Rosh Hashana in the Bois de Boulogne

                                                                                                                                        Oct. 2, 2022

The Jewish high holidays are with us, as are the mid-term U.S. election campaigns. 

In five weeks, immediately after the elections, my wife Margie and I head off first to Israel and the West Bank, then to Paris, where we lived for a year nearly 20 years ago.     

The convergence of events prompted me to look back over something I wrote back then. I called it Rosh Hashana in the Bois de Boulogne.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              2006 

[read the companion story, French from Dummy]

We were warned. At best, the French collaborate and cave. At worst, they are hardcore anti-semites, waiting for a Jean-Marie le Pen demagogue to bring out their true colors. France does not count its minorities. If it did, it would discover that 8-10 percent or more of its own are Muslims, many with seething contempt for Jews and Americans. And we are both. So we were told. 

Less than a year ago, Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Moroccan Jew was lured out of Paris, tortured and killed by embittered gang youth in a Paris banlieu. It took Ha’aretz, the daily newspaper in Israel, to break the story, all the more reason to distrust the French and France. We would withhold judgment, as we’re instructed to do in the Al Het, as we rap at our chests on the holidays: “For the wrong that we have done before you in the closing of the heart.” After all, this was the France that my mom sought out after the war, as she emerged from living as a Catholic in Poland. Until she could get papers, she lived in Lyon and married my dad in Marseille. 

We arrived in Paris a month before Rosh Hashana, enough time to sense what we were in for in our sabbatical year in Paris, away from Evanston, JRC and our friends. Our kids began school at the Ecole Active Bilingue Jeannine Manuel, which we were told opened in 1954, with the primary post-war mission to instill international understanding. We moved into an apartment only a few blocks away from Roland Garros, site of the French Open for more than 75 years, and which unknown to us was used during World War II as a prison for French political dissidents. We noticed a plaque on the elementary school next to our apartment. As we loosely translated the French, it reads: “To the memory of the students of this school deported between 1942 and 1944 because they were Jewish, innocent victims of Nazi barbarism with the complicity of the Vichy government. They were exterminated in the death camps. 100 children had lived in the 16th arrondissement.” It was dedicated on May 17, 2003 – “Never let us forget them,” it concluded. We cannot help but cringe each time police sirens sound. They sound often and the piercing sound is the Gestapo siren that is hardwired to our nerve endings. Of all things not to do away with. 

One of our first family outings was to the Marais, the old Jewish quarter that welcomed us with a showy intermarriage of Orthodox Jewish and fashionable gay, with an aromatic wafting of Sephardic falafel and hummus to spice up our walk. The kids had the best falafel of their young lives, and I put on tefillin at the behest of a Lubavitcher who told us he got a mitzvah out of my impromptu indulgence. I hadn’t lain tefillin in 30+ years, and I could tell he was kvelling. “It is good,” I could hear a Sholom Aleichem character say. We dipped into a synagogue on rue Pavee that was designed by Hector Guimard, the art nouveau architect, who designed many of the Paris metro station entrances we pass through every day. 

We wondered what we’d do for the holidays. Margie made two more pilgrimages to the Marais, for matzah meal and yahrzeit candles and what my mom used to call “tomm,” the holiday mood. We emailed friends back home to wish them a shana tova and plead for a mystical serving of kishke to appear with friends for Shabbat dinner. We discovered that Edith, an older upstairs neighbor who’d befriended us, was Jewish. We invited her to join us for Shabbat dinner on erev Rosh Hashana, though Margie was fighting a nasty cold. As it turned out, Edith developed a cold too and sent her regrets by card under the door. We brought her chicken soup. She brought us roses as thanks. We lit candles, sang the Kiddush from the Mahzor we’d remembered to pack, did the motze with finely-kneaded challah we’d bought at our neighborhood patisserie, and ate to the background music of Mandy Patinkin’s Mamaloshen and Fiddler on the Roof. There was something almost enchanted in the flavor of Margie’s matzah ball soup. Both helpings. We went to bed not knowing if Margie would feel up to going to shul in the morning or not. 

We each woke up humming. 

“May the Lord protect and defend you. May the Lord preserve you from pain. Favor them, Oh Lord, with happiness and peace. Oh, hear our Sabbath prayer. A-a-a-a-amen. 

Dovening to Fiddler on the Roof. 

We read about Alfred Dreyfus, the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the French army when he was convicted falsely in 1894 of passing military secrets to the Germans. He spent 12 years on Devil’s Island off the coast of South America before he was pardoned and released. The affair was memorialized as the icon of French anti-semitism. 

Other melodies followed: 

L’dor vador. “L’dor, vador, l’dor vador, l’dor vador nageed godlecha. Oole, nayzach, ni-zachim, oole, nayzach, ni-zachim, kiddushah nakdeesh.” 

Avinu Malkenu. “Avinu malkenu, avinu malkenu, avinu malkenu, honenu va’anenu ki eyn banu ma-asim.” 

And of course, Sim Shalom, sung always with the stealth “sim” emanating from the congregation in between the cantor’s chanting of the words “sim” and “shalom.” “Sim [sim], sim [sim], sim shalom, sim shalom tova oovrachah.” 

We knew we would have Rosh Hashana with us wherever we were. We opted for nature. Margie and I pulled out two bikes, Sylvie strapped on roller blades and Noah carried out his scooter. We drifted gently into the Bois de Boulogne, Paris’ grand park that is three times as large as Central Park and larger than Lincoln Park and Grant Park combined. We wandered, and ended up at a lake, where we ferried onto an island for lunch at a chalet overlooking the water. As quiet as the Amidah. 

Le Chalet des Iles

We didn’t have our holiday service, but we had its calm, in which we saw, heard and were enveloped by all of you. 

L’shana tova, rabbi, cantor and friends.

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