Like a Moth Circling the Flame

In light of the tragic news in Israel, I am including a tidbit before my main essay below. If I have observation to add about the horrific news that you do not find from the punditry, I will include it here at the top of the fold. I hope that you find it thought provoking. Here is my tidbit! My regular essay is featured below this reflection.

I read a post this week on my rabbi listserv. A colleague of mine who I know by reputation as a thoughtful, decent and successful rabbi asked us, his colleagues, if any of us could recommend a charity which would help the suffering Gazans. My head spun around as I drank my coffee! “What, American rabbis should donate money to help rebuild Gaza?! For real?” The snarky side of me told myself, “I will consider sending money to Gaza City when the Emir of Kuwait puts up a plaque at the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem!” But I said nothing. There is enough heat out there, and pain, and I figured another back and forth would not be helpful to anyone’s soul or the outcome of this horrendous war foisted upon Israel.

I know that with the civilian and military casualties mounting in Israel and Gaza, we have many people to mourn. It is impossible to fathom the pain that people on both sides of the border are experiencing. Personally, I am mourning mostly for my own people. At synagogue, 224 chairs were marked with blue and white ribbons representing the hostages brutally abducted from their homes. My focus on the Jewish suffering is natural and moral too. We care first for our family, then our community and then the world at large. I care for the innocent civilians in Gaza. Deeply. They are my second concern.

My first concern is for me and mine, the Jewish people. I do not need to apologize for my placing Jewish suffering first. I happen to love all children. But I babysit my grandchildren. They are not better than other children, objectively speaking (eeks, Judi please don’t comment!) But they are mine and my primary responsibility over other children. That is the way of the world.

To live by Jewish values, we must be concerned for all people. But we are responsible for the universe of humanity only after we first take care of our own. Caring for one’s family does not make us callous to the suffering of others.

Actually, the contrary is true. Caring first for our own family has us understand our responsibility to extend care and love to others. Children don’t learn to love the universe. They learn to love their unique parents, their specific siblings, their grandparents and only afterwards can they extend their affection to the world at large. Without the love and security of family, no one can learn to be a faithful and loving person.

It is acceptable, even mandatory, for Jews to be concerned for our own suffering over other people’s suffering. Let us rebuild the kibbutzim that were decimated during that infamous day of massacre. We should do that first. When we can right our own universe, we can then, and only thereafter, work to right the wrongs in the world.

And now the challenge to the world at large, including the London Street, the Manhattan Street, the Cambridge Street, and the Sydney Street, our very civilization is threatened when we cannot make a moral distinction between those who burn babies alive, murder parents in front of their children (and its opposite) and kidnap grandmothers, and those who defend their nation and our way of life.

I will probably comment more on this in posts to come. In the meantime, enjoy my posting below, for something different from the hours of doomscrolling that is occupying our lives, or my life at least.

Like a Moth Circling the Flame

Bavaria—February 13-16, 2018

I feel like a fly buzzing around the flame. Too close and I will burn up. But I can’t stop seeing the flame. That is Munich and Bavaria for this little Jewish boy.
 
Judi and I booked our tickets in May to come skiing in Europe in February. It was an impulse and a plan. I always buy my tickets when I make my plans to travel. This is a vestige from decades of habit as a pulpit rabbi. I chose to fly into Munich instead of Milan because German rental cars all have snow tires in the winter. In Milan, you have to rent chains and then put them on yourself in the freezing cold on the side of the road. In February, I prefer Munich to Milan.

Whenever I would make travel plans, I would buy my ticket so no wedding or Bar Mitzvah or speaking engagement can later claim priority. In November, Judi assessed her practice and said that she needed to work in Birmingham the few days we would be in Munich. We rescheduled her to follow me a day later.

But instead of drinking a glass of gersterminer wine in the back of the plane, she was instead visiting the doctor’s office with the flu, poor baby. So unmoored from my better half, I have several days to take in Munich by myself before we command our mountain-ready chariot to Italy.
 
By myself—I loaded up the skis in the back of our oversized minivan. This vehicle will be my partner for  a month. And I headed straight to the Dachau Concentration Camp, the first of its kind in Nazi Germany. The afternoon was sunny, cold and sparkling clean. About a half hour from the airport, I pulled into the parking lot of the former munitions factory, now a symbol of hell and the worse depravity of the human spirit. I walked through the outside first, forgoing the museum. Dachau was certainly tame compared to Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps. It is small, contained and less outwardly gruesome. But it wasn’t tame for the prisoners who were tortured there, the slave laborers put to work for the great German industrialists, and the more than 35,000 prisoners who died there. Some were murdered outright. Some died in medical expreriments. But most, weakened by starvation, disease, and medical deprivation were driven to exhaustion so their bodies and their spirits just couldn’t carry on. The gruesome pictures of the camp’s liberation were spread across America and that is when the west had its first eyewitnesses accounts to the horrors of Naziism.
 
I keep learning about the Shoah through reading and walking and thinking and praying. I cannot in these pages share everything I learned. A person with a mind and a spirit just cannot grasp this horror.
 
Munich is a lovely city. It is a new old city. Two thirds of the city was destroyed by allied bombers as the world war was coming to its end. It was rebuilt since then, and much of the rebuilding is meant to reflect the way the Munich appeared before the madness began.
 
I made my pilgrimage to the camp, and then I was determined to shake off the Nazi thing. The next day I was up pretty early, my internal clock being whacked out by the time difference. I headed to the Marienplatz, the center of the town. I hiked through the inner ring on a cell phone tour I downloaded—churches, markets, cobblestoned streets and a synagogue. Interestingly, the synagogue/Jewish center/kosher restaurant/day school and Jewish Museum have all been built as a major complex smack in the middle of the city. This is a good thing. But the security is very tight. I was circling the area admiring the synagogue shut tight like a bunker—no windows and the entryway for everyday prayer is underground through the Center about 20 yards away. A young man who looked casual, but serious walked up to me to say hello. I acknowledged him and smiled and kept going ahead. He obviously has a serious job to do. What a crazy world we Jews have to live in.
 
That afternoon I signed up for a three-hour Third Reich walking tour. Nazis again. Munich was the birthplace of the Nazi party, and its headquarters throughout its existence. Of course, not every Muncher supported Hitler or the Nazi Party. Our guide was a young Jewish guy from Chicago, a former school teacher who moved to Munich with his German wife. His family are Holocaust survivors. And here he is in Munich, married to a fraulein now his frau, making a living as a walking historian of Naziism. All the beautiful places somehow had a Nazi codicil in Munich. Here is the beautiful city hall in Marienplatz. And this is also where the Nazis set up their municipal government. There is the main square bordering on the public gardens. And that is also the place where Hitler would give his fiery speeches before the hundreds of thousands standing in a phalanx with their right arms raised in a Hitler salute. Here are the memorials and here is where the houses and the people were destroyed. Here is the Hofbrauhaus, the famous Beer Garden with the lederhosen and the oom pah pah band, which is also the place that Hitler organized the National Socialist party. And so it goes on. And on.
 
Munich is a very complicated city. It is the seat of Nazi ideology. The Munchers are mindful of their history. It is against the law for anyone to raise their arm in a sieg heil, and that person will be fined 3000 Euros if observed. A Chinese tourist raised his arm and was fined. Anti-Nazism is serious business too.
 
After my draining day, I was not in the mood for the beer hall. I had a quiet dinner with my thoughts and made my way to bed.
 
The next day I had to make an important decision. Will I go visit Munich’s art museum which gets good grades, or perhaps live on the wild side and go to the BMW museum? Cars don’t interest me too much, so I headed for the art museum. In the same area as the art museum is the stark Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, a museum, archive and study center about Nazism.  My feet were taking me to the art museum, but somehow my spirit brought me to the Documentation Center where I spent the next day. It was not an inspiring place. But it was remarkable that it was in one of Munich’s most well-known public squares. The center was a serious place. I appreciated the sense of purpose that this documentation center symbolized.
 
I am a moth circling the flame. Being a Jew in Germany, I cannot seem to be able to keep the flames away. I circle and circle and circle around again and again. I get close but not too close. I am not sure if I am spiritually and intellectually and emotionally prepared to be in Germany without becoming a little whacked out. But I am not sure if being a little whacked out is not what good Jewish sense demands of me.
 
On Remembrance.
 
Some lessons I have learned during my decades in Birmingham parallel my brief experience in Munich. The people in both places are extraordinarily nice, friendly, and polite. Both places have a stained history and are symbolic of evil and cruelty during our historical memories. Both cities are symbols of cruelty and also the ability to overcome cruelty. The younger people in both Birmingham and Munich can ask their previous generations, “Where were you during the dark times and what did you do when you were confronted with evil?”  And most often, the question goes unasked, and people do not readily volunteer.
 
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Documentation Center do the same thing. They tell the story, collect the archives, and share the historical narrative of what happened when the human spirit went ugly and the mind went crazy. It took each city a while to come to terms with this.
 
I hate to do what I am about to do. Beginning in 1923 Munich, the city prepared to show the world how depraved the human spirit can be. As many as 80,000,000 people were killed during the Second World War. Birmingham was not evil to the same extent. Slavery was absolutely horrible and evil. (BTW, there was no slavery in Birmingham since it was not founded until 1871.)  Jim Crow was absolutely horrible and evil. Genocide and world conflagration is also absolutely horrible and evil. The Europeans, beginning with Bavaria, unleashed such destruction that it is impossible to come to grips with it all, even 75 years after its brutality. But one wonders how easy it would have been for 1960’s Birmingham, if left to its own devices, to do similarly to the blacks what Munich and Germany did to the Jews and so many others. 
 
Being a Jew in Germany, I cannot seem to be able to keep the flames away. I circle and circle and circle around again and again. I get close but not too close. I am not sure if I am spiritually and intellectually and emotionally prepared to be in Germany without becoming a little whacked out

And there is something, well how to say it?—something perverse by the fact that Munich and Auschwitz and Birmingham and Selma and Montgomery now do quite a business offering tours of the horrible and the mean and the cruel. Bearing witness is at one and the same time a testimony to shame and good for the community. We profit on the evil of our ancestors. And as perverse as this might be, forgetting—not bearing witness—this would be an even greater perversion of the suffering and the evil unleashed by the darkest side of the human soul.
 
My Jewish moth flies around the flame, and around and around. I want to get close, but not too close. I try to understand what can never be understood.