Judaism in a Closet

Rabbi Jodie Gordon

Kol Nidre 5787

I want to tell you two stories tonight. One about a small town in Portugal. The other,  about Kol Nidrei itself.  But first, I need to introduce you to a man named Samuel Schwartz 

Samuel Schwartz was born in Poland in the late 1800s. He studied in yeshivas, and his father was part of the intellectual movement known as the Haskalah and an early supporter of Zionism. Schwartz became fascinated by languages, history, and the Jewish communities scattered across Europe and beyond. He eventually studied in Paris at the School of Mines, and became a mining engineer by profession. And then he traveled. Azerbaijan. Africa. Poland. Great Britain. Italy. Spain. And eventually, Portugal.

It was in Portugal that something happened that changed the course of his life.

A Christian merchant warned Schwartz not to do business with a particular man. And when Schwartz asked why, the merchant said: “it is enough for me to tell you that he is a Jew.” That sentence caught Schwartz's attention. Because this was Portugal in the early twentieth century, centuries after the Inquisition had supposedly erased Jewish life from the country. Schwartz began to wonder: What if it hadn't?

And so in 1917, Schwartz made the effort to meet that particular man-  Baltazar Pereira de Sousa. De Sousa eventually confessed to him that he was of Jewish descent and that his family in the small Portuguese town of Belmonte was still secretly practicing Judaism. Schwartz went to Belmonte. and perhaps unsurprisingly, the people there did not immediately trust him. Why would they? For generations, Jewish identity in Belmonte had been something dangerous. It was not something to announce, or talk about publicly, certainly not with strangers. 

Schwartz had to prove that he was one of them. And so one summer evening, he went before one of the priestesses of the community- I would pause here to note that by and large it was women who fortified and passed down Jewish practice and wisdom– and he recited Shema. And when he came to the word “Adonai,” this elderly woman covered her face and said: “He knows the word of the Lord. He is one of us.”

And suddenly, this stranger from Poland was no longer a stranger. He was Jewish.

Schwartz spent years learning about the community. Eventually, he published his research, documenting a Jewish community that had survived for centuries in one of the most unlikely places imaginable in a book called The New Christians in Portugal in the 20th Century in 1925.

This past summer, Josh and I went to Belmonte. It was a hot August afternoon when we arrived. We walked into this tiny town square and saw a giant menorah. There were shops where Hebrew was the shared language between us and the shopkeeper. One shopkeeper showed us her mother’s hand embroidered challah covers, and told us that her brother had made aliyah to Tiberias.  We visited the Jewish Museum of Belmonte- an extraordinary little museum, telling the story of this community that survived in the shadows for hundreds of years. Standing in Belmonte, I had a feeling as though I had stepped sideways out of Jewish history and into another Jewish world. 

But Belmonte was not a fantasy.

And what was even more remarkable was that what had survived there was not some perfectly preserved version of the Judaism of the past. It was something much more unique. Judaism had survived there by changing. It had survived without rabbis, a synagogue, or a Jewish school.

The Jews of Belmonte had survived, for hundreds of years, hidden away without any of the ordinary institutions that we tend to think of as necessary for Jewish life.

It survived in kitchens and bedrooms.

It endured in women's memories, whispered to their daughters and granddaughters. 

It weathered the winds of history  through candles hidden inside closets and cabinets.

It survived in Passover observance, in fasting on Yom Kippur and the Fast of Esther, in circumcision and ritual slaughter, in fragments of Hebrew prayer.

And it survived in stories.

Some of those practices changed over the centuries. Some were forgotten or adapted. Some became mixed with the Catholic world around them. There were prayers with Hebrew words alongside Portuguese words and even Catholic references. Matzah could be called pão santo—holy bread. And secrecy itself became part of the tradition. At first, secrecy was simply a way to survive. Eventually, secrecy became part of what it meant to be Jewish. That is what stayed with me.

I think we sometimes imagine Jewish tradition as something that is passed down intact.

As though one generation receives it, puts it carefully into a box, and hands the same box to the next generation. But that is not how memory works.

We forget.

We improvise and adapt.

We misunderstand.

We make something our own.

And somehow, if we are lucky, something makes it through.

So I want to ask a very simple question tonight:

How does a people survive and for what purpose? 

What is the smallest thing that can carry an entire tradition?

Is it a Torah?

A synagogue?

A rabbi?

A book?

A community?

Or could it be something much smaller?

A candle or a melody.

A word.

A recipe.

A story told by a grandmother.

A child who remembers something she doesn't yet understand.

Belmonte suggests that sometimes a tradition survives because one person remembers one small thing and then tells someone else. And perhaps that is what we are doing tonight, in our own way. 

Kol Nidre. Does any singular night on the Jewish calendar bear such a weighty reputation? The prayer that we call Kol Nidre has a murky history; they are words (and importantly, a melody) that seem to carry the weight of Sinai itself, and yet- it is much newer, and more complicated than that. 

There is a folk myth of sorts about Kol Nidre’s origins. It is believed to have been composed during the reign of Reccared 1, a sixth-century Visigoth king of Spain, who ordered the Jews to convert or face death. Spanish Jews chanted it when they gathered secretly to observe Yom Kippur; in that way, Kol Nidre was originally a cry of pain– an expression of grief at what it meant to commit apostasy. 

They did the same under Byzantine persecution in the 9th century, and again during the papal and Spanish Inquisitions of the 13th and 15th centuries. 

As Rabbi Alan Lew writes, “it sure corresponds very closely to the feel of the Kol Nidre service; the soul is in anguish because it has encountered a frightening obstacle to expressing itself. But it resolves to persevere, and in so doing finds its true voice.”

Kol Nidre offers us no soft landing—no build up. It is quite nearly the very first thing we do in this service, the evening before Yom Kippur. We have hardly settled into our seats before the opening arguments are made before a Beit Din convened on high:

בִּישִׁיבָה שֶׁל מַֽעְלָה בִישִׁיבָה שֶׁל מַֽטָּה אָֽנוּ מַתִּירִין לְהִתְפַּלֵּל עִם הָעֲבַרְיָנִים

“In a convocation of the heavenly court, and a convocation of the lower court, we hereby grant permission to pray with avaryonim– transgressors.”

But who are these avaryonim?

Translated most commonly as “transgressors,” (and sometimes as sinners) there is a persistent tradition that this word referred to Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity but continued to practice Judaism in secret—the Marranos of Spain and Portugal. This legal formula gave them a path into Yom Kippur that had integrity; forced as they were to live outwardly as Christians. 

Whether or not that is historically the origin of the word, it is a striking image with which to begin Yom Kippur. Before we say anything about our sins, before we ask God to forgive us, we make sure that everyone is allowed into the room:

Even the people whose Jewish lives are complicated and people whose relationship to Judaism has been hidden, fractured, or uncertain.

Even the people who, for whatever reason, don't know quite how to be here, and even, the so-called sinners.

And perhaps that is why the history of Kol Nidre feels so connected to the story of Belmonte.

Because the question isn't only: How did Judaism survive?

The question is also: Who gets to say, “I am one of us”?

Remember that moment when Samuel Schwartz recited Shema and the elderly woman covered her face and recognized him?

“He knows the word of the Lord. He is one of us.”

There is something profoundly moving about that moment. Judaism survived in Belmonte not because everyone possessed the whole tradition. They didn't. It survived because people carried pieces of it.

And then, when Schwartz arrived, they recognized something in him, and he recognized something in them.

That is part of what we are doing when we come into this room tonight.

We are not all coming here with the same Judaism.

We don't have the same memories or the same beliefs.

We don't have the same relationship to Hebrew, to prayer, to God, or even to the Jewish community. And yet we are here together.

Rabbi Larry Hoffman gives me a beautiful way into this.

He writes that tonight, we are not simply remembering.

“We tonight are memories in the making.”

That means that this night is not only about the people who came before us.

It is about the people we are becoming for those who come after us.

We are carrying something forward—even if what we carry is incomplete.

Even if we don't understand all of it.

Even if our Judaism looks different from our parents' Judaism, or our grandparents' Judaism.

Because perhaps Judaism has always survived this way.

Not perfectly.

Not intact.

But through people who carry something they have received and, somehow, manage to pass it on.

And perhaps that is part of the answer to the question of how a people survives.

We show up. We sit next to one another.

We hear the same melody. We say words that people said before we were born.

And then, without necessarily realizing it, we become part of the chain.

Hoffman writes about “warming seats for others who will remember us / In some Kol Nidrei they shall hear when we are gone.”

That is an extraordinary way to think about this night. What will Kol Nidre sound like to someone who hasn't been born yet?

Will they know the words?

Will they understand the theology?

Will they know why we stand?

Maybe.

But maybe not.

Maybe they will remember a melody.

Maybe they will remember sitting next to a parent or grandparent.

Maybe they will remember that once a year, there was a night when everything stopped and their family came here.

We do not know what our descendants will remember, and yet- we try to make durable memories to hand down anyway. We are ancestors in the making. 

There are different ways we can understand what liturgy means–there is the meaning the tradition gives us, and then there is the meaning that happens when those words encounter an actual human life.

Kol Nidre has its history. It has its legal language, its arguments, its complicated origins. But then we hear it. And suddenly it belongs to this particular night of our lives.That is the strange thing about inherited prayer: we receive words that existed long before us, and somehow they become capable of telling the truth about us.

Maybe that is what Hoffman means when he writes, “It is not the text, then, but the people who pray it that should concern us.”

The text is fixed. We are not.

So we bring ourselves to Kol Nidre, and for a moment we let the distance between who we are and who we meant to be become visible. And that is a vulnerable place to stand. But perhaps we need to stand there.

Because Yom Kippur cannot really begin until we are willing to be unsettled by our own lives. Until we can admit that the stories we tell about ourselves are incomplete. That we have hurt people. That we have been hurt. That there are things we still hope to repair.

Kol Nidre doesn't solve any of that. It simply opens the door. And for a few minutes, we have to decide whether we are willing to walk through it.

There is a phrase Rabbi Angela Buchdahl uses to describe Kol Nidre, which is “sacred homecoming”. Homecoming does not necessarily mean going back to exactly the place you left. You cannot go home unchanged. And you cannot return to a Judaism that existed exactly as it did before.

Belmonte teaches us that.

The Jews of Belmonte did not preserve some pristine Judaism untouched by history.

They carried what they could. 

And when they eventually came back into contact with the wider Jewish world, they had to figure out what it meant to return.

Because many of us come to Judaism through some kind of return.

Some of us return after childhood or college. For some of us, it’s because we have children.

Maybe we return because someone we loved died, or because we suddenly realize that something we thought was insignificant was actually holding us to generations of our family.

And sometimes we return without knowing exactly what we are returning to.

But perhaps sacred homecoming is not about recovering the past. Perhaps it is about carrying something from the past into a future our ancestors could never have imagined.

Standing in Belmonte on that hot day in August, I kept trying to put my finger on what it was that I found so remarkable. Belmonte is up in the mountains, a small hidden gem of a town, with fewer than 6000 residents. In that little town square, in front of the store called Casa Judaira, was a menorah. Across from the menorah, another shop, with the words Shalom and little hamsas painted in blue around the door frame. Down the street, a gallery, with “Bring them home now” stickers still on the window and Judaic art for sale. A little further down, the synagogue: Sinagoga bet Eliyahu, built and dedicated in 1996, nearly five hundred years after the Jews of Belmonte first went into hiding. 

And in thinking about it, I see that the real miracle of Belmonte is not that Judaism remained unchanged.The miracle is that something remained: something small enough to hide, and strong and precious enough to survive. 

A word. A prayer. A candle. A story. A melody.

And then, five hundred years later, something remarkable happened.

The people of Belmonte came out of hiding.

They built a synagogue. They put a menorah in the town square.

They put Shalom on their doors. They allowed themselves to be seen.

Standing there that afternoon, I kept thinking about that elderly woman who heard Samuel Schwartz say “Adonai” and covered her face.

“He knows the word of the Lord. He is one of us.”

For centuries, that sentence had been dangerous.And now, in Belmonte, it could be said out loud. I think that is what I want to hold onto tonight.Because we often talk about Jewish survival as though the goal is simply to make sure that Judaism doesn't disappear. But survival is not the same thing as keeping something alive.

At some point, something that has been hidden has to be spoken.

We received a Judaism that was already changed by everyone who carried it before us. We will change it too. Our children will change it again. That is not a failure of transmission.

That is transmission.

The question is not whether we will preserve Judaism exactly as we received it.

We won't.

The question is whether we will carry enough of it that someone after us can recognize it.

Enough for them to hear a melody and know that it belongs to them.

Enough for them to light a candle and wonder who lit it before them.

Enough for them to walk into a synagogue on a night like this and feel, even if they can't explain why:I know this. I am one of us.

That is what Samuel Schwartz discovered in Belmonte.

And perhaps that is what we are doing here tonight.

We are taking our place in a story that began long before us and, God willing, will continue long after us. We don't know what will survive us. We don't know which words our grandchildren will remember, or which melodies will still be sung, or what Judaism will look like a hundred years from now.

But we know something will depend on us.Not everything. Just something.Something we carry.Something we love enough to hand forward.

So tonight, after we have already heard Kol Nidre, after the melody has done whatever it has done to each of us, I want to leave you with one question.

Not only:

What do I need to let go of?

But:

What will you carry, and who will you hand it to? 

Because someday, we will be the people someone else remembers.Someday, someone will sit in a room like this and hear a melody we have helped carry to them.And they may not know our names.They may not know our stories. They may not know exactly what we believed.

But if we have done our work, they will recognize something.

And perhaps, somewhere in that recognition, they will hear the echo of a woman in Belmonte, five hundred years ago, who heard one Jewish word spoken aloud and said:

He is one of us.

May we be worthy of being recognized.

And may we leave behind enough for those who come after us to recognize themselves.