Judaism’s Worldview Series

Jewish Family Education with Candace R. Kwiatek, The Dayton Jewish Observer

Twenty-five miles southwest of Jerusalem, Tel Lachish towers over the Judean landscape, a multi-layered mound of destroyed and rebuilt settlements and major cities from 5,500 B.C.E. through the eras of Joshua, Kings, and Maccabees.

There, archaeologists recently discovered a rare gate-shrine housing a pair of four-horned altars from the First Temple period, the horns deliberately chopped short and the shrine desecrated by the incongruous presence of a stone-carved toilet.

Such destruction, according to the dig’s director Sa’ar Ganor, is likely evidence of the religious reforms of King Hezekiah, who sought to undo local cultic shrines and return worship to the Temple in Jerusalem.

Lachish was subsequently destroyed by the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, and eventually abandoned during the Hellenistic era. Today it lives again, rebuilt as an Israeli national park.

Creation and destruction are intrinsic to the world’s design. The extreme pressure and temperature that create rocks from organic matter or minerals also destroy them. Fungi foster plant growth and reproduction by breaking down dead organic matter. In the human body, cells develop and deteriorate at a replacement rate of about 330 billion cells daily.

Even human creativity, neuroscience informs us, first requires destruction of old preconceptions, judgments, and ways of doing things before it can embrace divergent thinking and innovation.

The Jewish worldview embraces these dual forces of creation and destruction, seeking their significance in Jewish history and literature and applying their lessons in Jewish law and tradition.

Consider: Joseph’s brothers fractured their sibling relationship and crushed their father’s heart by getting rid of the dreamer. On the other hand, Joseph emerged from imprisonment to become Egypt’s viceroy and ultimately reunite his family.

God decreed that the generation of the Exodus — which yearned for Egypt, accepted the spies’ skewed report of Canaan, and lacked faith — would wander for 40 years and die in the wilderness.

In that same wilderness, their children would begin to cherish freedom, act with fortitude, and trust in God.

Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple and deported Judea’s Jews to Babylon. There, they created a new Jewish worldview that emphasized Torah study and teaching, ennobled rabbis and synagogues, and encouraged new worship practices and customs that would allow Judaism to survive and flourish in exile.

When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, the loss of incalculable numbers of rabbinic scholars and students spurred Rabbi Judah haNasi to create the Mishnah, preserving 1,500 years of oral tradition in writing.

This became the foundation of two Talmuds (in Israel and Babylonia), generational archives of discussions, disputes, and diverging interpretations of theology, laws, and customs that still inform Jewish life today.

Creation and destruction also guide Jewish daily life. Six days are for work, the Torah teaches, for building and dismantling, followed by a day to rest and “re-soul.”

When facing an enemy, terms of peace must first be offered. But the Talmud declares, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up (first) and slay him.”

Words are used to tell stories, communicate ideas, and create relationships, but they can also destroy in at least a dozen ways, according to the Yom Kippur confessional prayer, Al Chet.

Just as God is the Author of Creation, a masterpiece of creativity and destruction, humans are designed to both create and destroy. But a basic ethical principal in Jewish law cautions, “Do not engage in wanton, senseless, or unnecessary destruction of useful things.”

“A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven,” Ecclesiastes observes, “…a time for tearing down and a time for building up…”

Carolyn’s beauty. Very much in demand by Hollywood stars Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman among others, Carolyn Gomberg was an unlikely beautician and makeup artist. Her face was pocked and stippled by noticeable scars and craters.

Although famous, she never hid the blotches on her own skin. When Carolyn was a baby in Ukraine, she was told, she had a bad case of the chickenpox, so the doctor bandaged her up like a mummy.

One day, a mob of local peasants brandishing pitchforks, axes, and knives began gathering at the edges of her shtetl, clearly readying for a pogrom.

Her clever mother tore off Carolyn’s bandages, exposing her scabs, and held her aloft in front of the crowd outside. “Smallpox,” she cried out.

Not recognizing chickenpox lesions, the mob scattered in terror. Carolyn’s scars saved a village — hundreds of people.

Huberman’s violin. At the end of the 19th century, the Polish Jewish violin prodigy Bronislaw Huberman toured Europe and America to great acclaim, impressing even Johannes Brahms.

When Huberman visited Palestine in 1929, he was moved by the locals’ passion for music and determined to create a world-class symphony orchestra there. It was a timely venture, for in 1933, Europe’s Jewish musicians began to lose their positions, and Huberman’s cultural project became an emergency rescue mission.

He traveled across the continent conducting auditions, and eventually chose 70 outstanding musicians from Germany, Austria, Poland, and Hungary.

In late December 1936, the first performance of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, took place in Tel Aviv, conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

Along with the lives of the musicians and their families — nearly 1,000 people — Huberman preserved the legacy of a European Jewish musical tradition that would certainly have disappeared.

“(God) foresaw the beauty of a tel, a city that has experienced endless destruction and rebuilding but never lost anything along the way,” writes Sara Hecht.

When we destroy to allow the new and good to emerge, when we reconstruct or build anew that which has been destroyed, we too are building a tel.

Literature to share

Kantika by Elizabeth Graver. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, its flourishing Sephardic Jewish community of nearly 500 years was forced to find refuge elsewhere. From Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana, and eventually New York City, this fictionalized version of the author’s family story follows three generations, a rich cast of characters whose successes only come to those who believe in fully living their one and only life.

Baseball and Belonging by Ryan Lavarnway. In this picture book for youngsters of all ages, Ryan Lavarnway shares his story of playing baseball as a youngster and eventually becoming a career catcher for Major League Baseball teams. When he joined the all-Jewish Israeli National team in 2016, he toured Israel to learn about the country he would represent on the world stage. There, he discovered his own personal connection to Judaism and the Jewish community — and wrote a book to share what he learned.

To read the complete August 2024 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.