Sermons
“Atonement and the Pianist: When Survival Is Not Enough”
“Atonement and the Pianist: When Survival Is Not Enough”
A sermon for the Jewish High Holy Days
By Charles Blustein Ortman
September 28, 2002
At The Unitarian Church of Montclair
67 Church Street Montclair, New Jersey 07042
973-744-6276 www.uumontclair.org
“Le shana tovah tikatevu.” “May you be inscribed for a good year in the Book of Life.” This is the traditional Jewish greeting from Rosh Ha-Shona, the New Year, which began this past Friday evening and runs through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which starts at sunset one week from this evening. During this time, Jewish people around the world observe and celebrate the season of fasting, penitence and atonement at this, the beginning of the Jewish New Year, 5764. These are the High Holy Days. Many of us in this congregation come directly out of the Jewish tradition; some of us are not quite so directly related to it, and others, not at all. In our Principles and Purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association, our living tradition which we share draws from many sources. We especially claim our heritage from Jewish, Christian, Humanist and Earth-Centered founda-tions. It’s our practice in the liberal tradition to celebrate these sources that have fed our own tradition, and to recognize the universal values inherent in their themes. And so, today we turn to the Jewish tradition and the message of the High Holy Days to consider the value of its theme as it relates to us in our time and place in the course of the world.
A danger in drawing from other traditions is the risk of inappropriately adopting elements of those traditions. It's not our attempt here to pretend that we’re all Jewish for the day. It is the attempt though, to recognize that these High Holy Days are of major significance in the Jewish year, that they carry valuable lessons for us all about Atonement.
I’m going to cast out a few threads, here at the onset, and hope to weave them together into a meaningful fabric – perhaps something like the prayer shawl worn over the head of the rabbis at High Holy Day services. So the first strand is that of these High Holy Days. The second is from a story about ritual that comes out of olden days of the Jewish tradition. The story has many variations.
In this one there is an old rabbi who had the responsibility, when his people were in any kind of grave danger, of going into the forest to perform a certain ritual. There in the forest he would go to a special place, and recite particular prayers, and he would light a special candle for deliver-ance. Each time that the rabbi performed these acts the people were removed from danger. One day, as we all will, the rabbi died.
His successor knew of the special place in the forest, and he knew about lighting the candle, but he could not remember the exact prayers. So when he felt that his people were endangered, he would go and do what he could remember. And somehow it was sufficient. This rabbi, too, was eventually gathered to his ancestors and in time there was yet another new rabbi.
And then his time came, and there was another disaster that threatened the people. This newest rabbi knew of the forest, but he did not know the special place in it. In any case he had forgotten all the particular prayers, but he lit the candle anyway. And somehow it was sufficient and the people were spared. What we learn from the story is that being sufficient meant being persis-tently faithful, even when faith and ritual seemed meaningless. In time, just being faithfully per-sistent can be enough to get us through the day.
And so let’s imagine these two themes – the High Holy Days and this story about ritual – as the warp fibers, the vertical strands of the fabric we’re weaving. And for the woof, the strands that run side to side, let’s weave in threads from the contemporary story of our day, The Pianist. I should quickly point out that there are two stories of the The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman. One is the award winning movie directed by Roman Polanski, the other the actual autobiography published just before Mr. Szpilman’s death in 1999. While the two stories are nearly identical in many ways there is a very significant difference between them.
I’m sure many of you saw the movie in which Adrien Brody portrays Wladyslaw Szpilman with such artful depth that he won this year’s Academy Award for Best Actor. For those of you who didn’t see it, the movie, a stunning achievement of cinematography, portrays a story of survival against the backdrop of one of the last century’s more horrific episodes of humanity’s inhuman-ity. The Nazi holocaust, set here in Poland, finds Szpilman at the beginning of the film playing piano over Polish radio while all around him the city of Warsaw is being bombed. The young concert pianist lives with his parents, his two sisters, and a brother.
The Szpilman family at first is quite defiant in the wake of the news of the German occupation. They quickly learn that any hope of survival is dependent on their ability to follow the strict and absurd and deadly serious rules of the Nazis. At first their home is already inside the ghetto but they are soon forced to move, anyway, into a much smaller and poorer apartment. Wladyslaw, at least for a while, is able to provide income for his family by playing piano in a Jewish restaurant.
One day the family is lined up to be sent to a concentration camp. Wladyslaw is pulled from the line by a Jewish guard but the other family members are loaded onto the train, never to be seen again. Szpilman is put on a work crew as a laborer building the wall that separates the ghetto from the rest of Warsaw. Later on he gets an indoor job as a worker in a storehouse where he becomes involved in smuggling guns into the ghetto. Many times over he barely avoids being murdered on the spot and without provocation. Eventually though, he escapes and through the kindness of strangers and others that he barely even knows, he is kept alive and hidden in various apartments not far from the ghetto.
As the Russians press closer to Warsaw, the Germans begin to systematically destroy what is left of the city. As the building he is hiding in is set ablaze, Szpilman takes flight out a back win-dow, this time fleeing back into what had been the ghetto. By this time the area had become the ghost town of the half million Jews who had either been murdered, or sent to their deaths from there. Half starved, he finds a building to hide in among the ruins. Here he is discovered by a German officer and once again Szpilman thinks he is about to be murdered. But when the officer learns that Szpilman is a pianist, he has him play what turns out to be a beautiful piece by Cho-pin. The officer spares his life and at his own considerable risk keeps Szpilman alive by hiding and feeding him throughout the remainder of the occupation.
The movie is an incredible depiction of Wladyslaw Szpilman’s story. It is an extraordinary story of survival and, when I saw it this past summer, I knew that it would become the centerpiece of this High Holy Day service. But it may not be so for the reasons you might think.
When I left the theater, I was quite disappointed in the movie. Survival wasn’t enough. The story I had watched was about an extremely talented young musician whose life, like those of his family’s and of other European Jewry, had been viciously shred to pieces. The film showed that he coweringly hid from view as his family was put on the death train. It showed him compli-antly obeying orders from Jewish leaders in the smuggling of arms into the ghetto. It showed that he depended upon several others to hide and feed him - quite at their own very serious peril – in order to keep him alive. The film showed him passively watching out of his apartment win-dow across the street into the ghetto, as his people were all massacred in the rebellion. And fi-nally it showed the German officer take pity on him and, again with great risk, keep him alive.
At the end of the film, I, too, could only take pity. I wanted a hero and what I got was a survivor who had been responsible for no one else, but only for his own survival. There had been no re-demption – nothing to turn his experience from his having been acted upon to his acting upon the world in some way to promote a better world. It was a story only about survival.
It may be too tall an order to expect more from someone going through the ordeals that were por-trayed. Is there any crime in being merely a survivor? I hope not. It’s a truly incredible thing that Szpilman could survive those horrors and somehow live to the age of 88. It is hardly a crime, but it’s a story about getting by, not about inspiration. And sometimes shouldn’t we ask, is survival enough?
Here we have this major motion picture in which the lead character is made out to be a hero in every respect except in content. So I had to read the autobiography to see if the movie was true to its source. What did I learn? Of course, it was not true. In many ways, it was. In many ways it was the very same story. What was missing from it though was all of the context and the con-tent that connected Wladyslaw Szpilman with the people and the events around him.
Perhaps he was not a Victor Frankl or an Oscar Schindler, but he was Wladyslaw Szpilman. And he was not there only for himself. That’s why I chose the reading from the postscript of his book for this morning, to show that he was indeed deeply connected to his people. For me, at least, to be a hero is hardly enough reason to promote emulation. For cultural narrative, survival needs to be redeemed by meaning. It is connection that gives the story meaning.
In his own version he was destroyed by the departure of his family. He was not compliant but actively engaged in the arms smuggling that led up to the ghetto revolt. Yes, he fled the ghetto before the revolt had begun, but his survival was no more guaranteed on the path he took than if he’d stayed inside – I can assure you that I don’t know what I might have done in his place. And, yes, he did put others at risk by depending on their protection, but from his own account, I get the feeling that if the tables were turned he would do the same as those who had come to his aid.
The details of the stories are quite similar and yet in one there is a sense of redemption and in the other there is not. And so, in preparation for this sermon, I I found myself wondering, why? First of all, why was it I had originally thought that this would be a good subject for this serman? But more important, why the discrepancy between these stories? Why would the big deal, Hol-lywood production of this narrative so highly celebrate a story of merely survival?
The answer that I’ve come up with, at least so far, is that this story is not about the culture of the World War II era. It’s about the culture of this, our day. Survival is largely about self-centeredness and we live in an age which definitely encourages self-centeredness. And we might even take that thought a step further to suggest that we are even encouraged to pursue our self-interests so that we might not notice the very dire straights of the world around us: the environ-ment, the economy, and the state of international relations.
The movie portrayed Wladyslaw Szpilman’s plight as somehow separate from the plight of the other 500,000 Jews who had lived and died in the Warsaw Ghetto. It promoted his survival, not only as a miraculous personal story of survival, but really as a triumph of the age. And we know, even with the hundreds and thousands of stories of personal survival that came out of it, the holocaust was not a triumph of the age but was one of the darkest chapters in modern history. But these were the triumphs of individual human beings, not of humankind.
Again 50 years later, the storm clouds are gathering and we, too, find ourselves in such a time of enormous and ominous potential. Halfway around the world Africans slaughter Africans, Arabs slaughter Jews and Jews slaughter Arabs. Half way around the world America is deeply engaged in a war begun of questionable cause and with the prospect of a dubious outcome.
At home we are assured that there is little of interest beyond our self-absorbed satisfactions. We have plenty of oil despite its impending depletion and the unending destruction its use has on the atmosphere. We have lots of nice clothes and good food, even if the children who make those clothes wear rags and go hungry. We have plenty to read and entertain ourselves with, even though 27% of adults in the world are illiterate and 98% of those people live in developing coun-tries. We are generally safe and fed and warm, even though millions of people around the world are threatened by starvation, AIDS, warfare, and other forms of death by unnatural causes.
Some of our politicians, our movies and other cultural media assure us of our singular impor-tance in the history of the world. When we believe these messages, we continue to consider only our own survival and we fail to be connected to the wider story unfolding around us. As long as we remain self-absorbed, the world, will continue to be imperiled. What we fail to recognize is that, just as Szpilman was a part of his world we are also a part of ours. And so in the long view our well being, and more likely that of our children, is just as endangered as anyone else’s. Rabbi William Rosenau wrote of Rosh Ha-Shona in 1929 that, “God is said to sit in judgment over individuals and [over] nations.”
Somehow in the midst of all our arrogance, we come upon Rosh Ha-Shona and we are offered this story and this tradition and this moment in our year that reminds us to take stock of our lives, as individuals, as congregations, and as nations. We are asked to take stock of what we have done. And we’re asked to deeply question ourselves. Have our actions served only ourselves, or have they also served our neighbors? Have we served our world? And have we served the larg-est sense of goodness that we might imagine?
While the culture around us asks us not to imagine goodness on a very comprehensive scale somehow our religious instincts challenge us to do just the opposite and to imagine goodness on the grandest scale and within the greatest common good. Even if we have forgotten how.
It doesn’t matter if we know the sacred location, the sacred words, and the sacred ritual acts. It matters that we are persistent. It matters that we are willing to search our hearts to find the errors of our ways. It matters that we are willing to stand up to whomever or whichever forces try to convince us of our self-importance and the lack of value in others – any others. It matters that we seek atonement and make things right for whomever we have failed, as individuals, as com-munities, and as a nation.
There is one story of redemption and atonement at the end of, The Pianist, where I like the movie version best. The last time the German officer comes to bring Szpilman food and clothing, as the Russians are closing in, Szpilman says, “Thank you.”
And the German responds, “Don’t thank me. Thank God… It’s God’s will for us to live.”
I don’t know how you imagine God or not-God, but I imagine that it is the will of the Spirit of Life that wants for us to live. What we do to serve Life will help to get our names inscribed into the Book of Life. What we do to impede that Spirit, those are the sins for which we must atone.
We have been weaving a cloth this morning, something like a prayer shawl. It’s not a prayer shawl though, and as your minister, I do not cover my head with it like the Rabbi to pray to God on your behalf. Instead, I unfold it for you, for us all to hold for a moment, for us all to take a look, to see if it suits or fits us, or if it does not. Today, as Unitarian Universalists, we ponder the question of atonement; of making right what has been wrong. We are encouraged by this day to use our hearts and our minds to search our actions and those of our nation to see how they have connected or disconnected us from our fellow beings and from our world. And then to make things right.
It doesn’t matter if we know the sacred location, or words, or actions if we are persistent, if we are faithful. For in time just being faithfully persistent we will know what to do. And it will get us through the day and lead us with hope to the next day that is waiting. Le shana tovah tikatevu.