Mother’s Day 2024
By Stan Schroeder

In honor of Mother’s Day May 12, I dedicate this column to Jewish mothers everywhere. I have written about the two well-known Jewish mothers. The first was glorified and honored by Sophie Tucker starting in 1925 when Jack Yellen and Lou Pollack wrote My Yiddishe Momme for Sophie following the death of her mother. The second was Gertrude Berg and her radio and television creation Molly Goldberg.

My own mother was the most important person in my life and personified the Jewish values I cherish and live by. She was born Sally Greenbaum, the oldest of three sisters, in Boston September 11, 1906. The family moved to Los Angeles in the mid 1920s and my mother married my father, Leopold Schroeder in 1929. His family had made the journey to Los Angeles from Detroit about the same time. Leo’s father Solomon had been driven out of Asbury Park, New Jersey by the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s. He had owned and operated two ice cream parlors and the Clan frightened customers away from Jewish businesses.

In any event Leo and Sally met, fell in love, and married. I don’t know if my mother knew, or had reason to suspect, that Leo was a gambler who was always out to make the next big score. He landed in prison for bad checks or a variety of other illegal schemes – spending most of his adult life behind bars. My mother and my two younger sisters and yours truly, went to live with Leo’s parents and we lived with them from my earliest remembrances until my bar mitzvah. My grandmother had died shortly before that.

When my grandfather sold the house and remarried, we lived in a rented house in which my mother rented rooms to make ends meet. She had worked in different jobs ever since my sisters were born. My grandfather and his new wife (Aunt Bebe to me) bought a larger house and we went to live with them again until I was 16. At that time my mother was able to buy a house where she again rented rooms and started a “nursery school” in a small back house.

My mother had a difficult life – she contracted colon cancer in her 40s and had colostomy surgery, back in the 1950s. She lived until she was 88. She never complained and instilled in her children an ethic of working, education, and helping others.

My sisters and I all worked while we went to high school, giving Mother the money we earned, and receiving what we needed. I lived at home while attending UCLA (my sisters were in high school at the time) and continued to help support the family.

My mother didn’t drive and the three of us took her shopping and made sure she had what she needed. I would often take her to Ralph’s where she bought groceries using coupons she had clipped from papers and advertisements. Then we would go to Green Thumb Nursery where she would buy plants on sale and we would plant them in her garden. She lived in her own house and valued her independence. Our lunches at Four ‘N 20 Restaurant were a real treat, especially sharing her favorite lemon cream pie for dessert. The waitress took the meringue off the lemon meringue pie and squirted whipped cream on top just for her.

The memories I have are of loving, caring for one another, and being an extended family with my maternal and paternal aunts and uncles and cousins. Thanks, Mother.

Please see the right-hand column for the poem I wrote for her on Mother’s Day 1990.

Board Meeting Dvar Torah (October 2, 2019)
By Owen Delman

“Blind obedience without the restraint of reason or morality is dangerous.”

“Abraham should not be honored for willing to kill his child because of a command from God.”

“The key word is blind — this is the stuff of fanatics and terrorists.”

These are some of the concepts regarding the Akedah discussion today. There are rabbis who refuse to include the Akedah in their Rosh Hashanah services because the concept is unacceptable. They reject any of the interpretations which attempt to justify the basic premise of God commanding a sacrifice. Given the holocaust with the murderers using as a defense that they were “just following orders” (an example of ‘blind obedience’) they condemn the whole concept.

Bringing it into our present day, they say if there had been a trial of Abraham he would have used the defense of “God ordered me to do it” and that this is quite similar to the defense stated by the assassins of Yitzhak Rabin who claimed that to give any part of Israel back would be a denial of God’s plan for Israel.

So how should do we deal it?

In Stan’s Torah study group we often hear the refrain “but that can’t be true” or “but that doesn’t fit with something in another part of the bible.” The questioner gets reminded that these are stories, parables used for teaching concepts.

After services yesterday, (where I had posited a number of theories of what the Akedah meant) a friend came up to me and asked me which one was the correct interpretation.

I asked him with which one he felt most comfortable because there is no one answer.

The Bible is not history, not an accurate accounting of past events

Let me stop for a moment: I’ve studied history and literature. Let me explain the differences.  History is a written account of past events based on the author’s examination of events and documents to back up his conclusions. Literature is a creation of an author perhaps based on fact or wholly conceived by the author. The Akedah is a story in the Torah meant as a lesson; a piece of literature. In the study of literature it is accepted that it is less important what the author meant as opposed to what the reader sees in the work — how it affects him. There is no correct answer, only how the viewer is affected by the piece.

Once a piece of art (literature, painting, sculpture, etc.) is given to the world, it matters little what the artist meant. What is important is how it is perceived and how it affects the contemporary viewer.

When you understand the Akedah for what it is to our day, to us, it becomes much more understandable. Those rabbis who won’t even allow the Akedah to be part of their Rosh Hashanah story may be missing a wonderful teaching lesson for the sake of political correctness.