A specific question for my readers and a meditation on what it means to be Jewish, to be Russian and to bow to history
By
David Gottfried
About 10 years I ago, I was lazily perusing rare documents in the Slavic Languages Section of the New York Public Library. I found, to my amazement, a translation of the Domostroi.
The Domostroi was a sort of guidebook, written at the behest of Tzar Ivan the Terrible, which instructed people on how to be good Russians and good members of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Among other things, it explained exactly how wedding ceremonies were to be performed. Among other things, the groom, before kissing the bride, was to smash a glass with one foot. I was amazed as we Jews do the same thing in our wedding ceremonies. We do this to remind ourselves, at our happiest moments, of our saddest moments. More specifically, the smashing of the wedding glass is supposed to remind us of the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans.
And so I want to know: Did the Jews get this custom from the Russians or did the Russians get this custom from the Jews. I had heard that in the Middle Ages there existed, in South Central Asia, the kingdom of the Kazars. Supposedly, the king was looking for a religion for his people, and he chose Judaism. Did this custom arise among the Kazars ?
Incidentally, as I read the Domostroi (It is a quick and easy read, and I read it in the Slavic Languages dept as the book could not be borrowed), I thought of my elderly, Jewish relatives from Poland, most of which, at the time of their immigration to America, was under Tzarist rule and was known as the “Pale of Settlement.”
I know that I am “supposed” to believe that Jews and Russians are very different. I am supposed to believe that we are cultured and that we love education and that Russians are brutes, bigots, and irredeemably backward. I am supposed to always remember that they are vicious anti Semites.
And I am supposed to forget Yevgeny Yevtushenko and his poem “Babi Yar,” which is the finest ode to the Jewish people that anyone, Jew or Christian, has uttered within the past 200 years.
But I knew I should not believe the nonsense propagated by neo cons and neo libs (Let’s just call them what they are: Stuck-up prissy preppies) when I read Virginia Woolf’s review of the novels of Dostoyevsky. She said that reading Dostoyevsky was akin to entering a room where a bunch of people were talking, in very loud voices, about the most personal and indelicate matters, in a very opinionated, emotional fashion, without caring if their coarse speech offended. Dostoyevsky’s characters had all the color and caprice of Woody Allen’s family in “Annie Hall” and Philip Roth’s Mishbucha (extended family) in Newark. Jewish and Russian literature made the grand characters of Anglo-American letters wintry, weary and marred by a monochromatic melancholy.
Of course, Dostoyevsky’s novelistic genius doesn’t make up for pogroms and the blood libel (the paranoid notion that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make Matzah), and the Domostroi is patently and explicitly anti-Semitic as it states that the Jews are an accursed and odious race, which is guilty of killing our Lord and Savior, and that good Russians must stay away from Jews as much as possible.
Nevertheless, the Domostroi, in its obsessive focus on holiday cooking, household finances and other quotidian matters, reminded me of old Jewish relatives from Poland. It was a book commissioned by one of the cruelest men of the “ancien regime,” and much of its focus was on what sweets and savories should grace a holiday table.
I doubt that most Russians could have afforded the foodstuffs enumerated in that book. Apparently, to be a good Russian, one had to eat a great variety of wonderful foodstuffs for each particular holiday. And the emphasis on seafood gave the book the aroma of Russ and Daughter’s, a famous Lower East Side Fish store which was always chock full of salmon, white fish, herring and other kosher foods of the water.
Also, the book’s emphasis on economizing seemed so particularly Jewish. The book explicitly directed all women to store up little pieces of junk, of threads, of broken buttons, of almost anything in little bags because at any moment the time might come when such a piece of detritus could be used again, and all of my female relatives had little ugly bags filled with lose threads to sew any torn garment. Also, it told housewives that the time for baking bread must be the time for washing clothes to save on firewood. The fire that heats the water that washes the clothes should be the same fire that bakes the bread.
And this reminded me of my grandmother, Aunt and Mother who saved used tea bags to make successive and steadily weaker cups of tea.
And if I closed my eyes, the tea bags became Samovars. and the scents of greasy French fires from the streets below were replaced by the bracing, briny small of the Atlantic Ocean, which would take me home, to the old country, where Friday nights were never sweeter and slaughter stained the days.
IF I HAD TO TAKE AN EDUCATED GUESS, I WOULD SAY THE RUSSIANS TOOK THE TRADITION FROM THE JEWS.
IF THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN DURING THE TIME OF CZAR IVAN THE TERRIBLE OF RUSSIA THEN IT MOST CERTAINLY WAS TAKEN FROM JEWISH CULTURE. THE TRADITION OF SMASHING THE GLASS AS I REMEMBER IT DATES WAY BACK TO ANCIENT BABYLON WHERE A BABYLONIAN RABBI IN THE 2ND OR 3RD CENTURY SMASHED AN EXPENSIVE GLASS GOBLET AT A WEDDING FEAST (BACK THEN ONLY THE VERY RICH COULD AFFORD SUCH LUXURIES). HIS REASON FOR THIS WAS THAT HE WAS FURIOUS THAT THERE WAS SO MUCH JOY AND SOMEHOW THIS CRAZY RABBI THOUGHT THAT BY SMASHING THE GOBLET HE WOULD GET ATTENTION AND WENT ON TO SAY HOW IN LIFE THERE IS JOY BUT ALSO GREAT SORRY. OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT I COULD BE OFF ON THIS PART.
SO OVER THE CENTURIES ITS MEANING HAS MORPHED. THE REF TO THE TEMPLE CAME ABOUT DURING THE MIDDLE AGES, SO MUCH LATER ABOUT, 1000 YEARS AFTER THE CRAZY BABYLONIAN RABBI SMASHED THE GOBLET
MORE RECENTLY IVE HEARD A RABBI AT A WEDDING A FEW YEARS BACK SAY THAT THE FRAGILITY OF THE GLASS REPRESENTED THE DELICATE NATURE OF THE UNION AND THEN WENT ON TO SAY WHAT THEY ALL SAY AS THIS GLASS SHATTERS MAY YOUR UNION NEVER BREAK...
SO IN CLOSING THE RUSSIANS TOOK THE IDEA FROM THE JEWS AND NEVER GAVE THEM CREDIT; DO YOU THINK WE HAVE A CASE CAN WE SUE MAKE SOME $$$ LOL....
IF I HAD TO TAKE AN EDUCATED GUESS, I WOULD SAY THE RUSSIANS TOOK THE TRADITION FROM THE JEWS.
IF THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN DURING THE TIME OF CZAR IVAN THE TERRIBLE OF RUSSIA THEN IT MOST CERTAINLY WAS TAKEN FROM JEWISH CULTURE. THE TRADITION OF SMASHING THE GLASS AS I REMEMBER IT DATES WAY BACK TO ANCIENT BABYLON WHERE A BABYLONIAN RABBI IN THE 2ND OR 3RD CENTURY SMASHED AN EXPENSIVE GLASS GOBLET AT A WEDDING FEAST (BACK THEN ONLY THE VERY RICH COULD AFFORD SUCH LUXURIES). HIS REASON FOR THIS WAS THAT HE WAS FURIOUS THAT THERE WAS SO MUCH JOY AND SOMEHOW THIS CRAZY RABBI THOUGHT THAT BY SMASHING THE GOBLET HE WOULD GET ATTENTION AND WENT ON TO SAY HOW IN LIFE THERE IS JOY BUT ALSO GREAT SORRY. OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT I COULD BE OFF ON THIS PART.
SO OVER THE CENTURIES ITS MEANING HAS MORPHED. THE REF TO THE TEMPLE CAME ABOUT DURING THE MIDDLE AGES, SO MUCH LATER ABOUT, 1000 YEARS AFTER THE CRAZY BABYLONIAN RABBI SMASHED THE GOBLET
MORE RECENTLY IVE HEARD A RABBI AT A WEDDING A FEW YEARS BACK SAY THAT THE FRAGILITY OF THE GLASS REPRESENTED THE DELICATE NATURE OF THE UNION AND THEN WENT ON TO SAY WHAT THEY ALL SAY AS THIS GLASS SHATTERS MAY YOUR UNION NEVER BREAK...
SO IN CLOSING THE RUSSIANS TOOK THE IDEA FROM THE JEWS AND NEVER GAVE THEM CREDIT; DO YOU THINK WE HAVE A CASE CAN WE SUE MAKE SOME $$$ LOL....