On new beginnings

RABBI DR. SHMULY YANKLOWITZ | PARSHAH BEREISHIT GENESIS

1:1-6:8 e’ve finally done it. We’ve made it through the fall holidays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah. And, though Jewish year 5783 began weeks ago, we’re now given yet another chance to begin again, with the start of the new cycle of Torah readings, with Parshah Bereishit, which consists of the first several chapters of the Book of Genesis.

New beginnings are a true gift in life. We start this year with a clean moral slate, having engaged in teshuva and acts of forgiveness. So too, we can begin anew intellectually and spiritually with a fresh start of Torah readings. As we emerge out of this long period of renewal, I’m struck by how one of the first things the Torah mentions is, rather than an annual period of resetting, a weekly one: Shabbat.

“The heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array,” it says at the beginning of Genesis chapter two, “On the seventh day, God finished the work that had been undertaken: God ceased on the seventh day from doing any of the

GILDED AGE

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15 the age created enormous opportunities for Jews. Mendelsohn and a fellow panelist, Roger Horowitz of the Hagley Museum and Library, described the conditions that allowed even poor immigrants to get a leg up, from the exploding market for readymade clothing and cheap consumer goods to new industries like vaudeville, sheet music and the movies.

And as these “alrightniks” moved into the management class, Jewish workers began to organize in ways that anticipated the labor movement — and liberal voting patterns — of the 20th century. New wealth also liberated Jewish women from domestic labors; historians Pamela Nadell and Esther Shor discussed how Lazarus and the essayist Nina Morais Cohen used this freedom to defend their fellow Jews from burgeoning antisemitism.

That antisemitism was the inevitable backlash to Jewish success. Yeshiva University’s Jeffrey Gurock spoke about the founding of the American Jewish Historical Society itself, saying that one of its main functions was “apologetics” — that is, chronicling and sometime exaggerating the Jewish contributions to the founding of the United States in order to counter growing antisemitism and anti- work. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy — having ceased on it from all the work of creation that God had done.”

WBy taking a step back one day a week — however we’re able to do it — we will naturally ask ourselves how we can improve our own character, how we can nurture our most cherished relationships and how we can be more impactful members of our communities. This first parshah, by introducing Shabbat, gives us not only a new beginning but continuous new beginnings.

In whatever way we embrace Shabbat, it should involve physical and spiritual rest and serve as a new beginning, where we ask ourselves the essential questions. Everything is not the same. Some people like to say history repeats itself but the Jewish wisdom I embrace is that everything is new, even when attached to the old. New beginnings are profoundly new. Everything around us is constantly changing: our bodies, the earth. We need to pause to realign and reattune ourselves to those evolutions.

In addition to God’s Divine renewal and our personal renewal, we can build our empathy for those we care about, seeing that they, too, are changing and embracing new beginnings. By taking time to breathe, we can see one another anew. We can truly see others for who they are immigrant nativism. You recognize that insecure impulse today whenever a Jewish friend forwards a list of Jewish Nobel Prize-winners or the latest “proof” that Christopher Columbus was a Jew. and who they’re becoming.

In a session on depictions of the Gilded Age in movies and television, Hale reiterated his criticism of the HBO series, but also noted the ways Jews in the series are “present by their absence.” The character George Russell is not identified as a Jew, but, as Hale and co-panelist Miriam Mora agreed, is “coded” Jewish by his attempt to break into old line New York society and the WASP characters’ attempts to keep him out. He is also one of the few characters in the series played by a Jewish actor, Morgan Spector (who also starred in HBO’s “The Plot Against America”).

For Mora, director of programs at the Center for Jewish History, a more honest portrayal of the Gilded Age was Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 film “Hester Street.” Set on the Lower East Side in 1896, the independent film dared to depict “Americanization as a negative.” Its protagonists are a striving Jewish husband who detests the Old Country, and a wife who is trying to hold on to her traditions. No saccharine Hollywood depiction of the Gilded Age — like “Meet Me in St. Louis” or “Hello Dolly!” — would have dared acknowledge these costs.

Every parent of a student can see from semester to semester how their child is changing. Others can see change in their spouses. Rabbis can see it in their congregants. Congregants can see it in their rabbis. We’re all making transformations and it’s important that we recognize those changes in others. Through Shabbat, we can cultivate humility in how we see others.

In my opinion, the gift of Shabbat is a wonder because it’s not deducible from the natural world. The cycle of the year, with its seasons and of the lunar months, with the moon, are observable astronomically. But there’s nothing in nature that says there must be a seven-day week. And so, we’re given this treasure of weekly renewal.

We don’t need to wait an entire year to change again. Each week, Shabbat can be our Elul, our time of reflection and repentance — and havdalah, Saturday night, the new week, can be our miniature version of the high holidays.

“What does Shabbat have to do with repentance?” the mystic Rebbe Nachman of Breslov asked over 200 years ago. The answer he found was based on a midrash that Cain repented on Shabbat and he thus suggests: “When a person repents completely and repels evil entirely, and so has calm — this is the aspect of Shabbat.” Our Shabbat is a place of healing and

For many Jews today, the Gilded Age looks like a grainy black-and-white photograph, but instead of a lavish black-tie dinner at Delmonico’s it shows an ancestor standing in front of a store window advertising “full line groceries” and “jobbers of dry goods.”

Learning about the Jewish Gilded Age is like watching that photograph develop in a darkroom.

On the one hand the picture reveals the anxieties that still haunt us: antisemitism, internal divides, the high price of assimilation.

It’s also a portrait of success. As Benjamin

Middle East

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15 resolution from our growth and repair each week.

Third, a reassertion of the rule of law within Turkey would greatly improve American confidence and attitudes toward the Erdoğan government. The release from prison of two unjustly held men would do wonders to signal this return: Selahattin Demirtaş, former co-chair of the People’s Democratic Party, and Osman Kavala, a Turkish human-rights activist, should be freed immediately.

Steps like these will make it much easier for the already eager departments of state and defense to convince a very reluctant congress to recalibrate its approach towards Turkey.

New beginnings are not just for a new home, a new job, starting college. They are built into the soul. We learn from Parshah Bereishit that even God wanted a new beginning. God could have saved this concept for the Ten Commandments. But instead, God didn’t just tell us to keep Shabbat. God engaged in Shabbat and was the first one to do so. We, then, are called to emulate God in being creative agents of renewal.

“Let me fall and my new self will catch me,” the Baal Shem Tov taught. We need courage to shed our old skin, to let briefly go before finding the courage to again take on the challenges of life. The way to do this, we learn in our parshah, is through Shabbat. JN

Steiner writes in “Yearning to Breathe Free,” “Hard work, traditions of mutual aid, respect for education, centuries of diaspora experience, structural economic forces tied to capitalism and the fact that most Jews had white skins in a society where Blacks were the principal out-group — all enabled Jews by the middle of the twentieth century to become one of America’s most successful minority groups.” JN

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

I have seen for myself that President Erdoğan is a strong and proud Turkish leader. He acknowledged to me his belief that Turkey’s best interests require him to take steps that bring peace, stability and wealth to his country — and that stronger ties with the United States and Israel would be instrumental in this effort. JN

Harley Lippman is the CEO of Genesis10, a top 20 U.S. IT consulting company. He serves as a member of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage, on the Dean’s Advisory Board at Columbia University’s Graduate School of International and Public Affairs, and as a board member on USAID’s Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace.