This article was recently published in the Spring 2024 issue of Humanistic Judaism Magazine. The excerpt is taken from a Yom Kippur address in 2009 which was previously published in the book Contemplation: Humanistic Reflections by members of the City Congregation of New York (2022). It is written by Devera Witkin. Devera was honored (with her husband Michael) with the 2023 Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine Lifetime Achievement Award and is a member of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of New York.
Photo: Devera Witkin (Center) with her husband Michael Witkin and Rabbi Miriam Jerris.
One of the most frequent comments I’ve heard and read about City Congregation members is that we’re “interesting people.” And indeed, while we share similar interests, we do have differing backgrounds. As someone coming from a traditional Jewish family, I can say that my own life—a combination of community and independence—has certainly been quite unusual.
My father was a military man, born in 1909 in Newport News, Virginia, a first- generation American and the youngest of
seven children. Raised in an immigrant Orthodox Jewish family, he was a rebellious but nice Jewish boy who, against his family’s wishes but eager to experience the wide world of life outside a small Virginia town, joined the army as soon as he graduated from high school. He stayed in the military until he retired some thirty-three years later. His most vivid recollection from his childhood was that his mother, for whom I am named, died when he was eleven. He was raised by his three sisters, who made sure he graduated from high school, the only sibling to do so. His second most memorable recollection was that he was frequently slapped on his hands with a ruler by his Hebrew teacher and seldom attended synagogue after his bar mitzvah.
Unlike the stereotypical, military- authoritarian father portrayed in the movie The Great Santini, my daddy was a kind soul, well respected by the airmen under his command and open to diverse ideas. Even though Daddy was in an occupation where authority was absolute and not questioned, he always encouraged me to question authority and to say what I thought and felt.
In 1945, my dad was in the first group of Americans who occupied Japan immediately after World War II. Dependents were not yet allowed, SO my mother and I moved from an army airbase in North Carolina where I was born to Portsmouth, Virginia, to live with my maternal grandparents, my Bubby and Papa, Orthodox Jews who immigrated to America from Lithuania in 1900. They also shared their home with various other family members and boarders, who came and went. My mother was the youngest of six and one of four girls. One of my earliest memories is of being allowed to stay up many evenings after Bubby and Papa went to sleep so that I could listen to my mother, aunts, and their childhood girlfriends, who would sit around the kitchen table and reminisce about their younger days. They’d tell dirty jokes and talk about their young adult escapades, such as going out to eat the local Tidewater Virginia delicacy of steamed crabs, the great forbidden fruit for these kosher-kitchen girls. I even heard them giggle about sneaking out on dates with non-Jewish boys, mainly sailors, since Portsmouth was a Navy town. My aunts spoke, to put it mildly, the language of Technicolor, which they cleaned up when they spoke with their parents, but not so much when they talked with each other in front of the children!
My entire family continues to tell the tale of the time when I was about three years old, walking downtown with my Aunt Sara to the one locally owned Jewish deli, when I spied the moon up in the sky during the middle of the day. I pointed up to the sky, asking Aunt Sara, “What is that?”
She said, “It’s the moon.”
“How did the moon get up there?” asked little Devera.
“God put it there,” said my aunt.
“What’s god’s last name?”
“He doesn’t have a last name.”
We walked on, with my little brain churning.
A few steps later: “Oh, I know his last name. It’s god-dammit.”
My mother and I were reunited with my dad in late 1948, and we moved to a very large airbase in Biloxi, Mississippi, just in time for my entry into first grade at a local civilian school. Thus began my elementary school career, a Jewish kid living on an airbase feeling like a total outcast. There was a lot to make me uncomfortable:
First, in Virginia, I had lived strictly with family, and hung out with my aunts, uncles, and lots of cousins, all of whom were Jewish. Here there were very few other Jews.
Second, my school friends had Christmas trees and made Easter eggs, and somehow equated Jesus with God. And I knew my family did not believe in Jesus the omnipotent being. My Papa told me that.
And third, I could never get a perfect attendance record because we always attended High Holiday services at our base chapel.
During my middle school years, we lived at a small airbase near Munich, Germany, a mind-opening experience for a preteen kid. By the time I was twelve years old, I had visited the concentration camp in Dachau twice, only eleven years after World War II, a time when ashes still remained in the crematorium, and I saw, even though through the eyes of a young person, the hell that was wrought in that place, and the hatred we as Jews had experienced. It was a transformative experience for my belief system. I accepted for myself that I could not believe in a higher being. This evil could never have happened if there were such an all-powerful being.
I attended high school in Amarillo, Texas. My parents joined the only synagogue in town, which was, typically for small towns in Texas, a Reform congregation. I joined the congregation’s youth program, TFTY-Texas Federation of Temple Youth-so I could socialize with the other four Jewish teenagers in Amarillo. Our tiny group traveled frequently to the larger Texas cities for conclaves (or conventions) to be with other Jewish teenagers. It was not easy being Jewish in the Texas Panhandle. Our parents worked hard to make it possible for us to have a “Jewish” experience in small-town America (if Texas can be considered America). It was at the conclaves, with constant discussions of spirituality and faith, where I began to understand the concept that I could be spiritual without belief in an all- knowing, unseen divine being.
Further on, in my college years when I considered myself part of the beatnik movement, agnosticism and atheism were considered comme il faut, the expected behavior of that group. I still identified culturally as a Jew, occasionally attending High Holiday services at the university Hillel—staying for an hour or so—to fulfill my self-imposed commitment to Judaism.
Now to fast forward to the present and my life here in New York with Michael. It was five years ago on this High Holiday, Yom Kippur, that Michael and I first came to The City Congregation. The possibility of death brought us here. In September 2004, Michael had just undergone an intensive medical evaluation for his ongoing asthma. At the end of the evaluation, the doctor showed us Michael’s CAT scan, pointing out to us a very visible 2.5 centimeter growth on the left lower lobe of his lung. We very quickly got an appointment at Sloan Kettering, where the pulmonologist told us the growth was very suspicious for cancer and recommended that Michael have a PET scan to determine if the lymph nodes in his chest were involved. The scan in fact showed signs of generalized lymph node involvement, which gave added weight to the doctor’s suspicion that Michael had a malignant tumor. The doctor wanted to remove the affected lung right away; but we agreed only to a biopsy of the lymph nodes, which turned out to be positive for inflammation, but not cancer. The pulmonologist still wanted to operate. After further research on our own, we opted to wait an agonizing three weeks for an appointment with a recommended radiologist at another hospital to perform a specialized lung biopsy – that being the one missing link in this ordeal.
Meanwhile, Yom Kippur was upon us. We both felt so strongly that this was the time in our lives to be honest in a public setting about our beliefs. We would not attend another High Holiday service where we would sit and listen to words we did not believe. We also had the strong desire to be with “our people,” and I desperately wanted to find a ready-community for emotional support and a rabbi to help bury my husband. We were relatively new to New York City at the time, having moved from our home in were San Francisco in the summer of 2001 – we had no support systems in New York.
And then we saw an ad in The New York Times for The City Congregation. We attended the Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur services, weeping as I was through the services, both from the thought of this being possibly our last holiday together, and from being in a place where we actually could believe all the written words words that expressed our belief system. Community and inquiry were so beautifully combined. At the break-the-fast on Yom Kippur, we were welcomed warmly by SO many of you. So we joined, in November 2004, taking advantage of the first year’s reduced rate for new members who came to High Holiday services. (We still have this great deal available.) Shortly afterwards, Michael had the biopsy, and one week later, on my birthday, we learned that his tumor was benign and required neither surgery nor treatment. But it was too late to ask for our money back from The City Congregation and damn if we hadn’t already begun to make friends!
As our beloved founder of Humanistic Judaism, Rabbi Sherwin Wine, said in his last radio interview, “Comfort comes from the people around you. To cope with death,” he said, “humanists need a certain courage. Courage is loving life, even in the face of death. It is sharing our strength with others, even when family and friends, even when we fear to lose them. It is opening ourselves to love.”
This is exactly the type of spirituality we had been seeking.
At the beginning, Rabbi Peter asked the question, where do we turn for comfort and solace? My answer is: to Michael, still my one true love, to my family, and increasingly to my friends—you—the TCC community, who, as I get older, are my family.
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