Returning, p.4
Returning, page 4
The main commercial street of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, when Mother was a young woman there.
But there was something that wasn’t so cheerful. Somewhere a generation or two back in Mother’s family, and probably the other proudly middle-class families of Perth Amboy too, were the Lower East Side slums. These were never to be discussed. People had been desperate, hungry, disordered. Was it completely impossible that they could fall back into the abyss? Maybe not. When I was a boy, Mother would sometimes drive me past a soup kitchen called the Ozanam Inn that was on the way between Quercus and Father’s office downtown. She would point to the long line of defeated-looking men standing outside. “See those men?” she’d say. “Every one of them made just one mistake, and that’s where they wound up.” Years before Mother was born, her father’s father, a poverty-bred no-goodnik, had won an illegal lottery, made a small windfall, and abandoned his family; my grandfather had managed to acquire a medical license at an early age after an unspecified, but evidently not large, amount of higher education, and then he went to work supporting the family. He grew a moustache to make himself look older. Mother told me that once when she was a girl, a strange man had approached her on Perth Amboy’s main shopping street and said he was her missing grandfather. She ran home and told her parents, who sternly admonished her never to speak to him again, if he should turn up, which he didn’t. He died alone in a rooming house in Newark.
Mother’s parents would instantly and firmly shut down my occasional inquiries into their family history. They wanted to focus on the bright future, not the mysterious but undoubtedly unpleasant past. Father’s firm uninterest in his own Jewish history came not so much from wanting to erase it as to remake it, so that we would have been descended from European aristocrats—or at least from an eternally upper-class Jewish family, on a level with the Sassoons or the Ephrussis. At one point he hired someone to design a heraldic shield for us. What he and Mother, with their different backgrounds, had in common was an impulse to create a clean slate in the present, devoid of poverty, devoid of discrimination, devoid of religion, devoid of what Jews call Yiddishkeit. Jewishness felt as if it had a strange power to ruin everything, unaccompanied by much countervailing benefit.
Mother and Father were married in 1951 in the living room of her parents’ house. By that time, her parents, doing better, had moved a short distance away from the apartment where Mother had grown up, into a house right on Raritan Bay, with a broad porch and no relatives as their housemates. Before the ceremony, Father spotted a basket of kippot, skullcaps worn on religious occasions, that had been put out for the men to wear, and hid them away. Mother and her family, thrilled about her propitious marriage to someone from a much less modest background, got the message. I don’t remember anything Jewish ever being mentioned during my long childhood visits to Perth Amboy. After Mother died, I was surprised to find out that in high school she had been a Hebrew school teacher at the synagogue, Congregation Beth Mordecai. Today Perth Amboy is a mainly Latino city, with very few Jews left; like Philip Roth’s Newark, it was a one-generation Jewish paradise for people climbing the American ladder, a step up from where they had come from, a step below what they were preparing their children for. Congregation Beth Mordecai has been reconsecrated as a church.
In New Orleans, we belonged to Temple Sinai, a grand, sand-colored, neo-Moorish building on St. Charles Avenue, founded in the late nineteenth century by German Jews, including my relatives. My great-grandparents, my grandparents, and my parents, along with quite a few other Lemanns, lived within a short walk of the temple, as if we were unusually prosperous shtetl dwellers, in a neighborhood of spacious old houses and live oak trees whose thick roots had extended over long years to the point that they had broken through the sidewalks. The rabbi, Julian Feibelman, was married to one of my innumerable cousins. When I was a child Father took us to the temple just once a year, on Thanksgiving; Mother didn’t come. He’d tell us that this was a holiday for all Americans, not just for Jews, who were to his way of thinking not a separate people, just a group of religious congregants like any other.
Mother and Father sent us to the temple’s Sunday school, where he had gone as a child, but not with a lot of enthusiasm. A few years ago, at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, I came across a series of letters Father had written to Julian Feibelman during the time I was growing up. One was from 1966, complaining that I had brought home a magazine for Jewish children that Father found objectionable. “It has, to my mind, an undue orientation toward the State of Israel and matters taking place there,” Father wrote. For many years after that, Father waged a lonely campaign against Israel’s ever being mentioned at Temple Sinai, or the Israeli flag’s being displayed there alongside the American flag. “Temple Sinai is a house of worship, not a foreign policy organization!” he’d say indignantly. Israel was maximally threatening to his preferred version of being Jewish. It was unavoidably different, impossible to miss, combative, surrounded by enemies, and indicative of a sense of Jewish particularity. Father loved to travel, including in the ancient world, but Israel was one place he never went.
Julian answered Father’s letter, in a patient but unmistakably exasperated tone, observing that you can’t please everyone. And he had a complaint of his own, about an assignment on Hanukkah that my sister had submitted, which “caused us much more of a problem than, I daresay, any magazine or textbook would induce.” It’s easy for me to guess what Nancy must have said in the paper. I had absorbed Father’s habit of being closely attuned to, so as to avoid, anything that might bring people’s disapproval; Nancy was more candid, exuberant, unrestrained. She probably had said forthrightly in her paper that we did not celebrate Hanukkah in our house. Instead, Christmas was an occasion of great and elaborate joy for us. In our attic were boxes full of beautiful Christmas ornaments, taken out every year after we had brought home our tree, and there were also wreaths on our front door, an annual ceremonial reading by Father of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” caroling, a lavish Christmas dinner—the whole schmear, as we wouldn’t have put it. Julian’s letter went on to chastise Father: if a child of the temple was getting one message at Sunday school (pro-Hanukkah, no doubt) and the opposite message at home, it put the school in an impossible situation.
A few months later, Father wrote another complaining letter to Julian. I had gotten a very low grade, 53 out of 100, on a Sunday school test about the early history of Reform Judaism back in Germany. (Until I saw Father’s letter, I had no memory of this. I don’t think I cared much about how I did in Sunday school, or felt that hearing about the opening of a splendid Reform temple in Hamburg in 1844 had anything to do with me.) Father included the test with his letter, along with my latest school report card, which was much better. My performance on the test, to his mind, represented a failure on Temple Sinai’s part rather than on my part. The temple had failed to capture my interest. Father told Julian that, in the face of relentless complaints from both his children about being bored in Sunday school, he was inclined to stop insisting that we go. Of course it’s the rare child who doesn’t protest being subjected to religious education—mine certainly did—so Father’s reaction showed how important his children’s Jewishness was to him: not very.
Around this time, unaware of this correspondence, I asked Father’s permission to quit Sunday school. He said I should go see Cousin Julian and tell him why I wanted to quit. If I could obtain his blessing, it would be okay. Julian was a small, immensely dignified man with a round, deeply creased face. He was seventy years old, thirty years into his reign at Temple Sinai, proud of the measure of prominence he had achieved as one of the South’s leading rabbis. I picture him in dark, floor-length, embroidered velvet robes, though he couldn’t have been dressed that way when we met in his office. I put my case before him: Every year we had two classes, Jewish history and Hebrew, and each one was the same every year, the first featuring the stories of the biblical patriarchs and the second devoted to teaching us the characters in the Hebrew alphabet. It was boring. Julian looked at me impassively, revealing nothing. Knowing what I know now, I think he must have been relieved. He was one nod of his wise head away from getting Father off his back. What I remember is his assenting, with a minimalist oracular opacity. I was free.
This happened when I was about the age I would have become a bar mitzvah, had I grown up in a more typical Jewish environment. At Temple Sinai we had confirmations instead, the way Episcopalians, a denomination we greatly admired, did. Father had been confirmed at Temple Sinai when he was sixteen, but I was not. In fact I can’t remember our doing anything explicitly Jewish for years. Somehow, though, if our aim was to attain a blessedly Jewishness-free consciousness, it didn’t work. Our membership in this mysterious and heavily freighted category of people was still ever-present, hovering around us in the air, troubling, undefined, unresolved.
What was I missing? To be more specific, what if I had been bar-mitzvahed? It’s something I wonder about now, but at the time, even if I was vaguely aware that bar mitzvahs existed somewhere far away from us, I had no idea what actually happened at one. Now I know. A bar mitzvah spends several years learning about the traditional Jewish Sabbath morning service, in which the bar mitzvah ceremony is embedded. He becomes familiar with the order of the service and with the prayers, and learns how to say at least some of them in Hebrew. At the climax of the ceremony, the boy is called to the Torah—meaning, he is summoned to a platform where a group of elders of the congregation are gathered, called by his Hebrew rather than his secular name, and put in front of a mysterious, sanctified long parchment scroll, dense with hand-inscribed Hebrew characters arrayed in columns, and—at least in the case of a well-prepared bar mitzvah—asked to read aloud.
Many Jews, at least American Jews today, are used to thinking of themselves as having a comfortable, casually worn ethnic identity, but you can see that here, unavoidably, the bar mitzvah is being removed from the mainstream and relocated as a Jew. He uses a different name and speaks a different language—a particularly challenging one if he’s reading from the Torah scroll, because, in addition to the alphabet’s being different, there are no vowels and the reading must be done in a distinctive singsong trope. The Torah itself is not reading matter, it’s magic. It’s handled with ritual and reverence, honored with prayers before and after it’s read. Letting it fall would be a disaster. It is divided into fifty-two weekly portions. Every Saturday morning Jews read one of them out loud and then listen to a comment delivered by a rabbi, a member of the congregation, a learned visitor, or, in this case, a bar mitzvah. People who are observant have read every weekly portion dozens of times; the idea is that, unlike any other book, this one, a peculiar stitched-together collection of stories and recitations of rules, cannot ever yield the entirety of the wisdom it contains. There’s always something new—not just new, so vital that life really ought not be lived without it—that each year’s reading of each week’s portion offers.
As a journalist and a professor, I operate in a culture that imagines itself to be capable and rational. Whatever is going on in the moment, we analyze it. If it’s a problem, we believe we can solve it. We don’t assume that there are limitations to smart humans’ capabilities, to their power of understanding. Entering the world of Torah study requires thinking of yourself differently. Whatever is in that week’s portion—fire, flood, liberation; peculiarly detailed instructions about animal sacrifice; poetry; excruciatingly long genealogical lists; unacceptable practices like slavery, concubinage, polygamy, and war crimes—is, at least in the moment, more important, more pertinent, than whatever is going on in the world. It has a special power if you submit to it. Why? Did God write the Torah? Did He reveal it to Moses atop Mount Sinai? Even if one wants to dodge those questions, as I do, participating in Jewish services requires acting as if the answers to them might be yes.
The Torah leads into a vast ocean of commentary, much of it written many centuries ago in a highly elliptical style by rabbis living in medieval villages. The premise is that the Torah, on one hand, contains all possible wisdom and is usefully applicable to all situations in the present, but, on the other hand, is full of unclarities, contradictions, and elisions. None of this can be simply a mistake—God doesn’t make mistakes—so it requires study and explication. To make this even more complicated, the commentators usually don’t come to a conclusion, they merely disagree eruditely. (The Talmud, the vast compendium of ancient and medieval Jewish law and commentary, begins with a long, unsettled dispute over the proper time to say the evening prayer.) All Jews should participate in this ongoing disputation—even a bar mitzvah. So preparing for a bar mitzvah also requires an encounter with the commentary on at least one’s weekly portion. The premise is that even a thirteen-year-old boy can—must!—add something of his own to a never-ending two-millennium-long conversation. That’s what it means to be an adult member of the community. And so it also means, at least if you conduct a portion of your life outside the confines of the kahal, the community, coming at the world in an unfamiliar way, having to negotiate constantly between two quite different forms of identity and consciousness.
Because Jacob Lemann’s departure from Germany is on my mind, I would like to imagine that, if I had a bar mitzvah, my Torah portion would be Lech Lecha, which takes up chapters 12 through 17 of the Book of Genesis. And because it’s likely that Jacob studied Lech Lecha himself, studying it might serve as a way to engage in informed speculation about his state of mind as he was leaving; my text was plausibly his text too. Lech Lecha is not one of those boring Torah portions that bar mitzvahs dread being assigned. It begins with a bang. God appears to Abram, a seventy-five-year-old man living with his barren wife, Sarai, in a village in what is now Turkey, and offers a stirring possibility—no, given the source, a certainty: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation.” The main storyline of the Torah begins here.
Dispatched on their unlikely journey by God, this elderly couple make their way to Egypt, where Abram essentially offers up Sarai to Pharaoh as a mistress and is rewarded with great riches. God puts an end to that episode. Long years of wanderings and wars follow. Sarai instructs Abram to consort with her servant, Hagar, so that he can have a child, and he does—call him Ishmael. Then, when Abram is ninety-nine years old and Sarai is ninety, God reappears and creates His covenant with our people: Abram will have himself and all the males in his household circumcised, God will at last give Sarai a child, the couple will be renamed Abraham and Sarah, and their numerous descendants will eventually be given the land of Canaan as an everlasting holding. Can we just immerse ourselves in the indelible, undeniable power of this story? Here we have longing, sin, an epic journey, adventure, miracles, and some awfully complicated relationships.
But this is a bar mitzvah, so, sorry, we will have to engage with Lech Lecha in the Jewish manner, which is not so straightforward. A very long time ago, we were driven out of the land God promised us in Lech Lecha. We no longer had the magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, and we still don’t. Scattered all over the world, we have focused intensely on studying the Torah. It’s what binds us into a people. Perhaps because of its supreme importance and therefore its familiarity, we pass right through its main narrative. Instead we look for small mysteries, unanswered questions, and lacunae, and then try to explain them. We look for meanings beyond the obvious meanings. For example, Rashi began his interpretation of Lech Lecha at the very beginning, with the first two words. Why did God say “go forth,” instead of just “go”? It couldn’t be just happenstance or idle wordplay. There must be a reason.
Rashi finds a great deal more than is obviously there in that one extra word: “GET THEE OUT (literally, go for thyself)—for your own benefit, for your own good: there I will make of you a great nation whilst here you will not merit the privilege of having children.” None of this is in the text. Rashi feels free to make Abram’s first encounter with God into more of a transaction and less of a simple command: stay, and remain childless, or go, and become rich and fruitful. Perhaps God knew already, as we don’t at that point, what a highly imperfect person Abram (like all the biblical patriarchs) was—a man capable of telling Pharaoh that Sarai was his sister, and of assenting to the banishment of Hagar when Sarai became enraged with her for becoming pregnant. Did God know that Abram was not sufficiently noble to make his terrifying journey without a material deal-sweetener?
All this speaks to the idea that in reading Lech Lecha, and for that matter every other Torah portion, we assume, at least for the purpose of a bar mitzvah, that this ancient document, containing nothing we would accept today as factual or scientific evidence, can still guide us. The Torah—physically unwieldy, unreadable without special training, often dull or indecipherable, full of material that offends modern sensibilities—rationally ought not to have bounded so many millions of people’s lives for so many years, but it did. Even now, when I see it taken out of the ark and unrolled to the proper passage, I can’t help feeling that there is an underlying order in the world, a stanchion against whatever is the disaster of the moment. It’s hard to explain in the language I’m accustomed to using to explain things, but the Torah’s power, for those who choose to submit to it, is undeniable. It endures. Nothing else endures.
If Jacob Lemann, childless like Abram and also wifeless, had looked to Lech Lecha for guidance when he departed Germany for Louisiana, what would he have derived from it? Abram’s journey, God told him through their various conversations, would bring him riches, and descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and a land populated by people we’d now call Jews. Jacob was moving from his small, constricted, but covenanted environment to a country that would be far less friendly to a Jewish life, at least in the short run, but far more friendly to Jews. The Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, a French aristocrat and politician, gave a “Speech on Religious Minorities and Questionable Professions” in 1789, just a few months after the Revolution (and twenty years before Jacob was born), in which he declared, “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to the Jews as individuals.” If this was the choice Jacob was making, his journey was different from Abram’s: away from the covenant, not toward it. He would be fully emancipated, he would have a chance to prosper far beyond what would have been possible in Germany, but he would not be able to keep kosher, or even to pray, since that requires a company of ten Jewish adults. He would surely have to violate the Sabbath.
