From Gedalyah to Gary to Menachem, Yonina & Tzeira

Rosh Hashanah First Day

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor
September 30th, 2000

 

Introduction

I grew up answering to "Gary." My brother is "Bruce". He married a "Susan". I married a "Ruby". My parent's names are "Henry" and "Clara". Yet my brother's children are named "Yael Nechama" and "Avi Binyamin". Our children are "Menachem Yosef", "Yonina Rahel", and "Tzeira Adina". They were perplexed when first asked, "What's your English name?" Indignantly they answered, "This is my name." That's the answer I wanted them to give. My brother and sister-in-law, my wife and I all have given English names.

How did I do this to our children?

Why did I do this to them?

The "how" is easy to answer. Our three children and my niece and nephew are named after deceased family members. That is no mystery. But I have never written a composition explaining "why" I did it. This Rosh HaShanah, I would like to share that with you, besides for them. But there is truly a deeper issue in the question and the answer.

I

Let me begin by placing my family's personal story in a much broader context. My timeline starts about 120 years ago, beginning in the little shtetl of Bielsk, in northeastern Poland. There lived my namesake, Gedalyah Cohen, whose picture I mentioned in last year's sermon. With a longer and darker beard and a long black coat, we would be identical. I am named after him, for I am Gedalyah, not only Gary. That Gedalyah could never be anything other than a Polish Jew.Everything about him bore testimony to who he was. If he had been asked, "Who are you?" in heavily accented Yiddish he would have answered, "Ich bin a Yid." Gedalyah's daughter was my grandmother Anna, who married Abraham Liebhoff, both having immigrated here at the turn of the century. My grandmother's Hebrew name was Nechama. Somewhere, somehow, she acquired her English name. She, also, could never have been mistaken for anyone other than an Eastern European Jew. Her appearance bespoke her Polish origins. She spoke a beautiful Yiddish and a "tsbrokkena Anglish". She knew the New York City subway by heart, but only learned to sign her name in English in 1969, so to get her passport to visit me in Israel. She was a faithful representative of the Jews who lived in Boro Park, Brooklyn, New York, a self-defined Yiddish world in every measurable way. Her daughter is my mother Clara, who first went to Yiddish school before the local public school. She and my grandmother had long Yiddish conversations that I never understood. But she and my father named me " Gary", a name that ironically is Germanic in origin. They moved the family to northern New Jersey. I went to public school, participated in the activities of the town's recreation department and played little league baseball. My native language is English. I looked like the other boys, and except for a few differences, my life was like theirs. In but relatively a few years, this Gedalyah bore hardly any semblance to that Gedalyah. If we had met on the street, we would not have recognized each other. We would have almost nothing in common. The transformation from "Gedalyah" to "Gary" was complete and almost total.

II

I pause in this personal narrative and turn to this morning's Torah portion and the story of the father of the Jewish people. Abraham was born in Ur Chasdim, the center of Mesopotamian culture. With his family they traveled to Haran, a major trading center and juncture of cultures in the northern reaches of the Euphrates. From there he went to Eretz Ca'naan. When he comes there, he doesn't look like Canaanites. He doesn't sound like them. His name is different. His language is different. His lifestyle is different. The questions hidden in the background of the Biblical pages are:

Will Abraham maintain his unique and special identity? Or,

Will Abraham and Sarah abjure their origins and abdicate their roots?

Will they relinquish their mission and renounce their essence?

Through the Torah we know the answer: He kept the faith. Truly. Totally.

But I would like to ask father Abraham:

"How did you do it? Avraham, how did you remain Avraham?

When you were surrounded with an entirely different world, language, custom, cuisine, and rituals,

how did you maintain your own self,and not give in?"

Could the pressures upon him and his little family be so much less that those exerted upon my family? Didn't they travel a greater distance geographically, religiously, ethnically, and culturally? In today's Torah reading they name their son Isaac, Yitzchak, a good Jewish name. But I want to know: why did his great grandsonsall have Hebrew names: Levi, Judah, Issachar…and I was called "Gary"?

Perhaps the answer is found in that Avraham Avinu had a special relationship with God, the berit, a contract, which bonded them together. God says to Avraham: "Walk yourself before Me, and be complete." (17:1) Our classical commentator Rashi cites the Rabbinic Midrash that links the word "Tamim" - "complete" to refer to the Berit Milah, ritual circumcision. There was not only a verbal connection between Avraham and God, but also a physical one. In a poetic sense, God's imprint is upon our very bodies that daily renews the covenant, and makes it everlasting. In the birth of Isaac and his berit milah, Avraham entered his son into the agreement and signed it in the spirit, and in the flesh. Maybe that is the reason that not only Avraham's great grandsons all had Hebrew names, but so did his great, great grandsons, Ephrayim and Menasheh, who were born in Egypt. Abraham transmitted to his family the commitment to remain inside the covenant, bound by its agreements, and faithful to God, regardless of their environment, despite the surrounding influences. Avraham's great great grandchildren remembered their names and thus who they were. This is why they were redeemed from Egypt.

III

I began this sermon with a personal reflection and have connected it to Avraham and Sarah of our Torah portion. Now I make another connection, to France in the 1780's. As a result of the French Revolution, the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine came before the National Assembly in Paris asking that the human rights propounded by the French Revolution be extended to the Jews. On September 28 th, 1791, 209 years ago the Paris Commune voted overwhelmingly and declared the Jews to be equal with all men and free citizens of the Republic of France. Yet that picture is incomplete. There was a price to be paid!! Clermont-Tonnerre then made a declaration, which the Jews of France accepted, even at the peril of their very existence. He said:

"To Jews as human beings – everything; to Jews as a people – nothing!"

If they were to be accepted as Frenchmen, the Jews had to give up their uniqueness. All that they were permitted was anethereal faith invisible and untouchable, which would evaporate. Perhaps they did not grasp the tragic irony of the French offer:

If you want to be, you must disappear!!

 

IV

Was this not the challenge to Avraham and Sarah when they left home and came to Canaan?

Was this not the challenge faced by my family – and all families – in the transition from Europe, the gambit offered by America?

Were not our people offered a safe haven under the banner of "liberty and justice for all" – yet:

Did we not say to ourselves, whether or not anybody said it to us, articulated or not, consciously or unconsciously, did we not say: There is a price to be paid!!

Give up your language and literature.

Give up your mores and traditions.

Give up your customs and ceremonies.

Give up your ways.

Give up your names

and then you can be Americans!!

The metaphor for America was the melting pot. And we were supposed to be sliced and diced, chopped and pureed, blended and shaken, until, being so dissimilar and disassociated from our origins, we would disappear into the larger mixture.

How many people in different careers changed their names to hide or suppress their origins?

How many politicians - James Schlessinger, William Cohen and Barry Goldwasser – relinquished their heritage on the altar of political advancement?

How many others – Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Stephen Bayer - while not renouncing their birthright, never practiced it in private nor proclaimed it in public?

I would have been thrilled if Hank Greenberg and raised Jewish children, but he didn't; if he and Sandy Koufax had done more than one Yom Kippur, but they didn't.

Wherever we turn in the history of the Jews in America, the lesson WAS that the priceofadmission was to give up our Jewishness.  

I would like to suggest some other models for our children, and us where we live our Jewishness, alive, active, present, proud and public:

Dennis Ross is an active member of the Conservative synagogue in Rockville, Maryland and his wife is the president of the their Sisterhood;

Dov Zackheim – both names clearly Jewish – is the number two man in the Defense Department, is a graduate of the Yeshiva of Flatbush;

Stuart Eisenstadt was the American ambassador to the European Union and whose embassy in Brussels is kosher;

And Joe Lieberman;

Who, when nominated for state senator didn't give his acceptance speech in person because it was Friday night, Shabbat, and sent a tape recording instead, for which he received a standing ovation;

Who despite the rigors of a national political campaign, does not campaign on Shabbat, but goes to synagogue;

Who observes kashrut in every location, all the time;

Whose father-in-law is a rabbi;

Whose children are graduates of the Solomon Schechter Day School – the Conservative Movement's Day School program;

Whose son is in the rabbinical school of the Jewish Theological Seminary with our Menachem, the school of the Conservative Movement;

Whose wife's name is Hadassah.

Regardless of any political issue, totally apart from for whomever you vote, finally, there is the true and authentic image and model for the Jew in America. A much more worthy motif of America is the patchwork quilt, where everyone preserves the richness of their heritage with all its uniquenesses, while being stitched together in a cohesive society.

Conclusion

And that is why our children are Menachem Yosef, Yonina Rahel and Tzeira Adina, only. They have their names. They have their essence. And by my life, off the pulpit, I showed them from birth, that I could be a thoroughly modern American and a truly authentic Jew. I wouldn't pay the price of admission. And now you and I have lived to see the day that a fully publicly recognized Jew can be nominated for the second highest position in the country. Win or lose, we have won.

The real question is: will we be worthy of this moment in Jewish history?

Will we come to shul when it is not Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur?

Will we insist with our bosses that our observances of Sukkot, Pesach and Shavuot be respected so that we can observe our holidays?

Will be insist to our children's teachers to not give tests when our children are absent – will they be? – when Yom Tov falls on a weekday?

Will we study Jewish texts, read the Bible, learn our Hebrew, and be proficient with the prayer books, Siddur and Machzor and the Haggadah of Pesach?

Will we keep kosher, beginning inside our homes and extending it outside?

Will the seudot, the meals that accompany Jewish life cycle events of Bar and Bat Mitzvah be kosher as befits the occasion?

And not be ashamed! And not be apologetic! And not be contrite!

Will we take back our names? Will we give them to our children?

Will we give them their heritage? Will we claim the birthrite, which is ours?

That is the question of the hour, of this precious and unique moment in the history of the Jewish people.

The question God asks us this Yom Tov: will we be worthy?

I pray that we will. I pray that we will.

For God. For our ancestors. For our descendants. I pray that we will. 

Amen.