[Avodah] Cancel Simchas Torah!

[Prof. Levine via Avodah]

Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2015 23:59:19 -0400
Subject: [RCA Forum]: Fwd: fyi - Cancel Simchas Torah!
From:
To: 
<mailto:rca-member-discussion-forum at googlegroups.com>rca-member-discussion-forum at googlegroups.com
I like the sentiment. Not sure about the actual 
suggestion. Any thoughts on doing something, or 
not,to acknowledge the current situation?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Rafael Medoff" <<mailto:rafaelmedoff at aol.com>rafaelmedoff at aol.com>
Date: Oct 3, 2015 10:28 PM
Subject: fyi - Cancel Simchas Torah!
To: <mailto:rafaelmedoff at aol.com>rafaelmedoff at aol.com

CANCEL SIMCHAS TORAH!

by Rafael Medoff

(Dr. Rafael Medoff is the founding director of 
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust 
Studies, and winner of a 2015 Rockower Award from 
the American Jewish Press Association for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.)
One of the most poignant anecdotes I have 
encountered in thirty-plus years of Holocaust 
research came out of an interview I conducted 
many years ago with the daughter of a Brooklyn rabbi.

She told me of a remarkable rule that her father, 
Rabbi Baruch David Weitzmann, imposed on his 
Brownsville congregation in 1942, after the first 
reports about the ongoing mass murder of Europe's Jews were confirmed.

"He wanted us to feel the tsa'ar of the Jews who 
were being killed in Europe," the rabbi's 
daughter recalled. "So if somebody wanted to get 
married--and there were a lot of these 
situations, involving boys who were about to go 
into the army--they came to our house, there was 
a little chuppah, some cake and soda, nothing 
more. No celebrations, no dancing, just the 
chuppah. He explained to us that you cannot 
celebrate at a time when other Jews are dying."

Consider, for a moment, how drastically this 
deviated from normative Jewish practice. The 
mitzvah of making a bride and groom happy at 
their wedding is considered so important that it 
is one of the few commandments which supersede 
the obligation to study Torah. Normally stoic 
rabbis set aside their books to take part in wild 
dancing and assorted ribaldry to entertain the newlyweds.

The Talmud (Tractate Brachot 6-b) declares that 
one who gladdens the hearts of the bride and 
groom at their wedding "merits to acquire the 
knowledge of the Torah." One Talmudic sage 
compares making newlyweds happy at their wedding 
to bringing a sacrifice in the Temple in ancient 
Jerusalem; another says it is the equivalent of 
rebuilding some of the ruins of Jerusalem.

This is the mitzvah that Rabbi Weitzmann in 
effect temporarily suspended in 1942, in order to 
raise Jewish awareness of the mass murder in 
Europe and, hopefully, galvanize his congregants 
to action. The importance of feeling another 
Jew's pain, he decided, took precedence over the 
obligation to celebrate at a wedding. There is a 
time for singing and dancing, but there is also a 
time for mourning--and mourning sometimes must 
extend beyond one's immediate family.

The very existence of the American Jewish 
community, after all, is based on the premise 
that Jews should care about, connect with, and 
assist each other. We are not merely a haphazard 
mass of individuals who happen to practice 
similar religious rituals in our private lives. 
We join together--in prayer, in celebration, and 
in other activities of communal partnership. The 
classic United Jewish Appeal slogan, "We are 
one!," resonated deeply precisely because it 
spoke to the essence of Jewish peoplehood.

Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, in his seminal book "Were 
We Our Brothers' Keepers?," confronted the 
painful fact that most American Jews in the 1940s 
failed to adopt an appropriate sense of urgency 
with regard to the plight of Europe's Jews. "One 
looks in vain," he writes, "for a sign that 
American Jews altered some aspect of their 
lifestyle to indicate their awareness of the 
plight of their European brothers [and] keep the 
matter at the forefront of their consciousness 
and to generate feelings of sympathy and 
solidarity
.The Final Solution may have been 
unstoppable by American Jewry, but it should have 
been unbearable for them. And it wasn't. This is 
important, not alone for our understanding of the 
past, but for our sense of responsibility in the future."

One wonders how Rabbi Baruch David Weitzmann 
would have responded to this week's brutal 
murders by Palestinian Arab terrorists in Israel. 
Two rabbis stabbed and shot to death in the 
streets of Jerusalem. A young couple gunned down 
in front of their four children. The latter 
attack hit particularly close to home for 
American Jews, as one of the victims, Rabbi Eitam 
Henkin, was the son of the renowned educator 
Rabbanit Chana Henkin, who has touched our lives 
through her writings, lectures, and her Nishmat 
school, where so many young women from our community have studied.

If he were alive today, maybe Rabbi Weitzmann 
would cancel the singing and dancing of this 
year's Simchas Torah holiday. Maybe he would say 
this is a time to feel the tsa'ar of the Jews in 
Israel, not a time for celebrating.

But today's Jewish community may not be ready for 
such a dramatic step. Perhaps something more 
modest would be in order. There are seven 
extended dances in the synagogue during the 
Simchas Torah celebrations. Why not cancel the 
seventh one? --and, of course, explain the reason for the cancelation.

Still too drastic? How about just shortening the 
last dance--and pausing to speak about the 
Henkins, about their orphaned children, and about 
what practical steps American Jews can take, in 
the realm of political action, to respond to the 
murders. Is that too much to ask of American Jewry today?






















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