew Doll. Many stalls sell them: wood carved Hasidim, they look like they could have walked here from Anatevka. Some smile and some frown. There are mostly male figurines but there are also a few females. Some play the violin while others hold pitchforks and sport pointed ears designed to look like the devil. They all, however, share one feature in common: long, very long, prominent Jewish noses. But if the noses and the pitchforks aren’t disturbing enough, they pale in comparison to the unique feature of the most common Jew Dolls throughout the market: the ones that clutch large gold coins close to their hearts. Nostalgia for the old days or blatant anti-Semitism? You will have to decide for yourselves. As for me, well, any thoughts I might have harbored about returning to visit beautiful Krakow vaporize the minute I lay my eyes on my first Jew Doll with the large nose viciously protecting his heart made of a gold coin.

Poland Journal - Day III - Death Camps

May 27, 2008
כ"ב אייר תשס"ח

I have been dreading this day in particular: A day of dead cities, death forests, and death camps. Our first stop: the Umschlagplatz – the gathering point for the deportation of the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. It sits surrounded by green trees and office buildings. Like so many places of Holocaust significance, this one is in an urban area that is modern and banal. We quickly board the bus and travel back in time to a shtetl.

We arrive at Tykocin. A former shtetl, half the town is Polish Catholic, dominated by the Cathedral. The other half of the town was the Jewish shtetl dominated by the Tykocin Shul built in the mid-1600’s. The surrounding buildings sit virtually unchanged from the time of the establishment of the shul and just as they did in the 1930’s: whitewashed walls, terra cotta roofs, cobblestone streets. The television satellite dishes do betray the museum like feel of the shtetl. Their presence announces that all did not stop in Tykocin. In fact, there are new residents in these old buildings – none of them Jews.

We enter the cavernous synagogue of Tykocin. This was a shul built as a statement of importance, as if to say in 1652, “We made it!” Today, the shul is a museum. It is restored with funding from the Lauder Foundation and others and it is possible to sense what the grandeur of the place was. We look at the photos of the Jewish residents no longer among the living. The megillat Esther is open to Chapter 9 where Esther and Mordechai and the Jews of Persia fight back and specifically, to the portion where Haman and his ten sons are hanged from the gallows prepared for Mordechai. Haim, our leader, calls me up to the bimah, along with Ilyse, and our friends shower us with candy in honor of our respective sons’ bnai mitzvah. It is our “Am Yisrael Chai” moment: Look you bystanders! You failed! We are still here.”

We leave the shul and there are a few residents sitting on the stoops looking at us with looks of curiosity. Most of them are rather elderly – ninety if they are a day. They too suffered during World War II. I “should” feel some modicum of sympathy for them. But I do not. I cannot imagine their narrative and, frankly, I am not interested. I want to approach them and ask:

Did you know the Jews that lived here in 1939?

Were you friends with them?

How long did you wait to move into their homes after they disappeared?

A day?
A week?
A month?

Did you even wonder where they went or what happened to them?

Tykocin, you see, gives new meaning to the phrase “Here today. Gone Tomorrow.” Soon after the Nazis conquered Poland, they came to Tykocin. The 2,500 Jewish residence of the town were called to assemble in the evening, were marched 7 kilometers to the forest of Pochova, and murdered en mass, shot into mass graves. Imagine going to sleep one night with 2,500 Jewish neighbors and waking up the next day with half the town missing. So, what do you do, you 90 year old woman giving me the dirty looks? You move into a now formerly Jewish home…

We finish our visit to the shtetl. Time for lunch. By the waters of Tykocin we are to eat. “A beautiful spot,” we are told. One of our colleagues is uncomfortable: “Maybe they made the Jews march across the bridge on the way to their deaths. It freaks me out. Can we eat somewhere else?” So instead, we eat in the nicely manicured town square, right in front of the Big Church, where we are promptly told that all of the men of the town were gathered by the Nazis and put to work in forced labor groups until the Jews were separated out and sent to the slaughter. In places like this, I cannot imagine that there is any spot we can sit and eat that isn’t shaded by the shadow of the Angel of Death or poisoned by the tumat met – the impurity of the dead – that pervades this part of Europe. As we leave Tykocin, I start to notice a vague familiarity in the small towns we drive through. It bothers me but I don’t pay much attention.

We drive seven kilometers through winding roads into the middle of the Polish forest of Pochova. Tall, thin pines and a few birch trees line the road. I am more uncomfortable than ever here in this forest; the winding roads feel even more familiar. I feel like I know them like the back of my hand. We walk the last few meters to our destination: the final resting place of the Jews of Tykocin – three pits in the middle of the forest. I am frozen. Disbelief. Anger. I wonder if this is how incomprehensibility feels. We hold a brief memorial ceremony. Our candles join those of the Israeli Police and other groups that were here the day before holding their own memorial ceremonies and the wreaths of the March of the Living groups that preceded us by a few weeks. We walk back through the forest to our bus and proceed to our next stop: The Death Camp of Treblinka.

Notorious for its relatively short life and great success in exterminating Polish Jewry, Treblinka was essentially dismantled by the Nazis after its purpose was fulfilled. There is virtually nothing of the Death Camp left, except for the “Roasting Pits” where the hundreds of thousands of bodies were burned. Since none of the buildings remain, there is just an enormous field left, cut into the Pine and Birch forest. A gigantic Soviet Era – or at least Eastern European – style monument dominates the site. Throughout the area are 17,000 stones, many bearing the names of communities wiped out by the Nazis. Only one stone has the name of a person on it, that of Dr. Janusz Korczak, hero to Poles and Jews alike. Again, the familiarity of the place overwhelms me, as does the enormity of the number of Jews murdered here.

Danny, an art educator and installation artist, shares his opinion, his distaste actually, for the monument. In his opinion, the mysterious horror of the place would have been best preserved by leaving the parameters of the camp empty. And then, at that moment, all the stones, the monument, disappear for me and I can see the answer. It is a moment similar to that in “Searching for Bobby Fisher” when Ben Kingsley, in an attempt teach his protégé to see what is not yet there, slams all the chess pieces of the board. “Can you see it now?” he asks. Silence reigns until the boy sees it. And now I see it to and recognize the familiarity that is haunting me. The winding roads through pine and birch forests, the smell of the pine needles and the fallen leaves, the sounds of the birds, the winding road that opens to an enormous field: This could just as easily be Conover, Wisconsin, my summer home for twenty years, Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, as it is the Pochova forest. This could just as easily be a summer camp, a place of life for Jewish children as it is a place of hatred, murder, collective annihilation.

I can see it: to the left is the perfect spot for a chadar ochel, a dining hall; to the right, a welcome center and business office. Over there, on the other side of the field, I spy the place where I would put a circle of boy’s cabins and a circle of girls cabins. There is a massive weeping willow just off the center of the main field. There, I would put benches for people to sit and talk, to enjoy the shade of the enormous tree – the gathering place for friends. I am sick to my stomach. Fury fills my every muscle, bone, and nerve. Can a place that looks like this really be used either for good or evil? Can the difference between a summer camp and a death camp be the intentionality of the leader and his followers? Leaving Treblinka does not relieve the anger, for driving through the little towns of rural Poland looks just like driving through the little towns of rural Northern Wisconsin: Wittenberg, Antigo, etc. The disconcerting nature of the similarity is just too much for me.

Like rural Wisconsin, there are rolling hills here, subdivided into farms. Often, the fields are separated by small patches of woods. The only difference is that in central Wisconsin, I don’t ask myself if Jews were rounded up and shot en-mass in these small wooden patches.

We return to Warsaw, where we will have a wonderful visit at the home of our classmate, Helise. On the way to her apartment, we walk through downtown and a man, somewhat drunk, calls us over. We stop. He pulls up his paunch, which hangs over his belt, and gestures at the belt where he proudly wears a Swastika. Seventy-two hours in Poland and I feel like someone is finally honest with us. He yells “Heil Hitler” and we just walk away.

Is there a renaissance of Jewish life in Poland or is it a patient taking its last breaths? I don’t know. What I do know, with great certainty, is that I don’t plan to stick around long enough to find out.

Poland Journal - Day 2- Warsaw

May 26, 2008
כ"א אייר תשס"ח

Monday: A day of anger; a day of contrasts. We visit the “active” Jewish sites: The Nozick synagogue (restored) where the March of the Living takes over when it comes to visit; the Lauder School which our friend Helise established; and the “Youth Lounge” for lack of a better term. These are the places that are “alive.”

And…

We visit the places that are dead…

The Warsaw Ghetto

A last remaining fragments of the Ghetto Wall

The Jewish Cemetery of Warsaw

A Monument to the Ghetto Uprising and The Holocaust Center

It is at the Holocaust Center that the anger, already brewing in anticipation of the trip, really bubbles to the surface. The story of the Warsaw Ghetto is terrifying and disturbing and the Center tells the story in words, in still photos, and in archival film footage. Here is what the Shoah is or was. There is no whitewashing here.

In many, if not most educational settings today, we are afraid that pictures of the Shoah will frighten or disturb and so we do not show them. The turn to personal testimonies of survivors as the central way to teach the Shoah is crucial. They bear witness to this incomprehensible tragedy and murder and will do so long after those who suffered but survived are gone. The personal testimony captures the experience of the individual, of the one. To begin to grasp the enormity, the collective suffering, murder and death of six million Jews, one must, at the right age, see these pictures and films. They ARE grotesque. They ARE horrifying. And…They must be seen in order to try and conceive the inconceivable.

My blood boils. The feeling of impurity, the poison of the place, grows stronger and stronger.

Poland Day 1 - Arrival

May 25, 2008
כ אייר תשס"ח

I don’t want to be awake at this hour. In fact, I don’t want to be going to my destination at all. It is 1:45 am I am overtired and I don’t want to go. But I am going because that is what we do. Baruch and I stand on the corner waiting for our Nesher to pick us up. Our professor calls and says the driver doesn't see us. "Look for the two Jews standing on the corner at the stoplight with the suitcases," I reply...

I wake up with a start as the plane does not really touch down in Warsaw as much as pounds down on the tarmac at Frederick Chopin International Airport. Brand new, or very recently renovated, Chopin is not a warm place – it is grey and glass and cold – or perhaps that is just how I feel on this morning. Despite my reluctance, we are off to Warsaw.

I have not seen a park like this in a very long time. Everything is so green and lush, with a lot of old growth. Around a small, man-made lake, people sit politely, waiting for a concert of piano pieces by Chopin. Perhaps I would feel differently were I not wearing a kippah, but I feel so very out of place, as though the entire park is looking at the back of my head trying to figure out what in the world I am doing there…what we are doing there.

At some point, we check into our hotel and then go to dinner at a restaurant that defrosts the kosher food sent for us from Israel. Walking back through downtown Warsaw, I again feel very self-conscious. For years, I refrained from wearing my kippah in Europe. On this trip, however, I insist on wearing it sans baseball cap, proudly and openly. In any event, I look at the grim faces looking at us. I don’t feel so safe outside, but the kippah stays on. Some members of our group choose to go out to pubs. I just want to get back to the room. My pace gets faster as I walk through the pedestrian tunnel.

I enter the hotel and suddenly feel safe. The lobby is filled with police officers dressed in light blue shirts and dark blue pants like police officers from anywhere in the world. These police officers, however, speak Hebrew. They are mishteret Yisrael – the Israeli Police – here on a memorial mission just as we are. I am among my own. I am not powerless. I am safe.

Parashat Shlah Lekha 2008

Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of attending the wedding of our dear friend, Rabbi Aaron Alexander and his fiancé, Peninah Podwol. I also had the privilege of standing under the chuppah with Peninah’s father, also a rabbi, and mother, and participating in the ceremony. With friends and family beaming with joy, the couple made their way down the stairs of the outdoor patio at the American Jewish University just before the sun started its descent. If the spot where the Milken School sits were replaced with the Temple Mount, this could just as easily been the Maiersdorf Plaza at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

It is a rarity for me to co-officiate at a wedding and I usually only do so at the weddings of people that I know well. Under the chuppah, you are privy to the entire ritual, to the looks of the bride and groom, to have the opportunity to share thoughts, hopes, prayers, and advice at the very moment boyfriend and girlfriend, fiancée and affianced, become chattan and kallah – bride and groom. Since it was Sunday, I based my remarks on this week’s parashah, Shlah Lekha. Since I almost never write down my remarks at a wedding so I can spend the time looking directly into the eyes of the bride and groom, here is a summary, to the best of my recollection, of my words to Aaron and Peninah:

“You know that I like to think and speak in threes (chuckles from the Ramah Darom chevre present) and so I am going to focus on two words at the beginning of the parashah and then one paragraph at the end. Our parashah opens with the story of the m’raglim – the spies – that Moshe sends to check out the land of Israel. Aaron, we first met because while I thought I was on a recruitment mission to the University of Florida, I think your mother, Linda, had me sent on a spy mission to make sure that you were well. Peninah, when I met Aaron at the Swamp at UF, I knew immediately that he would be a fantastic madrich (counselor). I didn’t know that he would become a talmid (student), a chaver (a dear friend), a teacher, a confidant, and a brother.

Aaron, it is because of another word in the parashah that I know Peninah’s family. Moshe instructs the spies to go and check out the land. Do they live in wooded areas or barren lands? Do they reside in fortresses or in machanayim, which shares the same root as machaneh, which of course, as most of us know, means camp? In fact, fifteen years ago, one of my first recruitment trips for Camp Ramah in Wisconsin was to the South suburbs of Chicago, where I met Peninah’s father at the home of Sarah Graff. So in a sense, I know both of you because of the camps Ramah.

Peninah, Aaron, I want to turn to the end of our parashah because there is crucial advice for you as you begin your married life together. Here, we read the paragraph that tells us of the mitzvah of tzitzit, the command to place fringes on the corners of all four cornered garments. The purpose of tzitzit, we are taught, is to remind us, to remind us of the Commandments and to do them, to remember them, and to refrain from pursuing those things that draw our attention away from our fidelity to our covenanted relationship with God.

Today, Aaron and Peninah, you place rings on your fingers, wedding rings, which serve a similar purpose to tzitzit. They are the outward expression of an internal fidelity, a commitment to one another that you are more important, unique, kadosh, than any other human relationship in the world; that you make promises to one another, commitments. You will both be very successful in your careers. You will be pursued by others who want you to give just one more class, one more lecture, to attend just one more meeting for the good of the Jewish people. And because you are both so committed to the Avodat Kodesh – the Sacred Work – that you do, you too will want to give just one more class, one more lecture, touch one more set of lives. You will pursue those interests with gusto. These rings remind you that before you can be excellent servants of the community and the Kadosh Baruch Hu, you must be excellent partners to one another. Remember that whenever you look at the wedding rings on your fingers.

Aaron, Peninah, Rebecca and I wish you unlimited happiness in this ultimate relationship and look forward to decades of continued friendship. Mazal Tov!”

After reciting the Sheva Berachot, together with Matthew Alexander who has an incredible voice, the glass was broken, a cheer went up and the new husband and wife were escorted to a few minutes of privacy. When they emerged at the reception, the dancing went on for a very long time and it was wonderful to see so many people surrounding the chattan and kallah in joy and love.

Mazal Tov!

Shabbat Shalom!

Notes:

To those coming to Israel on Ramah Israel Seminar, I look forward to seeing you very soon. If you are coming from Poland, I will see you at the Hava and not at the airport. If you are coming the day after on the regular Seminar, I will see you at the group area at Ben Gurion! I can’t wait to welcome you to מדינת ישראל !

Mazal Tov to our friend Marc Silberstein on his recent engagement!

Mazal Tov to our friend Anna Stern on her recent engagement!

Mazal Tov to Vicki and Jason on their pending move to Chattanooga, TN (which is about 3 hours closer to us in Atlanta)!

Yasher Koah to my colleagues at the Melton Senior Educator Program on the completion of the Program.

Starting on Motzei Shabbat, I will be posting journal entries from my recent trip to Poland and Hungary both to the google group and to my blog at www.hamirpesetsheli.blogspot.com . The blog site will include photos from the trip. Please note that this was an intense and difficult trip for me and the entries will communicate that very clearly.