Eighty-six years ago this weekend was the “Night of Broken Glass”, Kristallnacht, across Germany. Over two days thousands of Jewish businesses, public institutions and synagogues were vandalized and destroyed and ninety one Jews were murdered. The country’s face had already been marred by the ascent of open hatred toward Jews and dedication to a society built on false racial superiority. Now a bloody gash across the surface of Germany made clear the sickening extent to which the Nazis would make good on their forthright promises. It was well past the time for Jews to leave.
It is hard not to return to that day when watching the scene in Amsterdam play out over these last hours. A mob of predominantly Muslim Arab men chased, beat, stabbed and threw into the river tens of Israelis who had come to support Maccabi Tel Aviv in its match against the Dutch team Ajax. Many of the supporters shouted slurs and made despicable comments which might have been itself the story until the well-planned attack descended on the Israelis and menaced thousands of others in the city in what became a pogrom and a reminder that malice aforethought to attack Jews lives throughout the world.
This is the backdrop against which we read this week the story of another moment of leaving that stands out in the story of the Jewish people but in what seems to be a very different way.
Lech L’cha, “Get yourself out!” is the Torah portion in which the heretofore unknown Avram (soon to be Avraham) is told by G*d to leave his “land, his birthplace, his father’s home” to go to a land unknown, a land that would be shown to him. Most commonly the focus of this story is the unknown destination for which Avraham leaves. The blessing of the land and the promise of becoming the name by which nations throughout the world will bless each other. We think of the sacrifice of leaving so personally one’s only home, the place in which he comes, his very father’s house. But we do not often ask from what was he fleeing?
It turns out that the Sages in the midrash saw Avraham to be in mortal danger. His father’s house was a house in which idols were sold, his family tradition was idol worship and his nation was ruled by a tyrant named Nimrod, identified by the Sages as the builder of the Tower of Babel and ruler of what would be Mesopotamia the first great kingdom on earth. Avraham was the one who stood up and said that not only was there one true G*d, but Nimrod and his idols were empty and detested by the One who Created the earth. For this act of treachery Avraham was imprisoned by Nimrod and thrown into a furnace. The fires were lit and burned at a temperature that could melt earthenware. Avraham survived intact, walking out again. Then the call came, lech l’cha, get yourself out.
To be clear, none of that embellishment is in the Torah story itself, whose most salient feature is the complete lack of backstory, the silence about what Avraham believed and what he faced. Thinking about the story on this anniversary of Kristallnacht, however, emphasizes this version of the telling, the imprinting on Avraham’s journey of faith, the earliest story of hate of the people who would be Israel.
I still prefer the other way. The tale of awakening in which a man and a woman, Sarah and Avraham, discover that their world drips with iniquity and decide to give up everything they have to answer G*d’s call to follow a path of blessing. Yet at least this Shabbat, with unsettling echoes of decades past, my thoughts turn to those who never thought they would be abandoned by their country of their birth and the neighbors who lived next to their father’s house. Of the leaving of those who were able to leave, the forcing away of those who did not. The furnace in which no miracles occurred.
On those terrible days the story was not about the blessings on future lands, but the loss of the ground beneath the feet of the Jews. The persistence of the tyranny of Nimrod and the new call to leave for a land yet to be shown.
May we never forget the lives shattered on the night of broken glass and the lives lived on the journey that was to come.