EREV YOM KIPPUR
Rabbi Séverine Sokol, , B’nai Chaim 5772
L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux (essential things are invisible to the eyes) wrote Antoine Saint-Exupéry from his exile in New York City. Saint-Exupéry, a Lyonnais scribe, poet, adventurer and aviator was finishing his gentle masterpiece, Le Petit Prince. From his haven in America, his imagination transported him back to the North African desert, where as a pilot he flew countless reconnaissance missions. It was a crash landing in the desert that taught him about the fragility of life in inhospitable places. Without sustenance, without water, Saint-Exupéry was miraculously rescued from his desert grave by a passing Bedouin Arab. In Le Petit Prince, the pilot treads the same path. He is also a lost soul, a navigator seeking his way home, when suddenly he is greeted by what seems to be a ghost, but is in fact a little traveler, a child from a distant asteroid who teaches the man a valuable lesson about the interdependency of human beings. The prince’s devotion to his rose symbolizes our mutual responsibility to cherish life and keep hope alive. Saint-Exupéry dedicated his book, published in 1943, to his friend Leon Werth, a Jew trapped in occupied France, desperate to escape his circumstances.
The war re-drew the boundaries of Europe forever. Millions lost their lives. Saint-Exupéry was not immune. Le Petit Prince is not simply a castaway novella, fixated on one man’s escapist fantasies; it is an extraordinary meditation on the road less traveled.
As a patriot and a proud Lyonnaise woman, Le Petit Prince’s message is precious to me. It is a guide to our inescapable obligations: our need to remember, our need to build a better world, and alleviate suffering. Still, when we feel trapped or pigeonholed by life, we need more than the pages of a text, a crumpled map, or a trail of breadcrumbs to make our way back home. Saint-Exupéry had his extraterrestrial creation descend from the skies above. High hopes came from the celestial heavens. When we are lost and hope that help is on the way, we too need, as the Book of Isaiah prescribes, “a voice of wisdom [that] will steer us to safety” (7:15-16).
I am often asked about the unusual orbit of my own career. And for years, I was emotionally inaccessible, not ready to share this story. I was not ready for the media scrutiny and celebrity that followed the launch of the career of France’s first pioneering woman rabbi, Pauline Bebe. Early in my career, I recall dodging the phone calls of writers. It was like I fell to earth and there was this sense of alienation that followed me here. I put myself through school and with little fanfare or money, and much disbelief, made the journey across the channel alone to the seminary.
It was an uncommon journey, particularly for a young woman, such as myself, hailing from what is called HLM (habitation à loyer modéré) government assisted housing. Such housing was created for France's growing working class and is the primary address and destination for immigrants. Government statistics say that you will find in HLM housing the highest rates of poverty and crime in France. It is not a particularly rosy picture, but you find many more success stories than the statistics suggest. Yet, it is not uncommon to feel marginal.
In the Book of Isaiah, a source of inspiration and uplift for many faiths, God leads the disillusioned “by a road they did not know,” to “make them walk by paths they never knew” and “turn darkness before them to light. Rough places into level ground.” (Isaiah 42:16) I heeded the rabbinic calling, but I wondered; would I be heard?
I found support during my seminary days from my dear friend and former housemate, the German-Jewish rabbinic trainee Andreas Hinz, z”l, a princely figure in his own right, whose passion for Judaism ennobled him. He always had a wise word for me, and was a rising star, truly destined for greatness. Sadly, he was cut down in the prime of his life, a victim of one of the most sensational and gruesome anti-Gay hate-crimes that the United Kingdom had ever witnessed. The British tabloid coverage focused on Andy’s ending rather than his singular achievements. I never imagined when he left the house that night, that when I said good-bye to him it would be for the last time. I would never seem him again. Like Saint-Exupéry’s prince, Andy disappeared, but he did not vanish. His memory is always with us. Andy inspired me. He was courageous. He was a big believer in me. I was determined to complete my rabbinic journey. I knew, now more than ever that I needed, to use the pulpit to speak out against such abuses. No one should ever be persecuted for being different.
Life was tough, I had lost my friend Andy, but I was fortunate to have another voice of wisdom in my life: my friend and mentor, the late Rabbi John Rayner, z”l. Rabbi Rayner was born in Berlin, Germany and was evacuated to England on a kindertransport in 1939. He earned accolades in his studies at Cambridge and the Hebrew Union College, vaulting himself into the vanguard of Liberal Judaism. As my guide, teacher, and father figure, he shepherded me through the early days of my rabbinic journey in the late ‘90s. I felt a connection to his story. For my own father, a Lyonnais-born Sephardi Jew also escaped the Nazis, with his mother and siblings to Algeria, leaving, her husband, behind in hiding. Somehow he evaded the Gestapo, for reasons that to this day remain unclear to me. When my father and grandmother returned to Lyon after the war, they did not shout out their Judaism, but instead quietly rebuilt their lives. As a child, my father played in the traboules, the covered secret passages in the ancient quarter of town. The very same passages used by the Resistance as they sparred with the Nazis.
Childhood by today’s standards must seem like a luxury. My father grew up quickly, and when he was later in life deployed as a young man with the French army to his former Algerian sanctuary, he witnessed an idyllic sun-soaked country convulsing from a bloody civil war that hatched the kind of terrorism that still haunts us to this day. A new exodus of civilians was on the horizon into the arms of a now much more stable France.
Let me be clear: my generation lives an infinitely easier life than my parents or grandparents. And today, we are better equipped to understand the differences between the children of the Jewish Ghetto, the children of the Holocaust, and those who came of age in Post-War France. But I, like many, have had to find ways to cope with the legacy of our parents.
Many of us who see ourselves as the children of exile and assimilation, are enamored with the romance of the route. An adventure that allows us to leapfrog our circumstances, move freely to explore the planet, and go to the ends of the earth, in order to escape our backgrounds in the belief that we will live a better life. In Europe, our union was created to leave behind the bloodletting, but the signposts read that we live in a shrinking world with a growing number of refugees at our doorstep begging for a new beginning and not a dead end. For the Jews that live there, Europe is a fragile continent that unites the living and the dead. It is an uneasy marriage of forgiving and forgetting.
We have monuments and memorials in Europe, but this is not enough. While it is true that France has served as our paradise, our haven, we cannot romanticize history; France was ill prepared for the German occupation. There is also this hidden history of the crackdown against foreigners; the internment of 600,000 people, men, women, children, and elderly held in some 200 French camps between 1938 and 1946. They were the undesirables: among them were Spaniards, Jews and Gypsies. Perhaps one of the most difficult things to grasp is that many of the camps in France used to intern Jews: Compiègne, Drancy, Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande, Gurs, Rivesaltes, were neither guarded, nor run by Germans, but were under French control.
Rather than castigate an entire country, we must remember that all of France suffered through the unimaginable pain of occupation. Still we were not a nation entirely composed of resistance fighters. Nor can we ignore that the Vichy authorities handed thousands of Jews to the Germans who were either murdered in France or shipped to their deaths. Less than 3% of those Jews deported from France survived. Many of them were children around the size of Saint-Exupéry’s petit prince.
And this is the balancing act of a Jew born on European soil. On any given day, I would leave my home in Lyon. I would delight in the wonders of gastronomy at a local market or bistro, and then, turn the corner and stumble across the ghastly landmarks of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon’s reign of terror. For those of you new to this history, Klaus Barbie was a notorious war criminal who sent our people to their deaths in the concentration camps. I remember when Barbie was captured in Bolivia and deported to France. His trial in the 1980s at the Palais de Justice in Lyon, within walking distance from my home, riveted us all.
I spent my teenage years, like many, thinking about how I could escape to some far off land. Life can sometimes take us off the beaten path and that is how I discovered the rabbinate. Growing up I did not even know that Reform Judaism even existed. My parents never heard of it. The movement had no historical roots whatsoever in the Maghreb where my mother’s family hailed from. And truth be told, my father, still carries within him a particular kind of baggage in which there is no room for religion.
Outside Paris, the presence of Reform Judaism in most French towns is negligible, and it was only by accident on an exchange program in England, that I realized that there were opportunities for women to learn more about Judaism at the highest levels. At times, it was a lonely adventure, nearly ten years ago, to be only one of two French women in the rabbinate, especially when one-steps back and considers that France’s total population hovers around 60 million people. And yet, Jews make up only a tiny fraction of that population, weighing in around 650,000. In the same breath, Jews in France (since the collapse of the Soviet Union) form, thanks to the surge in North African Jewish immigration in the 1950s and 60s, the largest community in Europe and the second largest community in the Jewish Diaspora after the United States. France is also home to Europe's largest Muslim population and undoubtedly there is much work to be done on the streets where Anti-Semitism spikes every time Israel makes the headlines.
During my time in France, the idea of a woman rabbi in the minds of many was pure science fiction. When I became, in what I was told, the first French Sephardic woman to become a rabbi, the phenomenon was unheard of for the Jews who settled in France after the war from the Maghreb. Doors were closed to me, even in France’s Reform movement, where there are still synagogues a woman rabbi is not truly welcome in. Rabbi Bebe’s response was to bravely create a congregation from scratch. The answer posted on a recent 2011 CCAR rabbinic job listing for France was that “the single most important thing a rabbi needs to know about this congregation is…women do not read in the Sefer Torah.” I was informed by another European synagogue in their search for replacement, that they were not ready for a woman rabbi. It is the kind of discrimination that my American counterparts I imagine rarely face.
In North America, women have shattered many of the barriers to the pulpit. There are still hurdles to be crossed, but women, in many cases, are on equal footing with their male counterparts. But in Europe, you will encounter people who tell this dream is a road to nowhere. Yet I understand in the past couple of years, the ice has begun to thaw and a Reform synagogue in Paris, led by a charismatic and progressive American rabbi, has opened its doors to two women rabbis. But for me, the time had passed, and using my heart as a compass, I remained in England, and then followed my husband to the States. I fulfilled my dream, wandering further afield than I ever imagined.
So for years, I have spent my life as a commuter between America, France, England and Israel. The distance feels like nothing, when I imagine the caravans, troops, and lone travelers that at one time glided across the vast stretches of ancient trade routes of the Near East. These roads were a source of royal pride. They symbolized the need for human contact and communication. Safe roads were a metaphor for “an era of peace.” My generation is faced with a different choice than the previous generation. When we come to that fork in the road, the Torah places before us two different paths, two different modes of existence. In these verses, so central to our Yom Kippur services, God informs us “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—if you and your offspring would live—by loving God, heeding God’s commands, and holding fast to God.” (Deuteronomy 30:15)
The big shots of contemporary Judaism constantly warn us of the extinction of the Jewish people, languishing as strangers to ourselves in some exotic destination. But these pundits have followed the road to the wrong oasis. This is not the final chapter. We have not turned our backs to history. For many of us it is hard to say we are Jews. But still we return to Judaism on our own terms. In recent years, I have staged a number of events celebrating French-Jewish culture including a 2010 exhibition that received the support of my country’s government.
I never opted for anonymity. Empowerment can come in various guises. The truth is, we may acculturate outwardly, but inwardly we bear the imprint of Judaism in all its glory. For as the little prince learned, L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux (essential things are invisible to the eyes).
G’mar Chatimah Tovah – May you have a good seal in the Book of Life.