A Faith of Ones Own

For a child of survivors, faith comes easy. But thats where the trouble starts. By Robert Friedman On the red-eye from Los Angeles, my seatmate was a blond-haired man named Doug who, like me, appeared to be in his early thirties. During takeoff, I noticed him eyeing the booklet on my lap from the Simon Wiesenthal Centers Museum of Tolerance, which I had visited earlier that day. Later, shifting his gaze directly towards me, he blurted I have never been able to understand how a person can have faith after the Holocaust. Jarred by his seemingly impulsive query, I blithely responded that the act of flying is itself a small demonstration of faith on his part. He nodded in agreement, but was unsatisfied with my evasive response. For me, I confessed, a certain degree of faith, in God and in humankind, is not only possible after the Holocaust, but actually compelling. Thats even harder for me to understand. Youre telling me you have faith because of the Holocaust, not in spite of it? Doug persisted. Until then, I had only shared my feelings on these matters with a few intimates. I suppose it was the combination of Dougs being a stranger, his earnestness and the coziness of our airtight environment that lent me a certain sense of security. Letting go of my last urge of selfcensorship, I began by recounting the wartime experiences of my parents and how they have chosen to live their lives in the more than half century since the wars end. This is where my faith begins. My fathers story is reminiscent of the film Europa, Europa. At age fifteen, my father and his family were taken by cattle-car from Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz. The day they arrived, he was severely beaten in front of his helpless father for the crime of collecting into a bottle a few drops of water that were dripping from a cement truck. My father remained in the camps until the spring of 1945 when an American soldier descended from his tank and cradled my father's

scrawny body in his arms like a nursing mother holding a newborn infant. My father had never seen a black person before. But what remains embedded forever in my father's memory is the combined look of horror and empathy on his liberator's face. With sweat and tears streaming down his face he stared speechless into my father's forlorn eyes. After some time, he offered my father a can of Heinz beans, a small gesture that resonated far beyond its own dimensions. After liberation, my father drifted around the rubble of Eastern Europe with a band of displaced teenagers selling cigarettes from train to train in order to survive. Eventually, he joined a group of orphans who were taken from Prague by a Jewish organization to start a new life in Millisle, a small coastal town, near Donaghadee, in Northern Ireland. Though the war had ended, my fathers internal battles were raging. It was the peace and beauty of Millisle and its people that restored his faith in human nature. There, by the shore, he kissed a girl for the first time and ate his first orange - not knowing if he should throw away the peel. With the friendship and guidance of the young religious Zionist volunteers from London who lived with the orphans in Millisle, my father began to reclaim his familial heritage of observant Judaism. My mothers story is a female version of Au Revoir Les Enfants. The Nazis killed her father during a rumble at the start of the war. Soon afterwards, her mother placed her in a convent and would periodically emerge from hiding to visit her young Catholic daughter and together recite the Hebrew Shema prayer which confirms the belief in the Jewish god and his oneness. For the remainder of the war, my mother, along with a handful of other Jewish children, lived with a gentile farmer and his family, My parents met in New York in the 50s and married soon afterwards. They run a cultured pearl importing business on 47th Street, the bustling center of Manhattans jewelry district. The cramped booth from which they conduct their business doubles as a liaison office for the various community activities to which they devote themselves. He often is called upon to dispense his wit, wisdom and sensitivity as a peacemaker among squabbling relatives or business partners. My mother has adroitly negotiated the delicate task of raising four first-generation Americans in the elusive space between caring and smothering. That my parents are who they are now, in light of what they went through then, is a strong inspiration. They wouldnt allow themselves to become the broken link in a chain of countless generations that plod through the hardships of Jewish history by clinging to the principles of the Torah. And yet, knowing this, I still asked them the hard questions: Is their faith driven by a sense of survivors guilt? Was my fathers return to religion an outgrowth of an orphans yearning for community and stability? Or is there something unrelated to my parents particular circumstances even more profound and compelling? I have learned from my parents that beyond the importance of community and social justice, it is the cyclical routine of Jewish life, the Shabbat meals, the Torah study, the communion with a loving, though sometimes elusive, G-d that sustains, indeed revives us, every day. More through

their actions than their words, my parents taught me to value the challenge of growth over the comfort of complacency. Theirs is a legacy of faith and love that I hope I can transmit, or at least offer, to the next generation of Friedmans. And I hope I can do so in the same gentle manner in which my parents remind me that a good way to begin the transmission process is to end my singlehood. Occasionally, though, I wonder still if my own faith hinges on and draws its strength solely not from my parents unimaginably painful odyssey of deliverance, but from the way they have dealt with it. Perhaps, I am resting on their spiritual efforts. In Talmudic fashion I reason, a fortiori, that if they still believe, then I, who grew up in relative affluence, attending summer camps in the Poconos and annual holiday vacationing in Israel, surely must have reason to believe. So I try to deconstruct my faith, but the results are as disappointing as those of a recent attempt to intellectualize love after an ambivalent breakup. I immerse myself in the writings of Rabbi Soloveitchick, Kierkegard, Frued, Erich Fromm and Jane Austen. On the train to work a friend catches me red-handed, and a little red-faced, poring over an advice column in Cosmopolitan. Satisfying biological urges, providing for evolutionary and other material needs, companionship, emotional intimacy, stability and social order these are the underpinnings of love. Ultimately these explanations arent compelling and leave one less than satisfied. But beneath all the layers of academic and popular analysis, there remains a precious, hidden core to both love and faith. In my family and other relationships, Ive come to realize that I love someone not only because we need or complement each other, for the utility of who they are to me, but because of whom they are to themselves. To where does this analysis lead? While it seems the most fitting model for the religious faith experience is the experience of love, and both are the pillars of existence from a Jewish existential perspective, the mystery remains. The source of love and faith, it seems, is faith itself. My father is sympathetic to these continuing struggles. Yours is a difficult generation, he once told me, smiling warmly. In a strange way his words comfort me, even as I ponder their irony, considering all that he has endured. But this is his shorthand for our post-war struggles with modern American secularism, individualism, materialism and the plethora of choices and opportunities that relative affluence and an open society offer us. How these phenomena affect our ability to connect to G-d and to each other is the difficulty my father refers to and I am relieved by his awareness. But his words also empower me. I learn to cut myself some slack. Though Ive grown up in incomparably better circumstances than my parents, this new world, with all its unprecedented excesses and distractions, has presented its own set of unique challenges to my faith and give me ample opportunity to make it my own.