Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Shabbat Ha-gadol
April 11, 2003
The Least Important Question
This is the Great Sabbath - Shabbat Ha-gadol - before Pesach. Tonight I want to tell you about two men, both revered leaders of their people, who found themselves in the same difficult moral dilemma. They each were in a situation where all the weight of their tradition seemed to be on one side, and their gut instincts and moral values were on the other. I shall tell you these two stories, then I am going to ask you to do the same thing.
The first story comes from Poland. I read it in Yaffa Eliach's wonderful book, Hassidic Tales of the Holocaust. She tells the story of a baby named Shachne Hiller who lived in Krakow.
In 1939, when the Nazis conquered Poland, Shachne Hiller's parents entrusted him for safe-keeping to their Christian neighbors, whose name was Yachnowitch. Schachne's parent's did so with great fear, trepidation and ambivalence. The Hillers left letters to their infant child, with copies to their relatives in America, in which they said, "We are turning you over to our neighbors, so that you may be safe. It is our prayer that the war will end and that we will someday be able to come back and reclaim you. Till then, we ask our neighbors, the Yachnowitches, to guard you and care for you and love you and then, when the war ends, to give you back either to us, if we live, or to our surviving relatives in America, if we do not, so that you may be raised as a Jew."
The Hillers wrote this letter, left one copy with the Yachnowitches, and sent the other copy to their relatives in America. Three days later, the Nazis broke into their home, seized them, and put them together with hundreds of other Jews on a train to Auschwitz and they were never heard from again.
The Yachnowitches loved this little boy, Shachne, as if he were their very own and so they took him to church with them every Sunday. He soon learned all the Catholic prayers and felt at home in the services.
When the war was over, and the parents did not come back, the Yachnowitches hated to give this child up. They wanted to adopt him and have him baptized, but they had made a solemn promise to his parents. They felt torn between their moral duty to keep their promise and their religious duty to add another Christian to the fold.
For weeks, they could not make up their minds what to do. Finally, they decided to go to see a young, newly-ordained priest, who had a reputation for giving good advice; they told him the story to see what he would advise them to do.
They said, "We saved a Jewish child's life during the war and we have grown very fond of him. His parents are now gone and so we would like to adopt him, and have him baptized. We know that unless he is baptized, he will not be saved or loved by God in Heaven. Isn't that what you and all the other priests have always taught us?"
When they had finished, the young priest asked them just one question. "What was the mother's wish, when she entrusted the child to you?"
The Yachnowitches could not lie to their priest, so they admitted that the mother had made them promise to give the child back, after the war, so he could be raised as a Jew, and they even showed him the letter that Mrs. Hiller had written, when she left the baby with them.
The priest said, "I am sorry, but you have to keep your word. You have to honor the mother's last request. You have to give the child back to his relatives; I will not baptize this child."
You can imagine how hard a decision that must have been for this young Catholic priest to make. He came from a tradition in which it was considered a good deed to baptize anyone and everyone that you could, whether they wanted to be baptized or it had to be done to them by force. He came from a tradition that for many centuries tortured people in order to persuade them to convert. Yet, when he was faced with a decision between Catholic doctrine on the one side and the need to honor a family's right to continue on the other side, he chose to go with the family. He defied centuries of Catholic doctrine and refused to baptize this child. He probably figured that by making this decision, he had forfeited forever whatever aspirations for advancement within the church that he might have had. He made his ruling . . . and the Yachnowitches accepted it.
So, this child, Shachne, whose name is Stanley Hiller, now lives in New Jersey, near his relatives. And that young Catholic priest went on to become Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow. We know him better by his official name, Pope John Paul the Second.
The second story I want to share with you is about a rabbi who is as revered by his followers as the Pope is by his. I usually have nothing good to say about this Rabbi. Ovadya Yosef is the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel and the founder of the Shas Party. Rabbi Yosef has no understanding of, appreciation of, or respect for non-Orthodox Judaism. He is a right-wing zealot who has opposed all concessions to Reform and Conservative Jews in Israel. He is also one of the great Halachic authorities of our time. Recently I read of a case which surprised me.
There was a woman who, as we used to say, had a child "out of wedlock." This woman gave the child away for adoption and then, some years later, she married a man from the Shas community. For understandable reasons, she never told her husband that she had once born a child.
The woman became pregnant and her husband was thrilled. He began to make preparations for a pidyan haben, and the woman did not know what to do. Pidyan haben is the redemption of the first-born child, if it is a male, who opens the womb. The child belongs to the priesthood, according to traditional Judaism, and must be redeemed from the priesthood at the age of 30 days. But, again, it is the woman's first-born male child who is to be redeemed.
In this case, the husband thinks that this is her first-born - she knows it is not. If she told him that this was not her first-born, he would be very upset and it might well destroy their marriage. If she did not tell him, he would go ahead with his plans and conduct a pidyan haben which would be a lie. What should she do?
She went to her rabbi who said, "I do no know what to tell you. I wish that I could tell you not to tell him but, if you do that, your husband will make a pidyan haben, and he will recite a bracha which will be a bracha l'vatala - that is a blessing invoking God's name in vain - which is clearly forbidden in Jewish law.
So her rabbi said to her: "I will go and consult my Rabbi." He went to Rabbi Ovadya Yosef and asked what this woman should do. I must tell you, I was shocked by his solution.
A bracha l'vatala is a very serious breach of the commandment. The easy answer for Rabbi Ovadya Yosef, a stickler for traditional Jewish law, would have been to say - tell your husband, rather than violate taking God's name in vain. It would have been the easy Halachic decision to make, with lots of precedence on his side if he had chosen to go that way.
But, that is not what Rabbi Ovadya Yosef ruled in this case. He said: "The mitzvah of shalom bayit - of maintaining harmony, tranquility and peace in the house - has priority over the mitzvah of telling the truth, and even priority over bracha l'vatala in this case." He told the woman to let her husband make a pidyan haben and to let him do it with a bracha.
Now, let me tell you that that was a courageous decision. In the world in which Ovadya Yosef works, everybody is looking over their right shoulder to see if someone is more strict than he. It is a world where every posek, every deciser, lives in fear that someone is more stringent than he is. Ovadya Yosef knew he was laying his reputation as a posek on the line by deciding this way. Yet when he was faced with the choice in which most of the Halachic literature was on one side and the integrity of this family was on the other side, Rabbi Yosef decided in favor of family. Truly remarkable!
Which brings me now to the request I want to make of you on this Shabbat Ha-gadol - this Great Sabbath before Passover. In just five days, we are going to sit down at our seder. If we are lucky, some of us will have our children at the table and, if we are very, very lucky, some of us will have grandchildren sitting at the table with us. But it seems to me that in many of our houses today, Pesach has become what Yom Kippur was originally meant to be.
Yom Kippur was supposed to be the day when you drew close to those from whom you were estranged. But I think that in contemporary American Jewish life, Passover has become that time of the year when we draw closer to those from whom we are estranged because, on Pesach, children come home to their parents' house and they bring their children with them. When they sit together at the seder table, they have to face each other and they have to face issues which have often separated and divided them. If there is hostility in the family, if there is tension within a family, you feel it most on Pesach night.
And in too many houses today there is resentment and anger between parents and children or between brothers and sisters or between husbands and wives. They may have done things that we do not approve of, and we have done things they do not approve of; so, sometimes children choose not to come to the seder table and sometimes parents choose not to invite them.
Sometimes they come but they sit on guard, tense, braced, ready for the opening salvo, the first criticism, the first angry look, sarcastic remark or cruel word. Every time that happens, there is a hole in the heart of the people who sit at the seder table.
So, let me say it very clearly. When children and parents fight, the least important question is "who is right?" That question takes us nowhere. The real question is "how do we stay together?".
Yeah, perhaps Daddy should not have remarried so quickly after Mom died - so what? Yes, Sean should not have moved to California over my objections - but, so what? Sure, Dad should not have tried to run my life - so what? Yeah, Junior should not have invested in a fly-by-night get-rich-quick scheme after I told him not to - but, so what? What difference does it make who is right and who is wrong? What does it matter who did what to whom yesterday? The only thing that counts today is not to let distance set in - because distance begets distance, silence begets silence, separation begets separation. The only thing that counts is that the family be together and stay together - at least, no, especially, on seder night.
My friends, if Pope John Paul the Second could defy his church's teaching and could give up the chance to baptize another child for the sake of the integrity of a family; and, if Rabbi Ovadya Yosef could defy the laws of bracha l'vatala which, I am sure, mean a great deal to him, for the sake of saving the integrity of a family - can't we?
Therefore, I want to ask you this Pesach to do what they did and to decide before the seder begins that you will put the integrity of the family over everything else because, if you do not - the matzah ball soup may be warm, but the atmosphere will be cold; the charoset may be sweet, but the seder will be sour. You may recite all the words in the Haggadah, but you will not have fulfilled the first law of the seder. If you look in Exodus 12, you will see that the first law of the seder is "The Israelites were told to take a lamb, roast it and eat it l'mishpichotaychem - by families - seh labayit - one lamb for each family. At the seder they were commanded to eat the korban Pesach together, as one family - parents, children, grandparents all together. That is how our People started and that is how ultimately we will survive.
The bottom line is that when all the recriminations and all of the "do you know what he did to me's" are piled up on one side and the integrity of the family is put on the other side, Pope John Paul the Second and Rabbi Ovadya Yosef would both say to you - save the integrity of the family!
Let me finish by pointing out to you a verse from today's Haftorah which has made it into the Haggadah. It is the very last verse of the Haftorah. The Prophet Malachi says: May the great day come, the day which the Prophet Elijah will someday announce when the Redeemer will come. And what will Elijah's task be before the Redeemer can come? "He will restore the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents." He will reconcile parents with children and children with their parents.
That is Elijah's job, according to Malachi. His sole task is to make peace between parents and children. It does not say that it is the parents' fault and that he will persuade the parents to admit it; it does not say that it is the children's fault and that Elijah will persuade the children to admit it. Malachi says it does not matter whose fault it is; it only matters that the ears of both are to be turned back to each other.
It does not matter who did what to whom first. It does not matter who should apologize first to whom. That gets us nowhere. According to Malachi, Elijah's task is not to be judgmental or critical, not to choose sides, not to say who owes whom an apology. Elijah's task is to bring the hearts of both parents and children closer to each other because until that happens, there can be no redemption.
So this is my prayer for this Pesach. At your seder and at all the seders of the Jewish People wherever they may be, may parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives draw closer to each other so that redemption will be much closer and our seders will be truly joyful. Amen
This message incorporates the wisdom of Rabbis Mitchell Wohlberg and Jack Riemer.
