Shabbat shalom.
O ne of the benefits to my occupation as a journalist is that I get to meet all kinds of interesting people with all kinds of interesting stories to tell. The only criterion they must all share is that they live in the circulation area of my newspaper.
One of these stories was so compelling that I felt an obligation to share it with you. I chose Shabbat Shuvah because the story is about loss of faith and regaining faith, partially through forgiveness. It is also about wondering why God allows evil to happen in the world. These are all topics that hit very close to home, for me, and may for many of you as well.
Before I tell you the story of Wes Adamczyk, a Catholic Pole who was born in the period between the two world wars, and who now is a retired chemist and accountant living in Deerfield, let me bring you back to 1969 when I was 11 years old. My family and I were taking a European vacation: Three days in Brussels, three days in Holland, three days in Switzerland, three hours in Germany. I asked my mother why we were not visiting Germany for longer than it took to whiz across the country on the famous autobahn at 100 miles an hour. Her answer: your father is still angry about how the Germans had murdered 6 million Jews, including his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. He had no desire to visit a country tied to such evil. At the same time that my great-grandparents and other relatives were being taken by train to death camps from their home in Galicia, then southeastern Poland, Wes Adamczyk, at the age of 7, was experiencing his own nightmare in northern Poland. His father had been an Army officer in 1920, fighting the Bolsheviks successfully. The Soviets, under Stalin, in 1939 did not forget this. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 on the west, the Soviets invaded on the east. Wes's father was taken prisoner by the Soviets, and in the spring of 1940, he along with 15,000 other Polish army officers and "bourgeoisie" were murdered at close range in the Katyn forest area of the Ukraine. But young Wes did not know this, all he knew was that about six months after his father said goodbye to him for the last time, a knock came at the door telling his mother and his two teenage siblings and him to pack their bags and take a train ride. They were taken from their comfortable home, where Wes had prayed to God every night that all would be well, to a packed train foul with the stench of human waste: their bathroom was a hole in the floor of the train car. Wes and his family ended up in the steppes of Kazakhstan, far away from their homeland. In his book, Wes told the story of his brave mother, who resourcefully hid jewels in her clothing when they were forced to leave Poland, a trick my great-grandmother also did to allow the only surviving relative, my aunt Marcia, to survive when she was pushed off the train headed for a death camp.
Wes's mother took her two children to freedom by just walking out of their village of exile in broad daylight, and bribing bureaucrats with the hidden jewelry to allow them to get to what was then called Persia. At the age of 12, just after they arrived in Persia, Wes saw a trainload of Polish orphan children, some without eyes. He cried out to his mother, "Mama, is God blind too?" And shortly after that, he too became an orphan, when his mother died from malnutrition and disease. He told me that is when he lost his faith in God.
I know that David Bier, who works with Holocaust refugees, has been troubled by this concept because a while back he gave a d'var on this issue, saying he, too, had heard stories of those troubled by this whole question of how God could allow such unspeakable evil. If He is omnipotent, why did he not intervene on behalf of the Jews, on behalf of the Polish orphan children?
Wes Adamczyk entitled his book, When God Looked the Other Way. That line is also echoed in this and last week's Torah portion: Va-Yeilich, Chapter 31 verse 18 (page 1176 in Etz Hayim): va' anochi haster eesteer pah-nahy b'yom ha-hu (Yet I will keep My countenance hidden on that day) , but then it states: al kol ha-raah asher ahsah kee pannah el eloheeem achareem. (Because of all the evil they have done in turning to other gods). The commentary at the bottom even attributes to Martin Buber, a refugee from Nazi Germany, a link with this image to the thought that God is hiding, turning away, and terrible things happening during that time.
In this week's poem, Haazinu, the same line recurs in chapter 32 verse 18 (page 1189 in red book): va yomer, eesterah pah-nay may-hem ar-yehg mah acharritam (I will hide My countenance from them, and see ho they fare in the end) cee dor tah-heucctot hamah bahneem lo aymen bam (for they are a treacherous breed, children with no loyalty in them).
So the Torah sets out the precedent that God does warn Israel He will hide his face from them, but it appears linked to the Jews doing terrible deeds. Few of us want to believe that the Holocaust occurred because we Jews were doing terrible deeds.
Neil Gillman, who spoke at our 25th anniversary Shabbaton last year, tried to tackle this issue in his book, Encountering God in Judaism. Gillman posits the idea that all three statements cannot be true: God is omnipotent, God is good, the Jews (or Job or the innocent child who died) are blameless. When forced to choose which is not true, Gillman went for omnipotent. Maybe God is not omnipotent, sometimes God is just not there, and humans have free will to choose not only between life and death, as Jodie told us last week, but equally important, between good and evil, as Heschel said in his book, God in search of man.
But Heschel took a different view: God is omnipotent, in fact, he created humans knowing full well they could choose to do evil. Making it more complicated, sometimes humans start off thinking they are doing good, and it sort of transmogrifies into evil. Osama bin Laden, evil though his murder of those 3,000 plus innocent victims were at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania, apparently thought he was doing good, in his own warped view.
But we should not think that only 21st century Jews are grappling with this concept of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Clearly, our ancestors were anguishing over the same question in the times of the Bible. Heschel cites Psalm 55: Fearfulness and trembling come upon me, horror has overwhelmed me, and I said, O that I had wings like a dove, Then would I fly away, and be at rest. And Psalm 83: O God, do not keep silence; do not hold peace or be still, O God. For, lo, Thy enemies are in uproar; those who hate Thee have raised their heads." And Gillman cites Psalms 13 and 44 where he says "in neither of these texts is there even a hint that God's punitive behavior is deserved."
Clearly, the struggle to do good is a constant one for humans, which makes the Yomim Noraim and the accompanying soul searching and quest for forgiveness all the more welcome. If we could not purge ourselves of this guilt we feel over our misdeeds every year, think how polluted we would feel. And the beauty of Yom Kippur is it can appeal to everyone on the spectrum of belief in God. As Heschel said, in Judaism, we do not look into people's beliefs, we stress only their action, their carrying out the mitzvot.
Now this week as we go around asking those we love and those we know for forgiveness, we can feel better. Still, Judaism teaches there are two sins we cannot forgive each other for, slander and murder. Slander, because it is impossible to know how many others heard the lashon ha-rah and so impossible to make the victim whole again, and murder, because the victim is dead and they are the only one who can ask for forgiveness.
I asked my father last week if he still would refrain from visiting Germany today, 59 years after the Holocaust. He said yes, he was still angry.
Then, I read an article in Richard's Yale alumni magazine on "Why we hate' an article about the work of Robert Sternberg, professor of psychology and Education and the son of a Holocaust survivor which brought many of the pieces of this story together for me. Like my great aunt Marcia, who changed her name to "Maria" after her mother pushed her off a train headed for a death camp, Sternberg's mother survived because she had blue eyes and did not "look" Jewish. My aunt Marcia was also helped by righteous gentiles, Polish peasants who chose good, at great personal risk, hiding her and feeding her potatoes to survive.
Sternberg defined the importance of story telling in the human condition, saying narrative was a "fundamental aspect of human cognition" that sets us apart from other animals. These narratives give meaning our lives. The problem occurs when the narratives all center around the suffering of one group experienced at the hands of another. That is when hate is born, even if the initial injustice occurred hundreds of years ago.
And here is how Wes's story ends: Wes came to Chicago when he was 15 years old to live with his father's cousin. He finished college, married, had children. He always wondered what had happened to his father. The official line was that the Germans had murdered those Polish officers at the Katyn forest, although the Germans had maintained they had not done it. It was the one crime they, in fact, did not commit during World War II. Then in 1990, under Perestroika, President Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted that it was the Soviets who had massacred the Polish officers, with the approval of Josef Stalin. The Polish government then invited the surviving members of the officers' families to come to the Ukraine to lay wreaths on their graves. Wes went with his grown son to represent other Katyn families from the Chicago area. A BBC news crew filmed the visit which was made into a documentary, "Forgotten Odyssey," which Wes showed me. On the way back from laying the wreaths, the train stopped in a town that Wes remembered from his childhood. Everyone got off the train. Why? Some young Ukrainian soldiers wanted to break bread dipped in salt with the families of the Katyn victims. It was a peace offering. The camera showed Wes seating stubbornly on the train, refusing to get off. Then he said he felt a divine spirit move him to get off the train, and he went down to where the officers were standing. He dipped the bread in the salt and ate. Wes told me he believed that without forgiveness, this hatred would just continue on and on. The world has too much hate, Wes told me.
I believe we can all show divinity when we say we are sorry to each other, and when we ask each other for forgiveness. Just as God forgives, so can we as God's partners. In so doing, may God's countenance not turn away but shine on us.
Finally, I asked my father if, given the chance, he, too, would get off a train as Wes did, and break bread with the descendents of the Germans, if they made that request. He paused for a very long time, and then said quietly, "Yes."
Shabbat shalom.
Go home.