From Gedalyah to Gary to Menachem,
Yonina & Tzeira
Rosh Hashanah First Day
September 30th, 2000
Introduction
I grew up answering to “Gary.” My brother is “Bruce”.
He married a “Susan”. I married a “Ruby”.
My parent’s names are “Henry” and “Clara”.
Yet my brother’s children are named “Yael Nechama” and “Avi
Binyamin”. Our children are “Menachem Yosef”, “Yonina
Rahel”, and “Tzeira Adina”. They were perplexed
when first asked, “What’s your English name?” Indignantly
they answered, “This is my name.” That’s
the answer I wanted them to give. My brother and sister-in-law,
my wife and I all have given English names.
How did I do this to our children?
Why did I do this to them?
The “how” is easy to answer. Our
three children and my niece and nephew are named after deceased
family members. That is no mystery. But I have never written a
composition explaining “why” I did
it. This Rosh HaShanah, I would like to share that with you, besides
for them. But there is truly a deeper issue in the question and
the answer.
I
Let me begin by placing my family’s personal story in a
much broader context. My timeline starts about 120 years ago, beginning
in the little shtetl of Bielsk, in northeastern Poland. There lived
my namesake, Gedalyah Cohen, whose picture I mentioned in last
year’s sermon. With a longer and darker beard and a long
black coat, we would be identical. I am named after him, for I
am Gedalyah, not only Gary. That Gedalyah could never be anything
other than a Polish Jew. Everything about him
bore testimony to who he was. If he had been asked, “Who
are you?” in heavily accented Yiddish he would have answered, “Ich
bin a Yid.” Gedalyah’s daughter was my grandmother
Anna, who married Abraham Liebhoff, both having immigrated here
at the turn of the century. My grandmother’s Hebrew name
was Nechama. Somewhere, somehow, she acquired her English name.
She, also, could never have been mistaken for anyone other than
an Eastern European Jew. Her appearance bespoke
her Polish origins. She spoke a beautiful Yiddish and a “tsbrokkena
Anglish”. She knew the New York City subway by heart, but
only learned to sign her name in English in 1969, so to get her
passport to visit me in Israel. She was a faithful representative
of the Jews who lived in Boro Park, Brooklyn, New York, a self-defined
Yiddish world in every measurable way. Her daughter is my mother
Clara, who first went to Yiddish school before the local public
school. She and my grandmother had long Yiddish conversations that
I never understood. But she and my father named me “ Gary”,
a name that ironically is Germanic in origin. They moved the family
to northern New Jersey. I went to public school, participated in
the activities of the town’s recreation department and played
little league baseball. My native language is English. I looked
like the other boys, and except for a few differences, my life
was like theirs. In but relatively a few years, this Gedalyah bore
hardly any semblance to that Gedalyah. If we had met on the street,
we would not have recognized each other. We would have almost nothing
in common. The transformation from “Gedalyah” to “Gary” was
complete and almost total.
II
I pause in this personal narrative and turn to this morning’s
Torah portion and the story of the father of the Jewish people.
Abraham was born in Ur Chasdim, the center of Mesopotamian culture.
With his family they traveled to Haran, a major trading center
and juncture of cultures in the northern reaches of the Euphrates.
From there he went to Eretz Ca’naan. When he comes there,
he doesn’t look like Canaanites. He doesn’t sound like
them. His name is different. His language is different. His lifestyle
is different. The questions hidden in the background of the Biblical
pages are:
Will Abraham maintain his unique and special identity?
Or,
Will Abraham and Sarah abjure their origins and abdicate
their roots?
Will they relinquish their mission and renounce their
essence?
Through the Torah we know the answer: He kept the faith.
Truly. Totally.
But I would like to ask father Abraham:
“How did you do it? Avraham, how did you remain
Avraham?
When you were surrounded with an entirely different
world, language, custom, cuisine, and rituals,
how did you maintain your own self,and
not give in?”
Could the pressures upon him and
his little family be so much less that those exerted upon my family?
Didn’t they travel
a greater distance geographically, religiously, ethnically, and
culturally? In today’s Torah reading they name their son
Isaac, Yitzchak, a good Jewish name. But I want to know: why did
his great grandsonsall have Hebrew
names: Levi, Judah, Issachar…and I was called “Gary”?
Perhaps the answer is found in that Avraham Avinu had a special
relationship with God, the berit, a contract,
which bonded them together. God says to Avraham: “Walk yourself
before Me, and be complete.” (17:1) Our classical commentator
Rashi cites the Rabbinic Midrash that links the word “Tamim” - “complete” to
refer to the Berit Milah, ritual circumcision. There was not only
a verbal connection between Avraham and God, but
also a physical one. In a poetic sense, God’s
imprint is upon our very bodies that daily renews the covenant,
and makes it everlasting. In the birth of Isaac and his berit milah,
Avraham entered his son into the agreement and signed it in the
spirit, and in the flesh. Maybe that is the reason that not only
Avraham’s great grandsons all had Hebrew names, but so did
his great, great grandsons, Ephrayim and Menasheh, who were born
in Egypt. Abraham transmitted to his family the commitment
to remain inside the covenant, bound by its agreements, and faithful
to God, regardless of their environment, despite the surrounding
influences. Avraham’s great great grandchildren remembered
their names and thus who they were. This is why they were redeemed
from Egypt.
III
I began this sermon with a personal reflection and have connected
it to Avraham and Sarah of our Torah portion. Now I make another
connection, to France in the 1780’s. As a result of the French
Revolution, the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine came before the National
Assembly in Paris asking that the human rights propounded by the
French Revolution be extended to the Jews. On September 28 th,
1791, 209 years ago the Paris Commune voted overwhelmingly and
declared the Jews to be equal with all men and free citizens of
the Republic of France. Yet that picture is incomplete. There
was a price to be paid!! Clermont-Tonnerre then made
a declaration, which the Jews of France accepted, even at the peril
of their very existence. He said:
“To Jews as human beings – everything;
to Jews as a people – nothing!”
If they were to be accepted as Frenchmen, the Jews had to give
up their uniqueness. All that they were permitted was an ethereal faith invisible
and untouchable, which would evaporate.
Perhaps they did not grasp the tragic irony of the French offer:
If you want to be, you must disappear!!
IV
Was this not the challenge to Avraham and Sarah when they left
home and came to Canaan?
Was this not the challenge faced by my family – and all
families – in the transition from Europe, the gambit offered
by America?
Were not our people offered a safe haven under the banner of “liberty
and justice for all” – yet:
Did we not say to ourselves, whether or not anybody said it to
us, articulated or not, consciously or unconsciously, did we not
say: There is a price to be paid!!
Give up your language and literature.
Give up your mores and traditions.
Give up your customs and ceremonies.
Give up your ways.
Give up your names
and then you can be Americans!!
The metaphor for America was the melting pot. And
we were supposed to be sliced and diced, chopped and pureed, blended
and shaken, until, being so dissimilar and disassociated from our
origins, we would disappear into the larger mixture.
How many people in different careers changed
their names to hide or suppress their origins?
How many politicians - James Schlessinger, William
Cohen and Barry Goldwasser – relinquished their heritage
on the altar of political advancement?
How many others – Bernard Baruch, Felix
Frankfurter, Stephen Bayer - while not renouncing their birthright,
never practiced it in private nor proclaimed it in public?
I would have been thrilled if Hank Greenberg and raised Jewish
children, but he didn’t; if he and Sandy Koufax had done
more than one Yom Kippur, but they didn’t.
Wherever we turn in the
history of the Jews in America, the lesson WAS that the priceofadmission
was to give up our Jewishness.
I would like to suggest some other models for our children, and
us where we live our Jewishness, alive, active, present,
proud and public:
Dennis Ross is an active member of the Conservative synagogue
in Rockville, Maryland and his wife is the president of the their
Sisterhood;
Dov Zackheim – both names clearly Jewish – is the
number two man in the Defense Department, is a graduate of the
Yeshiva of Flatbush;
Stuart Eisenstadt was the American ambassador to the European
Union and whose embassy in Brussels is kosher;
And Joe Lieberman;
Who, when nominated for state senator didn’t give his acceptance
speech in person because it was Friday night, Shabbat, and sent
a tape recording instead, for which he received a standing ovation;
Who despite the rigors of a national political campaign, does
not campaign on Shabbat, but goes to synagogue;
Who observes kashrut in every location, all the time;
Whose father-in-law is a rabbi;
Whose children are graduates of the Solomon Schechter Day School – the
Conservative Movement’s Day School program;
Whose son is in the rabbinical school of the Jewish Theological
Seminary with our Menachem, the school of the Conservative Movement;
Whose wife’s name is Hadassah.
Regardless of any political issue, totally apart from for whomever
you vote, finally, there is the true and
authentic image and model for the Jew in America. A much
more worthy motif of America is the patchwork quilt, where
everyone preserves the richness of their heritage with all its
uniquenesses, while being stitched together in a cohesive society.
Conclusion
And that is why our children are Menachem Yosef, Yonina Rahel
and Tzeira Adina, only. They have their names. They have their
essence. And by my life, off the pulpit, I showed them from birth,
that I could be a thoroughly modern American and a truly authentic
Jew. I wouldn’t pay the price of admission. And
now you and I have lived to see the day that a fully publicly recognized
Jew can be nominated for the second highest position in the country.
Win or lose, we have won.
The real question is: will we be worthy of this moment
in Jewish history?
Will we come to shul when it is not Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur?
Will we insist with our bosses that our observances of Sukkot,
Pesach and Shavuot be respected so that we can observe our holidays?
Will be insist to our children’s teachers to not give tests
when our children are absent – will they be? – when
Yom Tov falls on a weekday?
Will we study Jewish texts, read the Bible, learn our Hebrew,
and be proficient with the prayer books, Siddur and Machzor and
the Haggadah of Pesach?
Will we keep kosher, beginning inside our homes and extending
it outside?
Will the seudot, the meals that accompany Jewish life cycle events
of Bar and Bat Mitzvah be kosher as befits the occasion?
And not be ashamed! And not be apologetic! And not be contrite!
Will we take back our names? Will we give them to our
children?
Will we give them their heritage? Will we claim the birthrite,
which is ours?
That is the question of the hour, of this precious and
unique moment in the history of the Jewish people.
The question God asks us this Yom Tov: will we be worthy?
I pray that we will. I pray that we will.
For God. For our ancestors. For our descendants. I pray
that we will.
Amen.
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