The month of March brought good news for literature connoisseurs. After a long wait that spanned decades, the first English translation of Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters reached the shelves across North America and beyond. Translated from its original in Yiddish, the volume tells the story of the misadventures of Rabbi Sholem Katzenellenbogen in Poland in the 1930s, with sons and daughters who do not seem interested in following tradition or in their ancestors’ footsteps.
Katzenellenbogen’s world is crumbling before his eyes, as his grown-up children go into the world to become professionals in various fields—one of them even gets a degree in philosophy—while his youngest daughter wants to run to the Holy Land with a group of dreamers. Against that background, the tight-knit Jewish community struggles while modernity and secularism slowly encroach upon every aspect of a lifestyle unchanged for generations.
The big irony of the whole narrative is that Grade’s book was first serialized and published in the 1960s, when Poland—and most of the postwar world, for that matter—had substantially changed. Many of the first readers of Sons and Daughters were Holocaust survivors, and they knew firsthand that the world described in the book had vanished for good.
In retrospect, many of the “big” discussions and polemics among different factions of Judaism—the religious of various persuasions, the “enlightened,” the Communist sympathizers, and the Zionists—and the family dynamics affected by them had lost all meaning. When the big crisis came and the trains began to transport Jews to the death camps, occupation forces did not make a distinction between the secular and pious, the traditionalists and the assimilationists, the right-leaning or the left-leaning advocates. Playing ignorance did not help; changing last names or habits to blur their heritage did not save them either. In perspective, even bitter scrimmages became eerily insignificant, like the proverbial local church board that fights about the color of the sanctuary carpet on the eve on an earthquake, a fire, or a flood.
World Upside Down
A few weeks before the publication of Sons and Daughters another unrelated piece of news caught my attention. On February 17 Delta Connection Flight 4819 from Minneapolis, Minnesota, flipped over a second after touching down at Toronto Pearson International Airport. While there were 21 passengers injured, everyone was accounted for.
Together with millions of people, I followed the details of the ordeal, as survivors and witnesses recounted the swiftness of the changes from a regular uneventful landing to a potentially deadly accident. Of all the comments, a phrase by passenger Peter Carlson stuck with me. Carlson, who was flying to Toronto for a paramedics conference, shared what he experienced just after the plane turned upside down. “Everyone on that plane suddenly became very close in terms of how to help one another, how to console one another,” he said during an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “That was powerful.”
You can only think to what extent airlines go to make their frequent or premium fliers feel special, how much airlines emphasize group-by-group boarding, and how many dollars some passengers are willing to shed for a few extra inches of seating space and a special meal during the flight. And yet, when the plane flipped over, there was no more business or economy basic distinctions, no more 1 million milers against occasional budget travelers. The all-encompassing feeling was “We are in this together.”
Which takes me to a natural corollary.
Pushing for a Cause
As Seventh-day Adventists march once again to the crunch time before a worldwide gathering of church delegates—a General Conference Session—the “Adventist world” is abuzz with excitement, rumors, and anticipation.
Not all excitement, however, seems to be Spirit-led. Lately, isolated groups of believers here and there have seemed to come alive from their usual somnolence to push for various ideas, demands, or agendas. Some are gathering signatures to try to tip the scales on behalf of a specific cause or dream. Others are busy surmising, reaching to conclusions beforehand, or even sharing purported outcomes of items that might not even be part of the session’s proceedings.
As I skimmed through the “platforms” of several of these advocacy groups, it occurred to me to ask myself, What will some of these causes look like in one, two, or three decades, should the Lord tarry? In retrospect, how meaningful will these agendas prove to be after we are forced to face what today is yet unknown?
The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that changes can happen faster than anyone imagined. And when revisiting what transpired in early 2020 at the onset of the pandemic, many agree that the crisis was just the canary in the coal mine—a harbinger of potentially worse things to come. So as we wait for whatever may come our way, what can we do to avert distractions that might not age well, and instead focus on what is essential?
The Ties That Bind Us
While it is unreasonable and probably unwise to live our lives in the shadows of what might or might not happen, it is good stewardship to focus on things that really matter. In a specifically Adventist context, what are those things?
I would suggest three: our pressing personal and corporate journey toward a Christlike character, the ongoing pull of mission, and the long-standing and living Adventist hope. A focus on those three, I believe, would go a long way to avert “carpet color” discussions and “premium airplane seating” demands just before disaster strikes.
It is time to focus on the essentials. Or we may end up lamenting what happens around us, like Rabbi Katzenellenbogen in prewar Poland, or scrambling to survive inside a belly-up plane on an icy Toronto tarmac.
