This Shabbat, Feb. 1, 2013, marked the 10th year since the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Ilan Ramon z"l was the payload specialist on this fated mission. He was not only an Israeli hero, but also a hero of the Jewish people.
Ilan Ramon was the subject of my Friday night sermon. I had the honor of speaking about him and telling a modern midrash composed a decade ago by Cantor Melanie Fine which I had saved among my files. The central idea of this story links the Torah that Ramon brought into space with the history of our people. It reminds us that we are blessed to carry Torah wherever we go, in times of celebration as well as in times of horror.
As I prepared to speak this Shabbat, I happened across another file. This one contained a sermon I had delivered roughly 6 years ago at the start of 2007. It is the next step in the story of Ilan Ramon and Torahs in space. Whether or not you were at services then or at services last night, I encourage you to read on. As Paul Harvey would say, here is "the rest of the story..."
Tonight, I want to share with you a beautiful story
– a true story, a Jewish story – from this past year (2006). This is about a little Torah that went into
outer space. It was not the first Torah
that left the earth’s atmosphere. That
Torah, also a little miniature Torah, was brought into space by Israel’s first
astronaut Ilan Ramon. Ilan was part of
the seven-member crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia. They traveled into space almost three years
ago but did not return to earth safely, their mission ending tragically when
Columbia broke apart while reentering the atmosphere.
My story tonight is about another little Torah, the
second Torah to go into space, and it belongs to a dear friend of my wife’s
family, and someone whom Michal and I knew quite well during our years as
students in Cincinnati. Even though he
was a professor and many years our senior, we spent lots of time with him and
his wife over the years. What was also
nice was that we counted his children among our closer friends in Ohio.
His name is Henry, Henry Fenichel.
A few facts about Henry... First, Henry is a very happy man. He is the type of person who you just can’t
help liking; always smiling, always thoughtful, always kind. When we knew Henry, he had fiery red hair – as
the years passed, it has turned grey. For
decades he taught physics courses at the University of Cincinnati. His specialty is optics and he would do cool
things with light including creating holograms, a trick that used to wow his
students.
But Henry had a deeper story and, from time to
time, he would share bits and pieces of it.
He was born into a Jewish family in the Netherlands. When he was in preschool, he was forced to
wear a yellow star by Nazis marking him, as it did so many others, for ridicule,
isolation, and eventually death. His
story has many parallels to Anne Frank’s story – he was hidden as a 2-year-old,
his father died at Auschwitz. Luckily,
Henry’s fate was different. He survived the
Bergen Belsen concentration camp, escaping death together with his mother on a difficult,
10-day train ride to British Palestine in what was called "Transport
222." This unique exchange of Germans for Dutch Jews was his lifeline.
Until recent years, though, Henry was reluctant to speak
in any detail about this side of his story.
Gradually, he came to the understanding of the importance of being a personal
witness.
So, last April, Henry participated in a video
conference between schoolchildren in Cincinnati and Israel. He brought something special with him, a
miniature Torah, to help him tell his story.
On the other end of the conference link was Rona Ramon, the widow of the
Israeli astronaut who died in the Columbia tragedy. Was it a coincidence? Could it be?
Here was a man holding a miniature Torah scroll, a gift from cousins who
had escaped Nazi Germany. It was amazingly similar to the one that Ilan had
taken with him into space on Columbia’s ill-fated mission nearly three years
ago.
Ilan Ramon had taken the original miniature scroll
into space as a tribute to Israel, to the Jewish people, and to his mother, a
survivor of the Auschwitz death camp. Rona Ramon remembered how, when she and
Ilan first held the tiny Torah in Houston before the Columbia liftoff, their
hands shook. What a holy
opportunity. What a way to demonstrate
how ideas such as brotherhood, and cooperation – ideas central to the Torah –
are elemental to our future; how they truly encircle our world.
That 4-inch, handwritten Torah belonged to Joachim
Joseph, an astrophysicist at Tel Aviv University. In 1944, as a Dutch child in
the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, Joseph had studied secretly for his
Bar Mitzvah using the miniature scroll that a rabbi smuggled into their
barracks. After the ceremony, the rabbi
handed it to Joseph, hoping that the boy would survive to tell the story.
In a nearby barracks was a red-haired, freckle-faced
6-year-old — Henry Fenichel.
Rona Ramon couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw
Henry during that video conference. “There
was this modest man, a Dutch survivor of the Holocaust, holding a small Torah
that was like a sister to the Torah that Ilan took up in space,” she recalled.
“I knew that I needed to ask him for a very big favor — to allow his Torah to
go up in the next shuttle, and make the return back to Earth — for Ilan’s sake,
for his memory, to complete his mission.”
Knowing that another Space Shuttle mission was
coming up, she called a close family friend, Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean, and
asked him if he might take the Cincinnati Torah on NASA's Atlantis shuttle this
past fall in memory of her husband and the Columbia crew. She contacted Henry and he agreed.
The Atlantis mission to the International Space
Station returned safely on Sept. 21 with Henry Fenichel's tiny Torah in its
payload.
There is a Hebrew word – shaleim – which means
“being complete.” I can’t help but think
about how many times I have heard the story of Ilan Ramon, and hoped that it
would end differently. That this Israeli
pilot, astronaut, and hero, would return safely. Thankfully, he held many interviews from
space, speaking about what he saw from his window, commenting on the issues
that should really matter for the inhabitants of our world. He noted how the Middle East, from space, has
no borders. It looks peaceful. Were it only the case that the reality on the
ground paralleled that view from heaven.
When Atlantis returned safely, Canadian Astronaut MacLean
made the following observation about his role in escorting this second Torah
into space: "The entire mission that I just did was completing Ilan's
mission..."
As 2006 ends and we think about closing out one
year, we should also think about the stories that require our efforts to
continue into the coming year. In 2007,
what will we do to make something, some place, some one, a little more shaleim
– a little more complete?
The Hebrew word shaleim – being complete – is
related to the Hebrew word shalom, meaning peace. When asked about his little Torah that reached
the stars, Henry Fenichel remarked that it symbolizes "a hope and future
for mankind." Even though he was so
brutally touched by the inhumanities of the Holocaust, his optimism – the
Jewish people’s optimism – still shines through. A newspaper article quoted Henry as saying
that “the Columbia Torah — and by extension my Torah, — the Atlantis Torah —
represents the survival of the Jewish people and the hope for the future, as
well as the ability to rise from the anguish of the Holocaust, and to reach for
the stars.” But he also noted that these
Torahs “went up in … spacecraft(s) built by Americans and an international
community, together."
It is this togetherness – this vision of shalom –
that we hope will prevail in the coming days and throughout the coming year,
and years to come.
May our world and our people be blessed with
completeness and peace – may this be God’s will – and together let us say –
AMEN.
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