Our Move to Trinity
Friday, February 3, 2023
Moving out from my office for relocation has taken me on a journey down memory lane. That office has been my home at work for nineteen years, and contains nineteen years of accumulated books and art, thank you notes from kindergartners, written work by teens from confirmation classes fifteen year ago, binders with minutes from meetings planning the first family camp, the first Mitzvah Day, the Rwanda preschool project, the Human Family project, our Bar/Bat Mitzvah challenges, ancient fundraising campaigns for our first executive director and our first assistant rabbi. Pulling everything out from the shelves and cupboards and drawers has been like an archeological dig, revealing layers and layers of Temple history and of my own personal history going all the way back to my earliest years, at UCSB Hillel, as a young rabbi almost forty years ago.
Among the buried treasure that came to the surface was a siddur, a prayerbook, that I created for our Hillel shabbat services back in the late 1980’s. That prayerbook included poetry by a range of Jewish poets that, after reading them week after week, year after year, became sacred scripture for me. Leafing through that prayerbook, sitting surrounded by boxes on the floor of my office last week, I came upon the poem “Exodus,”by George Oppen, a poetic response to the parting of the Red Sea. Jews all around the world are reading the Parting of Sea from the Torah this week. Oppen’s poem goes like this:
Exodus
Miracle of the children the brilliant
Children the word
Liquid as woodlands Children?
When she was a child I read Exodus
To my daughter ‘The children of Israel…’
Pillar of fire
Pillar of cloud
We stared at the end
Into each other’s eyes Where
She said hushed
Were the adults We dreamed to each other
Miracle of the children
The brilliant children Miracle
Of their brilliance Miracle
of
Back in those days, when we read that poem on Friday nights at Hillel, my own daughter Rachel was three years old, four years old, five years old. I was just beginning to tell her the story of the Exodus. I looked into Rachel’s eyes, and I thought of Oppen’s poem every time I would say “the children of Israel.” Now the years have gone by and Rachel is a mother and we will soon start reading to her daughter, our granddaughter Laila, the story of Exodus, and be reminded again of the miracle of the children.
As I returned to that poem, I suddenly wondered “who was George Oppen?” Who wrote those words “We stared at the end into each other’s eyes?” I wanted to know who this man was who had given me such an important Jewish touchstone. I googled him.
Born in New Rochelle in 1908 into a wealthy assimilated Jewish family, George Oppen was a turbulent teenager, in a car crash when he was 17, in which he was driving and a young passenger was killed. Oppen was expelled from a high school military academy, but managed to enroll at Oregon State University where in poetry class he met Mary Colby, a young woman from a mining town in Montana. On their first date, they stayed out all night, for which Mary was expelled and George was suspended. It was 1926. They hitchhiked to Dallas and got married, remaining married their entire lives until Oppen died in 1984. Then to New York City, where they became friends with the Jewish American poets Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff. Those are names I recognize. Why didn’t I know about George Oppen?
In 1934 at age 26, he published a book of poetry, entitled Discrete Series, and then stopped writing. He did not write again for a quarter of a century. George and Mary joined the Communist party and in 1942 at age 34 Oppen enlisted to fight against the Nazis, and was seriously injured in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he was awarded the Purple Heart. As I googled further, I learned that Oppen had been wounded by a piece of shrapnel that had passed first through the body of a friend at his side. The friend was still alive but so badly injured that Oppen used his friend’s body for a shield, lying there in the freezing cold for hour upon hour.
Convalescing in a hospital in France, Oppen received a letter from Mary, commanding him “you are to come home alive, no matter what the scars.” He did come home, and his daughter Linda…to whom he read Exodus….says that he suffered for years, from depression, terrible PTSD and guilt over how he had survived.
In 1949, despite George’s Purple Heart, they came under intense scrutiny and investigation by the FBI and the House Unamerican Activities Committee and they fled to Mexico. Eight years later, in 1958, they returned to New York, and George began to write poetry again. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his book Of Being Numerous. He is included in anthologies of Jewish American poets, although he never came to anything more than a vague sense of what being Jewish meant to him. He wrote to a friend “my sense of Jewishness is a vague sense of being foreign.”
How strange and how wonderful that this Jew who felt so far from his own Jewish roots left us a poem which became central to our Shabbat prayers!
At first I couldn’t even remember where I had found Oppen’s poem Exodus, thirty-eight years ago when I put together the first Hillel prayerbook, but then I found it. It is included in A Big Jewish Book, one of the strangest and most wonderful books in my library.
The full title is A Big Jewish Book: Poems and Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present, edited by Jerome Rothenberg, another buried treasure that came out of my shelves during my relocation excavations. That book is a wild, brilliant and outrageous collection of Jewish sources from the past three thousand years. I first found Oppen’s poem in the middle of that marvelous jumble of the crazy, the passionate, the irrational, the ancient, the unorthodox, the pious and the heretical sources from three thousand years of Jewish writing. Rothenberg threw his arms wide open and decided to include it all, the reputable and the disreputable, the normative and the forbidden, all together into one big book. Even Shabtai Tzvi, the false messiah who converted to Islam. And even Jacob Frank, a truly insane man who was hailed by thousands in 18th century Poland as the messiah. A Big Jewish Book included amulets and magic incantations and the words of many mystics and Sigmund Freud and Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg. A Big Jewish Book was one of my very favorite books when I was a young rabbi, because it was unafraid and unrestrained. It felt to me like our boring American Jewish community needed to learn to tolerate more madness.
Now forty years later, I have less appetite for craziness. Boring doesn’t seem as bad as it used to.
Madness, especially, has lost its luster. In large part, because we are reminded right now just how alive real craziness is, and how close it comes to us and to everything we love.
This week in Isla Vista the town was blanketed with fliers, much like those that appeared during Hannukah on the Mesa and the westside of Santa Barbara. Those fliers were not simple, impulsive, adolescent grafitti. They were carefully prepared and distributed with great energy, detailing charges of every conceivable evil against you and me. It is stomach turning.
I know, because we have been told by trusted experts, that these fliers are being distributed by a tiny, tiny group who have no power to hurt anyone, and more than anything, they want a reaction. So we should not give them that satisfaction. But it is deeply unsettling. Insanity is frightening.
To offer a simple antidote to any fear we may be feeling, I would like to speak about where we are tonight.
We are here in a church, Trinity Lutheran Church, whose members have welcomed us into their home. Not just for tonight, but for virtually every Friday night and Saturday morning for the next year and a half. As you can see, the cross--which declares the essence of their faith-- is concealed by this curtain. Our friends here at Trinity have allowed us to obscure their most sacred symbol during our services, so that we can feel at home here. It is a breathtaking, inspiring, heart-warming gesture of hospitality.
In the welcome that we have received here at Trinity, we have been reminded that the world is still full of sane, healthy, loving people. I hope that if and when we are asked to open our home to another community, we would respond with the same spirit of warm generosity.
In the opening of these church doors, we are witnessing the waters of the Red Sea parting.
It is a miracle. And if your child asks you, in a hushed voice, “where were the adults?” You might answer them, “they were there at the church.” Tonight the adults opened the doors of their house and the Children of Israel walked through the water, on dry ground.