Shabbat Acharei Mot 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Tony's sermon here or read it below
Not, of course, for you but for the person sitting next to you: lachrymose means tear-filled, consisting only of tragedy. I’m going to begin this morning’s sermon in a lachrymose place in our Jewish story but end not there but here in FRS, which offers, even at times of sadness and horror, the most un-lachrymose expression of Judaism I know.
I’m also going to tell a story which has its fair share of lachrymosity but ends with hope, not tears – in Ben’s yada’im, in Ben’s hands.
This story begins more than 30 years ago. Linda, my first wife - Lucy, Daniel and Miriam’s mother; Oliver, Zach, Harry, Rafa and the von Bayfields’ (Chessy and Ben) grandmother - and I were in Venice. We went to the old Jewish quarter, the Borghetto which gave its name to an infernal and shameful Venetian invention – the place where those in power isolate and confine Jews behind ghetto walls (or, in this case, canals). We left in sombre mood.
We passed an antique shop and I spotted a yad in the window – it turned out to be 19th century Russian, silver with an ebony shaft. I wanted it. Linda was far less sure: her more acquisitive husband was, at the time, in a precarious and hardly highly paid job. I had a light bulb moment and said: ‘Of course I don’t want it for me, Darling. Let’s buy it and if we’re fortunate enough to have grandchildren, we’ll give it to the oldest for their bar/bat mitzvah and he or she will pass it down the line.’ Emotionally blackmailed, Linda gladly capitulated.
In 2003, Linda died. Two and a half years earlier, Lucy and Matthew had produced Francesca – Daniel and Miriam were still unwed. Chessy spent much of her first 30 months with Linda – the only one of her six grandchildren Linda knew. Ten years later, Chessy leyned her portion at Alyth – using the Venice yad.
Three years after that, it was time for the yad to be passed on to her big little brother, Oli. Chessy was troubled. The yad connected her to the Grandma whose picture had sat on her bedside cabinet almost all her life. Grandma Linda’s yad was emotionally too precious to hand on – even to her totally adored brother.
I made one of the most ‘ambitious’ decisions of my life and announced I’d buy yada’im for Oli and each of his four cousins. And not just any old yads – but antique yads, as rare and distinctive as the one from Venice.
Oli’s came or, rather, was redeemed, from an antique shop in Newark near Nottingham – sadly they knew what it was and its value.
Finding antique yads isn’t so easy. First there aren’t many of them around because they aren’t Jewish family necessities like kiddush cups or candle sticks. Yads are synagogue gear – which reduces supply considerably. Second, I was only interested in un-engraved, un-dedicated yads because I wanted to have each inscribed with the name of the grandchild, the parents and Linda’s name. So, I turned to the Silver Vaults in Chancery Lane whence cameth Zach and Harry’s pointers to a hopeful future.
It was in Vault 23 seven years ago that Jacqui and I met Moshe (now Maurice) Dubiner. Moshe Dubiner had been, please note Ben, a renowned chazan, cantor, who’d sung in all the best Federation and United Synagogues in London – beginning in the shul in Great Garden Street in the East End, the very street where the makers of Oli and Zach’s yads had settled after fleeing persecution in eastern Europe. In his forties, Moshe Dubiner had forsaken the Cantorate for the Silver Vaults and I met him in his shop with his son. Over the years, I told them the story of the Venice yad. I’m not sure what Maurice really made of the Reform rabbi who gives his grandchildren – including a young woman – yads to leyn with. But business is business and about a year ago, his son contacted me and said: “Have we got a yad for you.”
It wasn’t on sale in the shop but came, Maurice said, from his ‘private collection’. Although he was ‘reluctant to sell it’ and ‘the price was special for me’ - it wasn’t engraved with a dedication: a huge plus. It was – he showed me – hallmarked 1893 and, in Cyrillic, stamped AG – for Alexander Golovin (and not Andrew Gilbert). The handle, the Dubiners declared, was a large griffin which made it unusual and extremely attractive. I bought it without hesitation, relieved: five down and only one to go. Rafa – we already have yours!
I never for a moment doubted the authenticity of Ben’s yad – the faking of Russian hallmarks on Judaica is rife at the moment – but it felt right. That is the yad felt right - but not the story.
Why would a yad maker in Moscow 130 years ago make a yad with a griffin for a handle? I don’t remember how but I stumbled across a Jewish legend based on a dubious translation of a word in Psalm 50. The Hebrew word is, as Ben will tell you, ziz and the Talmud [Baba Batra 73b] tells us that the ziz was a miraculous bird, large enough to stretch from earth to heaven. Griffin, schmiffin – the bird on Ben’s yad is a Ziz.
But what about Alexander Golovin, the maker according to the hallmark? We looked him up. There are only two Alexander Golovins known in the records. One, Ben discovered, is a Russian footballer who played for Monaco. And this one. This Golovin turns out to be the greatest stage designer of his generation who provided the set for the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird. He definitely wasn’t Jewish.
So why would Alexander Golovin, a non-Jewish, world-class stage designer be the maker of Ben’s yad? The simple answer is - he wasn’t.
Moscow was never a Jewish city. By and large, Jews weren’t allowed to live there. The main exception were called Cantonists – Jewish boys, stolen by the Tsar’s thugs from their homes in the shtetl in the Pale of Settlement and forced to serve for up to 35 years in the Russian Army. If they survived, they were allowed to settle in Moscow because they’d acquired useful knowledge and skills, not least in survival. There were also a number of Jews there who were useful or had some influence or had the protection of somebody important. In 1891, the most anti-Semitic of all the Tsars, Alexander III expelled 20,000 Moscow Jews, mainly in the liquor trade or skilled artisans. He had them transported as criminals and deposited in the Pale of Settlement, penniless.
Those few who stayed clearly had protexia. Alexander Golovin needed artisans – fabric makers, carpenters, painters and so on for his very broad artistic life which spread far beyond stage designing. He needed his silversmith – who happened to be a Jew but was very good at his job.
After 1891, there were only two token synagogues still open in Moscow but a number of secret, underground Jewish gatherings had popped up. After all, you can’t be a Jew and not have a place in which to read Torah. In the last analysis, it’s only surmise, but I’m completely convinced of what happened. One of those secret gatherings needed a yad to use when reading Torah – and they asked Alexander Golovin’s Jewish silversmith, who was a member of this secret shtibl, to do his stuff. He made the yad with the Ziz for a handle. It’s unengraved – no actual maker’s name, no dedication - because that would have been far, far too dangerous for all concerned and unnecessary.
That’s the story of Ben’s yad – which has survived the last 130 years and is now inscribed in Hebrew with his name, his parents’ names and the names of his Grandpa and Grandma Linda.
Let me end by pointing out something we never remark on as far as I know, even though it’s in plain sight. The reader of Torah stands, facing the congregation, yad in hand, pointing at the Torah scroll in front of them. When we read Torah we look and point ahead of us to the Torah and its meaning now and in the future.
Today, despite the tear-drowned awfulness of the world around us, we repeatedly affirm our determination to defy the lachrymose account of Jewish history and go forward in hope. The yad, the pointer points ahead to Torah and its importance to what lies in front of us. It demands we acknowledge just how much of our past has been worthwhile and has proved richly rewarding – and more.
Who could deny that the present has exposed so much of what has been tearful and terrifying and still, outrageously, persists. But our Sh’liakh Tsibbur and Ba’al Korei has, defiantly as well as musically, pointed ahead to a future in which all people, im tirtsu, if we will it, find a demanding but rewarding and even tear-free place and space to live in.
