Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
September 10, 2004
Almost Too Incredible to Believe
The verses which I read tonight on this last Shabbat of the year, (Deut 30:1-4) are usually understood metaphorically rather than literally. This paragraph is usually understood as a poetic statement rather than something which could actually take place. But I read a story recently which, if it is true, helps me to understand these ancient verses in an entirely new light. So, I want to tell you the story and see whether you think it is a commentary on these verses of the Torah portion for this Sabbath.
Elie Weisel once said in frustration and in bewilderment: "Go write Jewish fiction when Jewish reality is more incredible than anything that you can possibly think up." Weisel must have had in mind this story I'm about to tell you. It is a fantastic story, but not necessarily fantasy. I won't blame you if you are tempted to say, as I did at first, that this is an incredible story. It appears in a book by Nechama Goodman, and she says she has documentation which proves that it is true. So let me tell you the story and you will decide for yourself whether you believe it or not.
A word of context. One of the beautiful customs among traditional Jews especially is that it is a mitzvah to have guests at your Shabbat table and certainly a stranger who is passing through your community should not have to dine alone on Shabbat. So it is not unusual even today in traditional synagogues for people to look for a strange face, a newcomer, and make sure that they have a place for their Shabbat meal. It is also customary to prolong the Shabbat meal with z'mirot, songs; some families sing between meal courses. With that background, now the story.
A man was on his way out of a synagogue in Jerusalem one Friday evening when he noticed a young man in dungarees with a backpack, dark skin, curly black hair - he looked Sephardi, maybe Moroccan. The man walked over to him and said: "Shabbat shalom. My name is Dan Eisenblatt. Would you like to eat at our house tonight?"
The young man's face broke in an instant from a worried look to a smile. "Yes, sure I would," he said.
"What's your name?" asked Mr. Eisenblatt.
"Machi," the young man replied.
Together they walked out of the shul. A few minutes later they were standing around the Eisenblatt family's Shabbat table, about to make Kiddush. Dan noticed his guest fidgeting, leafing through his songbook, evidently looking for something. Dan asked him: "is there any particular song that you want us to sing?"
The guest's face lit up. "Yes, there is a song that I would like us to sing, but I can't find it in this book. I really liked it when they sang this song in the service tonight. What was it called - something dodi."
Dan paused for a moment. He was on the verge of saying: "L'cha Dodi is not usually sung at the table" but then he caught himself in time. "If that's the song the kid wants, what's the harm?" he thought to himself. Aloud he said: "You must mean L'cha Dodi. Wait, let me get you a siddur." He went to the bookcase, found a siddur and gave it to the boy.
After they sang the song, they made Kiddush and ate their first course. Dan asked their guest: "What song would you like to sing now?" The guest looked embarrassed, but after a bit of encouragement, he said: "I'd really like to sing L'cha Dodi again, if we could"
The same thing happened after the next course. Dan asked his guest which zemira he would like to sing, and the guest repeated his request: "L'cha Dodi, please."
Dan almost blurted out: "Let's sing it a little quieter this time, because the neighbors are going to think that we're nuts. Nobody ever sings L'cha Dodi at the Shabbat table. It is a part of the Friday eve synagogue service, not a zemira for the Shabbat table. But instead he said: "Don't you want to sing something else?"
His guest blushed and look down. "I really like that one," he mumbled. "There's something bout it - I really like it."
They must have sung L'cha Dodi eight or nine times. Dan wasn't' sure; he lost count. Later, Dan asked: "Where are you from?"
The boy looked pained, then stared down at the floor and said softly: "from Ramallah."
Dan was sure that he had heard the boy say "Ramallah" but that couldn't be. Ramallah is a large Arab city on the West Bank. It is where Arafat's headquarters is. And so he figured that he must have misunderstood. The boy must have said: "Ramleh," which is an Israeli city. So Dan said: "Oh, you come from Ramleh? I have a cousin who lives there. Do you know Ephraim Warner? He lives on Herzl Street.
The young man shook his head sadly. "No, there are no Jews in Ramallah."
Dan gasped. The boy really had said "Ramallah!" Dan's thoughts were racing. Was he having Shabbat dinner with an Arab? Perhaps with a terrorist? He said to the boy: "I'm sorry; I'm a bit confused. And now that I think of it, I haven't even asked you your full name. What is it, please?"
The boy looked nervous for a moment. Then he squared his shoulders and said quietly, "Machmud ibn-esh Sharif."
Dan was speechless. What could he say?
Machmud broke the silence, hesitantly. "I was born and grew up in Ramallah. And I was taught from infancy on to hate the Jews. I was taught that they were our oppressors and that killing them was a good deed. But I always had my doubts. We were taught in the Koran: 'no one of you is a true believer until and unless he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.' I used to sit and wonder: weren't the Yahud, the Jews, people too? Didn't they have the right to live the same as we do? If we are supposed to be good to everyone, how come nobody includes Jews in that?"
"I asked these questions to my father, and he got mad and threw me out of the house. By now, my mind was made up. I was going to run away and live with the Yahud, until I could find out what they were really like. I snuck back into the house that night in order to get my things and my backpack.
"My mother caught me in the middle of packing. I told her that I wanted to go live with the Jews for a while, and find out what they were really like, and that - who knows - maybe I would even want to convert.
"My mother was turning more and more pale while I said this, and I thought she was angry, but that wasn't it. Something else was hurting her, and she whispered it to me gently: 'you don't have to convert. You already are a Jew.'
"I was shocked. My head started spinning, and for a moment I couldn't speak. Then I stammered, 'what do you mean?'
'In Judaism,' she said, 'your identity goes according to the mother. I'm Jewish and so you are too!'
"I never had any idea my mother was Jewish. I guess she didn't want anyone to know. She whispered furtively: 'I made a mistake by marrying an Arab man. In you, my mistake will be redeemed.'
"My mother always talked that way, poetic-like. But this time she meant every word she said. She went to the safe, and took out some old documents and handed them to me: things like my birth certificate and her old Israeli ID card, so I could prove I was a Jew.
'I've got them here,' said Machmud, 'but I don't know what to do with them.'
"And then he said: 'My mother hesitated and then she gave me one more piece of paper. She said: 'You may as well have this too. It is an old photograph of my grandparents, which was taken when they were visiting the grave of some great ancestors of ours.'
"Machmud continued: 'Now that I am here in Israel, I've been trying to find out who this ancestor is, and where he is buried.'
"Dan put his hand on the boy's shoulder. Machmud looked up, scared and hopeful, at the same time. Dan asked: 'Do you have the photo here?'
"The boy's face lit up. 'Sure! I always carry it with me!'
"He reached into his backpack and pulled out an old, tattered envelope. When Dan opened it up and read the inscription on the gravestone, he nearly dropped the photo, so great was his shock. His voice quivered with excitement as he explained to Machmud who his ancestor was. 'He was a friend of the Ari, Reb Yitschak Luria, who was a great scholar, a saint and a mystic. And Machmud, your ancestor wrote that song that we have been singing all night: L'cha Dodi!'
"This time, it was Machmud's turn to be struck speechless. Dan Eisenblatt extended his trembling hand, and said: 'Welcome home, Machmud, welcome home.'
"That is the story, as it is found in Nechama Goodman's book. She says it is true and that she can document it. It is surely one of the most dramatic stories, one of the most incredible stories that I have read in a long, long time. Can you imagine an Arab child, fed up with hearing words of hatred against the Jews, words that he believes go against what the Koran teaches, being thrown out of his house for wanting to know more about the Jews? Can you imagine his mother revealing her secret to him that she and, therefore, he are really Jews? Can you imagine him falling in love with the song L'cha Dodi and wanting to sing it over and over again? And can you imagine him finding out, almost by accident, that the author of L'cha Dodi, Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabets, is his ancestor? Isn't this an amazing, an incredible story?"
One more item about the validity of the story, and then the lesson. I learned this story from the writings of Rabbi Jack Riemer, who runs a homiletics service from which I glean a number of examples during the course of a preaching year. Rabbi Riemer says that he emailed this story to a friend of his in Israel. The friend wrote back that he knows this young man whose name is now Menachem and that he davens in the same shul with him each Shabbat.
Now let's turn again to those verses from this week's Sedra. Deuteronomy 30 begins: "When all these things befall you - the blessing and the curse that I have set before you - and you take them to heart amidst the various nations to which the Eternal your God has banished you, and you return to the Eternal your God, then God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. God will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Eternal God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Eternal your God will gather you, from there God will fetch you."
What our Torah is saying here is that even though you may be driven off into exile, even though you may be scattered to the far corners of the earth, nevertheless, even then, even from there, you may someday come home again. Even from there you may repent and return to your God and to your People and to your Land.
It sure strikes us moderns as a metaphor, a figure of speech, but tonight I want to suggest it need not be so. We have witnessed in our own time with our own eyes, three events which make this passage in our Torah feel literally true for us. The first was when tens of thousands of Soviet Jews - many of whom barely knew that they were Jews, never allowed to study or practice Judaism - yet somehow they found within themselves the pintele yid, the still, small point of Jewish identity, and came home to their People.
Second example - the Jews of Ethiopia. Cut off from our People for centuries, they have come back and rejoined the Jewish People in Israel. Today Ethiopian Jews hold jobs of distinction in the Army and in Israeli society at large. Their children are going to college and graduate school together with other Jews in Israel. They are becoming acclimated and fully accepted as part of the Jewish People.
And now we have this incredible story. Yet it is no more incredible than that which has taken place in our time, before our eyes with the Soviet Jews and the Jews of Ethiopia. If those stories can be true then, who knows, perhaps this one is too.
We live in an age of wonders, an age when words like the Divine promise found in today's Torah portion are verified by today's newspaper. We live in age of wonders, and so we must not let the heartaches and the frustrations, the bad news, the disappointments and the disillusionments which are also part of life in Israel today, make us lose sight of the good news and make us cynical about the wonders which are taking place.
This is the promise found in today's Torah portion - the promise that even the most alienated, even the most far off of Jews, may yet some day come home. What I want to say on this last Shabbat of the year, this Shabbat which precedes the New Year, is that perhaps we can help make it happen here in America. Who can say for sure when or whether a Jew or the child of a Jew or the grandchild of a Jew should be written off as forever gone? Who can say that a Jewish line has really ended forever when we have seen so often people like Theodor Herzl and Franz Rosensweig and others who were on the very brink of disappearing as Jews and then somehow found their way back home to their People? Who can say for sure that if we reach our hands out to the people whom we know who are like them that it will do no good?
So, my dear friends, the core members of Temple Israel, the faithful who week after week are here on Shabbat, who know intimately how important Judaism is in your lives, here is our challenge. There are unaffiliated and, even more, unattached Jews living in Tulsa, Oklahoma and environs right now. I suspect that every one of you knows at least one such Jew. I don't care why that has been the case. I care that we make every effort this New Year to reach out personally and help them come home. Here is what I'd like to ask you to do.
If you believe that the Torah reading for this Shabbat is not a mere figure of speech, if you believe that there are Machmuds potentially waiting to become Menachems, then invite such an unattached Jew to join you in this sanctuary on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. We have room for them. We have room in our extended sanctuary and we have room in our hearts. You can guarantee them that the Rabbi will not chastize them for showing up on the High Holydays but at no other time, for not supporting the Temple and being freeloaders, that they will not be made to feel uncomfortable, but rather that you want to help them reattach themselves to their People, to come home again. My dear friends, I cannot think of a greater mitzvah that you can perform at the beginning of this new year. Help a fellow Jew come home. Amen
I am deeply indebted to Rabbi Jack Riemer for much of this message.
