On Rosh Hashanah, I spoke of the two sets of tablets, the first set that Moses shattered when he saw the Israelites dancing around the Gold Calf, and the pristine second set, delivered after the people’s contrition. The image of the two sets of tablets held in the holy ark, carried from place to place in the wilderness, is not only a metaphor for accepting the brokenness of our world even as we aim for wholeness. They are also a metaphor for teshuvah, for repentance, return, reconciliation.

Something happened between the first tablets and the second. Not only do the people repent, but God repents. This is one of those small moments that we often overlook when we read of God’s anger at the Children of Israel. But our Sages did not overlook this; the Rabbis chose to recall this moment by repeating the passage on YK and at shalosh regalim. Yes, God gets angry. God considers destroying the Children of Israel and starting over with Moses and some other people. But God doesn’t do it, and moreover, God publicly repents, repents and forgives.

Ex.32:14 ¹⁴ And the Lord regretted the punishment He had planned to bring upon His people.

Furthermore, Moses meets God face to face in that moment, and what he experiences is God as the source of forgiveness and compassion, in the words we now repeat at every holy day:

Ex. 34:6-7 "The Lord! the Lord! a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, ⁷extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.

That’s pretty big, God repenting. It’s a hard thing for any of us, to say we’re sorry. The apology itself is usually much smaller than the anger. But what power the small moment has to deflate the raging anger. And the more public the apology, the more courageous it is. At least if you’re asking forgiveness of a friend or loved one, you stand a chance that the underlying bond will win out, forgiveness will come, life will move on. Once you publicly apologize, you risk losing the people who never knew what you did in the first place. Just consider the challenges faced by the Catholic Church this past year. Facing up to our own responsibility, no matter who we are, is the essence of teshuvah.

I was witness to the largest public apology I have ever encountered on our visit to Berlin in July. Berlin was not high on our family’s list of places to visit, but given an unusual opportunity, we toured as much of the city as possible. Everyone tells us that Berlin is different from the rest of Germany. Because the only other parts of Germany we saw were airports, I can only report about the experience of being in Berlin. And it was an experience that taught me a great deal about the meaning of teshuvah.

Berlin appears as a wealthy, Western city. The entire metropolis is under construction, with fantastic new skyscrapers and award-winning architectural wonders rising out of the crushed concrete where the Berlin Wall once stood. Anything you want to buy, you can find in Berlin. The best food, the most stylish clothes, imports from every land. This city has emerged from its tragic and oppressive past and aspires to be the new capital of Europe.

Berlin was once one of the great Jewish centers of Europe, a meeting place for great Jewish thinkers and great ideas. Today, we think of Berlin, the capital of Germany, as the symbol of destruction of the great Jewish centers of Europe. The memory of what once was, and the shame of the Nazi era and collaboration by the German people might be considered a huge burden to this generation. Would a city that is so forward-looking be willing to provide an unblinking look at its own past?

On the first day we arrived, I took a walk with our daughter outside our hotel, in the center of what was once West Berlin. A couple of blocks away, we came upon a bus shelter covered by a placard in black and white photos and print. Not the usual advertising poster; we stopped to examine it. The shelter stood in front of a non-descript hotel building on Kurfurstenstrasse. One side had text in German, but the other was translated into English. Without apologetics or sensationalism, the poster reported that this building had housed the offices of Adolph Eichmann, head of the Gestapo’s "Jewish affairs" department. The poster explained that Eichmann had taken over the offices of the B’nai B’rith in this very building, and then recounted Eichmann’s plans for destruction of the Jewish people, and how it was carried out.

This revelation seemed ground-breaking. I thought to myself, would we ever find such a public record of our country’s crimes on the streets of Los Angeles, New York or Washington D.C.? Do such posters exist in Selma or Atlanta, proclaiming, this is where our government plotted to cheat the Native Americans out of signed treaties, this is where plantation owners bought and sold human beings like farm animals; this is where local police collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan?

One Chasidic master has taught, "As an individual you cannot be redeemed until you recognize your flaws and try to mend them. Nor can a nation be redeemed until it recognizes its flaws and tries to mend them. Whoever permits no recognition of his or her flaws—whether an individual or a nation—permits no redemption. We can be redeemed only to the extent that we recognize ourselves."

Several companies offer walking tours of Berlin in English. Each offers a general tour of the city, as well as specialized tours, such as a tour of Jewish sites, or "Third Reich tour." Yet even the general tour of Berlin includes key sites recalling the Third Reich, the deportation of Jews, and Jewish cultural highlights, so that we were assured that everyone who came to the city was exposed to both the horrors of the Nazis, and a rich portrayal of Jewish life in Berlin before and after the war. Our family chose a day-long guided walking tour of the sites of Jewish Berlin.

We visited Jewish sites that were alive with activity, and shrines to the culture that once flourished before Hitler. We viewed schools and synagogues, memorials and museums. We were shown the major department stores that the Nazis took over from their wealthy Jewish owners, and the factory where a little-known hero, Otto Weidt, Berlin’s answer to Oskar Schindler, saved blind and deaf Jews from deportation. He ran a broom-making factory, and he was assured of business from one of its major clients, the German SS. We were taught to notice the "stumble stones," small markers you might "stumble over" on the sidewalks and walls of the city, noting the name and deportation dates of Berlin Jews who were remembered with honor, and with regret. How unexpected to find people who are so eager to succeed in the 21^st century able to recount their moral failures in the 20^th.

The most startling revelation on our tour took place in a park that covered the rubble that had once been Berlin’s oldest synagogue. Surprisingly, the synagogue had been spared during Kristallnacht, since it had been built so close to neighboring buildings that vandals feared the destruction of the entire block. In the end, spared by the Nazi vandals, it was obliterated by allied bombing during the war.

On that spot, in the green open square stood a monument. Not a memorial of the synagogue, but something even more surprising. This was the site of the Rosenstrasse Women’s Protest, a little-known event that was apparently the single instance of public protest against treatment of the Jews. In February 1943, just after Germany’s disastrous defeat at Stalingrad, the SS rounded up what they believed were the last Jews remaining in Berlin. Between 1500 and 2500 Jewish men, and some women as well, were taken to a detention center on the Rosenstrasse, for deportation to Auschwitz.

Who were these Jews and why were they still in Berlin as late as 1943? In addition to those who went underground or fought in the resistance, a number of privileged Jews remained who were married to non-Jewish Germans. Within a day of the detentions, the wives began to turn up on the street, demanding the release of their husbands. Within five days, the few had turned to hundreds and the hundred had become a thousand. Soldiers returning from the front joined in the protest. The women shouted, "Give us our men back" and "Murderers!" The SS threatened them by placing soldiers with machine guns on top of the building across the street, but that did not scare the protesters away. Finally, the Nazis gave up and freed the detainees, and even returned twenty-five men who had been sent to Auschwitz.

Who has heard this story before? What a strange and amazing tale of courage and devotion!

At the end of the war, of the 172,000 Jews who had made Berlin their home in the 1920s, only 7000 remained. But these numbers do not tell the whole story! Yes, 55,000 Berlin Jews were deported between October 1941 and the fall of the Third Reich in May 1945. But even more Jews, 80,000 had escaped before the war, between 1933 and 1939. Of the remaining 80,000, 20,000 were able to emigrate even after 1939.

In the end, 7000 Jews lived in Berlin from the end of the war, when 1500 Jews returned from the camps and others came out of hiding, until the 1980s. The greatest influx of Jews has come from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Once they were a "packed suitcase" community, whose main uniting force was their sense of impermanence. But now, with Jews coming from the Israel, the US, and other Western states, the Jewish population of Berlin has grown to 12,000. This may sound small to us, who live in a metropolitan area with over 200,000 Jews, but Berlin today has the largest Jewish population of any German city. Germany now has the third largest Jewish population in Western Europe, following the UK and France, with 92,000 total. In the world, Germany’s Jewish population is in 11^th place, just after Australia. So the vibrancy of Jewish life in Germany is not insignificant, in fact, as noted in the guidebook to Jewish Berlin, "for a community that just ten or fifteen years ago seemed to be slowly fading out of existence, it is a remarkable recovery."

After the Second World War, the American military governor, General Clay, said that the true measure of German democracy would be how the country treated its Jews. Today, there is rising evidence of a new kind of tolerance and pluralism arising in Germany, just 57 years after the war ended.

The greatest monument to the Jews of Germany, past present and future, was erected just a few years ago, in a neighborhood not far from Checkpoint Charlie, once the main gateway between East and West Berlin. In an architectural marvel, the Jewish Museum takes the visitor on a very personal and deeply respectful journey. When one enters this museum, one not only follows the path of the Jews from their earliest settlements in Shpeyer and Worms and Mayence, with their stellar rabbinic teachers, to the great cultural achievements of Kurt Weill and Albert Einstein. The collection rivals any Jewish Museum I have visited. No, before reaching the privilege of viewing the museum’s thoughtful and engaging collection, one must take an existential journey through its basic design.

From the classic building housing the historic Berlin Museum, one must pass underground along three intersecting corridors to reach the annex housing the Museum. One must travel along the triangular crossing paths of the axis of exile, the axis of destruction, and the axis of continuity. As you walk along each white corridor, viewing the artifacts, the actual possessions of German Jews behind glass cases, you consider the lives of those who walked the routes to exile, to new life, and to death.

At the end of the axis of exile, following the paths of those forced to emigrate in the 1930s, you come to "the Garden of Exile and Emigration," an outdoor courtyard marked by seven rows of seven concrete pillars, each topped with a live tree. Forty-eight of the columns contain earth from Berlin, reminding us of the critical year 1948, when the State of Israel was established. The 49^th tree in the center contains the earth of Jerusalem, and stands for Berlin itself. It is a stunning representation of the displacement of exile.

The corridor of the axis of destruction leads to a very different end, the dark Holocaust Tower. The experience of entering this stark space cannot be adequately described in words. Standing in that empty, unheated tower, only dimly lit by a small window high above, even a child could comprehend the sense of hopelessness and desolation the architect is trying to convey.

After these two detours, you follow the axis of continuity into the museum itself. The exhibits are cutting edge and still comprehensive. But aside from the building itself, the most striking aspect of the museum to me was the floor documenting German Jewry after 1945. Of course, by the time we reached that section of the museum, we had been there for over 3 hours, it was getting late, and the children were ready for the gift shop and a snack. But I managed to stop at 4 separate computer screens, where the visiting public was invited to weigh in on current attitudes. At each screen, we read a question, answered it, then checked how other visitors had responded up to that moment.

Question 1: Is anti-Semitism inherent in German culture? 2/3 of the respondents answered no.

Question 2: Is it appropriate to joke about Jews in Germany today? The overwhelming response was no.

Question 3: Could a Jew become president of Germany in the near future? A little over half said yes.

Question 4: Is Germany today an open and pluralistic society? Again, two-thirds optimistically answered yes.

These results surprised me, as I was surprised at what I perceived to be an embrace and enjoyment of Jewish life and culture.

When I was in first grade, the principal of my elementary school decided to try a bold experiment. Mr. Tiergarten began teaching the entire first grade class his native language, German. By second grade, I knew 96 words, a feat that earned me the title of "German champion of the Second Grade," and for which both my mother and grandmother came to school. As a prize, I was allowed to choose any book I wanted from the school book fair.

Later on, when I wanted to learn more and build on this early start, I was confronted by a Jewish friend: "Why would you want to learn German?" she asked with a sneer. Ever since, I have met this kind of fear/hatred/contempt for all things German with some naïve surprise and guarded respect. In the past twenty years, I have met a number of German students who have become interested in Judaism. Some have even chosen to become Jews.

People have asked me what it was like to be a Jew in Germany. I admit that the German that I had been taught in second grade did not carry me very far. We were not privy to the conversations of the locals or to the speeches on the news. But I was taken off guard by what I saw in Berlin, by the sense of collective guilt and wholehearted welcome of living breathing Jews and awakenings of Jewish life. In the way we toured the city, we experienced a celebration of Jewish life---not as a dead culture, as Hitler had envisioned when creating the museums of Prague, for example, and not as an alien culture, as one might find visiting Poland. In Germany, klezmer bands play in the clubs and on any given night, Jewish cultural events take place across the city. In Berlin, the main synagogue of East Berlin has reopened as a Jewish center for locals and tourists alike. Next door, Café Oren serves up Israeli dishes and Israeli newspapers. Jewish tourists are finding Berlin a worthwhile destination, even as non-Jews also learn about Judaism as a culture integrated within Germany today. Not only did this experience give me hope for Germany and for the Jewish people, but it reminded me of the great potential for teshuvah in our world, and its overpowering impact when people approach repentance with seriousness, honesty, and acceptance

Closing

On this Yom Kippur, we need models of teshuvah, of reconciliation, restoration, repentance and forgiveness. We need inspiration to encourage us to do the hard work of admitting our faults, great or small. Whether the story of God’s attributes of forgiveness gives us solace, or the story of Berlin’s repentant renaissance stirs us, let this day move us in the direction of hope, for ourselves, our families, our people, our homeland, and our world.

As Rabbi Art Green has taught, "There is a possibility of return, of coming home. The original harmony—be it that of parent and child, or of a young and improperly balanced marriage—may have ended in pain and separation. But there is a way to come back. With real human participation in the terms of reunion, the way home remains open, and the prospects for longevity of relationship—if they are to be judged by Jewish history—are more than good. In this lies the eternal optimism of Jewish faith. It is expressed for us in the verse, ‘As You have borne this people from Egypt up to here,’ which introduces the thirteen qualities of mercy. However far we think we have to go in life, however distant we feel from the goal, we need only recall where we were when we started. Our faith in the One has brought us from Egyptian bondage to the place where we are now. Surely that same faith, if it has brought us all this distance, can carry us the rest of the way as well! (Art Green, p. 173 of Seek my Face, Speak my Name.)

Ken yehi ratzon!

Rabbi Barbara R. Penzner

Yom Kippur 5763

September 2002