Good God: Faith for the Rest of Us

Radbam February 21st, 2009

Vienna 2/20/09

I never quite got Westminster Abbey. Why take a perfectly good (actually, fairly remarkable) House of Worship and surround it with an indoor cemetery.  Pews sidle right up to graves in a scene only Stephen King could love.  Sure, it might enhance the prayers of some to be surrounded by the likes of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and David Livingstone (I presume). But for weekly, communal worship, the creepiness factor probably keeps away all but the most star struck and eccentric.

We met the inverse, but no less creepy, in Bratislava, Slovakia en route to Vienna. There, a small remaining plot of the 17th century cemetery containing the remains of the eminent Orthodox sage, the Chatam Sofer, has grown a visiting center and synagogue around it. While on many levels this is patently un-Jewish, as averse as we are to cults of the dead, especially when impressed into bondage to construct their stagecraft (I’m looking at you, Pharoah!), the ultra-pietistic and unapologetically anachronistic take great license in venerating the relics of the righteous.

Moses Shreiber, aka The Chatam Sofer, made his mark by drawing a line in the sand—resisting the modernizing pressures on tradition and the community for a Judaism relevant to the evolving cultural sensibilities of the emancipated Jew. Though more generous and well-intentioned in his approach, he is part of a long, gray line of reactionaries, some benign, some bellicose, futilely seeking value in recreating an imagined past at the expense of a more meaningful present and secure future.

The Chatam Sofer’s sarcophagus is the physical center of the small patch of earth at the nexus of this spontaneous shrine. But just behind his large slab is a more modest, almost obscured marker belonging to a man named Herzl. The proximity of stones reflects an irony only the fickle finger of fate or Hollywood could conceive, for it was this Herzl’s great grandson who would forge a nationalistic Judaism exclusive of faith, and sow the seeds of a modern nation-state that would provide refuge for the remnants of European Jewry’s annihilation. Herzl’s, seminal, visionary work, Altneuland, the Old-New Land, saw fate writ large upon the continental politics of his day. This vision acknowledged the past, but invested heavily in the urgency of the moment and an unrealized future. The Chatam Sofer would be a scarcely remembered figure of a vanquished, absorbed people had not Herzl and those he inspired embraced the demands and possibilities of what lay ahead. His great-grandpa’s stone should get better placement in the complex’s next remodel.  (photo and internet access:  Kyle Stratiner

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