The Grimm Brothers’ project was not intended for the entertainment or education of children, as fairy tales are mostly used nowadays. Titled Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), their first edition dating to 1812 had a different goal, a goal which is embedded in their plea. That goal was to rediscover German identity in the aftermath of Napoleonic conquest of Germanic lands, restore a common sense of German history and spirit and encourage German unification. 

This Thursday I represented the Jewish community at the annual Burial of the Unclaimed. I joined a group of other faith leaders, mostly Christian, but also Buddhist and Native American, providing a Jewish prayer and emphasizing that when we Jews remember our dead we commit to doing work to benefit those in need in this life. This year the ceremony laid to rest the cremated remains of 2,308 individuals in a (small) mass grave. It is painful to live in a place where so many people can be so completely forgotten in a year that there is no one to remember them.  

I deeply struggle with the idea that Yiddish cannot be revived and spoken as authentically and completely as it was once lived. To me, outside of my knowledge of linguistics or sociology, this is all about justice and goodness. Yiddish being reduced to a signifier is almost like a surrender to forces benign and evil.

ווי קען מען זיך אײַנבילדן אַן אָרט וואָס מען האָט קיינמאָל נישט געזען? אַן אָרט וואָס עקזיסטירט מער נישט–אַ וועלט וואָס הײַנט ליגטנאָר אין אונדזער כוח־הדמיון?

“Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.”

Synagogue libraries were once a regular part of the Jewish landscape, but those days are mostly passed. Even very large synagogues like Sinai Temple, that once had a well-staffed library, one of the best, if not the best in the United States long since laid-off most of their staff and is now primarily there to serve the Akiva Day School. The Sinai Library has an online catalog which makes awareness of the collection accessible to the public even though the collection itself is not.

Esther Shumiatcher (1899-1985) was born in Gomel, Belarus at the turn of the century. Although she immigrated to Canada with her family at the age of 12, she continued to write poetry in Yiddish, and in her marriage with the Yiddish playwright Peretz Hirschbein, she became part of a leading couple in the Yiddish literary scene. Her poem “Albatros” became the namesake of a prominent Yiddish literary journal in Berlin. One of her most noted poetic works is “9 months,” a poetic saga about pregnancy. This is Part II of her poem “In shoen fun libshaft,” published in a book by the same name in Vilna in 1930. Part I was published in the newsletter last week.

The Me’or Einayim teaches that when we awaken to the simple truth that “I am alive,” we realize that this very aliveness is Divine — that the life animating us is the life of the Blessed Creator. This chant invites us to rest in that awareness, to feel the Divine breath moving through our own.

“It  has  become  evident  that  no  external  factor  can  induce  anti‐Semitism in  the  anti‐Semite. Anti-Semitism  is  a  free  and  total  choice  of  oneself,  a  comprehensive attitude  that  one  adopts  not  only  toward  Jews,  but  toward  men  in  general,  toward  history  and  society;  it  is  at  one  and  the  same  time  a  passion  and  a  conception  of  the  world.” 
(Sartre, Jean-Paul (1949), Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, p11)

One can view the Territorialists as crackpots and dreamers. Indeed, some of them were. However, many of them were practical and highly respected Jewish leaders. Some of their failures were the result of unreliable partners. Others failed because they came too late to be the places of rescue that they were hoped to be.

LA Yiddish Day, by most accounts, was a success. But to me and Aaron Castillo-White, as co-organizers, it was a bit of a shock. We weren’t certain that anyone would come at all, and furthermore, it was difficult at times to lock in all the details we needed.

Esther Shumiatcher (1899-1985) was born in Gomel, Belarus at the turn of the century. Although she immigrated to Canada with her family at the age of 12, she continued to write poetry in Yiddish, and in her marriage with the Yiddish playwright Peretz Hirschbein, she became part of a leading couple in the Yiddish literary scene. Her poem “Albatros” became the namesake of a prominent Yiddish literary journal in Berlin. One of her most noted poetic works is “9 months,” a poetic saga about pregnancy.

Perennial Philosophy begins with the idea that all religions, however different, share a mutual and identical core. That core is the unified divinity which is in the base of all things and is both immanent and transcendent, meaning, it manifests in the observable world and at the same time is external to it. While all religions developed fundamentally different doctrines, practices and theologies, it is the esoteric part of each religion which appears to be similar, the part in which one can tap into divinity itself, communicate and participate within it.

We have the potential and power to oppress the weak or console and raise up the weak. And when we are the weak we can allow ourselves to be raised up. When we forget to see the wonder in creation we forget God. While we wait for absolute clarity, we can let the opportunity to make some meaning in the world through our actions pass us by. 

When I see a new generation of Yiddish-speaking Hasidim on Joe Rogan style podcasts, watching Tucker Carlson, engaging in heavy consumer culture and swearing profusely, I don’t think to blame them for the rabbit holes they’ve gone down or why they’ve gone down them. I think everyone is going down the same rabbit holes. I bring this example only to demonstrate that not even a community that kept Yiddish, ultra-orthodoxy, and strict rules about media consumption can withstand the vortex.

According to Maimonides’s “Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith,” one central principle of Judaism is the belief in the arrival of Messiah and the messianic era. We orient ourselves to the messiah as we orient to the future; the messiah is the one who has not yet arrived. But in Elijah’s prophecy to Gavriel in Gates of the Forest, Elijah claims that “The Messiah is not coming. He’s not coming because he has already come.”

The lack of awareness is the lack of ego, and the lack of ego allows us to do the impossible without hesitation, like little kids believe that everything is possible.

As a bookseller in San Francisco, I looked up to the great booksellers of the city from times gone by. There was a time when downtown San Francisco was dotted with a fine variety of booksellers, new, used and antiquarian. Even in my time we had dealers like Jeremy Norman who specialized in rare medical books and handled the Albert Einstein letters, along with McDonalds Book Shop in the Tenderloin, whose dilapidated collection was known as “a dirty ill-lit place for books.”

Most names for God in Yiddish come directly from Hebrew, but in the process of their translation, they take on connotations that are unique to the Yiddishe Neshomeh, the Jewish Soul. These Hebrew names, when translated to English, retain a sense of loftiness and power. In Yiddish, they mostly become more approachable.

Ziame Telesin (1909-1996) was born in Kalinkovitsh, Polesia, Belarus. He and his wife, the poet Rokhl Boymvol, lived in Minsk and wrote in Yiddish, translated Russian literature into Yiddish, and also wrote Soviet patriotic poetry. He volunteered on the Russian front in WWII and suffered severe shell-shock. He wrote for several Yiddish journals including Eynikeyt and Folks-shtime. He and Boymvol immigrated to Israel with their son in 1971.