p. 328 in the Hebrew edition of "All Israel vouchsafe for each other"

Yet Shulamit Richter, my room-mate, was at my side. "You should have been called Rachel", she said, and with her deep pleasant voice she began to sing a tune which since then I never heard again, the tune to the verse:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation, and bitter weeping,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refuseth to be comforted
for her children,
because they are not [Jeremiah 31:14 ~~~ listen to two tunes in SongGame]
She also sang the rest of the verse [see SongGame], which is comforting, but I couldn't take it.
Among the older people in Jerusalem I acquired friends who built a wall around me to protect me, but they also pushed me to go back to Germany at the end of the scholarship year: "here you can not help us, you must be there !"

That's what we said - the one who would be the future father of my child, and Ilse Strauss, later "Aunt Ilse", for whom I was like a family member during that study-year, and Prof. Hugo Berg-mann, who received me for a talk now and then; and Mrs. Teller, the matron of the students dormitories, the Austrian-Christian wife of a Jew, who lost one of her two sons in the so-called War of Independence 1948; and Uriel Simon, later professor for Bible at Bar-Ilan University, who guided me in my first paper in Hebrew, about "Eliyah the prophet"; and Prof. Shemaryahu Talmon and his wife, whom I cherished, the late Yonina Talmon, who invited me for the Eve of Pesach - an experience which brought me even closer to Judaism; Prof. Meir Weiss who suggested that I should explore the story of "Josef's brothers", a research - which was , in hindsight - the nucleus of "All Israel vouchsafe for each other". [see also my letter to Weiss in 1981]                           

p. 329 in the Hebrew edition of "All Israel vouchsafe for each other"

In the winter semester of 1961 I continued to study theology at Heidelberg. I still believed that I had to contribute my part to eradicate antisemitism through teaching Christianity in the "right" way, though this idea was kind of absurd already then. For my Christianity was totally "broken" following the Eichmann trial, and not only for me, but also for my catholic fellow student Gil Huettenmeister (who later worked in a mission for Israel and was in an Egyptian prison for a year). I still loved the music of Bach, but when in the "Matthaeus-Passion" the crowds yell: "Crucify him!" I heard: "Throw them into the gas-ovens!" and never again could I understand what was so special about the suffering of the crucified Jew in the face of the sufferng and death of all the Jews of my generation?
Christianity broke, but I still clang to "God". He knew, what would be with me, and so I continued to study.

The confrontations aggravated, and with them my anti-Germanism. "When I travel in a tram, I simply smell it if a Jew stands opposite me", claimed one of my professors in a lesson, "and in general, why don't you go back to Israel, ' if you love Jews?" *

In one seminary we learnt to hold sermons. The professor chose the first chapter of Jermiah for me. A mission! Responsibility! I'm wholly elated about what I discover, again with the help of the tools I had acquired. The professor calls me to his house: "This is the best sermon that was made in this semester, but you do not mention Jesus at all! Moreover: The sermon is full of gloom! That is the hallmark of the Old Testament : gloomy responsibility! Christianity on the other hand heralds joy!!" I had to give the sermon in class and not in church, as did my colleagues.

The word "joy" did not have any meaning in my dictionary then. If it happened at all that I was joyful, I felt as if I was betraying the murdered. The definition of Christianity as "heralding joy" against "the Jewish gloom of responsibility" was in my eyes the confirmation of the heaviest

[After I had written these lines in Febr. 1982, we traveled to Egypt, I and my pupil Esther, born in Egypt. [see my letter to my children about this journey in Nourishment>July 12, 2011] When we returned, one of the teachers in a school where she taught Arabic, asked about the Egyptian people. When she said, that it was a nice people, the teacher attacked her: "So why didn't you stay there, if you love them so much?"

No painter, Chagall included,
nor any other interpreter,
dwelled on what followed the experience with the burning bush:
a heated discussion between the
two partners, God and Moses.
God says,
"you'll go and liberate those slaves",
and Moses stubbornly refuses:
"Who am I?
I can't do it and I won't!"
After he rejects the quest a fifth time, God gets angry.
"Alright, he says, I agree,
it's difficult to do this alone.
But your brother Aharon is already on his way to you in the desert."

Why didn't God do the job himself?
Why didn't he spread some gigantic flying carpets and move
those difficult creatures in one go?
But, how then would they have trained in freedom?
Aharon, 83, while Moses was 80,
makes a poor partner,
as everyone else for that matter.
But at least he joins his brother
on his appearance before Pharao.

p. 330 in the Hebrew edition of "All Israel vouchsafe for each other"

blame which I turned against Christianity : "Everyone cares only for his own soul, and if he cares for another, its only out of pity and not out of the consciousness that he is dependent on his other." [July 21, 2011: just as the connection between yakhid, yakhid-sgulah, yekyud, yakhad gets lost in non-semitic languages, so does the crucial grammar of "his fellow, his other", which is expressed as a suffix, not as a separate word: "re'i' or"zulati".]
I saw myself outside the camp. How should I act?        

If so, I should keep my mouth shut for a long time, I thought. And frustration gnawed at me.

The time of the final exams arrived. The professor for dogmatics wanted to be kind with me: "You must contribute from what you learnt in Israel. Write about the teachings of Israel and Christianity in the dogmatics of Karl Barth!" I let myself be deluded...

When I delivered the paper on time, I found it necessary to reveal to him, that two weeks before I had given birth to my son Immanuel. A student of theology, who is not married, gives birth to a child, and the father is - a Jew...! What happened was familiar: The ideology of people is "alright", but if their emotions are touched (today, July 25, 2011 I would say: are "triggered"), to hell with the ideology! There just must be created the fitting situation, and the denied emotions will explode as a lava stream. [How amazing, that I already at that time use this term: denied emotions!]
And I? I'm , of course, again on the side of the good! Moreover, I find a reinforcement of my tendency which I had anyway - to play the role of the victim! Do me an injustice and I'm, of course, not responsible for what happens to me. [July 25, 2011: at that time I had not yet learnt , that I'm staging everyting] .......I was evicted from the examinations: "Your paper is Jewish and not Christian and moreover below the required level."

The time had come to make a living for me and my child. The scholarship for war-orphans which I had received was finished. Reinhold Mayer persuaded me to work in the Institutum Judaicum at Tuebingen . and again - a totally irrelevant job: the preparing of scientific background material for scientific comments, which two professors at the Institue wanted to add to their German translation of Josephus Flavius, "Wars of the Jews" ["De Bello Judaico" by O. Michel & O. Bauernfeind -1969]. What was the link between this science and the holocaust and Hiroshima and the hunger in India and all the human torment? The frustration and conflict tore me into pieces. [July 25, 2011: maybe there IS a connection between those wars and what happens today....]
After nine months - since my eviction from Heidelberg - I registered again for the examinations, this

Following the sharp intervention of the faculty's dean, Hermann Diem, I was permitted to be examined with the other students, but my certificate would not have any validity.

So now there I had completed seven years of university, and already worked as a scientific assistant and already taught students as a "tutor" - but was without a profession! Yet the com-pensation came after three years: The Hebrew University acknowledged the thesis which I made at Heidelberg and the exams which I made at Tuebingen, and I was allowed to make my PH.D.

          
A week after the exams another drama reached its peak: the drama of my exodus from Christianity and entry into Judaism. I became Jewish!

It would be impossible to correctly estimate the meaning of my integration between my Christianity and my Judaism today, if I won't describe somewhat the love story which took place between me and the church.

"At the age of three"' told my mother, "you entered the Christmas room and were not in the least interested in the presents. You only wanted to watch the Christchild in its crib". This symbolized what was to come.
My father, who was born like my mother in eastern Germany and had - at the age of 26 - acquired the title of a doctor of law, asked to be transferred to Stuttgart in the south and

managed to be a magistrate there for 2 years, till he was recruited (more exact : hurried to recruit himself) into the war rightaway when it began. As a condition of his employment in the service of the government he had to be a member of the Nazi Party, and his letters to my mother, which reached me lately, do not reveal, if in his heart he was critical of this job or not. What is real, is , that my parents who were good Protestants, dared to call her firstborn Eva-Maria-Christa, a triple Jewish-Christian name, which was a kind of provocation. It was about 2 months before "the Crystal Night" that my baptism was arranged. I once heard, that the Christians were meant to be the next victims after the extermination of the Jews. I heard, that the badge intended for them, was to be blue.[July 25, 2011: I tried to find out if that was true, but according to "Badges of dishonor" the "blue badge"was used for other kinds of outlaws, not Christians]

My father, who fell already in August 1943, was considered "missed" for 3 years and my mother turned her back on "God".Therefore, when the authorities evacuated us from Stuttgart
to a village in spring 1944 and I began to reach the consciousness of a child, I found myself in an environment which was purely catholic, rural, and without any guidance from home.

At the end of 1946 the French Occupation Authorities evicted those who had been evacuated from cities which now were in the American Occupation-Zone, and we had to return to town, to Stuttgart, in which most houses were destroyed. So was the house in which our rented flat had been. ----- Now I no longer had "a home" where I could enter at all hours of the day. The protestant churches are locked during the week. Worse: I heard "them" talk with contempt

about the Catholic Christians. "The truth is with us!" How often did I stumble over this approach in my life? Then it was the first time that I felt sadness and pain about the partitions which we humans erect between us and ourselves, and about this divide between "them" (the bad ones) and "us" (the good ones)/

As to the principles of "faith" - I adopted the Protestant ideology, but I yearned for the Catholic Church. What attracted me was the sensuality in the church and I envied the Catholics for being required to fulfill practical commandments. I had great difficulty with the freedom in the Protestant Church. I so much wanted to be told what I had to do. And yet, over the years I understood, that it was exactly this what "God" required from me - to not cling to the security of commandments but that to take responsibility for each situation, which I would happen to get in to. The commandments give direction to behavior, but in keeping them there is no insurance for responsible acting.

Already at the age of 13, I began to play the organ and to replace the cantor in the service. The need to practice allowed me to once again spend time alone in "the house of God" almost every day. The singing in the Protestant church, which replaced the beauty of pictures and the scents of incense which I experienced in the Catholic church, brought me closer and closer to the Christian faith.

If I explore the quality of that "faith" today, it mostly was nothing but a childish dependency
of a powerless human being. And not the miracle was what caused the child to hold on to that dependency, and not the will to be loyal to her vow, but those two only gave her the legitimation for her need of this dependency...till she came to Israel, where the process of liberation started.

        
And now look! two and a half years after my return from Israel and a year after the birth of my son who was NOT brought to baptism, I approached the dean of the Protestant church at Boeb-lingen where I was registered and asked "to exit the Church". He slammed the door behind me.

"The messenger of God that was going
before the camp of Israel moved on and went behind them,
the column of cloud moved ahead of them
and stood behind them,
coming between the camp of Egypt and the camp of Israel.
Here were the cloud and the darkness,
and (there) it lit up the night;
the-one did not come near the-other all night.

Moshe stretched out his hand over the sea,
and YHWH caused the sea to go back
with a fierce east wind all night,
and made the sea into firm-ground;
thus the waters split.
The Children of Israel came through the midst of the sea upon the dry-land,
the waters a wall for them on their right and on their left.
But the Egyptians pursued and came in after them,
all of Pharaoh's horses, his chariots and his riders,
into the midst of the sea.

Now it was at the daybreak-watch:
.... YHWH said to Moshe;
stretch out your hand over the sea,
and the waters shall return
upon Egypt, upon its chariots and upon its riders.
Moshe stretched out his hand over the sea,
and the sea returned, at the face of dawn, to its original-place,
as the Egyptians were fleeing toward it.
And YHWH shook the Egyptians in the midst of the sea.
The waters returned,
they covered the chariots and the riders of all of Pharaoh's army
that had come after them into the sea,
not even one of them remained.
But the children of Israel had gone upon dry-land, through the midst of the sea,
the waters a wall for them on their right and on their left.
So YHWH delivered Israel on that day from the hand of Egypt;
Israel saw Egypt dead by the shore of the sea,
and Israel saw the great hand that YHWH had wrought against Egypt,
the people held YHWH in awe,
they trusted in YHWH and in Moshe his servant.
Exodus 14:19-31