
I began to weep as I stood in the kitchen that day, and
heard the news of yet another school shooting. This one in Texas, ten dead,
eight students and two teachers. Such had been that painful week for all of us,
for this poor, sorrowing world, for this nation, sick in the grip of its
plague. So too had the week began, with far away gunfire ever so close, sixty
Palestinians dead on the Gaza border, the grip of plague in Israel too.
Oblivion seemed to reign in the face of such loss of life, while people from
another planet partied in Jerusalem on the opening of the American Embassy,
blood on their hands, on our hands.
It was the prelude to Shavuous, the feast of weeks, second
of the year’s three harvest festivals that mark the seasons in the Jewish
calendar. It was the Torah portion of
Bamidbar/In
the Desert, the turning of Torah calling us to turn, to seek a new way. We
come to Sinai and are reminded of the greatest unity that ever joined the
Jewish people as one, in that moment when the Torah was given and we spoke with
one voice and said,
na’aseh v’nishma/we
will do and we will understand. We are still trying to learn what to do,
what it means to live the values of Torah, to live human values, humane values,
still waiting to understand, waiting for the way to open. Through acts of love
and compassion, we are touched by intimations of what it means to love our
neighbor as ourselves, not to oppress or mistreat the stranger, to provide for
the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the most vulnerable among us, and so to be
holy as God, our God, is holy.

By doing, we come to understand. It is in the
way of means and ends, the nature of means determining the nature of the ends.

I had an intimation during that week of what it might mean
to act and only then to understand, receiving an unexpected gift, a moment of
pause in the midst of all the sorrow. It was from the beginning a bittersweet
evening, invited to a gathering of friends of the German Consul General to New
England, Mr. Ralf Horlemann, a gathering of those whom he had touched in his
time in Boston. My own life was touched deeply as part of the journey of twelve
rabbis to Germany two summers ago, Ralf our guide on a Journey of Remembrance
and Hope. Whenever I need a moment of catharsis I close my eyes and feel the
hot torrent of tears that poured down my face at Dachau, Ralf crying with us.
It was a transformative journey, one through which I will always be joined to
Ralf, son of a German soldier from then, and a Jew who had vowed never to go to
Germany.

Of people joined across divides, the gathering was held in
an art gallery, a Holocaust survivor’s tormented art upon the walls. After
words were spoken, words were then transcended as a string quartet of young
musicians lifted their instruments and began to play. Members of the Boston
Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, they were led by Maestro Benjamin Zander. It was
not a concert, but in effect a master class, the Maestro dancing among them,
singing the notes from memory, so loving and as enthralled as we were. Suddenly
he would stop the violinist, asking of her feelings in such a moment of loss of
which her instrument sang. And then the deeper feeling came through as bow
returned to strings, bringing tears to all of us. And to the cellist he said to
raise his eyebrows, show the surprise and magic of the music and the moment. He
emphasized the importance of the second violin, the message clear, that each
one has their own task and purpose, each one so needed for the gift of their
presence.
So the lessons continued to come, the bittersweet teachings
of the bittersweet gathering, sweetness somehow touching the bitterness of that
week. The Maestro spoke of these young musicians, from Russia, from Asia, from
North Carolina, joined across whatever might divide. “They all speak
Beethoven,” he said. He modeled the finest way of the teacher, how to correct
without hurting, doing so with such love, with such joy. Suddenly stopping the
music, he said how perfect it was, and then said, “that is what Motzart wrote,
but it’s not what he meant….” It was a lesson in Torah, the written Torah of
notes on paper, and the oral Torah of soul and spirit interpreting.

In sharing words of friendship with Ralf, the Maestro told
of his own father as a young man, a Jewish soldier in the German army of World
War I. He told of how his grandmother would send her son music scores that he
would bring to life in a place of death, giving wing to notes on paper, song
rising from the trenches. And now Maestro Zander has those scores, precious
reminders of hope, of a universal language, that one day the song of the human
heart might transcend inhumanity and violence. Then the whole world shall stand
as we did at Sinai, saying with one voice “we will do and we will understand….”
Rabbi Victor H. Reinstein
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