Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2008/5769
Written by Rabbi Dr. Tony Bayfield Wednesday, 01 October 2008
Not So Much ‘who Do You Think You Are?’ As ‘what Does It Mean?’
Early last year I embarked upon the first serious redecoration of my house since my wife Linda died. When I say embarked upon, I mean appointed an architect who got in a firm of builders and decorators. I don’t mean I scaffolded the outside myself or nipped down to Homebase to buy brushes and paints. I'm Jewish after all.
I think it was only after surveying the pristine white space stretching all the way up the stairs that an idea formed. I would put up a family tree of photographs starting with the earliest photographs at the top and working down to the place of honour at the foot of the stairs for the grandchildren.
My three children all raised their eyebrows, expressing that familiar range of reactions from ‘It’s not what I would do but if it keeps him happy’ through to ‘bonkers’.
I’ve only got one photo of Linda’s great grandparents but five of mine. I stood there looking at these five faces of five people that I never met and decided that I wanted to visit their graves. The reason I gave myself was to see whether the stones revealed any further information. It’s the generation which began elsewhere and ended in London and I don't know enough abouth them.
I decided to take three weeks’ holiday in August. A week just to read – I don’t make enough time for professional reading and yet it’s my lifeline, my source of enrichment and renewal. Then a week to potter around and do this and that. And a week with my youngest grandchild, Zachary, in France. OK – with his parents as well.
I began the holiday by going to Streatham. Why Streatham? My mother’s father’s parents are buried in Streatham which was where their East End synagogue had burial rights. Marcus and Fanny Mann (some of you will remember my off repeated gag about my mother being a Mann before she got married) came to this country from a shtetl called Husakow, then in Poland now in the Ukraine, in 1896.
I drove to Streatham and eventually found them. It wasn’t too hard – I had my great grandfather’s grave number and information from an elderly member of the family that my great grandmother was buried five or six rows away and roughly in line. The actual signage in the cemetery was …. pretty ‘shrug your shoulders’ – but I eventually found Mordechai who became Marcus and after a further twenty minutes or half an hour I found his wife, my great grandmother, Feiga who became Fanny.
The inscriptions did not give me much more actual information. But I now know exactly when each of them died, how old they were and therefore roughly when they were born and I know from their Hebrew names, the names of their parents. I learned that if you were poor immigrants, you couldn’t even afford a double plot to be buried together. I stood there, recited Kaddish, put a pebble on each of the graves and knew for certain that these humble people were something to do with me. No. Quite a lot to do with me.
I stood with Francesca who’s seven and patronises me in the same way as her mother, aunt and uncle, looking at the two photographs at the top of my stairs and said, “Those are your great, great, great grandparents”. There was a flicker of something, perhaps connection.
A couple of weekends ago I made the shorter journey to Carterhatch Lane to visit my mother’s mother’s parents – Bubba and Zeida Rubinstein. I was fascinated by the shteibl-isation of Carterhatch Lane with scruffy mausoleums for the distinguished rebbes and lots of new white stones all in Hebrew. My great grandparents are in an older section and the stones are in Hebrew and English and tell you all too tantalisingly little about the inhabitant of the grave they mark. Once again I found my great grandfather first, Samuel Rubinstein. He died aged ninety-four in 1956 when I was ten but he was far away in Nightingale Lane and I never met him. Then I found my great grandmother Beyla who’d predeceased him by twelve years and whose grave was amongst a cluster of other women. Great grandfather from Warsaw. Great grandmother from Lomza near Bialystok. My mother has little recall of her grandmother who died in 1942 and was, she says, a shadowy figure who didn’t speak English.
Lest you think I’m discriminating against my father’s grandparents, he never knew or has any records of two of them. The other two were buried in a cemetery at the end of British Street in Bow which along with British Street was bombed in the blitz and subsequently built on. It’s going to be much harder to trace Leendert Goudeket and his wife whom my father remembers as a besheitled lady who died when he was four or five. I have a picture of great grandfather Leendert who was born in Amsterdam 1845 but no picture of my great grandmother has survived.
What is obvious even to me is how ordinary, common place, the stories are. There they lie, Manns and Rubinsteins, surrounded by teetering, fading stones bearing the familiar names, foreign names, largely from Eastern Europe, which so many British Jews share.
What does it mean? I ask myself. What does it mean that my great grandfather Mordechai who ended up being called Marcus left Husakow in 1895, reached Ellis Island, got a message back to my great grandmother who had an eighteen month old baby and a six month old baby, my grandfather and told them to join him. She got a message back to him saying, ‘I’ve shleped as far as London with your two children and if you think that I’m shleping any further, you’ve got another think coming. Join me in London! And he did. And that’s why the family tree is on a staircase in Hampstead Garden Suburb.
You'll know better than I do that there is a television series called, “Who Do You Think You Are?” in which celebrities are taken to explore their family roots. I haven’t seen many of them but I did see the programme with Patsy Kensit and was very moved by it. She was so relieved to discover an ancestor who was a worthy parish priest in the East End in the 19th century because, up to then, the programme had revealed that her ancestors were petty thieves, semi-skilled or unskilled labourers with illegitimacy and the poor house vying with prison as her inheritance. The title of the programme is spot on: Who Do You Think You Are? We are, to a significant extent, the people from whom we have come.
I don’t know why that obvious truth should be pressing in on me so much at the moment. Perhaps it’s intimations of my own mortality and the desire not to be forgotten. But it doesn’t matter what selfish or neurotic emotions have highlighted a truth. It’s a truth nevertheless. We are significantly a link in a chain.
What does it mean that I’m a Jew descended from poor, humble refugees, bearers nevertheless of a rich, noble tradition that has persisted for nearly four thousand years?
What did I read during my holiday reading week? Well, only one of the worthy books that I’d set aside quite unrealistically for my seven days of study. I thought I would start with something that I really wanted to read and which once again served to confirm to my children that I’m an eccentric. for a couple of days I set aside Lawrence Freedman’s superb A Choice of Enemies in favour of Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics and the Birth of the Nuclear Age by Gino Segrè.
Like my children, you will now be totally convinced that I’m a complete ‘nutter’ but I was absolutely determined to understand quantum theory at least to the extent of being able to write something on the back of a postage stamp. The book is written around the year 1932 and a meeting of physicists in Copenhagen. It was one of a series of annual gatherings organised by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr which brought together all the leading theoreticians to bounce ideas off each other and think collectively. What was unique was this dimension of collaboration that Bohr introduced. In 1932 a major breakthrough was made in beginning to understand the unique physics of what goes on inside the atom which is not the same and doesn’t obey the same rules as what goes on in the world external to the atom. That’s quantum physics. In particular, this meeting in 1932 tipped the balance from the dominance of theory, mathematical formulae, to the importance of finding out more through experiment, demonstration. Towards the end of his book, Gino Segrè writes, “It would be another twenty years until physicists began to understand what the proton and neutron were made of and …. twenty more before the scientific community began to think about super string vibrations. Right now we are waiting for the thousand billion electron volt accelerator. The Large Hadron Collider [under Geneva] is expected to be operational very soon…. National boundaries have been breached to finance the machines and run the experiments. Big science was born in 1932”. We’re still waiting for the electrician to mend the fuse in the Collider. But that’s not what left me fascinated and reaching for something elusive.
There’s a photograph in Segrè’s book of the scientists gathered in Copenhagen in 1932. The key people, the stars of the show, the giants who transformed 20th century physics are seated at the front. There are seven of them. Six men and a woman. They are Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Lise Meitner, Paul Ehrenfest, plus Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Max Delbrück.
Niels Bohr is widely acknowledged as the greatest of them all. Indeed, I suspect that Segrè rates him as at least the equal of Einstein. He was certainly a wonderful human being who pioneered the concept of teams and collaboration. He was also a major figure in the rescue of Danish Jewry from the Nazis and a leading figure in the post-war peaceful use of atomic energy. He was born in Copenhagen in 1885 and his mother Ellen Adler came from a German Jewish banking family.
Wolfgang Pauli was a corpulent, hyperactive, mouthy, self-opinionated man who ranks almost as highly as Bohr. His father was a Jew and he exemplifies a certain kind of Jewish personality.
Lise Meitner was the daughter of Jews from the provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (where the Mann family also came from) who migrated to Vienna.
Paul Ehrenfest was born in Vienna in 1880 of similar provincial Jewish stock. The key experimenter who tipped the balance from theory to experiment was Otto Stern. The author of the book Gino Segrè is the nephew of Emilio Segrè, a Jew who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1959.
Still more Jews litter the book – not because Segrè goes Jew spotting, far from it. It doesn’t much interest him. But it’s obvious when you compare Segrè’s index with the list of Jewish Nobel Prize winners in physics at the back of the Jewish Year Book.
At the cutting edge of trying to understand the way in which the world is constructed and works, there are Jews far, far beyond the numbers you would demographically predict even if you allow for the bias towards the educated European middle classes.
What does it mean?
I don’t believe in that often cruel and mechanistic divine providence which is bizarrely making a comeback in fundamentalist circles. God wasn’t hovering over my great grandparents and making sure that the journey from poverty stricken Husakow turned out alright. If He had been, my great grandmother wouldn’t have sent her message and my great grandparents would have settled on the Lower East Side and bought a modest couple of acres in Manhattan.
I’m equally certain that Jews aren’t brighter than everyone else. God hasn’t bestowed upon us some special intelligence as a reward for the merits of our ancestors.
I’m even more sure – if that’s possible – that this extraordinary journey has nothing to do with race. I’m very conscious that if I ended my sermon now, every convert here or every family who has converts back down the line – which is most if not all of us – would have cause to be deeply offended. One of the blessed features of our story is that every convert to Judaism takes on this extraordinary identity, the journey becomes their journey, and yet they do not cease to be who they were before but thankfully bring that dimension of their identity with them.
And what to make of the sombre information that Bohr, Pauli, Meitner, Ehrenfest, Stern, Segrè and Segrè all either married out or didn’t marry at all and none of them, as far as I know, passed on the Jewish inheritance in any shape or form to the next generation.
What does it mean?
If nothing else, the question marks this out as a genuine sermon. It hasn’t been a scholarly paper on Jewish identity. Some unremarkable stuff about my family and the gleanings from a popular science book that I selected for reading because I already had a hunch about what it would say, doesn’t constitute twenty minutes of academic respectability. Richard Dawkins – he of ‘The God Delusion’ fame – would go spare at my lack of evidence and rational argument. Perhaps I’ll send him a copy.
It’s been a genuine sermon because it contains an intuition, a sense, an insight that I suspect and hope resonates with many of you. It leads to the Dawkins-infuriating definition of a Jew as someone who finds meaning and purpose in their identity as a Jew that goes beyond Darwin; who regards the Jewish journey as being remarkable and worthwhile but not explicable in terms of logic or biology.
That’s an insight that all three of my children share with passion and conviction. Maybe Francesca, looking at her great, great, great grandparents at the top of the stairs got some intimation. And I should add that for me, God is still in there somewhere but that’s another sermon.
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