Four lessons that my mother, Shirley Shlachter of blessed memory, taught me.
My mother taught me to say thanks. So let me begin by thanking the Los Alamos Jewish Center for organizing this event, for providing me with a slot on the agenda, and in particular, I’d like to thank Sy Stange and Rachel Adler who spearheaded tonight’s vigil.
The second teaching from my mother was that I should use words, not fists, to solve a disagreement. How should we solve disagreements? Not with violence, not with hatred, but with dialog – which involves both talking and listening. There is an old saying that God created us with one mouth and two ears so that we might spend twice as much time listening as talking. And we need to be in dialog not only with those who are like us but with those who differ from us in gender, in religion, in nationality, in socio-economic class, in age, and even in party affiliation. Central in Jewish tradition is that God created people in God’s image – a radical teaching found in Genesis 1:27, and a Jewish text from over two thousand years ago says that at first, only a single human was created, to teach that if anyone destroys a single human, it is as if they destroyed the whole world… And in the beginning, only a single human was created for the sake of peace in the world that no one may say to another “my ancestor was greater than your ancestor.”
Speaking of my ancestors, my grandparents to be exact – they all came to this country as immigrants, and they were helped by HIAS, then called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. I applaud the decision of the Los Alamos Jewish Center to use this vigil as an opportunity to raise funds for HIAS, and I proudly wear this pin from HIAS which says “My People Were Refugees Too.”
My mother also taught me that when I come to an intersection, I should look behind me as well as in front of me. I believe we are at an intersection right now in this country. And so I look behind exactly 80 years next week to a terrible event known as Kristallnacht. On November 9-10, 1938, a Nazi government-inspired pogrom against the Jews in Germany and Austria was launched. Kristallnacht resulted in at least 91 deaths, the destruction of nearly 300 synagogues and over 7000 Jewish-owned businesses, plus the deportation to concentration camps of 30,000 Jewish men. It foreshadowed the genocide to come.
As for my mother’s teaching about looking ahead when I come to an intersection, if we look far in the future to a messianic era, we read in Isaiah 11:6 “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid…”
Maybe that’s a stretch, but I envision a day in the near future when the elephant will lie down with the donkey, the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey, and I encourage you to vote next week to make that choice of an elephant or a donkey, but to do so without the animosity that is sadly spreading through our society.
And may God spread over all of us God’s sukkah of peace.
