When entering Congregation Shir Shalom, you are greeted by two large canvases painted by the late Harvey Breverman. On one canvas are a group of teenagers gathered with their backs largely toward us, only one young man has his face half turned toward us staring at his hand. They are all surrounded by a beautiful blue sky filled with drifting white clouds, with an ethereal golden ceiling floating over their heads. The other canvas has the same background but has no people at all, just a wrapped white tallit, over what looks like a white hydrangea bush.
On the plaque on the side of the paintings, the esteemed Buffalo artist identifies this painting style as a diptych, “a double-paneled painting, to create a continuous space across two separate yet joined canvases that may be divergent but related aspects of a single human situation.” Dedicated to the memory of Robert Unher, a nineteen-year-old member who died in the 1970s (he is apparently the teen turned toward us, looking at his hand), it is a haunting visceral experience, that despite its brightness, feels heavy and sad.
As we commemorate the third anniversary of the October 7th attack, I feel that sense of inhabiting two spaces at once, but not feeling comfortable in either one. This weekend marks Simchat Torah, the same holiday where the brutality occurred, one of the happiest of the Jewish year where we roll the Torahs from one end to the other, that in the aftermath of what transpired is now tinged with grief and loss. We also feel the strange separation between the Jewish communities of Israel and America, that is always pronounced but feels especially so at this moment in time.
Simchat Torah is one of the holidays that is often celebrated on different days inside of Israel and outside of it. While my Shir Shalom community will mark it this Shabbat, many Buffalo synagogues will hold Simchat Torah services on Sunday. But, more than that, the experience of our Jewish communities in our two modern homes has been drastically different these past three years. Here we battle college campus protests and levels of antisemitism not seen for decades. But our Israeli family and friends have had to engage in prolonged multi-front wars in which their very existence has been threatened. Like the paintings Harvey Braverman created, the divide between the two similar canvases feels like a chasm.
At the glorious Jewish Federation Kick Off event, the speaker Sarah Hurwitz called this “polarity thinking,” being able to hold multiple points of view at once. She said that while the rest of the world has trouble with this, it is our Jewish specialty. Three years after the largest atrocity inflicted on our community since the Holocaust, we must lean into this skill, dancing in joy with our sacred scrolls, even as eyes fill with tears at our monumental loss. May the memories of all who were lost on October 7, 2023, always be for a blessing.
Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex