Erev Ki Tetzei
September 12, 2008
From Generation To Generation
by Rabbi David Woznica
My father spent his teenage years in the Chestochowa [Chenstakova] ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps of Dora, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. During those years, he lost his parents, four of his five siblings and, undoubtedly, all of his dreams.
One of the clearest memories of my bar mitzvah was my father’s tears as he sat alongside my mother with my brother and sister in our synagogue. At the time I did not know why he was crying. It was not until years later that I learned he had never had the privilege of becoming a bar mitzvah.
Thirteen years ago, at the bris of my eldest child, Joshua, my father told me of a dream he was having. He dreamt of witnessing Joshua becoming a bar mitzvah.
Last December, my parents were called to the Torah for an aliyah as their grandson, Joshua, became a bar mitzvah. It was a moment that my father could not have imagined during the darkest moments of his life. Nearly sixty-three years after he was liberated, holding the bima for support, he watched and listened to his grandson chant from the Torah.
This time, it was I who cried.
Rabbi Harold Kushner teaches that a key to dreaming is to recognize that when dreams do not come true, you should dream new dreams.
To this day, my father has not stopped dreaming new dreams. In fact, as we walked out of the synagogue the morning of Joshua’s bar mitzvah, my eighty-one-year-old father was dreaming again. This time…of Joshua’s wedding.
[David Woznica is a Rabbi at Stephen S. Wise Temple in L.A. www.wisela.org]
We hear and read so much about the holocaust, about the physical deprivation of the Jewish prisoners. But most of these stories are written by or about secular Jews who had long before the emergence of Hitler’s final solution given up their Jewish observance.
We don’t hear very much at all about the deprivation of the religious practices of the observant Jews. As much as I had read and studied about the Shoah, I was not prepared for what I learned when I attended a Yom HaShoah commemoration at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Reb Pesah Schindler was a child when the Nazi’s invaded his town. His mother hid him and his brother in a Christian orphanage before she herself was taken away to a death camp. Reb Pesah talked about what it was like for the halakhically observant Jews to find a way to live even a remnant of their previous lives.
These are the Jews who had lived according to the numerous Jewish laws that most of us don’t even think about observing. They laid tefillin, ate only kosher food, prayed three times a day, taught Torah to their children, sang beautiful niggunim on Shabbat. And then there was nothing left of the life that had been their misgeret, their framework, for so long.
Even though I was newly observant when I heard Reb Pesah’s teaching, I was so aware of how important all those laws had become to me in such a short time. The thought of having to give them up made me literally feel sick. I had never occurred to me to think about that part of the concentration camp life. But as I listened to Reb Pesah, I understood the added cruelty of not just taking away someone’s control over their body but also over their most basic religious practices, their most basic spiritual connection with God.
When I read Rabbi Woznica describe his father’s lost dream of becoming a Bar Mitzvah, the loss that went unspoken for so many years, I thought about what I had learned from Reb Pesah. Being raised in an observant home, Woznica’s father had fully expected to become a Bar Mitzvah, to celebrate that event in front of his entire community. Then he was a prisoner and it was impossible.
Many of us still grieve over our lost dreams, the ones that for whatever reason we were not able to fulfill. For some of us, when we could not achieve our dream, a piece of ourselves died.
We cannot allow any parts of ourselves to be lost just because we were not able to complete any one of our dreams. As we grow older and hopefully wiser, we have to remember what Rabbi Woznica’s father was able to do. He was able to create a new dream for himself and then a new dream after that.
We are not our dreams but we are only as alive as our dreams are current. When we let our old and no longer viable dreams define who we are, we give up the possibility of being fully alive, of being fully involved in the life of our family and our community.
Let each of us during this month of Elul, reflect on those dreams that will no longer become reality and let go of them. Let us release the parts of ourselves that are still tied up in those dreams and use them to create new and more vibrant dreams. Let our new dreams bring us joy and love and fulfillment beyond anything we can imagine today.