Somewhere Over the Rainbow

To watch Rabbi Ingber's sermon, begin watching at 02:47:01.

1939.

The great Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro -- known as the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, also known as the Piaseczna Rebbe, with thousands of Chasidim, devotees, thousands of students. His pedagogy and prolific writing on the inner life, not only of adults, but also of children -- was well-known.

In 1939, the rebbe - when the Nazis assaulted Warsaw in the aerial bombing - lost his son and daughter-in-law. After the invasion, the rebbe ran a secret synagogue in the ghetto. He invested enormous effort to maintain Jewish life in the ghetto, even after his horrific personal loss, and he was able to survive the ghetto liquidation, avoiding most of the tragic deportations to Treblinka. But eventually, of course, he made his way and was taken to the a work camp near Lublin after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was crushed. Although he was offered an opportunity to escape the concentration camp, he refused and was killed on November 3rd, 1943.

The Piaseczna Rebbe in 1939 - when he lost his son and daughter-in-law - penned these words on Rosh Hashanah. He wrote the following through his Chasidim in a work, the only extant of his sermons and writings were put in a milk crate discovered by a construction worker after the war, which became the work Aish Kosdesh, The Holy Fire:

Kiviti Adonai Kivta Nafshi. Quoting from Psalm 27, where the psalmist says, "God, I hope in you." I have a hope, he says, that all of Israel will be redeemed. I have a hope. He writes that was gives him hope is that we have in the Jewish tradition a framing of calamity; we have a way of making sense of that which makes no sense.

Looking out at his devotees, he says that we have a tradition that when God created the world, God made many attempts before creating this one. God was creating worlds and destroying them. And then eventually there was this one.

So I know, he says, that the way our tradition looks at the world is that there is a world that comes after destruction. After this, I know another world will be born.

How do we make sense of a world that is eroding before our eyes? A world that is collapsing? A world that ceases to make sense to us? A world where the concepts we have are being reworked in the present moment? Where the concepts with which we make sense of the world are themselves being deconstructed and reconstructed before our very eyes?

The rebbe didn't have to look at the cosmology of the Jewish people - the creation and destruction and rebirth of worlds found in early rabbinic literature. He could have easily looked to the Talmud, which teaches that in 70 CE, when the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem and destroyed our sacred center, there were many different factions and sects vying for the Jewish future. Some thought they would run away. Some thought better to die on Masada than to give in to the Romans. And Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was brought out in a coffin to Vespasian, the ruler of the Romans, and he asked for the town of Yavneh and its scholars: give me the tools to build for the future - to take what we have an use it to build what we don't yet know. The power of Yochanan ben Zakkai's deal with Vespasian is what gave us the power to stand today with rabbinic Jewish riches and wisdom and practices.

So we might say today, I am a Jew because of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai. Because of the one who imagined a day after this, and adapted to that reality.

Maybe the Piaseczna Rebbe in 1939 wasn't just thinking about the Talmud, or destroyed worlds, or either of those stories. Maybe the rebbe was drawing on something else. Maybe he was drawing upon the earliest story in the Torah itself of destruction and its aftermath. Maybe the "after this" of Beverly Pincus' beautiful poem from this morning, begins with the "after this" of the flood.

The Torah describes in the early chapters of our mythic history of a great deluge, a great flood. Noah, the hero of the story, is told to come into the ark and save the seeds of what would potentially become the future. But he wasn't told how long the deluge would last. He wasn't told what to look for or the signs.

But Noah sends out some birds - an orev, a crow, and a yonah, a dove - and the dove didn't find a place to rest, so Noah sent it again until the dove rested on solid ground and Noah knew it was time. God's voice came to Noah and told him it was time to come out again into the world.

Noah and his family leave the ark and the story goes that Noah and his family are worried about what will happen - is it possible this will happen again? We are told in our sacred text that God will place a "sacred covenant" in the cloud above as a sign - a kashat, a rainbow, which will signify the power of life after this. Life after this.

I remember reading a book by Jonathan Lear, a great Harvard philosopher. He wroe a book calle "Radical Hope: Ethics in a Time of Cultural Devastation." He writes in the book, which is rooted in the story of one great chief of a great nation of the Native Americans, the indigenous original people whose name was Plenty Coups. When he was reading through the interviews between Plenty Coups and the white man and telling his history to a historian, he comes to a story in his narrative when Plenty Coups describes the loss of buffalo, an cultural construction that made sense for the Crow people. "And after that, nothing happened."

Lear wonders to himself as he reads this tale, what can "nothing happened" after the buffalo went away mean? Did it mean that literally, nothing happened? The sun did not rise or set? Or that human experience no longer contributed to events? Were there no events? He did not know how to understand these words. Was it just a figure of speech? Nothing happened - of significance?

"After this, nothing happened."

Lear goes on to explain what curse might mean and what hope might mean. He gives a simple definition:

Hope is living in the vulnerability that we share as humans who are limited who don't know.

To be born into this world is to be born not omnipotent and not omniscient. To be born into this world, Lear writes in using Plato's notion of eros:

In this morning's, Kriyat Ha-Torah, as we read this morning, it hit me so powerfully when I was thinking about the rainbow of Noah and the promise of the rainbow - in this morning's reading about Isaac and Ishmael, as we make the turn from the hopelessness of Hagar as she imagines her son, Ishmael, in danger in the desert without any water, she places him at a distance of a kashat, like the shape of the rainbow. She places him somewhere beyond the bow - somewhere beyond the rainbow.

Somewhere beyond the rainbow, she hoped and prayed that that which she could not yet know would be revealed. The concepts and structures that have been eroding and we don't know what will replace them and we don't know what will be after the pandemic, but we pray and yearn and are vulnerable and we take risks and we say, "somewhere over that rainbow" - over there.

Maybe some of you are thinking, "well, what about that somewhere? That other Wizard of Oz (strength)?"

That poignant song that merged out of the mass exodus out of Europe was written by a Jew named Yit Harberg. The lyrics came from the youngest of four children born to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. His real name was Isidore Hochberg. He grew up in a Yiddish speaking, Orthodox home in New York, and that "somewhere over the rainbow music" we are so familiar with was written by Harold Arlen, a cantor's song, whose real name was Harlan Arloch. Jewish immigrants from Lithuania wrote this song, which was voted the number one song by the Recording Industry Association and National Endowment for the Arts. That song became the number one song of 20th Century America.

And in writing that song, they reached deep into their Jewish roots, into their Jewish mythos. And they wrote an unforgettable melody with prophetic words.

If you read the lyrics in their Jewish context, they are no longer about wizards and some story of Oz, but about Jewish survival and human hope. These words were written in 1939, at the same time the Piaseczna Rebbe wrote his words.

So, listen to these words:

We are ever-born. This Jewish family, and this human family. Like the phoenix who rises from the ashes, we are a people of the rainbow. We are a people of hope. Our strength is to forever long for that particular risk that is involved in birthing hope. Believing in and taking those risks for the sake of our souls.

May our ancestors and all who came before us bless us with the hope that emerges from somewhere over the rainbow.

(transcribed by Sefaria team)