Love makes the world go round
Love makes the world go round
Somebody soon, will love you
If no one loves you now.
High in some silent sky
Love sings a silver song,
Making the earth whirl softly
Love makes the world go round. From Carnival, by Bob Merrill
You know I love Broadway musicals. So how can I talk about love, without sharing a song of love, from a show that I love, Carnival. It is a show about love, about the conflicts between feelings of love and our hateful instincts, caused by the difficulties we suffer. In the end, it is the giving of love that wins, but the source of love is hidden from its recipient, Lili. So yes, while love may make the world go round, often it is hidden, hardly revealed, and mixed with surrounding difficulties, at least according to the show, Carnival.
How necessary is love? Well, if you agree with Vulcans on Star Trek, love is just an emotion that gets in the way of logical decisions. If you prefer the Beatles then, “all you need is love.” While I love Star Trek, I agree with the Beatles. The circles of our lives are driven by love. As children, the love from our parents shapes so much of our whole lives. When we have children, our love for them drives so many of the life decisions we make. As we age, we need our children to show their love for us, even sometimes making sure we are cared for much the same way we cared for them as infants. Love makes our lives go round.
What does Judaism say?
Well, growing up, love was presented as the focus of Christianity, not Judaism. An example was this quote from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” I remember our rabbi saying it is not realistic to think people can be forced to love someone, particularly an enemy. It is more realistic, and better, to advocate for justice, not love.
Indeed, the texts highlighted by Jewish teachers are the prophetic texts about bringing justice to the poor, the orphan and the widow. The Torah texts we rabbis typically love to teach are about justice and righteousness, such as tzedek, tzedek tirdof, “justice, justice you shall pursue.” Yes the Torah teaches us to “love the stranger,” but we almost always put that a political context. Yes, the Torah teaches “love your neighbor as yourself,” but we automatically defer to the Hillel version: “what is hateful to yourself do not do to your neighbor.” We debate if love of our neighbor is really meant to be particularistic, or universalistic. In other words, it becomes the subject of an intellectual discussion.
It is hard to find a traditional Jewish text that discusses love. Instead there are stories showing how we confuse infatuation with love. For example, there is a story about Rabbi Chiya ben Ashi, whose wife was feeling very neglected by him. So she put on a wig, perfume, dressed up, and passed in front of him while he was studying. He asked who she was and she answered “Charusa, I have just returned from my travels.” He then propositioned her. When she revealed her real identity, he felt so guilty he fasted until he died. Another story tells of an observant man who was so overwhelmed by the beauty of a harlot, he paid 200 pieces of gold to sleep with her. But when he climbed into her bed, his tzitzitraised up, and hit him in the head, waking him up to the sin he was about to commit.
Judaism tends to teach about life mostly in the light of justice and intellect. I have come to believe, however, that love is key to life. So now I will share two stories, each about a man I believe demonstrated love. Both lived in Cologne, Germany. Both were my dad’s father. One was his biological father. The other was the man who actually raised him. They hated each other.
Walter Romberg was my grandfather. He died in 1942; the result of forced labor in a chemical factory in Nazi Germany. My father only met him once, while getting his signature on the paperwork needed to leave Germany. Dad’s parents were divorced before he was 3. While growing up, he was told by his mother and uncle, that Walter was despicable. Certainly it is easy to understand how bitter his mother, Martha Stern, felt about her experience with Walter. In 1922 Walter fathered a boy, with another woman. This half brother died in a street accident when Dad was a toddler. In January of 1923 Walter married Martha. My dad’s birthday was July 11, 1923. Clearly, this marriage was a “shotgun” wedding. To put it in today’s language, Walter was a “player.” Nobody in Martha’s family had anything good to say about Walter.
Even much of Walter’s family considered him the black sheep of the family. He was a gambler. He failed in every business venture or job he took. He was a member of the German Communist party, which put him in opposition to most of the Romberg family. He served Germany in World War I, and had the strange view that the war was fun, not tragic. His younger brother Karl, the most successful of the Romberg brothers, often gave him financial aid. Karl’s son Ralph was one of the few to say something positive about Walter. Every time Walter came to see his brother in Essen, he brought treats for Ralph, who found his uncle kind and funny.
In 1932, Walter married Margaret, a Catholic woman, about 1 month after their first child Charlotte was born. It was Charlotte who told me about her father, my grandfather. Walter had no relationship with my father, but he had deep love for the 4 children he fathered with Margaret. Each child felt their father’s love. He would play this game, calling each one by their name, gathering them into his arms one by one until he was hugging all four.
As the 1930’s progressed, Walter was forbidden by the Nazis to continue his career. Instead, he was pressed into hard labor on road crews. This paid very little, so the family moved into progressively worse apartments – from one with an inside toilette to one with the toilette in a hall shared by many families. Food grew scarcer, but Walter made a game of saving food for his children. He would not eat all of the lunch he took to work. He brought some home then made a festival of cutting it into little sections for each of his children, humorously calling it “rabbit food.”
Walter scrounged to find things to make his children happy. Charlotte wanted a toy pram, but they could not afford one. An acquaintance of Walter’s found one, but it was so old and out of style that Charlotte was ashamed to wheel it home with her father. They stopped at a kiosk to eat an ice cream cone, leaving the pram outside, laughing together over what should be its fate – perhaps someone would walk off with it while they were eating.
Even though he was married to a Catholic woman, Walter wore a yellow Jewish star like all Jews. His children were kept out of certain schools and once the war was on, he was forbidden from using the bomb shelters with German families. Still, Walter was determined to help other Jewish families. He knew a lot about the paperwork families needed to fill out to get out of Germany. He would help them get their paperwork done. He owned a small handcart and used it to help families being deported take their possessions to either train stations or deportation facilities – not realizing that the Nazis would often take these things from families especially if they were sending them to concentration camps. Walter, after putting in long, hard days of forced labor, helped these families almost every night.
One of the saddest cases was a Jewish family with two little girls Charlotte’s age who were told in 1941 they had to evacuate Cologne, and to report to a camp outside of the city. Walter used his small handcart and helped this family transport their belongings, not knowing this was a useless exercise, as this family was sent to a concentration camp in the east. In Minsk, this family was put on a truck and told they were being taken to a work camp, but the truck was a rolling gas chamber and they were slaughtered.
Walter Romberg died on a warm, sunny Sunday in early August 1942. He was home and sick in bed, probably because of the poisonous chemicals he was handling in forced labor. He came into the kitchen, clutched his chest, and collapsed in front of his wife and daughter. As his body was being carried from the building, another girl, the daughter of a Nazi family, asked Charlotte why she was crying. It was, after all, only a Jew.
As a young man, Walter was enchanted with looks and sex. In a little over a year he fathered two boys with two different women. In the 1930’s, as life for Jews became harder every year, he did all he could without concern for his own health, for his children and other Jewish families. His love grew as life degenerated. His love inspired his children for the rest of their lives.
The second story is about Richard Stern, the man who raised my father. I have spoken about him before, being a hero and a protestor, but this is not about his heroism. This is about the love that drove his life. Unlike my grandfather Walter, Uncle Richard was a deep part of my early life, dying about 6 months after my bar mitzvah. Externally he could be a little gruff. Yet his heart was soft and filled with love. I saw this many times but the real story of his love begins on January 23, 1928, the day Richard and his sister’s father, Marcus Stern, died.
Marcus had been caring for his divorced daughter and her 5 year old son. They lived with him in the apartment above his bedding store in Cologne, Germany. Richard promised his father, that upon his death, he would take over the business and look after his sister and her son. In 1928 it was impossible to know how this would affect his entire life. He could not have known the Nazis would take power in 1933 and overturn his future.
For the first few years of caring for his sister and nephew, life was normal. The business provided a nice income. Richard was active in local politics as a member of the Social Democratic party. He was a well-liked citizen in Cologne, and was the emcee for some events during the annual Karnival. He should have been able to attract a wife as successful businessman in his early 30’s, but on January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed the chancellor of Germany. After April 1, 1933, when he was arrested for protesting the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, his business declined. After the passing of the Nuremburg laws in 1935, life became extremely difficult, yet Richard placed the wellbeing and safety of his sister and nephew as his first priority. November 9, 1938 was Krystallnacht, and Richard survived by fleeing to a hiding place outside of Cologne. His sister and nephew were hidden by neighbors. All of the products in the store were stolen, destroyed or thrown into the street by the Nazis.
A few months earlier, Richard already realized he needed to get his sister and nephew out of Germany, so he applied to the US consulate for visas for all 3 of them. He was able to leave Germany in May of 1939, to get to New York, find a job, and begin a new life structure for his family. Instead of being an entrepreneur, he became a dishwasher. His sister and her son made it to New York in early September, 1939, while Germany invaded Poland.
What tore at Richard’s heart, even though he, Martha and my dad made it safely to America, was the splitting of their greater family. His brother, Heinrich, was put into a concentration camp shortly after Richard left Germany. They never heard from him after 1942. Heinrich was murdered by the Nazis. His sister Tekla, who was married to a non-Jew, Heinz, had made it with their daughter Ellen, to Brussels, Belgium, where she hid during the war. His sister Hilda and her husband Ludwig, made it to the United States. Richard worked hard to provide for Martha, buying life insurance and war bonds to make sure there were assets for her if something happened to him.
The possibility of Richard being killed became a reality when he decided to take a position in the US army corps of engineers in October of 1942. He then created a letter to his family, outlining how to utilize the few assets he had obtained if he died in the war. His main concern was Martha, who had no husband and whose son was now about to enter the army.
There is no doubt that Richard felt conflict about going into the army at age 43, knowing he had promised his father he would never abandon his sister Martha. But he made his choice because he felt opposing the Nazis would determine the ultimate safety of any of his family that survived. It is clear Martha worried constantly about her brother, as a letter from my dad to Richard in August of 1943, assured his uncle not to worry about dad’s mother. Dad wrote, “Uncle Richard, you have always been my very best friend. If today you are going into combat again on your own will, I respect you even more yet. If anything should ever happen to you, you can be sure that I will take care of mother.”
Richard’s love for my father never ceased. In the winter of 1945, Dad was standing guard with his unit somewhere in France. It was pouring rain. Dad looked up and saw his Uncle Richard walking towards him with tears pouring down his cheeks. They hugged and spent a couple of hours together. This was the only time from October 1942 until the end of the war that Richard and dad got to see each other.
Once the war with Germany ended, Richard applied for a pass to travel to Brussels to find his sister Tekla and to Cologne to try to trace the fate of missing family members. In Brussels, Tekla’s husband Heinz had gotten into some kind of legal trouble and was being held by Belgium authorities. Richard visited him and tried to help. I am not sure what he was able to do, but I have a picture taken in Brussels in June of 1945 of Richard and my dad, with Tekla, Heinz and their daughter Ellen. I also know, as I have a copy of the affidavit he filed in November of 1945, he sponsored his sister and her family as immigrants to America, swearing to use his income to insure their ability to settle in NY.
In 1949, at 50 years old, Richard was finally able to marry. His sister was doing well. My dad was building his own life. But that was not the end of Richard’s expressions of love. In 1959 Martha was diagnosed with cancer, dying in 1960 at 58 years old. Richard, living then in Allentown, Pa and already dealing with heart problems, spent so much time at her side, writing to my dad, then living in West Virginia, giving constant reports on his mother. In 1963, his sister Tekla was fighting illness as well. Richard went to NY to be with her and learned she had died a few days earlier. Her daughter, Ruth, never bothered to let the man who got her parents into the United States know his beloved sister had died. The funeral had already taken place and Richard was heartbroken.
Richard Stern wrote a short summary of his life in 1959. He saw his life as messed up. I never did. Uncle Richard saw me as his grandson. Being with him was so much fun. While visiting us in West Virginia, we took a walk to look for Indians. At the edge of a forest, we saw an old, thrown out chair. He told me it belonged to Sitting Bull. In December of 1967, just a few days before Uncle Richard died, I visited him in the hospital. Uncle Richard knew I saw him as a hero. When I walked in he broke down and cried, so upset that I was seeing him suffering from heart failure. To this day I still feel his love when I think of that moment.
What is love? Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, from the early 20thcentury writes this, “We see that love and giving always come together. Is the giving a consequence of love, or is perhaps the reverse true: is the love a result of giving? We usually think it is love which causes giving…But there is another side to the argument. Giving may bring about love for the same reason that a person loves what he himself has created or nurtured…”
Love is what motivates us to give at key moments during the cycle of our life. The best we can try to do is to begin, and end, with love.
Walter Romberg and Richard Stern each nurtured, gave, and loved. Walter’s life was so unsteady. He was an outcast from much of his family. His love, however grew under stress, and steadied his life. Richard’s life was stable. When Nazism destroyed that stability, his life was driven by love. Why did I pick a song from the show Carnival for this sermon? Both men lived in Cologne, Germany. The Karnival of Cologne was part of both of their lives, connecting two opposites. It represents the cycle of their lives. So I sing.
Love makes the world go round
Love makes the world go round
Somebody soon, will love you
If no one loves you now.
High in some silent sky
Love sings a silver song,
Making the earth whirl softly
Love makes the world go round. From Carnival, by Bob Merrill
The Jewish Observer 
What is the Sin of Sodomizing?
November 10, 2019 by thejewishobserver
Judaism, like most religions, has priorities over which sins we must absolutely avoid versus which are less impactful. At the top of the list, logically, are murder, rape, and turning away from God. Defining the last of those sins is a source of great disagreements between different religions. Our human evolution of understanding the world also changes how we define what it means to turn away from God. Yet, despite what various religious groups claim, despite an old vision of God as opposed to a modern one; we can find underlying moral truths that connect all of us together, by simply reading an incident in this week’s Torah portion and seeing its connection to other parts of the Tanach (which Christians call the “Old Testament”) as well as in the Talmud and rabbinic commentary.
Parashat Vayeira opens with Abraham hosting 3 men who turn out to be God’s malachim (angels). They predict the eventual birth of Isaac. As they move on, Abraham accompanies them and 2 of them head towards Sodom and Gomorrah. At the point God decides to inform Abraham of the intention to destroy those cities because of their awful sins. Here is the centerpiece of this incident, from Genesis 18:22 to 25
“The men went on from there to Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before God. Abraham came forward and said, “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? What if there whould be 50 innocent within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent 50 in it? Far be it from You to do such a think, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”
There are two of the key questions that typically arise about this story. What exactly are the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah? How should we react to Abraham’s response and challenge to God?
There are numerous religious groups that look at the response of the Sodomites to the men (actually malachim – angels) who arrive at Abraham’s nephew, Lot’s house. The conclusion drawn as the key sin is the sexual sin of sodomization. People who believe this will draw a connection to the verses of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. However, sexual sin is NOT actually stated to be the central sin, or even an ongoing sin in Sodom elsewhere in the Tanach. Rather, the central sin is stated in Eziekiel 16:49, the people of Sodom refused to give help to the poor and the needy.
Two rabbinic pieces of literature, chapter 25 in the midrash Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer and Sanhedrin 109, offer a lot of detail and elaboration of the level of these sins. In PRE it describes how the people of Sodom were extremely wealthy, but did not place trust in their Creator and Owner (see the connection to last week’s commentary?). Ergo they never offered food to the poor or a visiting stranger. Indeed, they did so much to protect their food they even put covers on their fruit trees that prevented God’s singing birds from sitting on the branches and singing. Further, they appointed corrupt judges who ruled against every wayfarer and alien getting any food. This midrash continues by adding that anyone who gave help to the poor and needy by even giving them a loaf of bread would be burned to death in punishment.
Sanhedrin 109 adds to this by quoting from Job 24:7 “They lie at night naked without clothing and they have no covering for the cold.” This is in the context of describing an evil community and the Talmud uses this to describe how the people of Sodom treated the poor and aliens – making them suffer even while trying to sleep at night. It further adds that Sodomites would steal from widows of their own community. Finally, this page in Sanhedrin tells a story of a young woman who would take bread hidden in a pitcher to poor people. She was found by the men of Sodom, then tortured by being pinned to the city wall, exposed to being bitten by insects and finally dying.
We saw in last week’s parashah that Abraham lived knowing God was the actual owner of the world, and respected the reality that no human can own anything forever. Therefore, they must not just focus on their own wealth, but helping the needy and the poor. The stories of Sodom add a connection to the multiple Torah statements that we must welcome the stranger through kindness and proper treating. All of this adds to the curiosity of Abraham’s challenge to God to behave justly when judging Sodom.
Rashi points out that the Hebrew word vayigash, translated as “came forward” is often used in multiple emotional situations including war, conciliation, and prayer. One can conclude that Abraham was trying to be fierce in approaching God, to get God to be conciliatory if enough righteous people were in Sodom, as well as praying that God would do what is proper. Malbim takes the perspective that Abraham knew that God’s work of destroying Sodom would be done by the malachim, just as the first born of Egypt would be taken by the angel of death. Ergo, Malbim thought Abraham was pushing God to be sure the malachim would act properly on behalf of God. In either case, God is responsible if the righteous are destroyed with the guilty.
Abraham’s interaction with God on this issue concludes by God agreeing to not destroy Sodom even if only 10 righteous people exist there. However, Sodom is destroyed. It is clear that God knew what the conclusion would be, yet God not only informed Abraham what was being planned but listened to his pushing God’s requirement for justice and mercy. Since God knew how this would end why did God allow Abraham’s objection and negotiate with him?
My conclusion is that God was training Abraham, and providing an example for all of humanity, that we must never be afraid of challanging and questioning those in power if we are concerned not only about the sinful doings, but the true application of justice along with mercy and forgiveness. If we are allowed to challenge God, then there is no human we are forbidden to challenge over justice and morality. We must challenge those who place their insistence on ownership of parts of the world over the commanded morality that results from accepting God’s ownership.
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