Yonatan Gordis is the Executive Director of the Center for Leadership Initiatives, an operating foundation working to support current and emerging leaders in the global Jewish community. www.leadingup.org

 

 

My mother’s father, Meyer Cohen, was something of a mythical character in our lives. Born (apparently) in Kiev in 1890, he was already in his 20’s when he immigrated to the United States. Married to Nechama (Nellie) Goldin in his 30’s, he was never much of a career man. He sold shoes. He sold encyclopedias. He sold insurance. Nechama taught Jewish topics and Hebrew to Jewish girls for sixty years.

 And he was deeply a Zionist. In various neighborhoods of NY, he and Nechama raised three children (one of them a chancellor of JTS). The mother tongue at home was Hebrew, not English or Yiddish. In 1959, the same year that his youngest child, my mother, gave birth to her first child, the mythological nature of Sabba Meyer which would be fed to me began to take shape.

 

In the first image, he returns home one day to their Borough Park apartment with two airplane tickets to Israel, informing Nechama that they were moving to Israel. He was 69 years old. She was 59. There was an eleven year old Jewish state. The need to move there was obvious. She declined and he moved. When asked thirty years later if they were separated from then on, she adamantly stated that of course not – they saw each other every summer.

 

It was then that the physical distance allowed the myths to take greater shape. Diasporas are good for that. At the top of every letter he sent from Israel, with the bureaucratic flare of the new state’s clerks, he rubber stamped the words, “יהודים – עלו ארצה למען תחיו ונחיה.”” “Jews – Move to the Land, so that you shall live and we shall live. “ He had bought it – the full Zionist dream. Later, he would write to the family of spending time sitting on a neighborhood bench with David Ben-Gurion deliberating the major political decisions of the day. In newspapers, he would publicize that he was opening up a school for girls – with Nechama as it primary teacher. She however had never heard a word of it.

 

When he died in 1976 at the age of 86, Nechama cleaned out his house pretty thoroughly. For myths to take root, someone needs to clean out the evidence or non-evidence. And thus, Sabba Meyer’s grandchildren grew up in those undocumented echoes. Gone were the pages with the rubber stamp. The myths’ foundations and relevance lay in what we would do with them. Clearly there was no longer a pshat.

 

Sitting in a Berlin café several months ago, I was speaking with a colleague from the philanthropic world and she was telling stories of her childhood in Jerusalem’s Beit HaKerem neighborhood. Among the tales was one of Ben-Gurion chatting with the old folks of the neighborhood as he took his daily walk. And then I entered the vortex of myth verification, adding spoonful of earth on spoonful of earth to the air he had left us with. And she me told how the stories of Sabba Meyer sitting with Ben-Gurion on a park bench were absolutely possible, that the myths that made up his echo were true voices.

 

I was the first of his grandchildren to make Aliyah seven years after he died, and I lived there for nearly twenty years. Three other grandchildren later did the same, and today he has ten great grandchildren entering adulthood in Israel.

 

What Israel offered Sabba Meyer and still offers us is the opportunity for myths to take on form and for dreams to become workable material. “Jews, move to the Land, so that you shall live, so that we shall live.” Sabba Meyer modeled that for the Jewish people and Israel to survive with any sense of relevance, it is incumbent upon us to live lives that to anyone else would seem mythic and perhaps illogical.

 

To celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday, I would gladly climb the carob tree to sit next to Honi the Circle Drawer or tell Ben-Gurion to slide over on the bench. We have visionary times to discuss.