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Jewish academic and Hebrew scholar Irene Lancaster reflects on lessons from Abraham and the significance of something as small as a dot.
What is a dot? It is a tiny marker. This is the subject of today’s article, based on a sermon given by the rabbi at Shul on Remembrance Sunday.
This year Remembrance Sunday coincided with Kristallnacht, when in November 1938, the Germans realized through research that no one would stop them from carrying out a major pogrom against their own 2000-year-old Jewish community. And November 11 was Armistice Day.
The Shabbat reading was Vayera (Genesis 18:1 – 22:24): ‘And the Lord appeared to him [Abraham] by the terebinth trees of Mamre, as he sat at the tent opening in the heat of the day.’
Abraham, aged 99, had just been circumcised as part of the covenant with G-d – so quite an ordeal!
‘And he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing over/by him. And when he saw, he ran to meet them … ’
Abraham was in great pain, but hospitality to strangers came first.
However (Genesis 18:9), the strangers asked: ‘Where is Sarah, your wife?’ A strange question from strangers. Who on earth were they?
A clue is given by the first instance in the Hebrew Bible of dots inserted above letters. These were added as cantillation markers by the early Massoretes. The dots are a sign. The strangers are special and Sarah is special. The strangers are angels (messengers from G-d) and Sarah will give birth to a child, miraculous at her advanced age.
And then there are the other dots, those utilized by the Germans in 1941 Amsterdam on their ‘Dot Map’. This map can be viewed at the Anne Frank Museum. As a result of these dots, wherever 10 Jews were domiciled together, they were rounded up. The Dutch Town Council willingly handed over to the Germans by utilizing dots the whereabouts of all their Jewish citizens.
In the five years from 1941 to 1945, therefore, 90 per cent of Dutch Jews were exterminated. The Germans didn’t do it alone. In fact they obtained all the information they needed to exterminate the Jews from the Dutch authorities who should have been protecting them.
Ironically, Anne Frank was spared at first, as there were only eight of them in her hiding place. Later she was betrayed.
Why 10? Goebbels had done his homework. He knew the Jewish Bible, history and culture inside out and even visited Haifa, Israel, under the British Mandate in 1936.
Goebbels, who had a PhD and was highly educated, knew about the latter part of the Genesis story, when Abraham visits Sodom with the three angels and tries to prevent its utter destruction.
In tandem with later Nazi values, hospitality was strictly forbidden in Sodom, with dire punishments meted out for non-compliance. This reminds us of the tiny number of righteous Gentiles who did try to help the Jews and were mostly exterminated together with them.
As you know, in Genesis 18:23-32, Abraham argues with G-d, down from 50 to 10 righteous men. If 10 are found, G-d agrees Sodom would be spared. Alas, there weren’t even 10 righteous men and Sodom was destroyed.
Ten appears to be a number solid enough to be able to affect the rest of a population for good or evil – 10 is now the minimum number for a Jewish religious service (quorum).
So two tales of dots – the dots in Sarah’s story of fertility, childbirth and future generations; and the Nazi dots of the death and destruction of Isaac’s descendants.
A dot is also a jot, an iota and the Hebrew letter yod, signifying 10 and the foundation for all the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
A dot is very easy to overlook, or to dismiss as a mere nothing, just as the Nazi mentality dismissed the Jews. But what about when we join the dots? What happens then?
Joining the dots leads us to understand a situation by recognizing relationships between different pieces of information. This often leads to a fuller picture of the bigger picture and finding a pattern.
This is why we are enthralled by detective thrillers and whodunits. But we also join the dots every day of our lives. We can see this pattern unfolding especially in the development of babies and toddlers. The realizations by babies and toddlers of the patterns of everday life are truly wonderful to behold.
Alas, this was not the case in Nazi Germany and it is also no longer the case for the Jews of England. As philosopher Professor John Gray (not Jewish) stated in a lecture for Policy Exchange, after the Yom Kippur Heaton Park murders in Greater Manchester ‘antisemitism has become normalized’ and there doesn’t seem to be a solution to this fact of life. Is Abraham alive and well in Manchester today? I think not.
However Abraham was followed not because of his teaching, as much as due to the fact that he cared deeply and people knew this. It is up to us whether our country opts for the Sodom way of cruelty, death and destruction, or the Abraham way of service, hospitality and openness to those who are ready to join.
Let’s hope that for the sake of the country, just as in the Genesis story, strangers opt to behave like angels, bestowing blessings on elderly, defenseless people, and looking for the positive patterns in life. The choice is not in heaven; it is with us.
