This High Holy Day season we speak of Jewish secrets that add meaning to our lives.

The mystics find meaning in the mysteries surrounding our congregation, all congregations, the people Israel, and the land of Israel. What can these secrets mean to us personally?

Secrets: The Congregation

Rosh HaShanah Morning
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

On the day that the Six-Day War broke out in June of 1967, a twenty-five year old woman in Toronto went to her bank and withdrew her entire savings. This savings account was set up twelve years before, starting with the money given to her by family and friends for her Bat Mitzvah. She was conscientious and frugal, never extravagant. She didn't care much for fashions and fads. So every week for twelve years, she deposited a portion of her income into that savings account. By 1967 the amount was substantial. On June 6, 1967, she withdrew it all in cash and walked to the office of the Consulate of the State of Israel in Toronto, where she placed her entire life savings on the desk of the receptionist. "This is a contribution for the State of Israel," she said.

The receptionist stared at the cash on her desk, bills and change, then looked up in total amazement at the young woman standing before her. It was obvious that she was unsure of what to do next. Finally, she asked, "Wouldn't you like to give this directly to the Consul?" The young woman said, "I am sure the Consul is very busy with the war and all." The receptionist said, "Let's take this to our administrative assistant. He can write you a receipt for the money." The young woman said, "I don't need a receipt. Just give the money to the State of Israel." The receptionist counted the money and placed it in an envelope. On the front of the envelope she wrote the amount of the donation. Then she looked up to ask the young woman for her name and address, but the young woman was already gone.

* * *

In April 1945, one writer and one photographer--two American reporters--were the first outsiders to enter a Nazi death camp. One of them was a man who helped shape an entire generation of American Jews.

His name was Meyer and his career began in 1923, when, at the age of eighteen, he joined the staff of the Chicago Daily News. This was a tumultuous time in Chicago. Newspapers were published like telegrams, issuing special editions several times a week, sometimes more than once in a day. The city was overrun by gangsters. In 1924, the suburb of Cicero held the most crooked election in all of Chicago's history, with dishonest voters paid to "Vote Early and Vote Often" and honest voters threatened by thugs at every precinct. Al Capone engineered these elections and his candidate was elected mayor by a wide margin. Within a week, the new mayor tried to make himself popular by promising to drive the mobsters out of Cicero. It was probably an empty promise, but it did not sit well with Scarface. Capone personally threw the mayor down a flight of stairs at City Hall. The Chicago Daily News printed a special edition. But violence did not scare young Meyer. He grew up in the "Bloody Nineteen Ward," the most corrupt and violent part of Chicago.

It was good that he was prepared for violence, too, because in 1924 two teenagers from wealthy Jewish families brutally murdered fourteen year-old Bobby Franks. Meyer reported the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. He was there when Clarence Darrow delivered his twelve-hour closing argument that saved the lives of his clients.

While reporting for the News, Meyer was also writing for a national Jewish monthly called The Menorah Journal. And in 1929 he published his first novel The Reporter. This set the pattern of his life for ever after. He first lived a story, then told it. He was always an activist, a commentator, and then a storyteller, in that order. In the 30's, when ten steel mill strikers were shot down, he led a citizen's campaign against police brutality, reported the story, and wrote a novel about it called Citizens (1940).

He traveled to Palestine to live on a kibbutz. Meyer admired this experiment in creating a new kind of Jewish community. In 1931, he wrote Yehuda, the first novel describing kibbutz life. He returned to work on the new Esquire Magazine, and he wrote The Old Bunch (1937), a novel about twelve young Chicago Jews flirting unsuccessfully with assimilation. It struck a chord that made it wildly successful, the growing-up novel for his generation.

He kept switching back and forth--being a Jewish author writing about American society and then being an American writer exploring Jewish themes. Then his life changed radically. He was suddenly a reporter on the front lines in the Spanish Civil War and then in World War II. He witnessed first-hand the horrors of the Battle of the Bulge. He reported the battles, but also the injustice of discrimination against Black soldiers.

In 1945, he teamed up with photographer Eric Schwab. Eric was worried about his mother who lived in the small town called Terezin. He had not heard from her in several months. The two of them joined a jeep convoy headed that way. On April 4, 1945, an emaciated skeleton of a man led them into Ohrdruf, one of the smaller outposts of the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. It was through Eric's photos and Meyer's dispatches that the rest of the world heard and saw the camps for the first time. Their reporting drew Eisenhower to Orhdruf and the Supreme Commander was so outraged that he had his soldiers gather Germans from every surrounding town, forcing them to march through the camp to witness the horrors first-hand.

Now Meyer would rush to each new camp as it was discovered, sometimes arriving even before the soldiers. He kept writing dispatches home, but he also began taking down the names of the survivors and organizing relief for them. One time, he met a Jewish woman who had been badly used by the Nazis--kept alive and fed only to be brutalized and raped. Other survivors were too weak to travel, but this woman was only crushed in spirit. He put her in the jeep and took her to where he and the other American reporters were being housed, a local mansion that had been the Nazi headquarters. He led her to a closet containing a profusion of dresses, shoes, hats, stockings, and nightgowns--all left behind by the wife of the Nazi commandant when they fled. He told her to take whatever she needed, but she looked at him as if he were a visitor from some strange planet. She shook her head and spoke four unforgettable words: "That would be stealing." She was a victim; she refused to become a perpetrator.

When the concentration camps were all found, Meyer turned to the plight of the refugees. He joined the Haganah to rescue Jews by taking them across Europe to a waiting boat that would smuggle them into Palestine. With unbelievable energy, he wrote and filmed a docudrama, directing his chosen actors even as the rescue was actually taking place. Meyer's film The Illegals starred a French actress who would soon be his wife and it revealed the bravery of the Haganah and the refugees to the whole world. Film was a new form of reporting for him. In Palestine, he made another docudrama about a young Holocaust survivor searching for his father. It was called In My Father's House and it helped promote the cause of reuniting Holocaust survivors.

In 1951, his wife asked him to read a book just published in Paris, the diary that a young Dutch girl kept before her death in the Holocaust. He immediately understood its power. He helped to get it published in the United States and he met with Otto Frank, father of Anne, asking for permission to write a stage play based on Anne's diary. The play, as he wrote it, stressed Anne's struggle to find her Jewish identity. The producers rejected his version. They produced a play with very little mention of Judaism and no search for identity. For Meyer, this was a Jewish tragedy. For thirty years, he struggled in the press and in the courts. One jury awarded him a verdict for the appropriation of his ideas, but his play never saw floodlights on Broadway. Instead, it became an underground classic--copied, circulated, studied, and staged in small venues around the world.

He took his energies back into fiction, starting with a book he had been planning for nearly thirty years. Compulsion was the thinly-veiled story of the Leopold-Loeb trial and he brought to it a new technique born in the filming of his docudramas. It was nonfiction fiction. As Hollywood was planning the movie version, Meyer wrote a trilogy of novels about the Holocaust and, to preserve the memory of the Jews of Europe, he wrote three textbooks for children in Jewish religious schools--The Story of the Synagogue, The Story of the Jewish Way of Life, and God and the Story of Judaism. In the 1970s, Meyer was writing two huge novels that would describe the history of the State of Israel.

He was nearly seventy years old, bright, driven, gifted, and still a Jewish and humanitarian activist. That is when I met Meyer Levin. He split his time with homes in New York, Paris, and Israel. When he was in New York, he would stop to visit at my publishing house. One time, I mentioned that I was going to attend a General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations in Montreal. He was also anxious to go, he said, but every hotel room was already booked. So I invited Meyer to be my roommate for five days. He thought it might be an imposition, but I thought of it as a exciting opportunity for me. How right I was.

At the end of the nineteenth century, western Jews first became aware of the black Jews of Ethiopia, the tribes of Beta Israel. The history of their beginnings was lost in myth. They believed that they were the descendants of the tribe of the Queen of Sheba, converted to Judaism when she returned from her visit to King Solomon. Whether or not that was true, they were certainly Jews, practicing a pre-Talmud, Torah-based Judaism, right down to the fringes on the four corners of their garments.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Beta Israel were suffering persecution and neglect. They were in a country which had become dangerously anti-Semitic, and many groups of them were starving. That is why Meyer Levin wanted to be at the General Assembly, because the Federations had invited an elder of Beta Israel as a featured speaker. Meyer not only knew this elder personally, he was indignant at Israel for dragging its collected feet. At his own expense he had traveled to Ethiopia in the 1960s and filmed a documentary showing the primitive and harsh living conditions of the Beta Israel. The first I knew about any of this was when Meyer arrived at our hotel room with a can of film under his arm, determined to screen his documentary for the General Assembly. Together we collared every important delegate and financier and talked about the need to rescue the black Jews of Ethiopia. He showed his film several times.

Unbeknownst to us, the State of Israel had been quietly transporting a few hundred Ethiopian Jews each year, but the raising of consciousness at the Montreal General Assembly began an effort that culminated in 1984 when the State of Israel conducted Operation Moses, an emergency exodus of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews, followed in 1991 with Operation Solomon, another large transport of 20,000 Beta Israel. Nevertheless, even as I speak to you tonight, there are still whole villages of Ethiopian Jews living on the edge of starvation and waiting to be rescued.

The last time I saw Meyer Levin was in New York City in 1980. I was driving down Broadway and he was walking downtown. I stopped and gave him a ride. He was on his way to speak to a Jewish group about the growing pockets of poverty in the State of Israel. He was still driven by activism, still writing novels, and still concerned with justice for his people. He died in the summer of 1981, just as his last book was being published. You can trust me when I tell you that he was not only a memorable person to know, but his memory will always be for a blessing among his people.

* * *

An anonymous young woman who empties her bank account to save the State of Israel and a short stocky giant of a man who lives, struggles, and reports every essential cause of his generation--together they hold the key to the secret of being Jewish. Just one more story will make it all clear.

Like all good stories, this one begins at the beginning, when God spoke the first words of Creation, "Let there be light." And there was a light--but a light unlike the sun or the moon or the stars. By this light you could see from one end of the world to the other. God did not create the sun, moon, and stars until the fourth day, but as soon as these luminaries were fixed in the firmament, God condensed and folded the first light of Creation and hid it inside a gemstone called the Tzohar. All other gems become brilliant by reflecting light; but the Tzohar glows from within, bringing light to everything around it.

Legend says that an angel named Raziel gave the Tzohar to Adam and Eve after they left Eden. Now this is something to keep in mind because the name of that angel, Razi-el, means "God's secret." When he was dying, Adam gave the Tzohar to his third son Seth. Seth lived many years and when he was dying, he gave the Tzohar to the most righteous person in the world, Enoch. Enoch was a master of wisdom. Some say that the Tzohar gave him his wisdom. True or not, Enoch expanded his consciousness to the point that he never died. Like pure energy he was transported to heaven where his wisdom transformed him into an angel and he became God's scribe.

Before departing this world, Enoch entrusted the Tzohar to his son, Methuselah, the man who lived longer than any other human has ever lived. Could it be that his long life was due to the fact that he possessed the Tzohar? True or not, Methuselah was still living when the world became so corrupt that God determined to bring on the Flood.

God knew that the rain clouds would hide the sun and the moon for forty days and forty nights. But Noah and his family would need light in order to care for the animals on the Ark. So God commanded Noah, saying, "Work the Tzohar into the Ark" [Gen. 6:16]. But Noah had never heard the word Tzohar before. "What is the Tzohar," he asked, and God explained, "It is the light of all Creation. For you, it will glow dimly by day and brightly by night, so that you will know day from night. By its light, you shall do My work on the Ark" [Gen. Rabbah 31:11]. That night, the angel Raziel appeared to Noah in his dreams, saying, "Fetch the Tzohar from Methuselah, for the time has come for him to die."

The very next day, Noah went to see old man Methuselah. Methuselah greeted him warmly and said, "I have been waiting for you to come. I have lived long by the light of this wondrous gem, but now I am relieved to be gathered to the bosom of my fathers and mothers." And Methuselah gave the Tzohar to Noah who hung it in the Ark.

After the Flood, when the Ark rested on Mount Ararat, Noah planted grapes and made wine. All this time Noah had been doing God's work, but now he imbibed so much wine that he fell into a drunken stupor. For ten generations, the Tzohar had passed from one righteous person to another, but at the moment of Noah's sin, the Tzohar vanished from the Ark and was lost for the next ten generations. Those were the generations of idolatry, of the makers of idols, of the worshipers of created things instead of the God of Creation.

It fell to Abraham to seek the mystery of God. Abraham thought, "How can I discover the true God while I remain among these idol worshipers?" So he took himself to a cave on the mountain of Ararat, for he knew it was a holy place, the place where the Ark came to rest. All day, alone in that cave, Abraham pondered the universe and prayed for understanding. When night fell, the light of the Tzohar jewel filled the cave, and suddenly Abraham realized that there was just One God who had created all things. Then Abraham heard the voice of God, commanding him to go forth from his land and from his birthplace, to walk in God's ways and go where God directed his steps.

The Tzohar lit his way from that day on, and he passed it on to his beloved son Isaac and Isaac passed it on to Jacob who always kept it by his side. It was the Tzohar that lit Jacob's dream so that he could see the stairway connecting earth and heaven. It was the Tzohar that gave Jacob hope as he hope as he lived outside the Promised Land, working for his wily father-in-law Laban and gaining wives and children, followers and flocks.

Some say it was the angel Raziel who appeared to Jacob on the night he returned to the Promised Land. Raziel said, "Only the worthy, only the righteous, can possess the Tzohar. You must give it up because you are nothing but a trickster. You deceived your brother Esau to steal his birthright and you deceived your father Isaac to steal his blessing. Now I have come to remove the Tzohar from your hands." But Jacob refused to relinquish the precious gem of his family. All night, he wrestled with the angel. Jacob would not give up, even when the angel wounded him. Finally Raziel begged Jacob, saying, "Let me go, for the dawn comes and every morning every angel must be in heaven to sing God's praises." Jacob answered, saying, "I will release you only if you give me your blessing." Then Raziel said, "I bless you with your new name, Israel, meaning, ‘the one who struggles with God and prevails.'" So Jacob released the angel and Raziel was gone. Of course, as everyone knows, the wrestling match was a draw: neither Jacob nor the angel won. But, if so, why did the angel give Jacob such a name as Israel, "the one who struggles with God and prevails?" It is because through his wrestling, Jacob did win. He kept the Tzohar in this world, though the angel had wanted to take it from him.

One day, Joseph told his father and his brothers that he had a dream in which the sun and moon and stars bowed down to him. The brothers thought this meant that Joseph would one day force them to bow down. But Jacob understood that Joseph had dreamt about the Tzohar, for the sun, the moon, and stars all bow to the primal light of the Tzohar. Jacob called Joseph aside, dressed him in the colors of the rainbow, and gave him the precious jewel, making him vow never to mention the gem to anyone.

Thus, the Tzohar's light was with Joseph when he was thrown into the pit, when he was sold into slavery, when he was thrown into the dungeon in Egypt, and when he told Pharaoh the meaning of his dreams. Even when he ruled Egypt, the Tzohar never departed from Joseph. When he was old and dying, he made his children, his brothers, and all their children take an oath: "When you return to the Promised Land, promise that you will take my body up and let me be buried there with my ancestors."

In the years of slavery in Egypt, the Tzohar remained hidden beside the mummy in Joseph's coffin. But before leaving Egypt, Moses went to fetch the coffin to fulfill the oath to take Joseph to the Holy Land and bury him there. When he arrived at the coffin, the angel Raziel appeared, saying, "Moses, open the lid and remove the glowing jewel, the Tzohar, the gem that holds the true light of Creation. As long as you do God's work it will protect you and guide your way in the world."

When he saw the wondrous light of the Tzohar, the humble Moses was at once afraid that owning it might make him proud. But Raziel reassured him, saying, "Do not hesitate to take the Tzohar, for this is all part of God's design."

Moses took hold of the gem and its light gave him strength. Whenever the people complained, whenever they sinned, and even when they were forced to do battle, Moses found the will to go on in the Tzohar. It was with him when he went up to Mount Sinai. It brought him consolation when he found the people worshiping the Golden Calf. It always gave comfort and faith.

Moses still had the Tzohar when God told him it was time for him to die. Moses asked God, "Why remove this Tzohar from the world with me? Why bury it in my grave where no one will ever find it? Its light brings faith and wisdom and inner joy. If it has done so much for me, would it not do as much for Your people, the Children of Israel? If only every one of them could have a Tzohar, could feel its warmth and live by its light. Would it not protect them from sin and urge them to do Your work in the world?"

God whispered to Moses, "Such was always my design. Until you, Moses, the righteous who possessed the Tzohar only used its light. You are the first to discover its inner truth. Now the secret of the Tzohar will bear your name forever. Because you have seen into the gem, you have won the honor to open it."

Suddenly, the gem opened in Moses' hands. Lo and behold! the light unfolded itself, expanding until it became a scroll of light. God said, "In your hands I place My Torah, the Five Books of Moses. You will give it to the Jewish people before you die. Whoever studies it will discover its inner secret as you have. The Torah is the Tzohar, it is a jewel that shines from within, radiating warmth and wisdom and peace to all who treasure it."

Now you know how the light of the Torah entered the world as a jewel to illumine the path of righteousness and guide each and every one of us to use the best that is in us to bring wisdom and light to our lives. This is the Tzohar, the secret light that glowed from the young woman who gave her life savings to save Israel and glowed from Meyer Levin as he wrestled with every injustice of his generation and struggled to bring peace and wisdom to his people Israel, to the new nation of Israel, and to the world.

There is only one more secret to reveal about the Tzohar. When King Solomon was about to build the Temple, the angel Raziel appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Hang a light above the Holy Ark that protects the scrolls of the Torah and always keep that light alive. It will be for you a Ner Tamid, an "Eternal Light" like the one that Moses kept in the Tabernacle above the ark in the wilderness. Every time the people of Israel see the Eternal Light, they will remember the secret that the Torah is the Tzohar--it is the light of creation by which you can see from one end of the world to the other."

To this very day, wherever that light hangs--in Jerusalem; in Moscow; in Toronto; in London; in Cracow; in Berlin; in Tel Aviv; in Sydney; in New York City; and here in Spring, Texas--it points to the Tzohar, the jewel that has made the world a brighter place since the time of creation, the Five Books of Moses, our Torah. Know this my friends: You do not belong to a synagogue because the synagogue does this for you or it does that for you. You belong to a synagogue because you are a Jew and you own the secret of the Tzohar. You must do everything in your power to keep the Tzohar from leaving this world, to ensure that the Torah passes on from your generation to the next, to ensure that God's light will never depart from us. That is the secret that ties the people of Israel and the land of Israel together with the God of Israel. And let us say: Amen.