What possessions does my family treasure? Treasure is a strong word, with powerful emotional connotations. For me, treasure is not only something cherished, it is an object that has some quality that makes it rare and irreplaceable. As I think is the case with most people, my family treasures objects from our past, objects that are seen as their heritage. The item that instantly came to my mind was my great-grandfather Leo’s tanakh.
“Tanakh” is an acronym composed of the first letter of Judaism’s divisions of the Old Testament. It comes from “Teaching” (Torah), “Prophets” (Nevi’im), and “Writings” (Ketuvim). A tanakh is an extremely common book, just like the Bible; they’re everywhere. So what makes ours special? To begin with, Leo’s tanakh is incredibly old -- well over 100 years. It’s very small -- about 5” by 7” -- but very thick; I can hardly hold it in one hand. Leo’s tanakh also has that Vogue mystical book look: dark yellowing pages, that beloved musty smell, warped pages from water exposure, peeling brown covers missing small chunks around the edges. And of course the biggest appeal of them all: it’s written in a language I can’t read and don’t (yet) understand. This is Indiana Jones level for a six year old, and I still have a reverence for the tanakh today.
Yet when my family discovered the book, our first emotion was surprise that Leo had a tanakh in the first place -- nevermind one that he brought with him everywhere. As a committed atheist and Communist, we would never have expected him to carry a religious book. Why did Leo keep the book with him? It’s a question I pondered a lot out of simple curiosity when I was younger. Now the question resonates more as I’m making important life decisions, such as what colleges I want to go to, and what I’m looking for there. These concerns are quite ordinary and far removed from ancient Jewish texts of the Old World. But in making these decisions I’ve been thinking a lot about how Judaism fits into my life right now, how I want it to work in the future, and how important a factor it is to me in the college search. For example, Notre Dame is a great school, 18 on the national list. On the other hand, 89% of the students are Christian. I need to decide how much statistics like these mean to me, and how much they will influence my decisions.
For both Leo and I, our schools and our Jewish identity were linked. It turns out that Leo got his tanakh when he was three years old (around 1898) on his first day of cheyder, a religious school that all Jewish boys went to. When Leo was fifteen -- younger than we are currently -- he saw the Romanian peasant uprising brutally beaten down by the monarchy, a sight that turned him into a revolutionary and an atheist. He then left the religious school to work in his father’s woodshop, a choice that hurt his father, who was a learned man and bible scholar, and wanted Leo to become a rabbi. Instead, Leo became a historian. Although he wasn’t religious, he still loved the tanakh, and occasionally read the Prophets. This book stayed with him his entire life, from his journey to Austria as a young man, his midnight flight from Berlin to Prague after Hitler took power, his years in the US, then Mexico, then Israel, and then his return to Austria after World War II -- another decision I have spent a long time trying to understand.
Leo traveled the entire world, and during all this time kept with him the tanakh he received when he was three, and didn’t believe in. His son, Friedrich, also carried the tanakh when he grew up, despite being an atheist. For a long time I wondered about Leo’s attachment to the tanakh. How could he treasure something so much that he did not believe in? And then I started asking myself questions. Why is reading from the Torah important to me, and why do I love Shabbat services, even though I don’t believe everything they say? I think that for both Leo and I, these practices formed a link to the past (albeit a rather imagined/recreated “past” for me), and were our way of staying connected with the Jewish tradition. The sense of community and history we revisit through these practices outweighs the practical teachings themselves. We may neither of us believe in God, but as the saying goes, we believe in the Jewish people.
PS: Here are some photos:
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