Sermon: From Berlin to the Congo- VaEtchanan 2010

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 26 July 2010

I was on an Egged bus seventeen years ago travelling from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, a Rabbinic student at Leo Baeck College working to improve my Hebrew in Israel.  As I settled down and we headed down the mountain on the Highway to the coast I tuned my Sony Walkman (this was a while ago) to the BBC World Service as my brain had run out of space for Hebrew!

I couldn’t have been more delighted to hear the voice of one of my teachers from the college – Rabbi Dr Albert Friedlander z”l – a mellifluous and always recognisable voice with the slightest German accent together with the tones of Mississippi where he spent his teenage years.  I cannot remember what he talking about at the time but for me Albert Friedlander, who died in 2004 was an inspirational teacher and the first Rabbi I knew when I grew up at the then Wembley Liberal Synagogue.

He was the Dean of Leo Baeck College and teacher of Jewish history and theology there for the best part of thirty five years.

I have just completed a paper on Albert Friedlander which will become a chapter in a forthcoming book from our Movement to celebrate two hundred years this year of Reform Judaism.    Rabbi Laura has written the chapter on Leopold Zunz – a formative teacher of Reform Judaism from a century and a half ago.   Albert’s teaching at Leo Baeck College meant that he educated a whole generation of Rabbis but his contribution to the Jewish people was much greater than that.

Every year on July 20th , and it happened three days ago, the government of Germany commemorates the courage of the men who plotted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1944.  In 1984 Albert Friedlander gave the main address at this commemoration.  He said “”as the Talmud teaches, to save one life is, as it were, to save the existence of the whole world.  But our world needs to be saved every day.  Every day, we must resist what is evil lest we become guilty of new disasters.  And every day needs to be a day on which to remember, a day on which to express our common humanity. Every day.” {^[1]}

Remembering Albert Friedlander is particularly appropriate on this Shabbat, just after Tisha b’Av when we try to return to a better world, having just commemorated the destruction in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Jewish history wrought by groundless hatred between Jew and Jew, and upon the Jews by the Romans, the Spanish authorities, the English King of 1290 and more.

Rabbi Albert Friedlander, born in Berlin in 1927 experienced Kristallnacht on the run from the Gestapo occupying their apartment with his father around the streets of the city.  He escaped Nazi  Germany on the last refugee boat to Cuba before the St Louis was turned back so that its Jewish passengers perished in the Nazi Holocaust.  He lived with the knowledge that that people he loved and the country of his birth was burnt up in the flames of hatred.  Yet he dedicated himself to spreading “groundless love.”

As university Rabbinic chaplain in New York Albert marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery Alabama in 1965, including as his wife Evelyn told me, lunching with Dr King in a roadside diner on the bus down to Alabama!  When he was given the opportunity of a study Sabbatical in Jerusalem he went back to Germany instead – when asked why he replied:  that “…the grief in my bones, the dark nights of persecution, the incompleteness of my identity as a Jew and a child in Germany, would not have been answered [in Jerusalem].  I wanted to go to Germany to find the beginning of an inner journey towards reconciliation.”   Commenting on Rabbi Bunam’s teaching that “Our wise men say, “Seek peace in your place,”” he wrote “”I had to embark on an inner journey which has its beginnings even before my experience on the so-called “Kristallnacht”. Because I am a rabbi, this was ultimately a journey through the millennia (I am really 4000 years old!).”  {^[2]}

Albert visited Germany many times, teaching thousands of young Germans, at church meetings, at education conferences, at state occasions.  This work meant that when the Council of Christians and Jews in the UK recognised that the Orthodox Chief Rabbi could not represent all Jews in this country, Albert became the first Progressive Jewish co-President of the largest interfaith organisation in the country.  Albert also helped to found the now yearly Jewish – Christian – Muslim conference in Germany twenty five years ago and was a strong supporter of Sir Sigmund Sternberg’s Three Faiths Forum in its early years.

Rabbi Albert Friedlander was a writer whose work effected a change which was very necessary not just for the Jewish community but for humanity.  It used to be that when a tragedy of human evil would take place ,  the victims would be traumatized, the perpetrators might or might not be brought to justice and the world would say it is time to move on, don’t talk about it  – that’s the way to go forward.

After Albert we could not say that again.  His most influential book was “Out of the Whirlwind”  published in 1968  when there was a real concern that the Holocaust might fade into esoteric memory as few were willing to talk about their experiences.  Friedlander knew the power of narrative.  In his introduction to this book he wrote:  “A whirlwind cannot be taught; it must be experienced.  And we cannot know what happened during the Shoah…solely by learning historical facts and figures and scholarly explanations. …we must also touch and feel and taste the dark days and the burning nights.  Our hearts must constrict in terror and grief.  Our minds must expand to make room for the incredible.  And our love for the goodness of life must grow strong enough to reach into the darkness and to discover the heart of that darkness, the experience itself.”  {^[3]}  “Out of the Whirlwind”, which has now been through many editions is a deeply moving reader of Holocaust first person literature, poetry, art – and was the first of its kind.

Even his book on Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck, first President of this Synagogue, began with narrative which leads the reader into the more intellectual core of the book as he introduces Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck as a garbage collector, prisoner number 187,894 in Theresienstadt concentration camp pulling a wagon around the camp while discussing philosophy with a fellow academic inmate.

Albert knew that without living the nightmare even in the smallest way it would be too easy for us to stay silent when as it does and will do, the nightmare begins to happen again.  Of the Shoah he wrote, in a beautiful and tragic interweaving of Psalm 115 with 20th century history: “The victims cried out to their neighbours, The neighbours had ears but did not hear.  They were listening to their own hatreds and jealousies, to the insidious voices telling them that the Nazis were acting out those dark dreams of hatred with which their own fantasies had played from time to time.  The neighbours had eyes but did not see.  Their minds were filled with visions of what might happen to them if they interfered; they did not realise that it was already happening.  They had mouths but did not speak.  And every outcry silenced before it reached the lips weighed down the “technically innocent” neighbour until he was turned into another Cain, branded, residing in his special hell.  The victims cried out to the world.  There have been so many victims in co many centuries, who have appealed to the conscience of the word – Albigensians and Huguenots, Armenians and Vietnamese – and the world has been silent again and again…Can God speak out if man is silent?”  {^[4]}

Earlier in the service we prayed a prayer for the people of the Democratic Replublic Congo – the same prayer will be heard in Churches tomorrow and many other Synagogues today.  We did so because, as teachers such as Rabbi Albert Friedlander have taught us, silence it not an option if we are to live in any kind of acceptable world – and prayer is our words to God begun with our words to each other.

Some sources say that well over 5 million people have died as a result of violence and deliberate starvation in the Congo since 1998, a country with a larger population than Britain and the size of the whole of Western Europe.  Rape is used as a weapon of war in the Congo.  Thousands of homes are burned to the ground, millions of people are displaced.  There is no solution in sight.

Over this month the people of Congo are trying to alert the world to their plight.  The website www.congointerfaithintiative.org  will tell you what is happening in the country.   There you will find the narrative to tell you why this country needs the help of all humanity.   As Rabbi David Mitchell writes the narrative, the real story of what is happening in the Congo, is so violent and graphic that he “often finds it impossible to sleep after reading these accounts.” {^[5]}  The organisers want “to raise awareness of the wars and human tragedy overwhelming the Congo and galvanize people of faith and every good-willed person to act as catalysts to move the UK and other major aid donors to address the root causes of the human tragedy overwhelming the Congo and surrounding countries.” {^[6]}

We pray because God cannot speak out if man is silent.  We act because we are God’s hands in the world – as Rabbi Albert Friedlander taught us.  In this week’s Haftarah the prophet Isaiah says “Comfort Ye Comfort Ye my people” because the time had come for the the exiles in Babylonia to return to their homes.  We can only be comforted if we too give comfort – right now to the people of Congo – read the news stories, contribute to the appeals, advocate for them if you have influence, help to save them as we too needed once help that never came