You Are My Witness: The Living Words of Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

INTRODUCTION

EPIGRAPH

PART ONE: FAITH

PART TWO: CONFRONTING GOD IN EVENTS

PART THREE: WAR AND PEACE

PART FOUR: PRAY, DREAM, REMEMBER

PART FIVE: DAYS OF AWE

PART SIX: THE LESSONS OF ARGENTINA

EPILOGUE

EDITOR’S NOTE

FIRST-LINE INDEX

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

In the late summer of 1985, a relatively unknown rabbi came to New York to take over an old and fading Upper West Side synagogue. Congregation B’nai Jeshurun had had a long history, but a sad present. It had so shrunk in size that it was difficult to get a minyan on Saturday morning, and the building was in such disrepair that the rabbi sat at a card table in the hallway, and carried rolls of quarters to work each day so he could make his calls on the pay phone there.

The calls Rabbi Marshall Meyer made were heard. And within a few years he had created the fastest growing and liveliest synagogue in New York. He was also in the process of transforming American Judaism.

Seeing the sorry state of affairs in New York City, with its murder rate, homelessness, and poverty, Rabbi Meyer used his pulpit every Saturday to rage against the cruelties of the time. He immediately teamed up with Rev. William Sloane Coffin and Bishop Paul Moore to address these problems. One morning the three of them were protesting globalization at the Wall Street headquarters of an international bank. They laid their bodies down in front of the great bank doorway. A policeman recognized one of them. Bishop Moore, he said, I can’t arrest you. Could you and your friends please get up? They sheepishly got up, but their efforts never stopped.

Rabbi Meyer was relatively unknown in America, but in Argentina he was a hero. When he and his wife Naomi arrived in 1959, they planned to spend a couple of years abroad and then come home. But the Latin American Jewish community was in need of leadership, and Rabbi Meyer did not shy away. They founded a conservative synagogue; they began a summer camp for Jewish kids. Rabbi Meyer founded the first Rabbinical Seminary in Latin America, and began a Jewish publishing company, editing and translating into Spanish prayer books and the great works of Jewish culture.

From the start, in Argentina, human rights was at the top of his agenda, but Rabbi Meyer heard the call when the military took over the country and began its dirty war. He was a lonely voice against the government, preaching against the dictatorship, welcoming the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo into his synagogue at great risk, and visiting the prisons weekly. He ran a virtual underground railroad, helping people escape the country, hiding others until they could get out, working tirelessly to locate the disappeared. He spoke out at every opportunity; his life was constantly threatened and his wife was advised to take the children home to America.

They stayed, and when Raúl Alfonsín was elected President of Argentina, Rabbi Meyer was the only non-Argentine appointed to the Committee for the Disappeared. He received the country’s highest medal bestowed on a non-Argentine. He is still a hero there and in Israel.

So it was with this background that Rabbi Meyer sat in the hallway of the empty synagogue, to start the process of rebuilding B’nai Jeshurun. With his magnificent voice, his prophetic vision, and his hatred of injustice, Rabbi Meyer and his young student and colleague, Rolando Matalon, were spiritual magnets. People flocked to B’nai Jeshurun for the beautiful musical Friday night services and for the intense theological conversations held on Saturday mornings. Nothing could frighten Rabbi Meyer, and nothing could stop him from speaking his mind about difficult and unpleasant problems. The people came, and then more came. The synagogue ceiling fell down and they moved to a large church around the corner. The church filled, and then another. The hunger for Rabbi Meyer’s message—a painful and unsettling prophetic message—continued. And then, in 1993, he died.

This book began on the last day of Marshall Meyer’s shiva, a cold January morning in 1994. It seemed to me impossible to let his words and his spirit be laid to final rest, but our hearts were too heavy to entertain such a project. Marshall’s papers were gathered and boxed, and sent to storage. Still, over the years, the project never died. As I began the sacred task of creating this book, I was startled by the power and relevance of his words. I felt as if I were encountering a burning bush on every page. This book is the result of my efforts to re-create Rabbi Meyer’s vision, so that it could once again inflame and inspire many, and infuriate some.

Rabbi Meyer had the habit, as many will remember, of going overboard in his admiration for your strengths. He had an annoying and adorable tendency to overrate you. You were the smartest, you were the best, the most powerful. Somehow that loving excess made you smarter, better, and more powerful. So the opportunity to create this book may be Marshall’s final gift to me, and I could not be more grateful.

Jane Isay

New York, 2003

In a time when man fights for his own existence, the spiritual light that emanates from Judaism must play a decisive role in the illumination of the western world. If the Jews are to serve society, we must return to the sources of our faith.

—Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer

PART ONE

FAITH

For Marshall Meyer, faith and struggle were synonymous. Faith was not simply given; it was never static; it was sometimes achieved through pain, love, or through action. He saw the never-ending search for faith as a great theme in the story of our lives. The Credos that appear here and later in this book were written for the High Holy Days in 1982 in Comunidad Bet El, Buenos Aires, Argentinia.

CREDO

I believe that a life lived without a faith that requires a total commitment is a one-dimensional, boring existence without passion.

I believe that there are moments and events which challenge the human being to such a degree that such moments and events appear to be attempts to make him or her lose all faith.

I believe that in precisely such moments and events, the human being must utilize all of his or her strength to once again generate the power to believe, to have faith, and to have confidence in love and in a future.

I believe that it is half the battle to believe and have faith in something.

I believe that it is a higher achievement to believe and have faith in someone.

I believe that the capacity to authentically confront life is the direct result of possessing genuine faith.

I believe that faith cannot exist without love. Nor without doubt.

I believe that every person in the world, in one moment or another, places his or her faith and confidence in another individual, and that only a select minority are capable of accepting the consequences of such commitment.

I believe that the most profound individual arrives at the conclusion that his capacity for faith in people and ideas derives ultimately from his faith in God.

I believe that the arsenal of a lasting faith in a better future is love between human beings; a love that is capable of outlasting anxieties and disillusionments, desperation and depression.

I believe that humanity must forge a genuine faith of commitment if it is to survive on this planet.

I believe that without faith in God, we as Jews will lose our reason for being and will no longer be witnesses bearing testimony.

Tsadik be’emunato yihyer. The Righteous shall live by virtue of their faith.

Amen

AMNESIA

In the mid-twentieth century, mankind is in a terrifying dilemma, because he has committed a terrible crime—he has played false to the purposes for which he has been created. His sin is that he has externalized that which must remain internal, and thus he has lost his identity. We are all suffering from a critical attack of amnesia. We have forgotten who we are and why we are living in this world. Our essential, our inner life of spirituality and holiness, has been bartered away for mass entertainment, cheap thrills, and the world of physical possessions.

FAITH IS BUILT SLOWLY

Faith is not a panacea for all of life’s pains. Often, it is precisely because of the solidity and strength of my faith that I am able to feel another’s pain more acutely. Faith is not a comfortable resting place to which I can repair in the face of life’s demands, but rather the strength I can marshal to respond to life’s demands. Faith is built slowly, cumulatively, brick by brick. If we are diligent and committed, we perhaps can build a wall of faith strong enough to allow ourselves to stand on the top and look out at life, able to make some sense of what at times seems so absurd.

How can one build a faith in God? If we are prepared to admit that faith in another human being requires ultimate risk and promises ultimate joy or abject disillusionment, how can anyone be expected to take this risk with God? What is required of us? How does one build such a faith? What do we do with our inevitable doubts? Faith in God is the most difficult of all faiths. Such faith changes lives and thunders in one’s soul; or, if you prefer, murmurs its existence in breaths of silence, in moments of spiritual ecstasy. This is the faith that makes life a polychromatic, multidimensional drama: sprinting ahead at one moment, falling down with a bruised heart the next.

THE NEVER-ENDING SEARCH FOR FAITH

We are accustomed to judging reality by our ability to touch it, measure it, photograph it, sell it, evaluate it, or exchange it for a newer model. But there are realities that defy physical dimensions. I would go so far as to say that those elements that most explain the very source and dynamic of our existence have no physical