The-Ave.US

 Are you a Jew?

Hugh,

You wrote a pretty nasty email about Jewish atheists.  You were especially mean spirited by attacking my role  when Havi and Hillel, my own children, were first called to  read the Jewish law, the Torah,.  Your daughter will, as I understand, do the same thing next month.  Perhaps this post may give you some perspective that could help on that important day.

In that spirit, I decided to write about the Judaism we all share not just as Jews but within our family.  This is  a tradition your daughter will  join ‘formally when she becomes a bat mitzvah, an adult Jew with the responsibility of reading Jewish law to the community.

This reading of Torah may be the oldest root of Judaism itself.  The alphabet, with is symbols for both consonant and vowels, appears to have originated amongst our ancestors.  A hint about why they needed this invention was that we became the world’s first people where ordinary folks, not just scribes, could read books .. and our book was the Torah!  One of the commandments in that law is that we teach our children to read.   Of course, you and Elena’s Mom, Janet, already know all that but I think Elena might find my perspective of some value since I have become sort of the family historian and learned a bit of Jewish history. .

This, the end of the Yom Kippur fast, is a good time to for writing about the history because Yom Kippur is a uniquely Jewish day.  Although called the “Day of Atonement,”  the week that ends with Yom Kipor is mostly about how Jews follow the law.  In Judaism the word “law” is another name for the Torah, the book Elena will read from.  Her bat mitzvah represents  recognition that she has learned how ot read from that Torah to the entire Jewish community.

We did not have bnai mitzvot ceremonies for coming of age in the time of the temple.  The rabbis  who created modern Judaism out of the bitterness of the destruction of the Temple  found laws, ethical rules, in the Torah.  While the Temple was destroyed, Judaism lived on in the written word Elena will soon recite at her bat mitzvah.  Those words, written in the alphabet our ancestors had created a thousand years before,  centered on laws the Romans saw as atheistic since they were not subject to the whims of men or the Gods created by men.  The bnai mitvot ceremonies were created to formalize the requirement that Jew read the law … using that same alphabet., today seen by some Jews as itself a creation of God.

These laws, the mitzvot found by the Rabbis in the ancient stories of the Torah, went far beyond the Temple’s  ritualistic sacrifices to God to atone for sins.  For example, the laws  of  Yom Kippur, required that

regretting/acknowledging the sin;
forsaking the sin (see below);
worrying about the future consequences of the sin;
acting and speaking with humility;
acting in a way opposite to that of the sin (for example, for the sin of lying, one should speak the truth);
understanding the magnitude of the sin;
refraining from lesser sins for the purpose of safeguarding oneself against committing greater sins;
confessing the sin (see below);
praying for atonement;
correcting the sin however possible (for example, if one stole an object, the stolen item must be returned or if one slanders another, the slanderer must ask the injured party for forgiveness);
pursuing works of chesed and truth;
remembering the sin for the rest of one’s life;
refraining from committing the same sin if the opportunity presents itself again;
teaching others not to sin.

Jews  repair the bad things we have done in the past year.  This repair, called Teshuvah,  was a good thing in its own right, not simply a way of appeasing God. As Judah Halevi taught 100 years ago in the Khazari, Jewish laws are not created by God.  Rather, Halevi said these laws exist on their own , like God.  The belief in a body of unchanging moral principles regarded as a basis for all human conduct is the basis of the American Constitution, the first nation to have a rule of law. Jefferson saw these “natural laws” as rooted in the Torah.  Isn’t is weird that fundamentalists today derisively call Jefferson an atheist just as the Hews in Roman times were called by that name?  I am proud to call Jefferson as one of my own valued teachers.

This tradition of laws based in Jewish ethics, is shared by haredi, orthodox, conservative, agnostic and atheist Jews.  A colleague, an attorney who is orthodox, started a meeting the other day by asking my forgiveness for any wrong he had done, by intent or not, to me. I was shocked but understood that he was following the mitzvot.  I responded in kind.  We were following Jewish laws, each performing a mitzvah.

These laws apply to all walks of life.  As a scientist I must never distort the truth. As a business man, the Jewish law requires you to review the fairness of your contracts and fix whatever is unfair.  Yom Kippur was also the time to manumit slaves, something Pope Francis recently invoked be equating the payment of low wages to slavery.  He may have been thinking about a recent story about kosher meat in the US.  The revelations that the kosher meat packing houses were paying unlivable wages to Hispanics, has led the liberal Jewish community  to declare this meat unkosher.   As a result of the difficulties Agriprocessors faced after the raid, the plant stopped slaughtering cattle and filed for bankruptcy. The profession of faith by the original owners and even their own strict observance of kashrut was trumped by their disobedience of the fundamental laws of Torah.

I wonder if the Rabashkin family, owners of that plant, had confessed their sins during the Yom Kippur service?  Sadly, they may have … thinking falsely that confession to God is a substitute for  good deeds toward men.  Of course, not all Jews will attend shul and listen to Kol Nidre … a song written by your and my Sephardi ancestors as they struggled to keep their Judaism alive during the Inquisition even when forced by the goyem to recant Jewish identity. .   I wonder whether Juan de Torres, the hidden Jew who served as Columbus’ navigator, thought about his duties as a Jew while attending Mass on the Santa Maria during this week?  We may never know if de Torres led a hidden Jewish life but his descendents are lost to the Jewish poeple. Did the Rabashkin family,  sing the Kol Nidre and understand its connection to our laws? Did their belief in God justify their violations of Jewish law?  Did ther actions serve to preserve the Jewish traditions?

Abravanel’s writings were different from the usual biblical commentaries because he took social and political issues of the times into consideration. He believed that mere commentary was not enough, but that the actual lives of the Jewish people must be deliberated on as well when discussing such an important topic as the Bible. This may explain the decision by Schmoel Schwartz to work as a roofer. Maury told me that Schmoel believed that rabbis should work afor living .. and idea that dates back to Hillel; himself who is said to have worked as a shoemaker while being the Nasi, or had Rabbi, of the Jews of Jerusalem.

I wonder how our own ancestors felt when they left the harbor of Valencia on the last boat to go into exile in 1492?  My genome traces our family to the first humans in Spain, some 30,000 years ago.  The Jews came to Spain much later as part of the Phoenician trading system, sometime at least 2500 years ago. By the time our family left Spain,  Jews had been there longer than the Roman or the Visgoths.   At that time, we were part of a group of followers of Isaac Abravenel.  Abravenel, whose family survives to today with a great rabbinic tradition, was the last of his line to remain in Spain. Unlike the Santa Maria, the boat we left on was filled with Jews who were free to proclaim their identity.  We continued to do so  even when the boat reached Italy and were not allowed to land at Laverno  because the ship carried plague.  Our family went first to the south of Italy and then. driven from our new home again  by the Inquisition, the Abavanel community went to Milan.   I do not know what happened to that community in Milan as the city later became Judenfrei.  Fortunately for us, our ancestors were able to migrate, still holding onto the writings of Abravanel, to Galicia.

Funny story. The original (above) of this is not a sketch by or of me. It is a self portrait of Paul Cezanne! It looks so much like me that I have taken the liberty herr of changing the skin tones ot look like me as “Negri.”

Our family was called “Negri” in Spain and Italy because we were very dark skinned. Negri, but the word was … at least in Spain a derogatory term like today’s N word.  In German speaking Galicia we became “Schwartz.”  Things became bad for Jews in Galicia after WWI so four centuries after leaving Spain, Schmoel Schwartz, a rabbi, and Rose Adler came to the US, where they married and had the three sons .. Maury, Robert and Solomon.   The Abravanel heritage was so important that when Zaydie Schmoel boarded that boat he brought books that probably dated all the way back to Spain   Those books, are now lost , buried after his death as holy books in a cemetery in Cambridge.  I tried to find  that grave site but the last surviving caretaker of the shul already had advanced Alzheimer’s when I found him.

Born Rose Adler in Galicia, Bubbie Perlmitter became a “Negri” when she married our grandfather, Zaydy Schmoel Schwartz and came to the US. After Zaydie’s death, Rose kept his traditions alive, raising thrre sons … Maury, Robert and Solly. After Schmoel’s death, Rose gave his books, including whatever he has from the time of Abravanel, to their synagogue. Decades later, Jews left Cambridge and after that syngagogue and its successors had closed, the books were buried somewhere in a Jewish graveyard.

Your letter writes about Schmoel’s anger when he learned that our own father was an atheist.  I certainly can attest that I have inherited such a temper.  I have an idea however, that Rev Schmoel’s anger was short lived.  After all, Schmoel Schwartz, my namesake, had carried a tradition of learning that went all the way back to my story about Isaac Abravanel.  He had reason to be angry but I think he would have been proud of the lives our Dad and his brothers led.    Although  our grandmother, Rose Schwartz married  an illiterate carpenter,  Bubbie Perlmutter saw to it that the Negri tradition  was transmitted via the academic careers of our father Robert and our uncle Solly.  Our Uncle Maury, a wonderfully smart man, who never had the money for college, knew more about the family than anyone else.  I remember Uncle Maury  telling me of Schmoel Schwartz’s  nights reading those books now lost in the Cambridge cemetery .  Those stories are more than a little reminiscent of my own evening reading habits, habits I may have gotten in turn from watching Dad consume journals each night before falling asleep.  I  believe that Rev Schmoel’s anger  would be long over and that he would be proud of Robert.  I think he would also be proud especially proud of Solly’s daughter Nancy Padian, one of the world’s experts on AIDS. While Nancy has not lived as a Jew, you might want to encourage your daughter to meet Nancy, her husband Kevin and their daughter Rae.  I hope that this twig of the tree planted by Zaydie Schwartx and Bubbi Perlmutter is not broken off from our shared roots.

This issue of “who is a Jew” brings me to the part of this letter where Einstein can speak  to you and to your daughter. Einstein knew his origins but did not think of himself as a Jew until the answering questions from the Nazi government.   Einstein said, “there is nothing in me that can be described as ‘Jewish faith.’ But I am happy to belong to the Jewish people, even though I don’t regard them as the Chosen People. Why don’t we just let the Goy keep his anti-Semitism, while we preserve our love for the likes of us?”—<1>

Einstein’s Judaism was attested to by his life of good deeds, mitzvot, his support for Israel, his criticisms of Israel’s failings, and his own work as a seeker of truth.  Did you know he described scientific research as a form of worship?  I share this idea.  Can you imagine how wonderful it is when an experiment works and I know something no human has known before?  Our father had a similar sense of wonder when he learned new things from journals or from his own work in pulmonary disease.

Sadly the Einstein family’s fight over the Einstein heritage is as bad as our own fight .  Reading  that story might help end the fight over our own father’s papers.  Another story about a famous man may have special meaning for our conflict.  Wiesel. like our father and like me, is an atheist. At age 17, not much older than Elena is now, Wiesel  was a patient in what passed for an infirmary at  Buchenwald.  When our father, commanding officer of the first med ics to enter the camp, arrived, Wiesel was likely his patient.   Sadly, non Jewish believers have tried to force their beliefs on Elie Wiesel. Last year the Salt Lake City Tribune announced that the Mormons had  performed a posthumous baptism of Simon Wiesenthal‘s parents and  that Elie Wiesel’s name had been submitted to the  database used for performing these proxy baptisms.  Wiesel called the practice “bizarre”, and said, “I am a Jew. Born a Jew. Lived as a Jew. Tried to write about the Jewish condition…the human condition all over the world, and they should do it to me?”  Wiesel is now in his late 80s.  I hope we do not waste the importunity to show Dad’s photographs of Buchenwald to this unique Jew.

The abhorrent practice of imposing God on others, whether they are living or dead, Jewish or goy, was why I so resented our sister Stephanie’s effort to involve me in prayers for our Dad.  Of course to Mormons this practice is normal.  Golda Meir was on the same list’  Golda too was an atheist.  If Jews have an afterlife, I doubt Golda, wherever she is,  appreciates this honor. Mitt even baptized his dead father in law, a man who was an adamant atheist.  At least in the Romney family case, Mitt had first converted all the man’s children ..including Ann Romney, while they were alive.

Steph, of course is welcome to pray but pushing this on me, especially given our father’s outspoken atheism, is hateful.  A far better thing is just to do her own prayers.  Our stepsister Max and her boyfriend Harvey, both devout Jews, have done exactly this.  They let me know that they pray for Robert on the anniversary of his death, his “yahrzeit.”  I appreciate that a lot!  Knowing that there is no God, is no reason to disrespect those who believe that there is a God. Of course that sort of respect should go both ways.  I hope Steph does pray to God for family peace and would be moved to know that she has done so.

Leaving the issue of who believes in God aside, I hope that my pride in the academic heritage of the Negri family does not hurt by giving the impression that the only important part of our tradition I value is learning.  I have already talked of my respect for Bubbie Perlmitter.  I also deeply loved Zaydie Perlmitter and am very thankful that you and Steph agreed to let me take the chair he crafted for Dad.  Do you also know how much respect Barb and I have for Zaydie Lerner, Mom’s dad?  Not to be funny but we used to go to the restaurant, “Ruth’s Kosher Korean Kitchen,”  that replaced Zaydie’s butcher shop simply to remember Zaydie Lerner!  Actually her mixture of stuffed cabbage with bul go gi was pretty awesome too!  Do you know that the shop is now gone?  We miss Ruth’s and were somewhat amazed to find a young Korean managing a kosher deli in Vancouver recently.  We did ask, but the man was no relationship to Ruth!

Of course, traditions can grow and carry the family in many new directions!  I still remember how proud you were of inventing the spout of the Spic and Span can!  I bragged a lot!

There is more to say about my own family’s traditions.  Barb and I this summer had the great pleasure of going to an Osheroff family reunion.  They have no story of ancient origins like ours.  I gather that the history before the first immigration to the US is sadly lost.   Nonetheless the family is wonderful .. with people doing everything from selling office supplies in Israel to serving the US Army as an attorney.   I am very grateful to be part of that family as well. … and yes I joined with enthusiasm in the family recital of prayers.

I also want to help by telling Elena how much value I see in Jewish ritual.   Without the ritual, the laws would be lost .. at least as Jewish law.  The descendents of Einstein, Salk, Freud, and Mendelson are not Jews.  Rituals, even those that praise God, preserve us as a people.  When Barbara, my wife lights candles we think of the shabat queen.  I believe this queen is a distant remnant of the Goddess Ashera, once the partner and equal of  the now single God of the Jews.  Her worship became an anathema around the time of King Josiah because Josiah used the worship of one God to consolidate his rule over Judea. .Still, somehow and at lest for Barbara and me,  Ashera  remains a magical reality when Jewish women perform the mitzvah of candle lighting.

It would be wonderful to imagine that someday Elena and Ziva, my granddaughter, could overcome the family fight and light candles together.

So Hugh, in ten short years, Ziva, my granddaughter,  will have her bat mitzvah.  Chris and Havi are doing a wonderful job of raising their daughter in our family traditions.  In ten years, your daughter will be be an adult and making her own decisions.  I hope she becomes a committed to a Jewish life. and attends her cousin’s first reading of Jewish law.  I also hope that this letter helps to bring these two youngest of our family together.

<1> A. Einstein quoted in A. Foelsing, English translation by E. Osers, Albert Einstein, a Biography, Viking, New York, (1997), p. 494; s speech to the Central-Verein Deutscher Staatsbuerger Juedischen Glaubens, in Berlin on 5 April 1920, in D. Reichenstein, Albert Einstein. Sein Lebensbild und seine Weltanschauung, Berlin, (1932). This letter from Einstein to the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith of 5 April 1920 is reproduced in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 9, Document 368, Princeton University Press, (2004).