Even though he died when I was barely 20, I learned a great deal from my father, of blessed memory. Doing things based on what I learned from his example is one of several ways he lives on through me.
Because he worked most of my waking hours during the week, my clearest memories of him are connected to Shabbat. Our Shabbat began with him walking in the door with a bouquet of flowers to add to the beautiful table my mother set. And Shabbat ended with my dialing two numbers immediately after Havdallah — one to each of his older sisters, to wish them a gut voch, or good week.
Those practices are alive in me and in both my brothers. I buy a bouquet of flowers every Friday to add beauty to my home and I call my mother and my children immediately after Havdallah to wish them all a good week.
But when I stopped recently at the florist on the corner of Quintara and 19th Avenue to buy my flowers, Zach, the nephew of the owner who already knows to go to the fridge to get me the freshest ones, warned me: “Next month is February. The prices will go up!”
“Of course,” I said to myself, as soon as I remembered that the month is one of the two biggest for florists — Valentine’s Day! And everyone with a lover celebrates Valentine’s Day, and if it’s not candy, it’s flowers.
When I was young, no one I knew celebrated Valentine’s Day because it was St. Valentine’s Day. We knew nothing of Mr. Valentine and why he was made a saint, just as we knew nothing of Mr. Patrick and what made him special in the eyes of the Catholics. But as long as “St.” preceded his name, we Brooklyn Jews knew it was traif.
Well, time has passed, we feel more comfortable in this country, and most of us are certain that buying our sweethearts candy or flowers won’t lead to conversion. But I wondered if the date had significance in Jewish history. And, thanks to a Web site called www.scopesys.com and a gentleman named William Blake who is probably a minister, I discovered some very important events that occurred on Feb. 14.
The earliest was the election in 1130 of a Jewish pope. He actually wasn’t Jewish and he barely became pope, but his story lives on to this day. His name was Pietro Pierleone, and he was the great-grandson of a Jew named Barukh who had converted to Catholicism, took the name Benedict, and married a Christian noblewoman of Roman lineage.
According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, wealth and powerful connections made the family quite influential, and Benedict’s great-grandson was made a cardinal around 1120. When Pope Honorius II died in 1130 the College of Cardinals voted this cardinal the successor and renamed him Anacletus II. But a minority of cardinals was hostile to Pietro’s election and appointed one of their own instead. The schism shook Christendom. There was horror when the word spread that a scion of the Jews would occupy the Throne of St. Peter, and rumors were spread including one that he was robbing churches with the help of other Jews!
But somehow, Anacletus held on to his position until his death seven years later. Only then did Innocent II take possession of the papacy. And most church historians continue to write about the “Jewish pope” with vehement contempt!
But now, with Pope John Paul’s health failing, one wonders if a “Jewish pope” might be elected again. The archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who is head of the College of Cardinals and a favorite of the current pope, is a child-survivor of the Holocaust. Born Aaron Lustiger in France, and hid by his Polish-immigrant father with a Catholic family while his mother perished in Auschwitz, he repaid his religious saviors by converting to Catholicism at age 14. He has been very popular among lay people and colleagues for many years. His intellect, insight into the challenges of modern culture, and his courage to speak out on issues important to the Catholic Church, now make him a very exciting candidate to succeed Pope Jean Paul II.
Feb. 14 is known for a number of other events important to us, some good, some tragic. The most tragic occurred in Strasbourg, France, in 1349 when 2,000 Jews were burned at the stake. They were victims of the vicious rumor that the Jews of Europe were responsible for the Black Plague by poisoning the wells. The city council was convinced of their innocence and tried to protect them. But the guild members forced them to resign and decided, on Feb. 13, to burn them to death.
They waited until Feb. 14, however, so they could perform their horrible deed on Shabbat. Six months later, Emperor Charles IV added insult to injury when he pardoned the town for the massacre, and until the French Revolution, two calls upon a horn were played every night in Strasbourg, to perpetuate the memory of the supposed treason of the Jews.
But Feb. 14 is also the date of good tidings. Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat,” the book that became the sacred text of the Zionist cause, was published then. And on that same day in 1949, Israel’s Knesset conducted its first session, and at that session named Chaim Weizmann the first president of the new state of Israel. He was 74 years old.
In 1980, Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” opened in the Minskoff Theater on Broadway and ran for 341 performances.
One event on Feb. 14 that I remember and took part in was the decision of the Rabbinical Assembly to accept women into the rabbinate. The vote was taken at the 1985 convention of Conservative rabbis, which I think was held at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills. I had been a signatory to the first petition to admit women some 10 years earlier. But even when we voted to admit women to the rabbinate, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the only rabbinical school for the Conservative movement, refused to admit women as students.
It took several years until Chancellor Gerson Cohen, of blessed memory, received a vote of a joint committee and opened the doors of that 100-year-old institution to women. Today, at least half the members of the rabbinical school and more than half the cantorial students are women.
Well, what a day! So, if you’re not sure about sending flowers this Feb. 14, or aren’t getting any, don’t let that stop you from commemorating that important day in Jewish history. And the price doesn’t go up!
Note: Feb. 14 is also the day the U.S. Air Force bombed Dresden in 1945, the nation met JFK when he appeared on “Meet the Press” in 1954, Khrushchev became the first leader to denounce Stalin and did so at the 1956 USSR Communist Party Conference and, in 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini offered up to $3 million to anyone who would kill Salman Rushdie because he published his novel “The Satanic Verses.”
Rabbi Moshe Levin is the rabbi of Congregation Ner Tamid in San Francisco, a Conservative synagogue.