Congregation Emanu-El of Westchester: Sermon Archives

KOL NIDRE - October 12, 2005

Robert Frost. The Death of The Hired Man:
"Home is the place, where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

Every once in a while, driving past my hometown of Albany I leave the highway and turn onto So. Main Avenue. Half way down the block of carefully manicured homes stands a white colonial house with a bright red door and the number, 220.

220 South Main Avenue - for over four decades my family lived there. Sometimes I park in front of the house by the curbside, hoping some one will see me and invite me in. They never have and I can't quite summon the courage to approach the house and announce: "Hello, I'm Dan Wolk. Once I lived here." Or maybe I don't want to revisit the home of my youth. Maybe. Maybe I should let it rest in memory. That's always safer. But someday. Someday I intend to ring that bell.

For that home was more than a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. It was where my mother baked lebkuchen, those delicious German spice cookies. It was where my father and I played baseball in the back yard. It was where my little black and white Boston Terrier, Snuffy, raced from one end of the living room to the next.

Now, many years later, remembrance of that house still glows. Why? Why? Because it was my home in those formative years? That's reason enough. Or is it because in the early 20th century my father was raised in an orphanage in Baltimore and the specter of his homelessness runs like a dark thread through the fabric of our family's history? Then again, maybe I return to that day in my childhood when the dikes on the Susquehanna River broke. Perhaps I am especially sensitive because, not too long ago, I lost a home of my own. Who knows, or maybe my reverence for a home is because, just because, I am a Jew.

Whatever the explanation, on this night I share recollections of homes. Not only my own.

Naomi lived in a small house in a development in Gaza. We sat in her kitchen, the aroma of a challah she was baking for the Sabbath meal drifted out of the oven. The walls of the kitchen were pock marked by 14 bullet holes. "Arab snipers," she said. One for each of the years I lived here."

Plants blossomed on every shelf in the kitchen. Red and yellow desert flowers. "I have made my home bloom" she said. A smile spread across a face parched by sun and wind.

Now that Israelis have evacuated Gaza what has happened to Naomi's home? It lies in ruins. Scavenged by Palestinians who dance and sing and celebrate Israel's modern Exodus from Egypt. King Solomon once ordered his people "not to rejoice when the enemy falls," but King Solomon was not a Palestinian.

There was a letter attached to the wall of one settler's home in Neve Dekalim, in Gaza, It said, "Here we sat, ate, laughed and cried. Soldiers and policemen, our house is your house, like your mother's, the smells of the food, the songs of the Sabbath, which the State of Israel is taking from us, with our memories, and those of hundreds of friends whom we hosted here - the crown has fallen from our heads."

Israel did not have a choice. How can 8,000 Jews live in the midst of 1.3 million Palestinians? Who wants an armed guard to accompany your children to school every day? Would you? But once again the wandering Jews packed their bags. The saga began 3,800 years ago when God spoke to Abraham: "Lech Lecha. Get thee out of thy homeland. To a land that I will show you." It began 3,800 years ago and it still continues.

The settlers leaving Gaza did not travel far. Unlike Abraham they did not follow the Euphrates River, journeying from Ur of the Chaldees to the Promised Land. The settlers only traveled several miles for refuge. At least geographically. But anyone familiar with the trauma of Jewish history understands that emotionally the distance was immense. For the early Zionist it was hoped that our ongoing journey would cease with the advent of the State of Israel. What Israel meant, what Israel means is to finally have a home, a haven of security safe from the flood waters of persecution. But the journey does not cease.

Those settlers will be re-established. The Jew never forsakes his own. But watching settlers and soldiers cry, I also cried within --- the loss of home playing poignantly on my heart. Tears. Tears. And at that moment I also knew that it was not enough to only cry for my own. Judaism counsels: care for your own but also care for others --- whoever they may be. Wherever they may be. On one of my frequent forays to Israel's West Bank I accidentally happened on a strange sight. At first glance there was nothing unusual; only a drab Arab village blending into the landscape outside Jerusalem. In the midst of the village an elderly Arab, dressed in a black and white checkered kefiyah, his wife in a faded blue shawl, sat rigid on a tattered couch. The aroma of a sweet coffee escaped from a finjan.

It was a peaceful scene, yet something was wrong, terribly wrong. You see the couple sat on their couch but the couch sat on their house. Not in their house, on their house. Only hours before an Israeli bulldozer had destroyed this home where, it was suspected, a terrorist lived. Now the couch straddled a pile of cement that a day earlier had been walls.

Recently, Israel's Minister of Justice Yosef Lapides commented, "When I saw a picture on television of an old Arab woman, on all fours, in the ruins of her home, looking under some floor tiles for medicines I did think, 'What would I say if it were my grandmother?'"

Care for your own, but care about others.

Considering the profusion of Israel's adversaries, nations and peoples desirous of her elimination, I believe Israel occupies great restraint. It is difficult to clap with a single hand. It is difficult to speak of peace when there has not been a partner --- but neither forced evacuations, or demolished homes will bring peace to the region. Nor will walls of separation secure Israeli homes. Only dialogue between Jew and Arab, --- interaction, not exclusion, will safeguard a home and the life existing within that home.

Home is where, when you have to go there they have to take you in. And when that home lies in shambles, whether in foreign lands or in our own country, what then? Shortly after the withdrawal from Gaza we found ourselves enveloped by the aftermath of Katrina. For me one picture still resonates. A television clip of a black couple on the roof of their house in New Orleans. The couple had been stranded for three days when a CNN helicopter flew by. In desperation the woman waved a pair of white undergarments and her husband waved an American flag. They were convinced this was a rescue helicopter, not a camera crew transmitting pictures to families outside the disaster area; families watching the six o'clock news.

Turning off the television I attempted to dispel the image but in its place a memory surfaced. A flashback. I was 7 years old. In those days my family lived in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, at 33 Mallery Place, only a block from the raging Susquehanna River. And, in that seventh year of my life the dikes of the Susquehanna broke. What an experience! For a young child this was exciting. Water rushing up to the steps of our wrap around porch. Suddenly a rowboat appeared, sent out especially to ferry the Rabbi's family to safety. While I grabbed my stuffed panda, the purple one with the white arms, my father gathered the yellow sheets of the sermon he was scheduled to deliver that Friday night ---- and we were off. To the luxurious house of Charles Pfefferling, President of my father's congregation. Pfefferling lived on high ground. There we would be safe. Charles Pfefferling had a home where, when we had to go there he took us in. Graciously. We came to rest on high ground.

What of the man and woman in New Orleans --- the ones with the white undergarments and the red, white and blue flag - the ones with panic etched on their faces --- Their high ground was to teeter on the roof of an inundated house from which they could not flee, to which they would never return? And as they waved I heard what I assumed was their voice. "See me!" But they were invisible. The me nobody knows not only in New Orleans but throughout our world --- even in our own neighborhoods, perhaps even in our families. Waving. Waving. "See me. See me."

We live in a time when we do not want to see. Our government tried to prevent the media from showing photographs of the dead in New Orleans. According to FEMA this was out of respect for the victims. In reality it was denial. Pictures of coffins returning from Iraq were banned by our government. Once again: Denial.

But no one could deny those two clinging precariously to their roof in New Orleans. No one --- and there was not a Charles Pfefferling --- or even a rowboat ---anywhere to be seen.

The waters of Katrina, rushing through crowded neighborhoods, taking homes and people in their wake also swept away certain illusions concerning America's values. In the midst of the rescue operation two Navy helicopter pilots and their crews, after delivering food and water to military installations along the Gulf Coast, ferried 100 hurricane victims to safety. One pilot exclaimed, "I felt it was a great day because we resupplied the people we needed to and we rescued people too."

The Talmud says, "to save one person it is as if you saved the world." Those pilots saved 100 worlds, but, on their return to Pensacola, they were reprimanded for not following orders. They had only been ordered to deliver food and water. What good is food and water if we neglect the human spirit?

In the aftermath of Katrina we are brutally sensitized to the vast disparity in our country. Some live on high ground --- and others? Others try to hang on to a rooftop waving the stars and stripes. The United States has spent 200 billion dollars in support of an indefensible war in Iraq. On death. What will we spend for life?

When William Faulkner accepted the Nobel Prize in 1950, he said, in part: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance."

For the moment we have learned from the tragedy of Katrina. But in the rapid current of time we quickly forget.

This summer marked the death of the Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. In an interview Wiesenthal was asked why he became a searcher after Nazis. He explained: "When we come to the other world and meet millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, "`What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Still another will say, 'I built houses,' but I will say, 'I didn't forget you.'"

We can not forget --- as once we were forgotten, wandering the face of the earth searching for a home - and discovering the doors were locked.

But don't we know: home is the place where, when you have to go there they have to take you in.

Well, not always. Not always.