Keep Judaism at the center

Torah Study

RABBI ISMAR SCHORSCH
Passover

In his accompanying letter, the chaplain reported that the Haggadah had been printed on the press used to print the division newspaper. The soldiers who did the job had used Nazi flags to clean the press. Of its significance, Chaplain Bohnen wrote: "I am confident that it is the first Hebrew religious work printed in Germany since the advent of Hitler."

It is more likely that the Rainbow Haggadah was the first Hebrew text printed in Germany since the end of 1939. Throughout the final oppressive phase prior to the outbreak of war, books of Jewish content in German and Hebrew were published at an astonishing pace. Ghettoized, German Jews resisted the Nazis spiritually by grounding themselves in the gamut of Jewish culture.

The first redemption from Egypt augured acts of redemption yet to come for the Jewish people. I can only imagine with what resolve the soldiers in attendance at those seders in 1945 intoned words suddenly fraught with searing relevance: "It is this promise that has sustained our ancestors and us, for not just one enemy has arisen to destroy us; rather, in every generation there are those who seek our destruction, but the Holy One ... saves us from their hands" (Rachel Anne Rabinowicz, ed., Passover Haggadah, Rabbinical Assembly, p. 43).

But will God save us also from the devastation that we inflict on ourselves?

Rabbi Alexandri, a third-century Palestinian sage, used to end his daily silent devotions with this prayer: "Lord of the universe, it should be quite evident to you that our will is to do your will. What impedes us? The yeast in the dough and national subjugation. May it be your will to rescue us from their hands, so that we might return to abide by the laws of your will with a full heart."

"The yeast in the dough" refers to the fermentation in our hearts. Rabbi Alexandri is speaking of two impediments to religious life: adverse external conditions and the instability of our own character.

Unlike any previous Jewish community, contemporary Jewry in America has been spared the impediment of national degradation. Being Jewish no longer imposes any liability. Individual Jews can be as unscrupulous and outrageous as anyone else without jeopardizing all Jews.

How sad that we should have come this far to be the cause of our own undoing. Today, for too many Jews, a preoccupation with self and a secular frame of mind militate against any sense of personal obligation to a sacred past or to a venerable community.

In 1902, the Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter arrived in New York a few days before Passover to assume the leadership of a reborn seminary. He would choose as the emblem for his institution the burning bush, to declare his conviction that America would not become the graveyard for Judaism. A national academy of enlightened yet passionate Torah study could offset the lure of assimilation. But not without the daily reinforcement of the Jewish home.

Passover reminds us through its domestic theater of the seder that the ultimate incubator of Jewish values and behavior is the environment we create at home. If we can saturate our homes with echoes of eternity, our children will naturally absorb Judaism as their center of gravity - a moral compass, a medium of expression, a source of pride.

Let us rededicate ourselves this Passover to the truism that if Jewish education begins at home, the bush will never be consumed.

Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.