Sermon
regarding Trip to Spain
July 30,
2016
Cantor Jack
Chomsky
To
paraphrase Eric Idle
In any great adventure,
if you don't want to lose,
victory depends upon the people that you choose.
So, listen, Europeans, very closely to this news:
You won't succeed in History,
If you don't have any Jews.
On July 4,
Susan and I joined with Larry and Rosa Stolz of our congregation – and about 50
cantors – and about 375 people from the U.S. and Canada on a historic Cantors
Assembly Mission to Spain.
This is the
3rd Mission of the Cantors Assembly conceived and led by our unique
colleague Nate Lam of the Stephen S Wise Synagogue of Los Angeles.
Our first
Mission was our trip to Poland in 2009.
This trip culminated, in a sense, with the production of a motion
picture documentary 100 Voices. Our
second trip was to Germany in 2012.
What’s the
difference, you might ask, between a trip and a Mission? What makes our Cantors Assembly tours worth
the time and money that people spend to travel with us?
I would say
that the unifying idea is to deepen the experience – to celebrate the culture
that coursed through these places before the Jews were driven out. In the first two cases, it also became an
opportunity to overcome our anger about what happened to our people—not to
forget (God forbid), yet to reach out to those who have been reaching out to
us. In Poland, which once was
one-quarter Jewish, many people have come to realize that you cannot tell the
history of Poland without incorporating the history of its Jewish community. When we were in Warsaw, ground was broken for
the first Polish Museum of the History of the Jews – not the extermination of
the Jews, not another Holocaust commemoration.
Also,
traveling in the company of 50 or 100 hazzanim means that you get to see and
hear the music that came from these places.
And to share that music with the people who live there now – non-Jews
and a tiny fledgling, slightly growing Jewish community. And you get to move past “I wouldn’t spend a
dime of my money in that country where they did this to my people” – an
understandable feeling, but one that looks only backward.
As
then-President of the Cantors Assembly, I was a chair of the Germany
Mission. One of the challenges to us was
that our target shifted somewhat: Instead of going to a place to see only the
ashes of our ancestors and traditions, it turned out that, by the time we made
the trip, there wasn’t a fledgling Jewish community, but rather a burgeoning
one. I don’t think anybody saw that coming. So many of us felt that we would never go to
even SEE Germany – and then it turned out that thousands of our people – from
ISRAEL no less, and from the U.S. – and especially – for different reasons –
from Russia and the former Soviet Union --had chosen to do more than visit
Germany – had actually established a new Jewish life there! Our musical mission was largely a celebration
of Lewandowski and the great German Jewish musical masters of the 19th
century. Performing this gorgeous and
excellent music in some magnificent venues was unforgettable. Mission-wise, it was probably more important
to the non-Jewish German population, as the new Jewish German population have
mostly moved forward, or away from traditional synagogue practices.
Going to
Spain, the heart of what became Sephardic Jewish tradition, was our natural
next destination, even though we of the Cantors Assembly are overwhelmingly
Ashkenazic in lineage. Our President two
times after me is Alberto Mizrahi, whose family came from that part of the
world. Alberto’s family wasn’t from
Spain, but rather from Salonica. Yet
that means they were once from Spain.
And that
phrase – “once from Spain” – is at the heart of more Jewish life than we tend
to realize.
Many of you
have probably visited Spain, and if so, you have likely visited the
quote-unquote “Jewish sites” of Spain. I
say “quote-unquote” because there often isn’t much to see—and often isn’t much
to feel. The Jews left Spain by 1492 –
many earlier than that. It’s not the
same thing as having left in the 1930s.
Not by a long, long shot.
I felt that
one of the main benefits of the Cantors’ mission would be to overcome a problem
that you other Jewish Spain-visitors may have experienced. That you SEE it, but you don’t feel it in the
kishkes. (That shows the problem right there, doesn’t
it? There are no kishkes in Spain. If I’m not
mistaken, in Spain, they are tripas.)
As I
mentioned, one of the leaders of our group was Alberto Mizrahi, whose heritage
was Sephardi but whose training is Ashkenazi.
Yet he is certainly among the most sophisticated interpreters of Ladino
traditions in the world. And we had
Aaron Bensoussan. Born in Morocco, he is
a 3rd-generation Sephardic hazzan who also chose to study Ashkenazic
hazzanut. His original melodies have a ta’am – a taste – that brings you to
Morocco for sure – and perhaps back to its Spanish roots. And we have something like a minyan – maybe
even twice that—of native Spanish-speakers – an influx of hazzanim who have
joined our organization after having emigrated to the U.S. and Canada from
Argentina, Ecuador and other Latin American countries.
Larry and
Rosa can tell you whether or not that helped.
I won’t take
you stop by stop through our trip.
That’s available on my blog, which you can access after Shabbat by
googling my name and “blog.” [jackchomskythinks.blogspot.com]
So what DO I
want you to know from this experience? And what are the unique takeaways of
having traveled with this particular group?
Jewish life
in Spain was rich and deep. It
originated probably in the 2nd century CE. It was during Moorish – Islamic – rule in
Spain that Jewish life flourished. The
Jews – and the Christians – were tolerated by the ruling Emirates – and those
who had valuable skills could rise in the society and economy even though they
weren’t considered the equals of the Muslim ruling class.
A Golden Age
came about beginning at the end of the 9th century. But by the early 11th century,
unified rule was breaking down – so some places were very good and some places
were pretty bad. Things really deteriorated
after that –
The disaster
of the Inquisition of 1492 really begins with mass conversions and massacres
100 years earlier in 1391.
A new
takeaway is to think of the Inquisition not as Christians vs. Jews, but rather
as the Catholic Church convulsing itself through the blood of those who had
BEEN Jews. The question of the
Inquisition is an impossible one: How can you be a true Christian when you
haven’t been one in perpetuity (though you may try to prove otherwise)? [Conversos often did create elaborate “family
histories” trying to demonstrate their “yichus” – again a Yiddish term
completely out of cultural context – in Christianity.]
What drove
the Inquisition? From the point of the
masses, jealousy against those who did better than them. Conversos were likely more successful prior
to the Inquisition because, as Jews, they had been a literate community. This distinguished them from the Spanish masses
and made them a threat to the Church hierarchy also, as the church really
wasn’t prepared to have a literate population questioning its priests,
challenging its teachings the way Jews were bound to do (culturally speaking)–
even if they didn’t think they were Jews anymore!
From 1492,
there simply isn’t anything Jewish to see in Spain—yet those who left Spain
took with them a vibrant Jewish and Spanish culture that they nurtured in many
of the places they went; a culture that continued to flower in a specifically
Spanish way in some places for centuries, and a culture that affected
“normative” Jewry – that which is shared by both Sephardim and Ashkenazim in
ways that we typically haven’t recognized, appreciated or acknowledged.
Some of the
greatest things I saw in Spain weren’t in Spain. That from Spain comes the work and teaching of Rambam and Ramban (Maimonides and
Nachmanides) and Joseph Caro (author of the Shulchan Aruch that tells us so
much about how we live according to Jewish law), of Kabbalah and Jewish
mysticism. How is it possible that our
people were thrown out and turned out to build so much in the other places they
went?!
That’s an
old story, and a familiar story; a very Jewish story.
Another new
takeaway: The Expulsion from Spain is
also a Muslim phenomenon. One of our
scholars said that Jews chose from among 4 possible paths—going down a road to what
would later become political Zionism, Lurianic Kabbalah, Messianism, or
genuinely becoming Christians. And that
Muslims essentially had their own versions of these paths to respond to their
similar crisis. [So – although it’s
somewhat obsessive to look at everything in the world through a Jewish lens, it’s
something that we are likely to do, but can me moderated somewhat by
recognizing that Muslims were also victims of the rise of Catholic hegemony in
Spain.]
So when you
see Spain today, you can see vestiges of Muslim times, and very little of
Jewish times. In Madrid, you can visit
the Royal Palace – built in the 1700s in the image of Versailles. In Barcelona, you can see the amazing work of
Gaudi. You can appreciate it, but if you
want to think Jewish (and you don’t have to), you have no access point –
because he had no access point. This is
less of an issue when you see the Park Guell that he designed, but for me was
harder in visiting the amazing basilica Sagrada Familia. The place is gorgeous – but in a way that I
can’t relate to at all emotionally. Once
you have intuited the idea that God is right there in front of you—or inside
you--my Jewish understanding—it can be hard to relate to a God—or his son—who
is so big and imposing—so high up and seemingly far away. It’s important to see the place—but they can
keep it.
In Seville, we heard from
Moses Hassan, a local Jew, born there to parents from Morocco. He took us again through much of the history.
He’s doing well. He grew up Jewish in
Seville and has a Jewish son. He had
help building his Jewish life from visits to and time spent in Israel and the
U.S. There are a few hundred Jews in
Seville—if that many.
There were once 700,000
Jews in Spain. Now there are 30,000 in a
population of 47 million. That’s one Jew
for every 1500 Spaniards.
Moses Hassan says “I don’t
see why I should leave. But I don’t see
why I should stay.”
I started
with the words of Eric Idle, but I’ll conclude more seriously with the words of
Don Isaac Abravanel – statesman, philosopher, Bible commentator, financier –
born in Lisbon in 1437, fled to Toledo in 1483, wrote his greatest works there
and also tried to bribe the Spanish monarchy to save the Jewish community. Ultimately he fled along with his community,
days after the Expulsion Edict of 1492.
Abravanel wrote “From the rising of the sun to its setting, from north
to south, there never was such a chosen people (as the Jews of Spain) in beauty
and pleasantness, and afterwards, there will never be another such people. God was with them, the children of Judea and
Jerusalem, many and strong. . . a quiet and trusting people, a people filled
with the blessing of God with no end to its treasure.”
We went to
Spain in search of a trace of this remarkable people. We found little evidence remaining. Yet the evidence is with us every day.
