Emma Lazarus
Friday, August 27, 2021
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
Emma Lazarus was 34 years old in 1883, when she was asked to write a poem to help raise money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. At first she refused, saying she could not write a poem about a statue. Eventually she changed her mind and decided that she could write the poem if it would be in support of the Russian Jewish immigrants to America, fleeing the pogroms in Russia. She wrote “The New Colossus” highlighting the contrast between the great woman whom she named “Mother of Exiles” and the ancient Colossus of Rhodes.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
The “imprisoned lightning,” by the way, refers to the electric light which illuminated the statue’s torch, which was a technological marvel at the time.
Lazarus’ poem was the very first entry read at the fundraising event, but then was forgotten and played no role in the opening of the statue in 1886. Emma Lazarus died a year later, in 1887, at age 38. After fourteen years, in 1901, her friend Georgina Schuyler began efforts to memorialize Lazarus and her poem, and two years later in 1903 the text of the poem was cast in bronze and installed where it now resides on the inner wall of the pedestal.
Emma Lazarus grew up in New York in the 1850’s and 1860’s and knew that she was a Jew, but she and her family were unaffiliated with any synagogue or Jewish community. When she was 32, in 1881, news came of the pogroms following the assassination of Tzar Alexander II, and the arrival of thousands of Jews fleeing from Russia awakened her interest in her own people, and she began to study Bible, Hebrew, Judaism and Jewish history.
The following year, when she was 33, still a year before she wrote “The New Colossus,” she wrote a poem about Rosh Hashanah, called “The New Year,” which I would like to read with you right now. As we approach Rosh Hashanah, attempting to make meaning out of jumble and chaos of our lives, maybe Emma Lazarus can help us begin our preparations for our new year.
Her poem “The New Year” begins by contrasting Rosh Hashana, which arrives with the fullness of the autumn harvest, with the other New Year, January 1st, coming in the dead of winter.
Not while the snow-shroud round dead earth is rolled,
And naked branches point to frozen skies.—
When orchards burn their lamps of fiery gold,
The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn
A sea of beauty and abundance lies,
Then the new year is born.
In this opening declaration, Emma Lazarus announces the coming of the living fire….of Rosh Hashanah and I think of Judaism as well. The fiery lamps of orchards full of color and ripe fruit, and vineyards bursting with glowing jewels of grapes, not only distinguish Rosh Hashana from the frozen American new year of mid-winter, but Lazarus is bearing witness as well to the passionate, beautiful, living fire of Judaism. This is a young woman, in love with her heritage.
In stanza three Lazarus sounds the shofar, the central symbol of this season, and hears it calling specifically to Jews like herself, American Jews who have drifted away from their Jewish roots, but in whom a Jewish heart still beats. She speaks of the year is which she is living and writing this poem…the bloody year of 1881 and 1882, and the pogroms which terrorized the Jews of Russia, and which awakened her own Jewish identity.
Blow, Israel, the sacred cornet! Call
Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb
With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all.
The red, dark year is dead, the year just born
Leads on from anguish wrought by priest and mob,
To what undreamed-of morn?
In stanza four the poet sees herself and her generation standing at the crest of two thousand years of Jewish history, all the years that had passed since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 CE.
For never yet, since on the holy height,
The Temple’s marble walls of white and green
Carved like the sea-waves, fell, and the world’s light
Went out in darkness,—never was the year
Greater with portent and with promise seen,
Than this eve now and here.
This young American Jew sensed that she was living through a great moment in history, great with portent and with promise. Her entire life she had not studied Judaism; now she was awakening both to her own Jewish identity and to the meaning of her moment in history. Reading her poem might inspire us to ask: what is the meaning of our moment in history? What is this new year that is about to be born?
Stanza five begins with Isaiah’s prophecy, from 2,500 years ago, that the tent of the Jewish people will be stretched far beyond our old borders. Then Emma Lazarus, writing in New York City in the 1880’s, marvels at just how far our Jewish tent has expanded… from the steppes of Russia, across the treacherous ocean, and coming at last to mountains of the high Sierras.
Even as the Prophet promised, so your tent
Hath been enlarged unto earth’s farthest rim.
To snow-capped Sierras from vast steppes ye went,
Through fire and blood and tempest-tossing wave,
For freedom to proclaim and worship Him,
Mighty to slay and save.
Then Lazarus turns from the immigrant journey and speaks of religion, and the role she hopes that this people will play in the modern era, this time of crumbling faith. Writing in 1882, already seeing the decline of religious belief all around her, she calls on us, the Jews, to continue our 3,000 year mission to bear witness to the reality of God.
High above flood and fire ye held the scroll,
Out of the depths ye published still the Word.
No bodily pang had power to swerve your soul:
Ye, in a cynic age of crumbling faiths,
Lived to bear witness to the living Lord,
Or died a thousand deaths.
In stanza seven, writing 13 years before Theodore Herzl gave birth to modern Zionism, this young prophet Emma Lazarus speaks of the two great new directions of Jewish history….one to the ancient homeland and one to the new land of America.
In two divided streams the exiles part,
One rolling homeward to its ancient source,
One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart.
By each the truth is spread, the law unfurled,
Each separate soul contains the nation’s force,
And both embrace the world.
Finally, in the eighth and last stanza, Emma Lazarus brings us back to her original theme, Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. This is the moment in our year when we stand atop the mountain of history….just as she has done in this poem….and look from the highest possible perspective, to see where we have come and where we might be going as a people. And she brings us at last into our own home, with candles and apples and honey.
Kindle the silver candle’s seven rays,
Offer the first fruits of the clustered bowers,
The garnered spoil of bees. With prayer and praise
Rejoice that once more tried, once more we prove
How strength of supreme suffering still is ours
For Truth and Law and Love.
With this vision of beauty, and of sweetness, Emma Lazarus defined for us the modern meaning of Rosh Hashanah, and in a poem she captured the living essence of Judaism. Her vision for Judaism is just as alive for us today as is her vision of America, emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty:
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
She wrote “The New Colossus” at age 34 and the poem “The New Year” when she was 33. She passed from this world when she was 38. What profound teachings about the meaning of America were lost to us when Emma Lazarus died? What passionate visions of the Jewish future might she have shown us had she lived?
And who is the 30-something year old woman living among us today, whose poetic, prophetic voice might teach us the meaning of our moment in history, and the promise and the portent of the new year that is about to be born?
Shabbat shalom!