Miracle Update

005: Little Ripples

Sometimes synchronicities occur like little ripples riding to shore. For example, the morning after I posted my last entry (004: "There Once Was a World"), in which I mention congregation Emanu-El B'ne Jeshurun in Milwaukee, I was about to sit down to meditate, when the phone rang. It was a telemarketer. I went back to my chair. About 10 seconds later, the phone rang again. I almost didn't answer it but decided on impulse to pick it up. To my great surprise, it was the wife of Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman, my beloved childhood rabbi, who conducted my bat mitzvah at Temple Emanu-El nearly 50 years ago (find his remarkable autobiography here). Rabbi Friedman is 89 years old now, and was not able to make the call himself, but his wife wanted to thank me for the prayer book I sent him, so she just decided to pick up the phone, which I almost didn't answer . . .

Then this morning another ripple: After Shabbat services I was walking back to the parking lot when a young man I hadn't spoken to in a long time (I'll call him Rick) was walking behind me and called out my name. He asked me how I was doing. I told him that I was thinking about this morning's Torah portion—the part when Moses balks at God's assignment to speak to the people, but God tells him to just do it and God will tell him what to say.

I told Rick that I was thinking about this because I've been doing a lot of public speaking about my book lately, and I never know exactly what I'm going to say until I say it, and even when I carefully plan a talk, I often say something entirely different. Rick said he gives talks that way, too, and then asked me what my book was about. I told him about my being estranged from my son, Adam, for more than 11 years and then finding a 19th-century prayer book, called Hours of Devotion, that contained a prayer for a mother who was missing her son. I told him that within about six weeks of finding that book, Adam was back in my life—in part, because that prayer had given me the courage to reach out to him again.

"I was estranged from my mother for more than 11 years, too—12 years, actually," Rick said.

"Really?" I replied. Ever since the book came out four months ago, many people have confided their personal stories of estrangement, but virtually all of them have been parents, or relatives of parents. This is the first time I'd encountered a young person who went through what my son did—and under very similar circumstances.

He said he would read my book. I gave him my card. Maybe we'll talk. We'll let God tell us what to say.

004: "There Once Was a World"

The extraordinary story that led to the idea of this "Miracle Update" blog in the first place began with a simple phone call. My book was to be published in August 2007, and a few months earlier I had decided that one of the first places I wanted to visit was my childhood congregation, Emanu-El B'ne Jeshurun, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I had had the honor of being the first bat mitzvah. So I called the rabbi, Marc Berkson, to discuss that possibility. We hadn't talked for more than a few minutes when he said, "You know I've been to Lostice." Lostice (formerly Loschitz) is the small town in the Czech Republic where Fanny Neuda, author of "Hours of Devotion," was living with her husband, Rabbi Abraham Neuda, the rabbi of Lostice in the 1850s, when she wrote her book, the first full-length prayer book for Jewish women to be written by a woman.

"You've been to Lostice?" I asked with surprise. Lostice, nestled in the rolling hills of eastern Moravia, is so remote, I had to buy a detailed road map just to find it. "How is that?"

"My wife's family is from there," he replied.

"Really?!" We talked for a few more minutes until the full impact of the rabbi's statement struck me. "Excuse me," I said. "Let's back up a minute. Do you mean to tell me that you are the rabbi of my childhood synagogue, where I was the first bat mitzvah, and your wife's family just happens to be from the same small town where Fanny Neuda—the author of the book I'm about to publish—lived and worked?

"You should really talk to my wife," he replied.

A few days later, I was able to reach the rabbi's wife, Deborah Carter-Berkson, in the car, on her way to visit her mother, Edith Knopflmacher Carter, then aged 92 (she turned 93 this month) who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. After a few minutes of conversation, Debbie said, "You should really talk to my mother." To my delight, I immediately found Mrs. Carter to be one of the sharpest people of her generation I had ever spoken with (and I used to work in Leisure World!).

In preparation for our conversation, I was holding a copy of a booklet called "There Once Was a World," published by the Respect and Tolerance foundation of Lostice, an organization dedicated to preserving Jewish history and culture of the area. Although there isn't a single Jew remaining in the town, the 500-year Jewish history of the town will not be lost, thanks to this remarkable group. I had visited Lostice on a research trip in 2006, and the foundation was, and continues to be, extremely generous in assisting me with my research.

Without any prompting on my part, Mrs. Carter was able to tell me the names of at least half a dozen victims of the Holocaust from Lostice whom she remembered and whose names are recorded in the booklet. After our conversation, I immediately put the pamphlet into the mail to her, along with a flyer describing my forthcoming book. About a week later, I received this extraordinary message on my voice mail:

I just opened my mail and I found your very nice note, and I found the little booklet . . . "There Once Was a World," and to my greatest, greatest surprise I saw first thing, on the cover, a picture of my grandfather’s 70th birthday with my father, my mother, and the six siblings of my mother! It is just amazing! . . . And I can hardly believe it! How ever did you get that picture, because nobody in that picture is alive. There are only three left alive [in the family] . . . so I can hardly believe it.

And the other thing is about your book by Fanny Neuda . . . Fanny Neuda’s are the best prayers that any woman can have if she is really in need of some kind of help. I had one that my mother used to have, and I had it with me in the concentration camp [Thereisendstat]. And I had it on the way to Auschwitz, too, [but] when they chased me out of the wagons, they hit my hand, and this way I lost the book. . . . But [now I have] one from my mother-in-law. It is the nineteenth edition of the prayer book, the 1903 edition. So you can imagine how surprised I was with everything. it’s just unbelievable!

Edith Knopflmacher Carter survived Thereisenstadt, Auschwitz, and the long march from the concentration camps after liberation. She made her way back to her decimated hometown and waited for years for her husband to return after the war, only to learn that he was killed by an American bomb. And then, by the grace of God, she met and married her husband's first cousin, Debbie Carter-Berkson's father, and emigrated to America. Finding this remarkable survivor alive and well, and able to witness what is being done to preserve the history of her people in the place where she lived, seems to be a miracle made just for her.

Naturally, I couldn't wait to share this information with Ludek Stipl, director of Respect and Tolerance. He promptly called Mrs. Carter and gathered even more information, including details on her birthplace, which was a short distance from Lostice. This is the story he included in an e-mail message to me, dated October 1, 2007, after a trip there to see what he might find:

I went to visit the town Nemecka Huzova (formerly Deutschhause) where Mrs. Edith Carter Knopflmacher was born. The town is located in the former Sudetenland about 38 km [23 1/2 miles] from Lostice. It was populated mostly by Germans who were sent to Germany after 1945. Many houses remained empty for many years and later were torn down, some of them were repaired and modernized without much taste during 1970s. Not very nice place tell the truth. Soon I gave up any hope of discovering any useful site from the Knopflmacher era. Even houses in the historical town square were torn down . . . There is only one nice historical house on the square and most probably in the entire town. After going through the period photographs we realized to our great surprise that this is the house where Edith Knopflmacher was born and where she lived with her parents and siblings. Hard to believe but it is the truth.

In November, Mr. Stipl made a longer trip, from the Czech Republic to Cincinnati, to interview Mrs. Carter in person. He brought with him pictures of her native village, pictures of her family, and the clear assurance that her story would be documented not only in the several videotaped interviews that have already been conducted by Holocaust study centers in America but also that it will be preserved and remembered in the Czech language, in her own childhood home, in Lostice.

 

003: Einstein and Relative-ity

I decided to start off this weblog with a quote from Albert Einstein on miracles not only because I thought it was so appropos to the blog's title but also because it affirms my experience that everything changes depending on how you look at it. Little did I know that Einstein would show up in my research somewhere else, but more on that in a few minutes. . . .

Now that "Hours of Devotion" has an actual existence in the world and is no longer my "project," I rather miss the engrossing activity of working on it morning and night, turning Fanny Neuda's prayers into poems—which often felt like living inside the prayers themselves (what an amazing place of blessing that was!)—so I've taken up a related obsession: trying to locate Fanny's descendants. This is not an easy task after the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia and Austria, where Fanny and her family lived. But, thanks to the Internet, and the existence of searchable databases, more bits of information are starting to arise, literally, from the ashes.

A search of the Yad Vashem central database for Fanny's relatives immediately yielded results. Yad Vashem, located in Jerusalem, has collected and recorded the names and biographical details of as many as half of the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust. The names show up in one of two ways: either from documentation collected by various groups or from pages of testimony by a relative. The testimony pages are especially valuable for genealogical research because the forms often show the parents' names as well as the name and address of the person who filled out the form.

On my very first try I found the name Lili Neuda-Halpern (1882–1940) recorded in pages of testimony by two of her children, Lisa Jack (née Lotte Halpern) and William Ward (née Robert Halpern). Though recorded 15 years apart, they both tell essentially the same story: Lili's father was Moritz Neuda, Fanny's eldest son, and the family lived in Vienna before the war, where Fanny also lived in the 1880s, when she was in her sixties. This confirms my suspicion that Fanny moved from Lostice to Vienna to be near her grandchildren. Not only that, but in William Ward's testimony, he records his mother's profession as "writer and poet." Could Lili have have been inspired by her grandmother to become a writer as well?

Lili also had an illustrious mother, Rosa Neuda-Bernstein, a noted opera singer. I originally found Rosa's name in a discography last year but didn't know how she might be related to Fanny. Now, finding her listed as Lili's mother, and thus Fanny's daughter-in-law, I could start to form a picture of what a highly cultured, aristocratic life the family must have lived in Vienna in the late 19th century. I was especially thrilled to find this quote in Walter Frisch's 1990 book, Brahms and His World:

As far as I know, the well-regarded concert singer and voice teacher Frau Neuda-Bernstein is the only talent in Vienna who can boast of having enjoyed piano lessons with Brahms (p. 169).

If Rosa studied with Brahms, might Fanny have met him personally as well? She could very well have been present at the 1876 world premier of his achingly beautiful Symphony No. 1, and she most certainly would have seen the composer conduct one or more of his great masterpieces of the 1880s. How impossible it would have been at the height of this period of grace for this privileged family to see into the future and imagine the nightmare that would eventually befall them and that would engulf Fanny's granddaughter  Lili and many other members of their family as well.

Which brings us back around again to Einstein. . . . Today, in digging deeper into Lili's own work, I found Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology, in which the author examines Einstein's thoughts on mysticism. In the course of doing so, he quotes a 1921 interview conducted in Vienna by our own Lili Neuda-Halpern (then age 39)—a writer, poet, and journalist, who had enough interest in mystical thought to raise such questions to Albert Einstein, whose name sits at the top of this blog. Now that's what I call a "miracle update."

Next time, a miraculous story of survival with awesome connections at every turn.
  

002: Full Circle

This morning I had the honor of giving a Shabbat drash [see note] for Metivta: A Center for Contemplative Judaism. Metivta has wonderful Shabbat services with chanting and meditation every month or so, led by a group of skilled and learned lay leaders and held in members' homes in Los Angeles. I was especially glad to be asked to speak today because the Torah portion for the week, the last chapter in Genesis, was also the last chapter of the Joseph story—a story of suffering and forgiveness. This narrative is close to my heart for many reasons, not least of which is that it tells of estrangement and reconciliation, which is part of my own story.

As I tell in the preface to my book, Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda's Book of Prayers for Jewish Women, my son, Adam, was estranged from me for more than 11 years as the result of a very bitter divorce. I was working as a freelance editor at the time and one of my clients, Judith Orloff, M.D., was an intuitive healer. So I decided to ask her about my son. She said that she saw him with my family in the future and told me I could pray, that it works. But I was not in the habit of praying and I simply couldn't find the right words.

Around that time, I was browsing in a used bookstore around the corner from my house. I wandered into the Judaica section and happened to see a slim volume on the shelf with no writing on the spine. I plucked it off the shelf, and read the title, "Hours of Devotion: A Book of Prayers and Meditations for the Use of the Daughters of Israel for Public Service and at Home, for All Conditions of a Woman's Life," translated from the German in 1866. As I scanned the table of contents, I saw prayers for morning, evening, every day of the week, and then a section just for women. Among prayers for brides and mothers was a prayer "For a Mother Whose Child Is Abroad." I took the book home, started saying that prayer, among others, and within a period of about six weeks, my son was back in my life. The first thing I said to him was, "Adam, I have to tell you, this is an answer to a prayer."

Since that time, Adam and his wife, Rachelle, have given me two beautiful granddaughters. So this morning, when I read the words that Jacob said at the end of his life to his son Joseph, I could relate to them completely:

“I dared not accept the thought that I would see your face again, and here God has shown me even your offspring.” (Genesis 48:11)

The Joseph story is significant to me for another reason as well: It's where I "came in," so to speak on Ronnie Serr's teaching, the night I became his student. It was a cold November night in 2001, and I was suffering another loss: the loss of my marriage of 12 years. I had just started to attend Thursday night meditations at Metivta just so I wouldn't spend the whole night crying. Ronnie had come in as a substitute for the rabbi that particular night and was telling the story of Joseph, the parsha for the week then as well. What he taught that night has never left me. It's a teaching from the Bal Shem Tov: the 5 steps from suffering to gratitude:

1) Suffering—something that comes to us all
2) Acceptance of suffering—recognizing that everything comes from God
3) Prayer—asking God for salvation
4) Receiving the answer to your prayer
5) Thanksgiving

At the end of the class, I went up to Ronnie to tell him how much his teaching had meant to me because I was going through so much suffering. He just looked me straight in the eye and said, "The world is for you." I didn't have the least idea what he meant at the time, but I knew I had found my teacher.

That night, through my tears, I prayed, really prayed, for the first time. And I began to heal.
And this morning, I talked about Joseph and recited those five steps to others—coming full circle.

Happy winter solstice! May the longest night of the year and the darkest darkness bring you the brightest light.

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NOTE: According to the Velveteen Rabbi's excellent definition, "To drash something means to explicate it, usually through story; it relates to the word 'midrash,' which is an exegetical story, a tale that explains a piece of Torah in some new or interesting way." To learn more about the tradition of Midrash, just click the word!

001: Miracles Everywhere

As the New York Times writes, "the very existence of [my new book], Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda's Book of Prayers for Jewish Women, is a minor miracle." Since the book came out last August,  amazing events have collected around it like iron filings around a magnet. Until now, I've mainly been sharing these stories with my spiritual mentor, Ronnie Serr, founder and leader of the ShirHaShirim study group. Ronnie started to refer to my e-mail messages as “miracle updates.” Thus the origin of this blog's title and the blog itself—a place where I will be sharing the unfolding story surrounding Hours of Devotion with you and where you are welcome to share your own miracles as comments to these posts.

This is a season of miracles. We say at Hanukkah that "a great miracle happened there." But for all we know, great miracles may be happening everywhere all the time. What do I mean by “miracles”? Good question! I came across a beautiful answer last Shabbat, in the middle of the Amidah service, in the prayer “Thanksgiving for Daily Miracles.” In it, we thank God

for our souls, which are in your care;
for your miracles, which are daily with us;
and for your wondrous kindness at all times—
morning, noon, and night.

What are these miracles that are “daily with us”? The very ground we tread, star nurseries in distant galaxies, and even our own bodies are bursting with evidence of them. But what about the amazing synchronicities that all of us experience from time to time—from receiving a call from a friend we've just been thinking about to discovering an improbable connection, a collision of elements that startles and shocks us out of our complacency and forces us to question how the world works? These sorts of events are no doubt happening all over the world every moment of every day. If they are "daily with us" why be surprised? Maybe a better question would be, why not be in awe of them, along with the ordinary miracles of the earth turning toward the sun each morning and the red-breasted robin flying south every fall? Why not cultivate a state of ongoing, perpetual wonder at everything? My mother, Helen Berland, an artist whose trompe l’oeil paintings detailed every pinfeather in a robin’s wing, lived her whole life by this principle. I think she had it right.

What miracles have happened to you lately? I'd love to hear about them.