Editorial: Nothing new under the sun

Issue of March 27, 2009 / 2 Nissan 5769

In 1897, Bircat HaChama did not go smoothly in New York City.

According to a report in The New York Times the following day, “the celebration ... was spoiled for hundreds of people by the interference of two park policemen with a gathering in Tomkins Square, the arrest of Rabbi Wechsler, and the flight of Rabbi Klein.”

The report, circulated by e-mail earlier this week, offers a fascinating snapshot of time and place. It is also a glimpse at the obviously large numbers of halachically observant Jews in New York City during the beginnings of sweatshop and pushcart days — more than half a century before the time mythmakers would have us believe Orthodoxy truly arrived in America.

The Times explained that the two rabbis of large East Side congregations decided to gather their congregants at Tomkins Square Park to mark the once-every-28th-year occasion en masse.

Nobody was in charge, nobody thought to obtain a permit for a large public gathering and, the paper reported, “By 8 o’clock the square and the sidewalks around it were crowded. Rabbi Wechsler arrived about that time and was astonished to see Rabbi Klein running away at full speed. This last phenomenon was explained a moment later by the appearance of Park Policeman Foley, puzzled and excited.”

The celebration surrounding the custom of reciting a blessing on the sun once every generation or so can be somewhat difficult to comprehend and “Rabbi Klein’s knowledge of English is slight, while Foley’s faculties of comprehension of matters outside of police and park regulations and local events are not acute,” the Times dryly noted. “The attempt of a foreign citizen to explain to an American Irishman an astronomical situation and a tradition of the Talmud was a dismal failure.”

With Rabbi Klein’s hasty departure from the scene, Rabbi Wechsler gave it his best shot. His English was better, it seems, but not good enough to get his point across to the officer, who “seized the rabbi by the neck and took him to Essex Market Police Court,” where he was held for nearly an hour before being arraigned before a magistrate who dismissed the case for lack of any wrongdoing.

Other Bircat HaChama gatherings, on the waterfront at the East River, were not disturbed, the Times reported.

The account ends by noting that “Records of the synagogues show that ‘the new sun’ service has been conducted by orthodox Hebrews in this country at intervals of twenty-eight years for 180 years” — that is to say, since 1717.

While the large Orthodox population is highlighted, so is the fact that even hundreds of years after the first Jew arrived in the New World, they were still “Hebrews” who were “foreign citizens.” In some ways, it seems, Golus (exile) still hasn’t changed much.