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April 30, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Achrei Mot
April 30, 2022 — 29 Nisan 5782
Two Boxes
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
For the last 45 years or so, our shul has been distributing candles that we light at night to usher in Yom HaShoah. Each candle carries the name of one person, one out of the Six Million. As I shared at this year’s Yom HaShoah program, our members Barbara and Steve Grossman showed me their folder that has the names of the individuals that they thought about as they lit the candles every Yom HaShoah for the last 45 years. They have kept every name. I won’t go through all 45 years, but just to give you a sense of it: In 1994 they remembered Esther Kligerman. In 1995 Raizel Farbman. In 1996 Moshe Bikel. In 1997 Else Paradies. In 1998 Samuel Hirsch Kornblatt. In 1999 Theres Neuberg. In 2000 Moshe Fish. In 2001 Gertude Meidedner. And so it goes for 45 years. For each one, they would ask, we would all ask: where was the rest of the world? What was the rest of the world doing?
That was always our question, at every other Yom HaShoah.
But mah nishtanah yom hashoah hazeh mikol yami hashoah, why is this Yom HaShoah different from all the other Yom HaShoahs? Because this year we are the rest of the world.
Every morning, on every screen, we wake up to stories of fresh atrocities, war crimes and murder in Ukraine. Train stations. Apartment buildings. Theatres. Civilians are brutalized and murdered every day, we know it, we see it, and so the question is what are we doing?
We are not indifferent. To the contrary, most of us know and care. We wonder and worry. We are just stymied. What to do about it is the question that most of us cannot answer. Yes, we can and have written our elected representatives. Yes, we can and have written checks to Ukrainian relief. But still the brutality keeps happening, and as we remember the Six Million, and our pledge of never again, we grapple with how to handle the fact that it is happening in our time, again and again.
I want to tell you two stories and leave you with a piece of art that might help us begin to create a response to this conundrum.
The first story: In 1993 a young man named Louis D. Brown, age 15, was killed in a fatal crossfire shoot-out in Dorchester. By all accounts Louis was uncommonly caring, brilliant, and hard-working. He was an avid reader interested in engineering. He looked forward to going to college and to getting a PhD. He even dreamed of becoming the first black president of the United States. He was on his way to an anti-violence youth meeting in Dorchester when a stray bullet tragically ended his life.
How does one even begin to process this loss? Gun violence on our streets is not new. With every shooting, we say never again and yet it happens again and again. This young man who had all the promise in the world is literally killed by gun violence on his way to organize against gun violence. How to deal with a problem that is seemingly intractable?
His mother, Tina Chery, founded the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute whose mission is to serve as a center of healing for families impacted by violence. Tina Chery wants to show compassion for the families of victims of gun violence—and for the families of those incarcerated. The institute named for her son brings all these families together to build understanding in a tough and troubled world.
Tina reached out to other communities to build support for her initiative. That’s how she met Caron Tabb, our artist in residence. As soon as Caron heard Tina’s story, she knew that she wanted to create a piece of art that could speak to the poignancy of Louis’s loss and Tina’s resolve.
Caron Tabb took a trope of Jewish tradition—a tzedakah box—and made one significant change. She took away the final hey, converting a tzedakah box to a tzedek box. Tzedakah is charity. Tzedek is justice. Caron’s artistic response to Louis’s loss and Tina’s resilience is to build a tzedek box—a box that invites us to think about our contribution to making the world more just.
We’ve all seen tzedakah boxes. They’re in our homes, in our preschool, in our current Sisterhood Museum Windows. We know what to do with the tzedakah box. In the wake of the war in Ukraine, CJP has raised more than 3.6 million dollars for humanitarian relief. That is already more than CJP has ever raised for an emergency relief effort. In addition, CJP raised yet an additional 5.8 million dollars for refugee resettlement, almost 9.5 million dollars in two months. This tzedakah provides thousands of Ukrainian refugees, Jewish and not Jewish, with food, medicine, trauma support, and humanitarian aid. Thank God for tzedakah boxes, and thank God that the value of tzedakah has been transmitted to our people.
But in addition to the money we give, what of ourselves can we give? What would our version of Tina Chery’s energy look like? That is why we need two boxes. A tzedakah box, where we give our resources. And a tzedek box, where we give ourselves.
What does this mean, practically speaking? I don’t have an answer for you. I don’t have a three point plan, which is a good thing, because answers are boring, and my answers are not your answers. The best answers every person discovers for themselves.
But if we could figure out what to put in our tzedek box, what we can give ourselves to, the impact can be literally infinite, which leads to my second story.
At our Yom HaShoah program Wednesday night, Paula Apsell was telling the story of Jewish resistance, which took many forms. The Nazis prohibited any Jewish babies in the ghetto. Babies were killed instantly. One family in Kovno, Lithuania was determined to resist this evil decree. They had a little daughter, a baby, whom they drugged, so that she would stay asleep, they put her in a potato sack, and she was smuggled out of the ghetto. The girl was raised for six years by a Christian family and was reunited with her Jewish family after the war.
The adult version of this little girl is a woman who appears in the film, and tells her story, narrating a film of herself as a baby, in the potato bag, being smuggled out. That’s already dayeinu. She survived being smuggled out as a bag of potatoes. She emerged into adulthood. She told her story in Paula’s film about Jewish resistance. But there’s more.
During the program, Paula tells us that this woman, whose name is Dana Mazurkevich, is in the Rabbi Samuel Chiel Sanctuary. She rises, and is acknowledged by those in attendance. I called Paula the next morning and asked for the back story. How did Dana end up at our program, in a film which told Dana’s story?
It turns out that Dana lives 10 minutes from Paula. How did she get there? It turns out that those desperate parents who smuggled her out of the ghetto in a potato bag were virtuoso violinists. Dana grew up to become a virtuoso violinist herself, studying violin at the Moscow Conservatory, where she met her husband, Yuri, also a virtuoso violinist. Dana now teaches violin at Boston University.
The baby in the potato bag grew up to be a violinist and a teacher, a wife, a mother and grandmother. All those names we all remember on all those notes on all those candles over the last 45 years–only God knows what they might have done, who they might have become, the people they could have helped, the books they could have written, the songs they could have song, the healing they could have offered, the love they could have shared, had they been allowed to live.
Dana Mazurkevich embodies the Talmud’s teaching that if you save one life, you save a universe. And she reminds us that if we don’t have the answer now about what to do about Ukraine and society’s other intractable ills, like gun violence, that’s okay. A tzedek box is a lot harder than a tzedakah box. That just means we need to think again about what we put into our tzedek box: what part of our humanity, our energy, our passion, our love, will we give to our world? Because the good we can do once we figure it out is as beautiful as a violin concerto played by a master who has been to hell and back. Shabbat shalom.