”Sholem Aleykhem” dear friends.
In greeting each other with the words, “Sholem
Aleykhem” we say several important things:
We say we’re happy see each other… We remember
that “Sholem Aleykhem” is a universal greeting
for Jews when they meet each other… and we honour
the memory of most popular writer in the history of
Yiddish literature, Sholem Rabinovitch, who took the
name Sholem Aleichem and wrote about “Jewishness
as if it were a gift, a marvel, an unending theme of
wonder and delight”1
That we meet in May and Sholem Aleichem’s birthday
was May the l5th, and we do look on “Jewishness
as if it were a gift, a marvel, an unending theme of
wonder and delight,” is as it should be.
When we, at this conference, say “Sholem Aleykhem”
to each other we greet the occasion of our coming together.
We do it as individuals and as members of groups that
add the words secular and humanist to our identity to
help define our point of view as Jews vis a vis other
parts of the community that base their world view on
different parts of the Jewish tradition. As Jewish secular
humanists we are one of the links in a long chain of
Jewish history that has held together, most of the time
in tension, always in angst ridden conversation but
never broken.
Our job this weekend is to find new ways to renew ourselves
and keep the conversation going; to always be able to
say “Sholem Aleykhem” to any sector of the
Jewish community and receive the acceptance of our presence
through the return greeting of – Aleykhem Sholem.
That this acceptance hasn’t always been easy is
seen in the shadow of the McCarthyism of the fifties
that created fear in the secular Jewish community…that
fractured relationships amongst and between the founding
Yiddish speaking secular groups and also created the
need to form new secular Jewish humanist groupings such
as CSJO and its affiliates.
Today, as well as saying “Sholem Aleykhem”
to each other we celebrate the fiftieth anniversaries
of two of the most important contributors to the CSJO,
the Sholem Aleykhem Club of Philadelphia and the Sholem
Community of California. Both grew out of the McCarthy
carnage. Both have made important contributions to secular
Jewish life and culture in general, the Jewish community
in particular and to the creation and growth of CSJO.
As organizations active in the Jewish community the
Sholem Community and the Sholem Aleykhem Club voice
their concern-- not only for social justice for Jews--
but social justice for all peoples. They have established
themselves as institutions that not only bring forward
the cultural treasures of Jewish life in Yiddish and
in English for themselves but also open the door for
all people to become familiar with Jewish culture and
our secular Jewish tradition in particular.
When Sholem Aleichem started writing, the words, “
naye tsaytn, naye lider,-new times -- new songs.”
would have been very familiar to him. The secular Jewish
organizations and Jewish political movements that grew
out of the Jewish Enlightenment – the Haskala--
were recognition that new times did need new songs,
new ways of living, new ways of believing and new ways
of expressing one’s Jewishness. Jewish socialism,
labour Zionism, and the mass working class Jewish organizations
and the secular Jewish schools that attached themselves
to these movements focused their activities on the development
of Yiddish culture and the idea of Yidishkayt.
Yidishkayt is/was a cultural philosophy —centered
on the Yiddish language and Jewish ethical values. The
philosophers of Yidishkayt felt that a community comfortable
with Yiddish as a language of the home and culture would
hold back the tide of assimilation and keep the Jewish
identity strong in a world in which ghetto walls had
tumbled. Many of us come out of the Yiddishist organizations
that centered their secular humanist community activities
around the Yiddish language and culture.
Just as the founding of the original secular Jewish
organizations, at the dawn of the twentieth century,
was a reaction to the condition of the times, CJSO’s
founding is a reaction to our times and an understanding
that the old forms of community organization and expression
were just that-- old forms delivered in old forums.
Naye tsaytn…naye lider…New times demand
new songs. CSJO is creating its own new songs for new
times building on the traditions and cultural inheritance
that the Yiddish speaking, founding organizations have
left us.
We are carrying on the tradition of Yidishkayt in our
own way. When I’ve laid that proposition out to
some people –- secular people – they’ve
challenged me. They say, “You can’t talk
about doing anything about strengthening secular Yidishkayt
unless you center your activities on the Yiddish language.”
I, with respect, disagree.
Why do I raise this issue of defining Yidishkayt as
now being more than just Yiddish centered?
Most of you don’t know Gerry Cohen, that is G.A.
Cohen, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory
and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University.
He is a political philosopher of world renown and a
graduate of the Morris Winchevsky Jewish school in Montreal.
In his book “If you’re an egalitarian, how
come you’re so rich?” Prof. Cohen has a
chapter in which he describes growing up in a secular,
atheist Jewish home and school which induced a belief
in a strongly egalitarian doctrine. I draw from the
chapter in which he shows how the narrowness of the
atmosphere, in home and school, effected and effects
his feelings as a Jew.
Gerry Cohen writes “We learned a lot of true things
at the Morris Winchevsky School, but a lot of false
things, too…the biggest falsehood was that religion
was not central to being Jewish….But that, I now
know, is not true. Individual Jews, like me, can be
irreligious, yet we are Jews only by virtue of connection
with a people defined not by place or race but by religion…I
am Jewish not because I practice the religion, but because
I descend from the people who practiced the religion
(and still do)…Whatever happens to Israel and
to Judaism as a religion the secular Yidishkayt in my
identity will not last, except as an object of academic
attention albeit of affectionate academic attention.”2
Is Cohen’s empirical weighing of facts and coming
out pessimistic about the future of secular Yidishkayt
something we should worry about? Does he know something
we don’t know? “No” is my answer to
both questions.
Like Cohen we know that the Yiddish speaking base of
the secular Jewish community is shrinking. Like Cohen,
we know that those of us who sing Yiddish songs at these
conferences are taking, for the most part, a nostalgic
look back into a time when we had Yiddish speaking parents,
lived in Yiddish speaking neighbourhoods and went to
Yiddish speaking schools and camps. What we forget is
the secular Yidishkayt of our parents or grandparents
wasn’t won easily. It grew out of a time of upheaval
– political and economic change. Eastern Europe
was an economic basket case. The shtetle had gone bankrupt.
Jews were leaving the shtetle and moving into the industry
of cities like Vilna and Warsaw. They were becoming
economic and political refugees. There was tremendous
displacement. The social base of Jewish life was in
transformation. Young people felt restricted by the
religion of the shtetl. Through the influence of the
Haskalah they were learning about the culture of the
peoples around them. Through organizations like the
Socialist Bund and the Zionist movement they were realizing
that they had political choice. Through the anti-semitism
and reaction of the Tsarist authorities to the new found
militancy of the Czars Jewish subjects, hundreds of
thousands of those subjects knew they would have to
move on and build new communities other than in Poland,
the Ukraine or Lithuania. They were both pushed out
and left voluntarily. And, when they came to the United
States and Canada, they found they weren’t released
from struggle. They had to continue the fight for social,
political rights that had begun in the Old Country.
One of the weapons of solidarity they used and developed
to maintain their sense of self and community identity…was
the secular Yiddish culture – the Yidish Yidishkayt
that supported the writers, the choirs, the theatre
and the Yidish schools that formed the secular outlook
of people like me, Prof. Cohen and so many of you in
this audience. It is that Shtetl, immigrant, secular
Yidishkayt, as expressed through the Workers Order,
Arbeter Ring and Paole Zion, for which Cohen is saying
Kaddish.
Is he right to say Kaddish for that particular cultural
and community sensibility? Is he right when he says
that Yidishkayt gave irreligious Jews a connection to
the Jewish past? Is he right to think that an organization
like the CSJO is an “areligious cultural periphery
[that] cannot become the core, or even a core, of something
new”?3 Again, I
say, no! Jewish life is not and has never been singular.
Jewish life is like a garden in which many different
flowers bloom. There are flowers for believer and flowers
for non-believers. Flowers for the Yiddishists and Hebreists
and Flowers for those who’ll never know either
language. And, to the dismay of some of the gardeners,
all the flowers are of the hardy variety. Like it or
not we pollinate each other.
So, Prof. Gerry Cohen, while I may agree with you about
the importance of the source, the “believing religious
root,” there are others, even in this audience,
who don’t agree with you, or me. What I don’t
agree with is your sad discounting, your certainty that
we modern, secular humanist Jews can’t be the
core of something new. We are the core of something
new. We’re not disappearing Jews. And, Yiddishkayt,
just as its meaning was adjusted to reflect the cultural
and political realities of an immigrant generation,
is being adjusted today by those who call themselves
secular humanist Jews. There are those in this room
who would gladly join with you in a Yiddish reading
circle or language class – because maintaining
the Yiddish language is part of their contribution to
a vibrant secular Jewish culture. You can even find
such people in London where you live. The point is,
we build the communities we feel necessary for ourselves
to perpetuate ourselves. Prof. Cohen, it’s time
you did some community building.
On the front page of our CSJO web site we state what
we have to offer. We know there are many in the Jewish
community who want something other than Jewish life
centered around religion. So, we say to them: “looking
for a way to be culturally Jewish with your family and
with a Jewish community group: Looking for a way to
connect to your Jewishness through history, civilization,
literature and ethical values?” If the answer
is, yes, we ask them to join with us. In the process
of asking these questions we’re saying that the
CSJO and all its constituent organizations are offering
a different take on how to be Jewish. We are creating
“new songs for new times.” And many people
like the music.
We Jewish secular humanists are creating new links to
extend the chain of secular Jewish history. In coming
together as a community we make welcome those who want
to sing Yiddish songs or study Yiddish or Hebrew. We
also make welcome those who want to live Jewish lives
not encumbered by religionists who say that only God
can set standards for human behaviour. We help people
of reason mine the depths of our cultural and humanist
history. We encourage them to strengthen their identity
with the Jewish people. We encourage them to use that
which is most meaningful to them from the folkways,
traditions and history of the Jewish people. We show
that the development of ethics and morality, in individuals
and in society, doesn’t depend on belief in God.
We have it in our hands to build the new Jerusalem without
supernatural intervention. In the process we add new
voices and new strength to the ongoing growth of secular
Jewish life.
We have no creed. As secular humanists we hold up the
self-liberating light of reason and knowledge as central
to our making our way in this world. Sometimes the light
flickers, and , we argue about form and content. But,
in this going back and forth, we don’t characterize
as enemies (or shouldn’t) others who follow a
Jewish secular humanist path that, in some areas of
tone or emphasis, is different. The “dignity of
human beings [is found] in their freedom, and in their
respect for other people’s autonomous and responsible
beliefs.”4
The fact that professor Cohen finds the broader Jewish
community uncomfortable and the base of his secular
Yiddish speaking Yidishkayt being eroded, and being
made less consequential in today’s times, is sad
but no reason for him to accept it passively.
We are today celebrating two organizations which are
examples of how to use our cultural treasures, including
Yiddish, to add to the life of the entire Jewish community.
We are also celebrating the 145th anniversary of the
life and works of Sholem Aleykhem. Not only because
he wrote wonderfully in Yiddish, but because this greatest
poet of Jewish humanism touched with wry humour on problems
that are still with us to solve: the problems of greed
in the market place, equality before and under the law,
human dignity, the problems of political corruption,
alienation, freedom, war, peace and identity for the
new times. These are the themes that Sholem Aleykhem
dealt with over a century ago.
In his novel “In Shturm…In the Storm”6
written just after the Russian revolution of 1905, Sholem
Aleykhem lays out the lives of a group of young people
who live in the same square (hoif). The young people
represent in their persons the political and economic
shifts in the Jewish community of Czarist Russia. They
are capitalists, communists, Zionists, liberals. Some
want to change society, others want to profit materially
from society, and still others want to emigrate to Palestine.
There are two women of the group who have made the move
to sing new songs for new times. Both push for modernity.
One, the upwardly mobile, bourgeois Tamara, wants to
break out of the subservient role designated to women
of the time and go to university and become a doctor.
The other, Masha, a socialist firebrand, will become
the most effective member of her revolutionary circle
and pay a terrible price. But, modernity, in its push
to assimilation, has a cost. Sholem Aleichem shows this
cost as being the discounting by the two women of their
cultural heritage, their Yiddish language and the value
of belonging to a Jewish community. Sholem Aleykhem
sees this weakening of the link to their people, as
a danger to the whole community. He has another of the
friends, Sasha, a left-wing Zionist who loves the Yiddish
language, confront Tamara, about her desire to learn
foreign languages and not know her own. After he finishes
his argument Tamara answers with a quote from the Song
of Songs: “They have made me a keeper of the Vineyards,
but my own vineyard I have not kept.”
In the novel this quotation is used as an attempt to
make the young people who are breaking down ghetto walls
and fighting to make their place in the broader world,
understand that fluency in the language of the Jews,
whether it be Hebrew or Yiddish, is vital if one wants
to leave the ghetto yet keep their roots in the treasures
of Jewish life, history and culture. He points out that
if one wants to break out of the ghetto, he or she should
go into the world with their own soul intact. Sholem
Aleichem uses the issue of language symbolically. He
is not just talking about language, but the links to
the history and culture from which one comes.
It’s interesting to note that the language of
Sholem Aleichem’s home was Russian, not Yiddish.
The letters to his children were in Russian –
not Yiddish. In his own life style and in his own time
he had recognized the inexorable move to change in Jewish
society. He recognized the need for new songs for new
times. His will baldly states his understanding of the
change in times. In it Sholem Aleichem wrote: “on
the annual occurrence of the day of my passing, may
good friends select one of my stories, of the very merry
one, and recite it “in whatever language is more
intelligible to them, and let my name be recalled with
laughter.”
He was asking two things of those who came after him.
He was asking us to stay rooted in Jewish tradition,
folkways, and community. He was also asking us to establish
a new tradition – that of consciously remembering
him, not only for his stories, but for the fact that
his stories, because they dealt with the human condition,
could be read any time, in any language and still be
pertinent to the times in which we live. He was also
reminding us that the personality of a people is shaped
by tradition.
One of Sholem Aleychem’s contemporaries, Y.L.
Perets, the father of Yiddish literature, made the same
point even more strongly when he suggested, that living
in a spiritual ghetto was of no value. But, in living
in the world, he said,
“We must “give and take…yet continue
to be oneself – that is the important thing. The
ethical light in which [a Jew] sees the world must be
Jewish….
[He also said] You cannot survive unless your spirit
is your own…You may be influenced…you make
take suggestions, may be moved. But living with an alien
will is impossible.”5
That’s why I say to you… at a time when
Secular Humanism in general is being attacked by government,
and free scientific inquiry is being circumscribed by
the academic and clerical evangelical right of all denominations,
how wonderful it is to be celebrating the 50th anniversary
of the Sholem Community of Los Angeles, the 50th anniversary
of the Sholem Aleichem Club of Philadelphia, and the
145th anniversary of Sholem Aleichem the writer who
has transcended the Jewish community and is now a revered
part of world literature. And how wonderful it is to
be celebrating the dedication of each one of us to continue
building our secular, humanist Jewish community. How
wonderful it is to be able to reach out and welcome
those who want to join us in contributing new songs
for new times. How wonderful it is to know that we have
a younger generation contributing its voice in helping
us move forward. Yes, with our own soul. And yes, with
our Jewish secular humanism, to bring our sense of Yidishkayt
not only to the Jewish community but to the larger community
in general.
Nayte tsaytn, naye lider. New songs for new times. We’re
composing them. We’re singing them. Sholem Aleykhem!
1. Zukerman
and Herbst, eds, quoting Alfred Kazin, from fly leaf,
Vol. 2, Sholem Aleichem, The three great classic writers
of modern Yiddish literature, Panglos Press, 1994
2. G.A. Cohen,
If you’re an egalitarian, How come your so rich,
pages 39/40, Harvard University Press, 2000
3. G.A. Cohen,
If your and egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?,
p.39, Harvard University Press, 2000
4. Paul Kurtz,
article form Free Inquiry Magazine, Volume 24, Number
3
5. Sholem
Aleichem, In the Storm, (English translation by Aliza
Shevrin), G.P Putnam and Sons, New York, 1984
