We Are Not Boring: The Secret History Jewish America©

Parashat Ki Tissa 2025-5785

We Are Not Boring: The Secret History Jewish America 

by Rabbi David Baum

Congregation Shaarei Kodesh

Parashat Ki Tissa 2025-5785

www.rabbidavidbaum.com

Has anyone here seen the movie the Frisco Kid? My father used to watch it with me every weekend growing up. 

The premise of the movie is of a newly minted rabbi in Poland, the center of Jewish learning in the late 1800’s, is sent to America to serve as a rabbi for a new community, and of course, hilarity ensues. 

But Jewish Americans didn’t quite understand that the joke was actually on them.The film follows Avram Belinski (played by the Jewish actor Gene Wilder of blessed memory), a kind-hearted but naïve Polish rabbi who is sent to America in the mid-19th century to lead a Jewish congregation in San Francisco. In the end, after many misadventures and being the but of every joke, Avram finally reaches San Francisco and his congregation. 

But the Frisco Kid wasn’t the joke, we, the American Jewish community at the time was the real butt of the joke. The rabbis of Europe would never have sent a rabbi from their class to serve in America. Hassidic rabbis in Eastern Europe talked about America as a land of exile. Eastern Europe was the homeland. When the Belzer Rebbe was asked to come to America to help build the growing community in the late 1800’s, he said, “Generations of piety in Europe had purified Europe of those evil spirits. But there were no pious chassidim in America. And so America was a world still full of evil spirits.”

Before the Holocaust, there was relatively no Ultra Orthodox presence in America. From the Ultra Orthodox to the Modernist intellectual Jews - American Jewry was a joke. We were the only Jewish community in the world that didn’t produce Jewish scholarship, or intellectualism. And yet, we are one of, if not the, most unique populations of Jews in history, and we don’t even know it. 

Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur recently noted in a podcast about the history of American Jewry: 

“American Jewry is also one of the most extraordinarily powerful, well-organized, cohesive Jewish diasporas in the history of Jews, and certainly minorities in America, with a multi-billion dollar institutional edifice of vast charities, activist organizations, advocacy organizations, left-wing ones, right-wing ones. It's a community that is at once extraordinarily strong, cohesive, but doesn’t have a powerful sense of self, and extraordinarily weak. And without that sense of self, it's a very confusing and strange community, and their strangeness is fascinating, and they're mistaken in thinking that they're boring.”

And here’s something else I want to add: we are profoundly ignorant of our own history, and it’s a shame because knowing our accomplishments is vital to who are we, and who the Jew is and will be in the world. The American Jewish story is, in many ways, the continuation of a deeply embedded Jewish value that dates back to the Torah itself—the idea that every Jew counts.

This week’s parashah, Ki Tissa, begins with what we would call the first annual fund in history. 

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: When you take a census of the Israelite people according to their enrollment, each shall pay the LORD a ransom for himself on being enrolled, that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled. This is what everyone who is entered in the records shall pay: a half-shekel by the sanctuary weight—twenty gerahs to the shekel—a half-shekel as an offering to the LORD. Everyone who is entered in the records, from the age of twenty years up, shall give the LORD’s offering: the rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less than half a shekel when giving the LORD’s offering as expiation for your persons. You shall take the expiation money from the Israelites and assign it to the service of the Tent of Meeting; it shall serve the Israelites as a reminder before the LORD, as expiation for your persons.

The Jewish people have an uncomfortable relationship with assigning numbers to people.  One does not have to look further than the Shoah when Jews in concentration camps were assigned a number as their identity in order to dehumanize them.  In fact, there are many sources that forbid the counting Jews by number. 

That all being said, we have to be able to count people for the good of our communities and countries which most often happens in the form of a census. The counting is to be performed through by having each male who is of military age (at least twenty years old) to give a half shekel.  

The question is, why does everyone have to pay the same? Why couldn’t a richer person pay more to make up for a poorer person? Ibn Ezra, a well known Spanish Medieval commentator explains that the reason for this is that the money is an atonement for one’s soul, which was the expressed purpose of the census. The implication here is that all souls are equally precious.

And we see this in Jewish American history more so than in any other land that Jews have been in since we were in Israel. 

In 1654, the first Jews arrive in what will become one of the most Jewish cities on earth, New York City, then called New Amsterdam. When these first 23 Jews arrive as penniless refugees because their money was taken at every port where they weren’t allowed to settle. New Amsterdam was their final stop. As Jews, they could not get off the ship in South America where the Inquisition was still law. After they gave the captain everything they had, the only way they were allowed off of the ship was to promise that they would take care of every Jew who came to this city, and land. And from them, there is a legacy of a smaller group of Jews welcoming Jews who were much different than them into the land. 

This becomes Jewish America’s legacy. Haviv says the following: 

“America is born because it's born from the lowest class, American Jewish community, from the lowest class of Jew in Europe, the least educated, the least literate, is born as a community without tremendous Jewish learning at institutions of cultural creation. And one of the first things that American Jews do at every turn literally from day one is take care of each other…In every major city that absorbs, in which a small community of well-to-do German Jews absorbs the desperate, vast numbers of Russian Jews, these communities can no longer afford to maintain their institutions, their charities, their communal institutions. This is in America long before the welfare state of today. They can no longer afford to do it on an ad hoc basis. The old age home and the Jewish hospital and the burial society and the school can't all afford to each have their own fund raiser who goes around and depending on the specific charisma of each specific person, that's the budget of that institution for that year. There's just not enough money. Every dollar matters. Then you get the first proper federation, and that's established in 1895 in Boston. And it's all the Jewish charities who come together around a single table and say, we're going to fundraise together, and we're going to disperse the money together. Because not a single dollar can be spared.”

And so the Jewish American heroes aren’t famous rabbis that you can collect on trading cards (which by the way, does exist), or Jewish American intellectuals like the European intellectual giants of Martin Buber or Franz Rozensweig. Rather, our heroes are much like the heroes of the Purim story, Mordechai and Esther. Mordechai, named after the Babylonian god Marduke, hardly a nice Jewish name at the time, and his niece Esther, who changed her name from Hadassah so she could fit in with the Persians. Our heroes were Jews who felt their Judaism in their kishkas, and never forgot who that they too were strangers in a strange land, even if they weren’t the traditional Jews. 

In her introduction to the book of Esther, Dr. Adelle Berlin notes that Esther is the quintessential Diaspora story. The story reflects a situation in which Jews were a minority in a larger society and where it fell to the individual Jew, not to the state, to ensure Jewish survival. And yet, this story holds none of the traditional things that we think help us as Jews survive as a minority: God’s name isn’t mentioned once in the book, so there is no theology; neither is prayer, Kashruth, and the marriage that we learn about is an intermarriage between a Jewish woman and a non-Jewish king.

But what makes it Jewish are the mitzvoth, the commandments we took upon ourselves in the megillah: to feed the Jewish and non-Jewish poor, to give gifts to one another, and to fast in solidarity with Jews in other places who are not safe when we are. 

Your ancestors weren’t the greatest minds of the Jewish world; but what they brought with them is something that has sustained our people more than the story of words; it was a Torah of deed. They may not have had the biggest minds, but the Jews of America had the biggest hearts. 

And it was those hearts that welcomed my parents in as refugees to this country when they were stateless Jews; and it was the hearts of American Jews through HIAS that gave my mother’s family train tickets, hot food, and support when they arrived. 

This is the substance, this is what American Jewry has been and must continue to be; a community that cares for all Jews regardless of their intellectual abilities, culture, or material wealth. 

We took the message of that census to heart: all of us count, and perhaps this is the greatest gift we gave to the Jewish world. But, we must continue the work. 

To help our Jewish organizations return to that core of the Mahazit Ha-Shekel - the half-shekel, the idea that no one stands alone—we are all responsible for one another. In our modern world, this principle reminds us that every contribution, no matter the size, has immense value. Whether through acts of tzedakah, community service, or simply reaching out to someone in need, we uphold the sacred idea that all Jews are bound together. By fostering a culture where everyone feels seen and valued, we ensure that our community remains strong and unified.

We must continue to strengthen Jewish Identity – Like Mordechai and Esther, Step Up in Times of Need. Throughout history, Jews have faced moments that called for courage and action. Mordechai and Esther stepped forward when their people needed them most, and today, we are faced with similar moments. One of our teens asked me what I thought if he wore a kippah to school. It was something I never would have done as a teenager in public school. I didn’t want to do anything to stand out, let alone for being Jewish. And, I have to be honest with you, I asked him in a tone of discouragement because I was worried for his safety: “Are you really sure about this? I mean, are you worried about being attacked or shunned?” He said, “Yes, I want to show the world I’m Jewish. He is wearing a kippah during times of unprecedented antisemitism, which might seem like a small act, but to me, it’s heroic. 

We each have the power to shape the Jewish future. Now is the time to embrace our identity with confidence and ensure that Judaism remains a source of light for generations to come. American Jewry is one of the most influential, well-structured, and united Jewish communities in diaspora history. We boasts a multi-billion-dollar network of charities, activist groups, and advocacy organizations spanning the political spectrum. We are anything but boring - we are the legacy of a million hugs that welcomed our destitute people to a new land, and made them feel at home. I will leave you, the most powerful and wealthiest Jewish diaspora community in history with the words Mordechai said to Esther, “Who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for times like these.”