(RNS) — “Why are there no American Jewish holidays?”
A particularly smart religious school kid asked me that question last year, and I have been thinking about it ever since.
Think of it: Where do most Jewish holidays occur?
- Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur (appearing soon in a synagogue near you). Rosh Hashana commemorates the creation of the world, so that occurs in the cosmos. As for Yom Kippur, it is in the soul.
- Then, there is Sukkot, the harvest festival. That festival was originally located in the wilderness and then became a pilgrimage festival in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem.
- Hanukkah? Ancient Judea, under Greek domination.
- Tu BiShvat? The land of Israel and anywhere else you want to plant trees.
- Purim? Ancient Persia.
- Passover? Egypt (as in: getting out of Egypt), and then, the wilderness.
- Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day? Europe.
- Yom Ha’atzmaut? The modern state of Israel.
- Shavuot, the commemoration of the giving of the Torah? The Sinai wilderness.
- Tisha B’Av? Jerusalem.
You get the picture. There are no Jewish holidays that take place in the United States of America.
Except, one — and we marked it last week.
It is Landing Day, the 370th anniversary of the arrival of 23 Jews at New Amsterdam, which would become New York City, which would become the most significant Jewish city in the Diaspora.
The Jews had come from Recife, Brazil — refugees from a place that had shifted from Dutch control back to Portuguese domination.
Landing Day now has a rightful place on the official New York City calendar.
Peter Stuyvesant, attributed to Hendrick Couturier, circa 1660. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia/Creative Commons)
A few musings.
First, who met the Jews when they arrived in New Amsterdam? Peter Stuyvesant, who served as the last director-general of New Amsterdam.
Peter Stuyvesant would not have been an honoree at an ADL Man of the Year dinner. He was (how shall I say this nicely?) an antisemite. He seized the Jews’ belongings and sold them at auction. He then jailed two Jews and asked the Dutch West India Co. for permission to expel the Jews. He worried that their indigence might make them a burden on the community.
In April 1655, the company confirmed the right of Jews to live in New Amsterdam, “so long as they do not become a burden to the company or the community.”
Alas, the last laugh is on Stuyvesant. He could not have foreseen that New Amsterdam would become not only a center of world finance and culture, but that Jews would be key elements in the creative life and building of the city. There is no other Jewish city like it in the world (though, before the Shoah, Warsaw came very close; its Jewish population was second only to New York).
Neither could Peter Stuyvesant have foreseen that the housing project that would bear his name, Stuyvesant Town, would have been as predominantly Jewish as it once was.
But there is another piece to Landing Day that I only recently learned — and it hit me like a lightning bolt.
I learned this from Elana Stein Hain this past summer at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
We are living through a time of crisis, and Hain taught us how rabbis had responded to past crises — through sermons.
A 1912 illustration of Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia/Creative Commons)
For example: Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira, who preached in Amsterdam in the 1600s. He was born in Venice, then migrated to Paris and ultimately to Amsterdam. There, he presided over the Sephardic community, descendants of refugees from Spain and Portugal who had settled in Amsterdam. They built one of the storied Jewish communities in history, a place that both produced and persecuted the philosophers Uriel da Costa and Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, a place that witnessed the birth pangs of capitalism, a place that Simon Schama described as containing “an embarrassment of riches.”
In the 1640s, Rabbi Morteira delivered a sermon, in which he referred to “four kinds of weeping”:
The first is the weeping of pain and anguish from the terrible events that have confronted the glorious holy community of Lublin [Poland]. Cruel enemies have destroyed it, and the weeping is profuse…Weeping over the dead does not seem painful in comparison with the weeping over the captives — the men killed, their wives and small children taken into captivity. This is the greatest evil…
This is, presumably, a reference to the violent uprisings (1648-1650) led by the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which decimated the Jewish communities of Ukraine. In many ways, those acts of brutal murder and torture — unspeakable and unprintable — were the demonic forerunners of the actions of Hamas on Oct. 7; indeed, it is the closest historical analogy.
Morteira continues:
From this is derived the second weeping, that of compassion…This applies when you think about the considerable number of notables who yesterday were wealthy, but for whom today fate has set up an ambush, when they were driven out of their domicile of pleasure, out of the land of Brazil. They are indeed hard-pressed and destitute; they are in anguish because of their previous good fortune, while now they have no covering against the cold as they arrive from that warm land…
Rabbi Morteira was referring to the Jewish refugees from Recife, Brazil, who went to New Amsterdam!
This is the founding text of New York Jewish history.
Two takeaways from this journey into an almost 400-year-old sermon.
First, it places the arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam into a larger historical context. The 1640s was a time of great disruption in the Jewish world — in Ukraine, the worst acts of violence against Jews until the Holocaust, and in New Amsterdam, the beginnings of what is, arguably, the greatest Jewish community of the Diaspora.
Both of those events featured Jew-hatred: the first, of the most violent kind; and the second, of a more genteel variety, but nevertheless hateful.
What was the result of that first chapter, the violence against Jews in eastern Europe? Jews plunged into despair. There were several false messianic movements, including Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank. And out of the shards of those messianic longings, the origins of Hasidism.
And the result of that second chapter, the initial persecution of Jews in New Amsterdam, the suspicion that indigent Jews would rely on public funds? That not only created the New York Jewish community; it no doubt inspired and nurtured Jewish self-reliance.
Second, the arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam should remind us that American Jewish history began as the story of refugees, fleeing from hatred and persecution, and being met by an antisemite with his own agenda and his own fantasies about the Jews.
Just substitute “immigrants” into that story, and see what happens.
For that reason, Landing Day merits becoming an American Jewish holiday.
It reminds us of who we were, who we are and what we strive to be.