Kafka and Kindness

The Torah we read from this morning is special.  It is our Czech Memorial Scroll, saved from the destruction of the Jewish community of Czechoslovakia just before the Shoah, a reminder of the Jewish world that existed before the Holocaust, and it is a Torah which we use actively in the life of our vibrant congregation. 

This scroll is also dedicated to the memory of my own grandparents, Rabbi Samuel S. and A. Irma Cohon, through the generosity of my father, Rabbi Baruch Cohon, so it has additional meaning to me, personally, and my family.  This Torah was rescued from obscurity and decay in a Prague basement along with 1500 other Czech Torah scrolls in a long and complex odyssey in part through the efforts of Rabbi Harold Reinhart, my great uncle of blessed memory.  This scroll came to London in the 1960s, was repaired there and lived a second life serving a European congregation, was then returned to London and became Beit Simcha’s first Torah in the fall of 2018, when my son Boaz and I received it and we brought it back to Tucson.

This past year, through the munificence of our wonderful Beit Simcha congregation, we were able to augment our hard-working 125 year old Czech Memorial Scroll with the much younger Our Torah, the King Family Torah, dedicated last Simchat Torah.  But we have chosen on Rosh HaShanah, the Yom HaZikaron, this Day of Remembrance, to chant from this remarkable Holocaust scroll.  It is a way of re-telling a story from a scroll that has its own story to tell. 

In fact, when I first learned of the Holocaust scrolls many years ago, the tale told of their rescue was a different one than the narrative we know today. 

The original story was that these scrolls were collected by the Nazis when they destroyed the Jewish communities of Moravia and Bohemia.  Being Germans, they carefully noted and catalogued where each scroll had come from, planning to place them in a Museum of Extinct Peoples to be built in the historic synagogues of the Prague ghetto.  After the fall of the Third Reich, the scrolls lay untended for over 15 years, until a bulldozer building a parking garage broke into the underground storeroom where the Torah scrolls languished.  The then-Communist government of the then-nation of Czechoslovakia decided to sell them for much-needed hard currency.  After complex negotiations, they were purchased from the Czechs for a small amount of British pounds sterling by a wealthy congregant of the rabbi of a congregation that had just bought a large building in Westminster, York House, which had plenty of room to store the scrolls.  That was the old story and it was widely taught.  I learned it originally from the rabbi of a prominent Reform synagogue in London.

But many years later I learned the truth was somewhat different.  After the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938 our Torah was sent to the Jewish Museum in Prague.  It was sent there for preservation by an endangered Jewish community in that overwhelmed country before it could be destroyed by the Germans.  At that time, the Jewish residents of cities and towns and villages all over Czechoslovakia saw what was coming and deliberately gave up their own Torahs and sent them to be preserved.  The people who kept careful records of these scrolls were not Nazis at all but the Jewish curators of the Jewish Museum of Prague, who had encouraged communities to save their Judaic treasures from the rapacious Fascists.  The neglecting of the scrolls was the result of the death of the curators at the hands of the Nazis, and of the 1948 Communist takeover and the Iron Curtain that descended then, rather than the scrolls becoming lost at the end of World War II.  The Czech Communist agency empowered to sell goods for hard currency saw these scrolls as useless but demanded to be paid $30,000 US dollars in 1964, perhaps $300,000 today—not a king’s ransom, exactly, but not a pittance, either.  In London, Rabbi Harold Reinhart supervised the cataloguing and refurbishment of the over 1500 Torahs until he passed away in 1969; when the scrolls arrived in 1964 they provided work for a scribe, David Brandon, for the rest of his life.  For Rabbi Reinhart and David Brandon and everyone associated with the Czech scrolls it was a labor of great love, and that labor continues to this day.  Our own congregation’s connection to an otherwise lost community is revived every time we chant from this Torah, as we did this morning.

Isn’t it interesting how these Czech Torah stories differ?  The more accurate, current version is better.  Not only is it more authentic, it restores agency to our people, since it was Jews saving the Torahs, rather than our enemies, as a way to preserve our own history for future Jewish generations. 

Which brings me to a very different Czech Jewish story, about one of the most famous of all Czech Jews, the great 20th century author Franz Kafka.  It is also a story about how we remember, and about love. And this story, too, has two versions.

The version I learned first goes like this: ‘At the age of 40, the author Franz Kafka, who never married and had no children, was walking through a park one day in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully.

Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look again for the doll.

The next day, when they looked but had not found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll saying "Please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures."

Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life.

During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.

Finally, Kafka bought and brought the little girl a doll that had “returned” to Berlin.

"It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the little girl.

And Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "My travels have changed me." The little girl hugged the new doll and brought the doll with her to her happy home.

A year later Kafka died at the age of 40, in 1924.

Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter hidden inside the doll. In the tiny letter was written:

"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."

Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.  A gentle story that teaches us about kindness.

Now, this is the version of the story that has been circulating on the internet for 15 years.  It’s a beautiful tale, and it’s in keeping with what we know of the generous character of Franz Kafka, the great Czech Jewish author of Metamorphosis and many other extraordinary works. 

It’s such a lovely story that it immediately made me run it by Snopes to see if it’s true.  It turns out that we don’t really know.  We do know that Kafka’s doll’s letters have never resurfaced, and there is no record of the girl ever finding one of them inside the doll years later, or even of the name or history of the girl.  Perhaps she later lost the doll or gave it away when she grew up; perhaps she was Jewish and died in the Holocaust.  We have no tangible corroboration of the tale.

On the other hand, Kafka’s partner for that final year of his life, Dora Dymant, was the person who originally shared a story about Franz Kafka and a doll, and she would have known.  Her own version of the story brings more depth and meaning to the little tale.  A little background on Kafka and Dora Dymant is helpful.  Literary critic Anthony Rudolf wrote:

“Dora Dymant met Franz Kafka at Miiritz on the Baltic coast of Germany in the summer of 1923. She was 25 years old and working in the kitchens of a children's holiday camp run by the Jewish People's Home of Berlin.  Kafka happened to be on holiday there with his sister and her children.

Dora first noticed him on the beach. A few days later, on July 13, ten days after his fortieth birthday, Kafka came with his sister for supper to the camp. Dora had thought the couple on the beach were husband and wife. She was delighted when she learned the truth.

Kafka continued visiting the camp — every evening for three weeks.  Dora told one story of a little boy in the camp who got up to leave the table one evening, and fell down, deeply embarrassed in front of his friends. Kafka said at once: "What a clever way to fall, and what a clever way to get up again." The child instantly became the hero of the moment, thanks to Kafka.

Franz Kafka made a deep impression on Dora: his looks, his sensibility, his culture, his generous spirit. She was an Eastern European Jew from a Chasidic background — she came from a small town not far from the Czechoslovak border. Dora's father was a follower of the Gerer Rebbe. Kafka, who rejected his parents' minimalist "Western" Judaism, was turning East for more authentic Jewish inspiration. Dora, who abandoned her father's Gerer-Chasidic Orthodoxy, was turning West for more modern Jewish inspiration. They found in each other not only personal happiness but a way of fulfilling their Jewish destiny.

After the Baltic holiday Kafka returned to Prague, but he soon moved to Berlin where he set up a home with Dora. He never tired of hearing Dora's Chasidic stories. She would sit with him while he wrote.

Fellow author and close friend Max Brod wrote that Dora "perfected" Kafka.  Released from his ghosts he was free to find himself, as a man, a writer, a Jew, through her. They studied at the famous Lehranst alt fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Academy for the Scientific Study of Judaism in Berlin.  Dora, appropriately enough, was studying Halacha, Jewish law, while Kafka, equally appropriately, was studying Aggada, Jewish legends. They read the great Biblical commentator Rashi together at home in order to improve Kafka's Hebrew in case they ever reached Palestine, as they hoped to do.  Imagine that: together they read the 11th century Rhineland commentator on Torah to teach Kafka modern Hebrew!  Dora's own Hebrew was excellent, and she was a convinced Zionist. But in addition to potentially immigrating to the new Jewish homeland, they also discussed the possibility of going East to Poland where Kafka felt Jews were still authentic. Sadly, all this time Kafka was growing weaker from the lung ailment that would eventually kill him.

Dora wrote this about the famous doll story: “While we were in Berlin Franz often went to our local park. Sometimes I went with him. One day we met a little girl. She was weeping and appeared to be in complete despair. We spoke to her, Franz questioned her, and we learned that she had lost her doll. At once he invented a sufficiently plausible story to explain the disappearance of the doll: "Your doll has simply gone on a journey — I know because she's written me a letter." The little girl was a bit suspicious: "Have you got it on you?" "No, I left it at home by mistake, but I'll bring it with me tomorrow." Intrigued, the child had already almost forgotten what had made her so upset in the first place.' And Franz went home immediately to write the letter.

He set to work with the same seriousness he displayed when composing one of his own works, and in the same state of tension he always inhabited at his table, even when writing a postcard. It was a real labor, as essential as the others, since the child must at all costs not be cheated, but truly appeased, and since the lie must be transformed into the truth of reality by means of the truth of fiction.

The next day he ran with the letter to the little girl who was waiting for him in the park. As she did not know how to read, he read the letter out to her. The doll declared that she was tired of living in the same family all the time, expressed her longing for a change of air, wanted to go away from her —indeed, she loved the little girl, but from whom she had no choice but to separate. She promised that she would write every day. In fact, Kafka wrote a daily letter telling of new adventures, which evolved very rapidly, according to the special rhythm of the life of dolls.

After a few days the child had forgotten the loss of her real toy and had no thought for anything but the fiction she had been offered in exchange. Franz wrote every sentence of the epistolary novel with an attention to minutiae, with a precision full of humor, which rendered the situation completely acceptable. The doll grew up, went to school, got to know other people. She continued to assure the child of her love but made allusions to the complexity of her life, to other obligations, to other interests which made it impossible, for the time being, to live with her. The little girl was invited to reflect upon this and was made ready for the inevitable renunciation.

The game lasted at least three weeks. And Franz was in terrible distress at the thought of having to bring it to an end. For it was necessary that the end should be exactly right, capable of substituting order for the disorder brought about by the loss of the doll. He cast about for a long time and finally decided to marry off the doll. He described the young man, the engagement, the wedding preparations in the country, then, in great detail, the house of the young couple: “You yourself will understand, said the doll, we must give up seeing each other." Franz had resolved a child's conflict through art, the best method he possessed for bringing order into the world.”  And the little girl understood, with dignity and gravity, that it was time to let her doll go…

The whole tale is rather the opposite of Kafkaesque, isn’t it?  Instead of a hopeless scenario that gets ever more hopeless for those experiencing it, we have a gentle, thoughtful, sensitive story of respect and extraordinary kindness, of growth and maturity through kindness.

I like the second version better because it is so true to our own lived experience.  The beauty of life is never quite as simple as we would like to believe it to be.  The acts of kindness and goodness we do are sometimes complex and subtle, and require us to see how others view things differently than we do.   

It is a deeply touching tale, of course, because it shows us that kindness is incredibly important, and that it can be expressed in a variety of ways.  When we sing of the attributes of God, notzer chesed la’alofim, the Shlosh Esrai Midot, the thirteen attributes of God, we praise God’s kindness to the thousandth generation.  In Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, chesed, kindness is a critical Sephirah, a central emanation of divine favor that represents the very best of the flow of holy energy that we can receive.

Kindness is so important to Judaism—to life.  It is easy in the flow of a human community to discount the great value kindness has.  How we treat one another, the ways we respect the innate dignity and the human needs of each other, is critical to the wellbeing of our lives and of those around us.  Kindness must be the basic requirement for any synagogue community.

The authentic Kafka story shows that kindness, even extraordinary kindness, is not always completely gentle.  The greatest act of kindness can be, as in Kafka’s doll letters, a way to gently teach important lessons about human decency and maturity.  Of course, the short version of the story is lovely.  On the web, a coda has been added to it: “Embrace change. It's inevitable for growth. Together we can shift pain into wonder and love, but it is up to us to consciously and intentionally create that connection.’”

A valuable lesson.  But not quite as valuable as the lesson Kafka taught in the more complete version.  For the truth is, it is kinder to gently help people grow in understanding, rather than to simply fool them to assuage their sadness, or your own discomfort.

My friends, I don’t know if love comes back to us in different ways, to remake our pain and loss into wonder and love.  But I do know that change often means both growth and pain, that experiencing the beautiful things in this world may require that we give up something else we hold dear.  And I know definitively that by being genuinely kind to each other we will continue to build our community in the ways that we wish it to grow, develop and flourish.

I can promise you that this new year, 5784, will bring surprises and disappointments, both blessings and, well, curses.  We will lose some things, and some people, that we love.  We will gain some new things, and some people, that we will learn to love.  But perhaps most important of all, we will learn new and valuable lessons.

Our prayer for 5784 is that this year we find it within ourselves to demonstrate true kindness to those around us, and to do so in ways that bring healing and blessing to the world.

LShana Tova Tikateivu v’Teichateimu