From the Rabbi

I was given a precious gift last fall. It was a circular piece of black lace.

“My grandma wore it to synagogue,” explained Ruth Kingberg.

Ruth Kingberg was born in Germany in the 1920’s. Her family had lived in the German village of Göppingen for many generations.

Her grandmother, Rosalie Dörzback, had worn the black shawl to services at the same synagogue Ruth went to as a child.

The shawl dated back to the second half of the nineteenth century, to a life and a culture, and a Jewish community that was utterly destroyed by the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in the 1930’s. Ruth had kept her grandmother’s shawl carefully folded and wrapped in tissue paper and plastic for many years.

She wanted me to make myself a dress, she explained. She hoped that I could use the shawl as part of that dress, and wear what I made to the party my congregation, Temple Or Olam, had planned to celebrate my ordination as rabbi.

I went to the fabric store, bought a pattern and a brilliant turquoise fabric to lay underneath the black lace. Then I unwrapped and spread out the lace.

But before I could lay out the dress pattern, I noticed the holes.  Here and there the thin threads had broken and frayed.

I called Ruth. I explained.

She was heartbroken. “I wouldn’t have given it to you if I’d known,” she said.

“Ruth,” I said, “Do not worry.”

I knew what I needed to do as soon as I’d seen the holes in the lace.

Ruth’s family made it out of Germany at great risk and terrible loss. Ruth has a perfume bottle given to her by a childhood friend who was deported east. Her beloved friend did not survive the Holocaust. Neither did most of the other children of her little school. Ruth still has a picture of herself with those children, aged six to thirteen. Most were murdered in the gas chambers.

The black lace she gave me had survived, but the holes in the lace spoke of all that had not.

I went back to the store. I came home and laid the fabric over a silver gray shawl that glimmered softly underneath the curlicues, the rich black flowers unfolding across the woven threads.

I left one hole in the lace. You will not see it unless I point it out. But it is there, to remind me.

A small piece of lace was left to sew onto a kippah, a little head covering many Jews wear  during prayer.

The night of the celebration, I set the kippah on my head. I drew the silver-grey shawl over my shoulders. The black lace covers each end, swirling across the fabric.

Rosalie’s shawl is still worn over the shoulders of a Jewish woman. With it, I carry the knowledge of German Jews who once lived lives of hope and promise.

Her prayer shawl sits lightly on my shoulders, though it has taken such a different form. Rosalie’s memory blesses my own efforts to continue to build a Jewish congregation where there once was none, to nurture Jewish life here in Cabarrus County and its environs.  Her granddaughter is a founding member of Temple Or Olam.

May Rosalie’s memory be for a blessing. May Ruth’s gift be one I hand on someday to a Jewish woman of a generation perhaps yet to be born. May she remember, too, and resolve to hope.

[This piece was printed in the Neighbors section of the Charlotte Observer on May 8, 2011]

When the conversation goes right, it opens to a vision.  We catch a glimpse of a world at peace, a world that knows to celebrate human kindness and generosity in any form.  It is the world we long for.

I crave this world.  I look for opportunities to speak to people about what our world needs from all of us – regardless of faith or affiliation, regardless of ethnicity or language.

You never know who your conversation partners might be.  You cannot know what they will teach you or what you might gift to them.  But find one, and it can shift what you know about this world.  Truly, it may change your life.

I was on a plane back to the Piedmont.  It was just after Charlotte-Douglas International Airport opened again after the first snow and ice storm of the New Year.  I sat down with my book on Lamentations, a short collection of poetry from the Hebrew Bible.

I wore my kippah, a traditional Jewish head covering.

A man sat next to me in the aisle.  I am not sure if it was the book or the kippah, and I honestly don’t remember his first question.  But it was a first question that led to one of the deepest conversations I have ever had about matters of faith.

We spoke about our background.  We compared and contrasted his Christian sense of being born in sin with my Jewish sense about a broken humanity contending with a broken world.  The outcome of either belief was not dissimilar: Both of us longed to reach out for grace and healing.  We knew it was our obligation to try, again and again, to act in a way that could invite goodness.

“Be a mentsch,” I said.  “A good person.”

“Love Christ,” he said.

I mentioned the way atheist friends of mine aspired to exactly the same goals.  We could recognize the basic humanity of all who strove for goodness.

All the time we spoke, I felt that the man beside me was on some kind of search, questing after some kind of truth.  I was impressed at how articulate he was in explaining his own beliefs.  I was even more impressed that he never once spoke as if he had to convince me that his faith was superior to mine.

He didn’t try to change me.  He listened.

I didn’t try to change him.  I listened.

Finally, he pulled out his bible and told me which passage he’d been studying.

We looked at the passage together.  We explained what we both saw in the passage.

And then, as we landed and taxied on the tarmac, this man told me he had been thinking of becoming a minister.

He had been struggling for a long time with the idea.  He has a good job, and his children are young.  Life was stable as it was.

I asked him if he could simply go inside and ask himself: What did he long for?  What did he feel God longed for?

He said he could hear the phone ringing.

“I haven’t picked up the phone,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “if you decide to pick up, remember it’s a local call.”

It is now weeks after this conversation and I admit that I am hoping and praying that whatever he decides, this young man listens to his heart and feeds his soul.

That is what he did for me.  I won’t forget it.

[This piece was printed in the Neighbors section of the Charlotte Observer on January 30, 2011]