Sermons

Sacred Trash, Sacred Treasure
Oct 8th 2011

Yom Kippur 5772 - Yizkor

The written or spoken Name of God is considered to be especially sacred. The Kohen Gadol would articulate YHVH, the four letter name of God, only on Yom Kippur and only after leaving the confines of the Holy of Holies. We never pronounce YHVH. Instead we substitute Ad-nay. However, even that is felt to be a name worthy of extra sanctity, so when not praying, we have a further substitute: Hashem. The Name.

This respect goes beyond verbal attunement. According to the Torah, it is forbidden to erase or disrespect anything inscribed with the Name of God. That is why we have a tradition of respectfully burying books and documents.

From time to time, many of you leave at the synagogue old Jewish books that contain The Name (YHVH). Some of them are worn, unusable, and appropriate for respectful burial. Others are real treasures which we re-circulate to members or students.

In some communities these texts were simply put in a storeroom. Geniza (גניזה) means “hiding place” or “storage” and came to refer to the old material left in the room. The back room of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo, where our members, Roger and Liliane Gozlan were married, became the most famous Geniza in history, the unintended archives of the Egyptian Jewish community.

Because of the dry climate, letters, contracts, bills, receipts, lists of inventories, court records, wills, leases, marriage contracts and writs of divorce were preserved along with copies of Bible manuscripts, prayers and other sacred texts. The Cairo Geniza became a treasure trove of information about Jewish and Mediterranean life from 870 to 1250.

The Geniza includes almost 300,000 documents and fragments of texts. They identify 35,000 people, including hundreds of  important families and significant individuals. The Geniza documents include letters from philosopher-legal scholar Maimonides, original manuscripts from the philosopher-poet Yehudah Halevi, critical information about the Palestinian poet Yannai and previously unknown work by Saadia Gaon of Babylonia. The Geniza includes the first example of notational Jewish music. Fragments tell us of the occupations and the diversity of commercial goods available in the region. We have instructional materials, appeals for funds to pay for the release of captives, and accounts of attacks on the Jewish community by Muslim mobs.

In A Mediterranean Society, his multi-volume study based on the Geniza material, Shlomo Dov Gotein points to documents from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, North Africa, Spain, Southern France, Italy, Sicily, Turkey, Aden, and India. The Genizah revealed information about communal organization, the role of women in society, loans and interest, the Jews as tolerated people of Scripture, tzedakah campaigns, communal records, medical history, magical incantations, sea travel and warfare.

Geniza material also enabled scholars to confirm that in ancient Biblical versions, the Name of God (YHVH) continued to be written in ancient Canaanite script even though the rest of the text was in the modern square-style Hebrew. This taught us that the sanctity of the Name was so great that even changes in how it was written were not made casually. It also shows how aspects of Judaism are retained even as other elements evolved.

How was this Geniza discovered? One May day in 1896, at a dining-room table in Cambridge, England, a meeting took place between a Romanian-born Jewish intellectual and twin Presbyterian Scotswomen. Margaret and Agnes Smith brought the Geniza to the attention of Solomon Schechter.

The Smith sisters were not typical Victorian scholars or adventurers. Middle-aged and without university degrees, they made one of the most important scriptural discoveries of their time. In the monastery of Santa Katarina in the Sinai, they found the earliest known copy of the Gospels in the language that Jesus spoke. In Santa Katarina, they were served dinner accompanied with some documents written in Hebrew. Told that they came from the Ben Ezra synagogue, the sisters later visited and climbed into the back room geniza. They brought some material back to Schechter.

He recognized the significance of the find, went to Cairo, saw that this sacred trash truly was sacred treasure, and brought almost 200,000 fragments with him back to England. When Schechter came to the Jewish Theological Seminary, he brought a significant amount of the material with him to New York.

While the world centres of Geniza research are at JTS and Cambridge, the University of Toronto also has some Geniza fragments and the project to digitalize the all the Geniza material is based at the University of Waterloo. Years ago, I brought my family to the Rare Book Room of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The librarian showed us a box of unrecorded Geniza fragments. One son reached in and removed a small piece of parchment. His face lit up. “Abba! This is the quote from Isaiah that is the title of the book you are translating!” Hazut Kasha, the “grievous vision” of Isaiah 21.2 was in our hands. Properly catalogued, a photograph of the fragment from the Cairo Geniza is now on the wall of my study.

The discovery of treasure is not limited to the Geniza. In the summer, many people have garage sales, selling what to them lacks value. Others, rummaging through the trash, can occasionally find a real treasure. A family from Buffalo jokingly referred to the painting hidden behind the living room sofa as “The Mike”. After the owner retired in 2003, he researched the painted pieta. Recently, an Italian art appraiser, backed up by scientific analysis, declared that this canvas is probably a lost Michelangelo painting.

Some of you are aware that in Jerusalem, under the Temple Mount, the Muslim waqf has been carrying out repairs to the ancient open spaces known as Solomon’s Stables. The work has been carried out without any archaeological study and raised fears that vitally important historical information would be lost forever.  Since 2004 volunteers have sifted through dump sites to examine their contents and tens of thousands of objects have been discovered. One woman from England found gold coins from the Byzantine period. Another volunteer found an ancient half-shekel, probably used during the days of the Temple for the annual offering of support to the sanctuary. When you visit Israel, make some time to do some sifting. What the Muslims discarded as trash, Jews are reclaiming as treasure.

This past week, eleven precious Bible manuscripts from Damascus, Syria, went on display at Israel's national library. the manuscripts, known collectively as the Damascus Crowns, include meticulous Hebrew penmanship and illustrations in ink and gold leaf. One, a 700-year-old Bible, was spirited out of Syria thanks to the efforts of our congregant, Judy Feld Carr, and donations from our membership. We know that before 1492 this volume went from Italy to Castille, then to Constantinople, to Damascus, to Toronto, and finally to Jerusalem. This Bible, once hidden, is symbolic of the epic journey of the Jewish people.

My colleague, Gerald Zelizer, reminded me that as individuals, we also have a personal genizah, our own inner space where we store memories and experiences. Some recollections may be too sacred to be exposed. Others may be too subversive. What might be reclaimed from your personal genizah?

In the Yizkor service, if we are blessed, we recall those we loved.  But not everyone retains positive memories. Years ago, a congregant asked me a challenging question “Rabbi, based on my relationship with my parents should I observe shivah and say kaddish or forget about it?” This person told me of being sexually abused by a family member while one or both of her parents ignored it and thereby allowed it to recur. At least that was her recollection. The genizah of this individual retained the memory and she brought this complex question to me.

After she spoke of her pain, after she asked me what was right as a Jew to do, I responded with great hesitation and humility:

I recognize that you have a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and ache. Your parents did not protect you. Don’t pretend to grieve in ways you cannot. But as a Jew, you may recite kaddish to acknowledge the parent who gave you birth even if that person failed you in other crucial and vital ways.

Many times we mourn and weep for what we have lost. Other times, we grieve and cry for what we wish we had had. Mourn for what you wanted and needed from your parent, not only the failed reality which you lived. Ask God to take your kaddish and your hurt, to lift them up the way we speak of Yom Kippur as transforming our lives. Use the kaddish to free yourself from the disappointment and pain, the hurt and anger that you feel and move to a new place in life. Bury your parent, sit shivah, mourn what you lost as well as what you never received.

This year, I have included in our Yizkor booklet a meditation in memory of a parent who was hurtful.  It comes from Mahzor Lev Shalem published last year by the Conservative Movement.  This meditation is for and from the many people who have shared their stories with me.

Similar advice might also apply regarding mothers and fathers who were emotionally distant. Last Father’s Day, Charles Blow recalled his own father whose personality and interests severely clashed with his own, He recalled that his father could never say “I love you”, but once proudly called him “My Boy” in front of others.

Although he had never told me that he loved me, I would cling to that day as the greatest evidence of that fact. He had never intended me any wrong. He just didn’t know how to love me right. He wasn’t a mean man. I had never once seen him angry. He had never been physically abusive in any way. His crime and cruelty was the withholding of affection – not out of malice but out of indifference... It just goes to show that no matter how estranged the father, no matter how deep the damage, no matter how shattered the bond, there is still time, still space, still a need for even the smallest bit of evidence of a father’s love.

I know that there are examples of that in our congregation today. Yizkor allows us to reclaim that relationship from our personal genizah.

For those who only know of Picasa or Snapfish, there once was a quaint custom of bringing film for developing and then picking up 4x6 photos to pass around at home or office.  Many of us have had the experience of taking out old photos from scrapbooks and bring them forward. Perhaps you have showed those pictures to another

Are there any snapshots from your mental album which are too personal to share even with grandchildren? What fragments in your genizah feel too sacred to bring out? What do we want to leave only in our memories? Are they meant to remain in the genizah as sacred personal property between you and another loved one? Not everything should be reclaimed or put in public.

Genizah is more than the fragments of parchment and paper hidden away in the back of the synagogue in Cairo. It is also a message about Judaism, about family and about faith.

For some, Jewish teachings and practices are simply old stuff, appropriate for burial, disposal, or putting behind the sofa. But when we look carefully at what may be hanging around the genizah of our homes, the old traditions and wisdom of our people, we may find that what some consider trash is truly treasure to be reclaimed.

For others, our pain and our hopes, that which hurts us and that which we especially cherish – they have been placed in the genizah of our memories. Hidden away.  Hidden because they are too sacred or too subversive. Some which we may begin to disclose to our families and others not.

But before the One-whose-Name-is-Holy, there is no genizah, there are no secrets. The One-whose-Name-is-not-Pronounced knows what is revealed and what is concealed, what we can articulate and what remains in us – unstated – even on Yom Kippur.

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole.  (Nextbook/Schocken, 2011)

Sacred Treasure Mark Glickman (Jewish Lights, 2010)

The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels, Janet Soskice.  (Knopf, 2009)

History in Fragments: A Genizah Centenary Exhibition  Cambridge, United Kingdom. November 1997–February 1998. http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/exhibition.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/opinion/18blow.html?pagewanted=all

Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Identity, Guy Corneau. (Shambhala, 1991)

The Emotionally Absent Mother: A Guide to Self-Healing and Getting the Love You Missed, Jasmin Lee Cori. (The Experiment, 2010)

My thanks to Rabbi Gerald Zelizer for suggesting that genizah might apply to our personal lives and for his two examples.