PASSOVER By Maayan Schoen We are the people of the book. We sit and study our Torah, and we get up and practice it. One day, a boy named Zach [Baumel] closed his book for the last time. He was leaving yeshiva to answer the call to the front lines in Operation Peace in the Galilee. An oleh [recently made aliyah] to Israel from Brooklyn, he had returned home once, but from that day it would be almost 40 years “in the desert” until the intelligence community and Russia could return him home again, to rest. At his overdue, improbable funeral [April 4], I stood next to the mother of one of the three boys kidnapped and murdered in 2014. I listened to our leaders, wondering how something could make me want to sing “Hallel” and wail “Tachanun” all at once. We felt G-d’s mighty hand and outstretched arm! Russia, once the enemy, returned an MIA Jew! But … he and so many others are gone. I left the cemetery of marble headstones for Jewish military heroes on a Jerusalem hill and now stand in a Polish forest with few grave markers for our murdered millions. This week, I am bearing witness to the Holocaust. My heart aches from what feels like a perpetual cycle of enslavement of our people to the curses of exile. Over seven tons of human ash, I sing “Hatikvah.” It’s not a cycle, I realize. It’s a spiral, coiling out to nationhood, G-d’s revealed hand, peace someday. The spiral is greater than us, something that perpetuates us. Soon we’ll open the book, the haggadah, and remember 210 years of Egyptian enslavement. Like then, we’ve passed a tough period. It’s the blink of a G-dly eyelash, the tale of the people of the book, and our return liberates me. I can’t wait to touch down soon.
A Refreshed World View By Margo Gold We’re all busy in some way or another and preoccupied with too many devices and screens. But there’s an antidote and she comes with a pony tail and pink and blue fingernails. This past week my 8-year-old granddaughter Izzy and I turned the pages of an art book featuring photos of outlying hospital buildings of Ellis Island, now in ruins but with haunting images telling the story of those detained there. We talked about what it must have been like to leave one’s home, travel across the ocean, knowing that America held freedom and opportunity and hope, yet how scary an experience it must have been for so many. Leaving what’s known and familiar and gathering courage to embrace a new future. So, too, the Israelites left slavery in Egypt and headed into an unknown, with trust in Moses and growing awe in God, who was yet to be more fully revealed. Spending time with Izzy was such a treat for me. To talk with a child, to see the world through their refreshing world vision, to remember that we all start from a state of innocence and then either have the good fortune – or not – to learn to appreciate the world and our environment, to respect that people are created in God’s image and to understand that our words and actions matter. Spending time with a child is liberating. It can be an exhilarating reset button for our outlook and for our own world view. Margo Gold is immediate past international president of United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
Maayan Schoen is a gradutate of Atlanta Jewish Academy who now studies in the Migdal Oz Beit Midrash for Women. By Marissa Rosenbloom I believe you are enslaved by thinking “inside the box.” Self-limitations, self-doubt, small ideas. For example, if you take a quick look at a box of matzah, you might only see nine separate pieces. But, if you look outside the box, you can discover all the things that can be created with those matzah pieces: matzah pizza, matzah brei, french toast matzah, matzah lasagna! To be liberated, don’t be limited by the measurements of a box, be freed by looking outside the box, where your options are limitless. Marissa Rosenbloom is executive director of The Packaged Good.
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Cell 404.915.9622 | Office 770.396.6696 Realtor.MelanieWhite@gmail.com 38 | APRIL 19, 2019 ATLANTA JEWISH TIMES