Erev Rosh HaShanah: Rekindling Our Pintele Yid

(Delivered by Rabbi Sacks on September 25, 2022)

My practice on Erev Rosh HaShanah is to tell a story and to see what lessons it might yield. Tonight’s story is a true account, a travel story from a professional traveler.

Some of you may remember the Birnbaum Travel Guides. The imprint was bought by Disney in 2001, and the only guidebooks published under the name Birnbaum today are the guides to Disney theme properties. Stephen Birnbaum founded the series and wrote precisely 36, double chai, travel guides before he succumbed to leukemia at the age of 54. In an essay, he relates how he once left for a business trip to Germany on a night just like this, the very first night of Rosh HaShanah. He thought of himself as an assimilated Jew and, therefore, had no compunctions or feelings at all about the trip’s timing.

His tour guide engaged him in conversation. “Birnbaum, that’s a German name, isn’t it?” It means “pear tree.” Tell me, does your family come from Germany?” Birnbaum didn’t think it worthwhile to explain that while his father’s roots were German, his family had migrated to Poland in the thirteenth century.

To himself, he thought: the move, though made seven centuries before, hadn’t saved his father’s parents and five sisters from Hitler. So, he simply replied, “Yes, they came from Germany.”

The guide continued: “It must have been difficult for them during World War II.” Birnbaum nodded, at a loss for an answer, but suddenly, his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, became real to him for the first time.

He had been about six-years old when his father learned of their deaths. He had never seen them and had never given them any real thought. Now for the first time, he was trying to imagine what they had been like.

He describes his reaction: “It had taken two steps onto German soil and just a few words from the first German I had met to evoke this reaction. Talk about consciousness raising.”

On the fifth day of his visit, he was invited to dinner in a small village not far from the North Sea. After dinner, his host took him for a tour of the house. In a long hall hung with large oil paintings, his host pointed out his ancestors, who were all dukes, counts, and barons. Then, pointing with obvious pride to the last painting, he declared, “And that–is my father.”

The father had steel-blue eyes and a fiercely determined jaw. The artist had missed nothing, down to the shining SS initials on the father’s collar. Birnbaum realized that his host’s father had been a member of the Schutzstaffel, the notorious paramilitary wing of the Third Reich that was most responsible for murdering Jews during the Shoah. Suddenly Birnbaum felt that he would suffocate unless he left immediately. He made a hasty apology and ran out of the house, shaking. Astonished at his own reaction, Birnbaum reveals, “Five days in Germany had uncovered an identity I had labored a lifetime to minimize. I was a Jew, and there was no getting away from it.”

Birnbaum had thought of himself as a totally assimilated Jew until he confronted the reality of antisemitism. Suddenly, he thought of what the Nazis had done to his own family and at the same time realized what they had done to his extended family, the Jewish people. In that moment of revelation, he discovered that deep within the recesses of his being there lay dos pintele Yid, a tiny spark of Jewishness, that had been kindled for the first time.

Several days later, Birnbaum’s business travels took him to Regensburg in southeastern Germany. A thought had been germinating, and so he asked his guide if he would find out if there still was a synagogue in Regensburg, as he wanted to attend services for Yom Kippur. The guide brought him to services at 9:30 in the morning. Birnbaum had not been inside a synagogue in 18 years.

He arrived early. The caretaker let him in, and he was alone for some 15 minutes when two older men entered and nodded to him. After a while, one of the men came over and, without comment, pushed up his left sleeve. There, on his forearm, was a concentration camp tattoo consisting of indelible blue numbers. His companion rolled up his sleeve, revealing the same.

Later on, an even older man came in. They exchanged holy day greetings. Then he rolled up his sleeve to reveal his numbers. It was like a bond between them, a symbol of shared tragedy. Slowly, one man after another arrived, and they sat quietly and conversed. He wondered why they didn’t begin the service. Suddenly, it dawned on him that they were waiting for a minyan, for a tenth Jew to enable a quorum for the service.

Finally, everybody heaved a collective sigh of relief. The tenth man had arrived. He introduced himself to Birnbaum as Ben Mandel from Plainfield, New Jersey. He told Birnbaum about his new home and business there, so Birnbaum asked him what he was doing in Regensburg. He explained, “I was liberated here.” Then he rolled up his shirt sleeve to reveal his own set of numbers. He explained that his brother, sister, and he had been sent to Auschwitz. His sister had died there, but he and his brother were liberated by the Allies. His brother emigrated to Israel, and he went to the United States. Every year, Ben Mandel visits his brother in Tel Aviv for Rosh HaShanah and then goes to Regensburg for Yom Kippur. He explained, “It helps me to remember how lucky I’ve been. It makes me remember how it was. Besides, these few old men are the only Jews left here. Once 10,000 Jews in the area, now they can hardly make a minyan on Yom Kippur. Imagine.”

I myself cannot imagine someone who had gone through the Shoah describing themselves as lucky, or returning to the center of their horror yearly.

Birnbaum does not tell us what he thought. He merely states that he then closed his eyes, sat back…and cried.

Why did he cry?

Perhaps it was because of the pathos of these survivors, each with his own story of horror.

Perhaps it was in admiration for Ben Mandel, a survivor who could understandably stay home, but who yet returns in thanksgiving to G!d and in loyalty to fellow Jews, to help them make a minyan for Yom Kippur.

Perhaps he cried in anger at himself, at the many years he had attempted to downplay, even deny, his own Jewishness.

Perhaps he wept with esteem for this “saving remnant” of the Jewish community of Regensburg, who refused to give up and struggled to maintain their identity and their minyan, a moribund community. Indeed the minyan was part of their identity.

Birnbaum concluded his account with these words, “Germany is not the place for an assimilated Jew to visit if he expects to stay assimilated.”

What a powerful story: A tour guide drums up conversation; a dinner in a remote region is served in the home of a former SS man; and Yom Kippur services are with a minyan of Holocaust survivors.

I tell you this true story this evening for several reasons.

First, while we do not want to make or suggest any comparison to Birnbaum’s family in Europe or the lives of the Regensburg minyanaires, we should all be clear that we have all been through a lot these past years of the pandemic, and knowingly or unknowingly we carry the effects of it all with us, wherever we go. Our changed way of living, our changed way of socializing, our changed way of communicating have all shifted the way we do life. It has been more difficult than we imagined. And, we, too, like the Regensburg survivors, have been fierce and resilient.

We, too, like Ben Mandel, feel lucky in some ways and, like him, continue to feel that life holds out so much for us in this new year.

We, like the Regensberg minyanaires, recognize the spirituality of minyan, the power of community, and the sense that we belong to one another. Community matters more than ever in an age of physical distancing and Zoom.

Our CAH family approved a new Mission Statement this past June at our Annual Congregational meeting. It was Emailed to all members and now lives on our Website under the “About Us” tab. We have also placed a copy on page 12 of your Rosh Hashanah handout. We hope you will not just read it, but sit with it over this holy day season. The third bullet point states, “We strive to create a community in which Judaism feels central, indispensable, and relevant.” What the Regensburg minyan was to the survivors, we hope CAH can be for you.

Finally, Stephen Birnbaum’s reconnection to Judaism renders him, in more classically Jewish terms, a ba’al teshuva, a Jew who has returned to an appreciation of our heritage.

Whether as assimilated as Birnbaum was, or as connected as our clergy team is, we are all here tonight because we, too, need to have our own pintele Yid rekindled. Like Birnbaum, we do not always know when we’ll be touched by a chance encounter, a conversation, an insight from someone during a class discussion, or a haunting melody.

It can happen by spending a Shabbat with someone here, and falling in love all over again with the warmth of a Shabbat meal with others and the exaltation exuded by the spirit of Shabbat.

It can happen when we discuss Torah together or when we feed the Ventura-area food-insecure population.

Rabbi Chaim Halberstam, the nineteenth-century Chassidic leader in Sanz, told of a man wandering for days in a forest, lost. Suddenly someone approached. Hopeful, he hurried to the woman and asked, “Sister, I have been lost for days in this forest. Which is the way out? She replied, “Brother, I do not know the way out, either. I, too, have been wandering here for many days. But this I can tell you: do not take the way I have been taking, for it will lead you astray. So now, let us join together, and look for a new way out, together.”

We all sometimes feel like we are lost, or wandering aimlessly, or have gotten off our path, or can’t seem to find the way.

So, let’s this year, even more than before, and, in the words of our new Mission Statement, come together to anchor our lives, to find guidance, to welcome and care for each other, to find spiritual direction and personal deepening, to feel connected to something greater, to be part of a community upon which we can rely.

In discovering each other, we can find ourselves.

In discovering ourselves, we’ll already ensure that 5783 will be a good, sweet year.

Kein y’hi ratzon. So may it be. Amen.