KOL NIDRE & YOM KIPPUR 5773 / 2012
FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION… TO GENERATION
RABBI JONATHAN BLAKE
WESTCHESTER REFORM TEMPLE, SCARSDALE, NY
Today, and every day for the next 18 years, 10,000 Baby
Boomers will reach the age of retirement.
I am a member of Generation X: more Madonna and Michael
Jackson than Beatles and Stones, more Back to the Future than The
Graduate, more Michael Jordan than Mickey Mantle.
Gen-X’ers are now entering the prime time of their lives. Gen
X’ers in positions of prominence include Larry Page, CEO of
Google; Jordan Roth, one of Broadway’s most innovative
producers, and CNN’s Rachel Maddow. And for the first time,
we have a Gen-X’er on a major presidential ticket, Paul Ryan.
This historic moment prompts us to ask: what can Judaism
teach us about healthy transition from one generation to the
next?
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The answer to that question begins with a wonderful word,
palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or
book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be
used again.
Ancient Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be
smoothed over and reused. Vestiges of the earlier writing can
often be seen underneath the later composition. What emerges
is a conversation among generations.
What a palimpsest is to a scholar of literature, a tel is to a Biblical
archaeologist. The Hebrew word tel refers to a hill created by
different civilizations living and rebuilding in the same spot.
Over time, the surface level rises, forming a mound. Excavating
a tel reveals buried structures.... They often overlap, horizontally,
vertically, or both.1
In a metaphorical sense, all sacred Jewish texts are palimpsests
because they superimpose conversations from one generation to
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1 This definition from Wikipedia, “Tell.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell
the next, the way a tel reveals the architecture of bygone
generations, side-by-side and overlapping.
These images offer Jewish ways of contemplating how one
generation leaves its mark on the next, and a new generation
builds on the words, the wisdom, the foundational structures left
behind by the previous.
The job of the rabbi has always been to nurture a conversation
between the generations, “determining how the Judaism
treasured by one generation will be received and transmitted by
the generation that follows,” as our colleague Rabbi Elliot
Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue puts it.
Consider Moses in our Yom Kippur Torah reading. He says:
You stand this day, all of you, before the Eternal your God… to
enter into the covenant of the Eternal your God…. I make this
covenant… not with you alone, but both with those who are
standing here with us this day before the Eternal our God and
with those who are not with us here this day.2
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2 Deuteronomy 29:10-14.
...meaning both those who came before and those who will
follow. Moses is nurturing a conversation among the
generations, a conversation that will last for generations.
“It is a delicate conversation to manage,” Rabbi Cosgrove
acknowledges. And I would add: one person cannot manage it
alone.
Still, “[o]n the one hand I need to assure one side that what is
most important to them will be passed down unchanged and
untarnished. Yet I need the next generation to know that the
Judaism I invite them to practice is a response to them and their
moment, not that of their parents and grandparents. It is not
easy to manage this balancing act, but there is no conversation
more important, not only to this synagogue, but to the future of
American Jewry.”3
Our country has its generations, each with unique identities and
identifying characteristics, shaped by history and fate.
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3 “Dialogue Between the Generations,” June 2, 2012, as cited on http://pasyn.org/resources/sermons/dialogue-between-generations.
The Generation of the Depression, desperate to shore up every
penny. I think of the cabinets in my late grandparents’ little
apartment kitchen in Trenton, New Jersey, spilling over with
paper napkins and Sweet & Lo™ and ketchup packets hoarded
from McDonald’s. They were also The Greatest Generation,
having defeated fascism on two great fronts.
The Baby Boomers, molded to hopefulness on the one hand by
the liberation movements of African Americans and women;
inducted to disillusionment by the assassinations of King and
John and Bobby Kennedy, by the Vietnam War and Watergate.
And now, Gen X’ers, raised in an era of two-income households,
rising divorce rates and a faltering economy; ever-more
enmeshed in our technologies; anxious about the future in a
post-9/11, post-2008 reality; coming to terms with the fact that
we may never achieve the success or security of the generation
that came before us.
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We can also pinpoint Jewish generations, each with unique
identities and identifying characteristics, shaped by history and
fate.
“[W]hat we are is more than what we individually plan on
being,” says Rabbi Larry Hoffman. “We are regularly buffeted
by waves of history that we neither plan nor anticipate. They
mold our generation, and they define our project.”4
So as I stand here today, nurturing this conversation between the
generations, I reflect on the particular projects of three
generations of American Jewry because, as our Torah portion
says, Atem nitzavim ha-yom, “you all stand here today.” Three
generations, in one sanctuary, side-by-side and overlapping.
As a third-generation Jewish American I will speak to the three
generations born on these shores--my grandparents’ generation,
my parents’, and my own--and how each of their projects
interrelates.
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4 “From Ethnic to Spiritual: A Tale of Four Generations” by Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman. From the Synagogue 2000 Library.
A distinguished senior rabbi recently shared with me his mission,
the animating idea of his rabbinate. In a word, he declared:
Survival. The Survival of the Jewish People.
It was not a surprising pronouncement. In a sense, this rabbi,
who is approaching seventy years of age, speaks for his entire
Jewish generation. Even a cursory glance at the defining Jewish
moments of his lifetime would explain a mission of survival:
born during the Shoah, childhood witness to the establishment
of the State of Israel, a rabbinical student during the Six Day
War and a newly minted rabbi during the outbreak of the Yom
Kippur War…. He has been branded with the hot iron of Jewish
history and his sense of mission burns with an ever-present
awareness of existential threats to the Jewish People and the
State of Israel.
Could there be a more important generational project than
Jewish Survival? Rabbi Eugene Borowitz who is approaching
ninety still teaches at Hebrew Union College. In 1976 he
authored a definitive statement of his generation at a gathering
of Reform Rabbis in San Francisco.
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“Previous generations of Reform Jews,” he wrote, “had
unbounded confidence in humanity’s potential for good. We
have lived through terrible tragedy and been compelled to
reappropriate our tradition’s realism about the human capacity
for evil. Yet our people has always refused to despair. The
survivors of the Holocaust, being granted life, seized it, nurtured
it, and, rising above catastrophe, showed humankind that the
human spirit is indomitable. The State of Israel, established and
maintained by the Jewish will to live, demonstrates what a united
people can accomplish in history. The existence of the Jew is an
argument against despair; Jewish survival is warrant for human
hope.”5
For many of us, the project of Survival still fuels our Jewish
energies. Many affiliate with a synagogue, give tzedakah, stand up
for Israel, insist that their loved ones observe holidays and marry
inside the faith, because theirs is the project of Jewish survival.
Still, I wonder: does this project resonate today? How does my
generation--and, even more, the generation after me--feel about
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5 “Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective.”
the project of Jewish Survival? To a teenager growing up in
Scarsdale, New York, growing up in the nucleus of Jewish Success,
does a mission of “Jewish Surival” even make sense?
All four of my grandparents were born on American soil, a few
years after their immigrant parents--my great-grandparents--
landed on these shores. The immigrant generation had its own
project: making it in America. The effects of that project
continue to ripple down the decades.
Solomon Schechter once wrote that “every generation must
write its own love letters.” For the immigrant generation, so
eager to make it here, a commitment to education was its love
letter to the next generation.
Thanks to that commitment, my grandparents were destined not
to be street peddlers but pharmacists and factory managers and
teachers and administrative professionals, and their children
would become accountants and doctors and… well, you know
this story, because it is your story too.
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An image comes to me from earliest childhood, of five wooden
Russian nesting dolls all in a row, on a bookshelf, their rotund
bellies and babushka’d heads framing a purse-lipped smile on a
peasant woman’s face.
We still have these Russian dolls; I spotted them keeping vigil
atop a dresser on a recent visit to my parents’ new house in East
Greenwich, Rhode Island. There was, I recall, an identical set
in my grandmother’s house, and when we would visit, my sister
and I would place one doll inside the next, until the big fat doll
stood alone, all the other generations of her family within her.
I thought, what an appropriate image for the transition from
generation to generation, which is often mistakenly described as
a “chain of tradition.” A chain of tradition implies that each
link is a thing complete unto itself, utterly dependent on the
integrity of the link that comes before even as the one that
comes after hangs on for dear life.
Perhaps the conversation between one generation and the next
looks more like a set of Russian nesting dolls--each successive
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generation containing something of the previous, an echo of
itself….
Recent scientific studies have explored “whether the history of
our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected
ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls
genes, switching them on and off. At the heart of the field,
known as epigenetics, is the notion that genes have memory and
that the lives of our grandparents—what they breathed, saw and
ate—can directly affect us decades later.”6
Each generation shapes the next, imparts its commitments to the
next, lives and breathes the hope that another generation will
arise to take up its banner, so that when we shuffle off this
mortal coil, we will rest secure that our project does not die with
us.
To the the older generation we owe a debt of gratitude. Even
more, we owe a promise that their commitments will be
remembered and thereby live through us. We have no gift to
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6 Doreen Carvajal, “In Andalusia, on the Trail of Inherited Memories,” New York Times, August 17, 2012.
offer our children and grandchildren more precious than a
lifetime supply of precious Jewish memories.
When we light Shabbat candles, the next generation grows up
warmed by the glow of Shabbat, enchanted by its beauty and
power. When we take a family trip to Israel, the next generation
grows up imprinted by the experience, reflexively bonded to our
ancestral land. When we introduce our children to tzedakah; take
them on a march for social justice; volunteer with them at a soup
kitchen or after-school program, the next generation grows up
appreciating that what we earn, we share; that what stirs our
hearts must also stir our hands and feet.
In this way the project of one generation lives on within the next
and achieves its immortality.
In like fashion the generation whose Jewish project was
Survival--prompted by the Shoah and the uncertain first decades
of the State of Israel--never abandoned their parents’ dreams of
making it in America. Their optimism about, and ceaseless
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devotion to, this country continued to ripple through them, even
down to the next generation.
But post-War children would have their own Jewish project, one
forged in the suburbs. “When… newly affluent Jews flocked to
developing areas outside the great cities, the first institution they
created was usually the synagogue.”7 America of the 1950s was
already undergoing a great religious revival. “Under God” was
added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Joining a church or
synagogue became almost a national obligation, American as
Mom and apple pie. Never before nor since has America seen a
period of synagogue building like the 1950s and 60s, and WRT
is living proof.
Here in the suburbs, we embraced the project of this new
generation: to live for our children.
This project was not exclusively Jewish. Everything from the
advice of Dr. Spock to the exploding consumer culture identified
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7 Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1995, p. 354.
children as the most important residents of a household, around
which life would revolve.
Synagogues followed suit. If you look at synagogues from
around this time you will see that the school wings often dwarf
the sanctuaries. The focus of a rabbinic education began to shift
from preaching skills to teaching skills. And in countless other
manifestations, the project of living for our children continues to
shape Reform Jewish synagogue life.
I am the happy product of this child-centric project, born six
days before Rosh Ha-Shanah and sixteen days before the
outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. My father who had not set
foot in a synagogue for more than ten years, returned to shul for
the High Holidays the week after I was born, which means I’ve
been nudging people to come to temple for a very long time.
Still, I wonder: does this project resonate today? How will my
generation, just entering parenthood, and the generation after
us, with one foot still in childhood, relate to the child-centric
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enterprise which has dominated the Reform Jewish landscape for
60 years?
What will it mean to those in this sanctuary who are empty-
nesters, or who have not parented children, and who still want a
Judaism that still matters? Religious school education continues
to drive synagogue affiliation. But what will drive our
generation’s Jewish project now that the kids are grown? What
will capture the hearts of Gen-X’ers who regard with suspicion
the notions of “affiliation” and “membership” in general?
We cannot be museum curators for the Judaism of the past.
“Museums,” said Bob Dylan, “are cemeteries.” What he meant
is that a project of pure preservation can never sustain a new
generation. Our Reform Jewish heritage is founded on the
premise that change keeps Judaism alive, that each generation
must become not just guardians but innovators.
Too often we find ourselves rehearsing the old ways, then
wondering why a meticulously preserved religious practice fails
to inspire us or our children.
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A funny little film called Gefilte Fish! The Movie introduces us to
three generations of women preparing for Passover Seder. The
grandmother’s gefilte fish recipe requires the triumverate of
whitefish, carp, and pike. She chops it by hand and cooks it in
its own stock. We even learn about her mother who would buy
live fish at the market and keep them in her bathtub until it was
time to get cooking.
Her daughter, a mother herself, makes her mother’s gefilte fish,
but sometimes leaves out the pike, or the carp. She does not
chop by hand. She uses a Cuisinart.
Her daughter also likes gefilte fish. When she wants a piece, she
opens a jar.
Our Judaism will require new recipes. We cannot reach for
something in a jar. We have to create it. Think about it: the
word “generation” comes from “generate”: to create. Our
shared Jewish project is one of Generating Meaning. “We seek
something to hold us together and connect us beyond ourselves,
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as we go about choosing the paths that will take us through the
labyrinth of life,” observes Larry Hoffman.8
We now go beyond survival, beyond living for our children, to
generate a Judaism that calls us to intentional living.
In the Judaism that we will create together, many of the
ingredients will remain the same--in our worship, in our study, in
repairing the world and building community--and many will
taste new and unfamiliar.
We are all in this. Atem nitzavim ha-yom. We all stand together
today--all become partners today--three generations, side-by-side
and overlapping.
From the Hebrew prophets, to the titans of social justice whom
your parents and grandparents venerated, to the mission of this
synagogue, Judaism has never wavered in its insistence that when
we work together, generations aligned, we can make this world a
little more like the one it ought to be.
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8 “From Ethnic to Spiritual.”
Some projects know no generational boundaries.
In prayer we announce, “L’dor va-dor nagid godlecha, from
generation to generation we will proclaim Your greatness.”
Every generation bears witness that an Eternal project endures
long after our wordly concerns have gone to dust, a project that
connects the generations each to each.
Call that connectedness Spirituality; call it God; either way it
means a Power that gives our lives meaning and direction and a
reach beyond our fleeting years.
Over the past decade I have come to know so many of you and I
can say with confidence that each one of us seeks a spiritual
anchor for our lives--a sacred purpose--no matter our age. You
may have come to WRT under Rabbi Stern of blessed memory,
or under Rabbi Jacobs who leads our Movement with strength,
or you may have joined us only days ago, and we welcome you.
However and whenever you came to our synagogue, if you are
standing here today, you now can seize the opportunity to
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generate an authentic Jewish spirituality that goes beyond
survival, beyond teaching our children.
Abby Pogrebin, an up-and-coming author who presented at
WRT a couple of years ago, puts it this way: “I have come to
believe, in my middle age, that Jewish feeling doesn’t land in
your lap or get sprinkled on your head like fairy dust. More than
I realized, it does take more than a dash of Seder and synagogue
twice a year…. I’ve come to feel this tradition is more relevant,
more challenging, and more interesting than my parents ever
showed me. Each Jew makes a choice – to let it go or keep it
going.”9
You came here to honor the past. You also came to see the
future.
In two years, our Reform Movement will produce a new machzor,
a High Holiday prayer book. We explored a draft copy on the
second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah. Some of the words come to us
from sages of antiquity; some frame the voices of today’s
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9 Unpublished quote courtesy of Rabbi Michael Friedman.
promising poets. Some of the melodies are said to have been
heard at Sinai; some have yet to be composed.
Not long after, in a time many of us will surely live to see, prayer
books will give way to tablets and e-readers; and beyond that,
who knows? Who can say what the Hebrew School classroom of
tomorrow will look like? Who can say what opportunties will
present themselves to collaborate with other congregations here
and abroad, to become ever closer to Israel in an ever-more
globally interconnected world? Who can say what urgent and
emergent global crisis will impel our ardent action, compel our
moral fiber, propel our philanthropic reach?
What we can say today is this: WRT will always be a place
where meaning resides in the cornerstones of generations past,
in the welcoming of new generations born every month. But
perhaps most importantly, WRT will continue to be a living
laboratory of Reform Judaism, a place where meaning is
generated.
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We will be a palimpsest, where the love letters of each
generation are written atop the last; a tel, where layers of history
intersect and cause the entire enterprise to rise from the ground;
a Russian doll, where one generation’s reason for living is
embraced within the next, inspiring it to grow greater still.
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