Anyone who has read these reflections for a while knows by now that I grew up in Brooklyn. I hope I am not being repetitions if I return to my roots once more. My boyhood neighborhood was mostly Jewish and Italian. After World War II there was an influx in the neighborhood of Jewish refugees, survivors of the war. They came from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Yugoslavia, etc. Somehow they escaped death during the Holocaust. When they arrived many did not speak much English and you could hear them speaking Yiddish on the streets. There was even a New York radio station that broadcast songs, news and entertainment only in Yiddish. On Friday evenings and Saturdays they went to the neighborhood synagogues, many dressed in the few clothes they brought with them — usually donations from charities, since they had nothing after the war ended.
What marked the newcomers wasn’t just their dress or their language, but the numbers tattooed in the concentration camps on their left wrists or forearms. They had somehow survived imprisonment in the camps; many were the only survivors in their families. They had to start life in America from scratch and with horrible memories of what they had endured and what they lost. Some survived the camps just by shear endurance and luck. Others found ways to outsmart their guards and steal food. Parents died because they gave the little food they had to their children. The inmates lived in desperation and did what they could to survive, day after day.
Besides the struggles and survival tactics we would presume they did in such desperate situations, they also did something we might consider impractical and, it would seem, could even heighten their misery. They talked about foods they had cooked before their imprisonment and dishes they would cook when they got out — even though they were surrounded by slaughter and knew that they probably wouldn’t ever get out to cook those meals again. There is even a cookbook one group of prisoners wrote on scraps of paper that has survived and was published. Imagine, a cookbook written by starving prisoners about to die, victims of a vicious machine that even tattooed numbers on their bodies to classify them for work or elimination.
What good did talking about food and writing a cookbook do those prisoners? What good their talk of the future and food they didn’t have and might never see again? I think we can figure out the answers to those questions. What they did gave them hope. It was also a way to pass on their dreams to another generation that might survive theirs. Sharing their memories, especially those about food, gave them something to live for. We die without food and drink. But we can also die another kind of death without hope.
The fact that I would see those refugees going to synagogue each week suggested something else about their hope: it kept their faith in God alive. Theirs was a faith that believed God was with them in their suffering and would never abandon them. I don’t want to romanticize their story: I know that others in their situations gave up on God and ceased practicing their faith. I can’t help wondering whether I would have kept faith under such conditions, right up to the inhuman ending that so many of them had to endure. We can consider ourselves fortunate that our faith has not been tested as that of those Jewish concentration camp victims. But life does have a way of testing us all; sometimes severely, but mostly in daily and often frequent ways.
Today’s reading from Isaiah sounds like a passage from one of the cookbooks written by the people in a concentration camp. “… a feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy rich food, pure choice wines.” It also reads like a menu from an expensive restaurant! Isaiah is holding out a promise to desperate people. They are hungry and he promises that God will feed them a feast. They are living in slavery and God will free them. They are suffering the consequences of their sins and God will “remove their reproach.” They and we, live under a veil, a “web that is woven over all nations.”
The veil is death and Isaiah promises that God will come to rescue us even from death. God “will destroy death forever.” The people had to put their hope in Isaiah and the promise God was making to them. It’s what we have to do, trust in a promise when life becomes a daily struggle that seems to have no end or promise of relief.
To complete the picture about God’s coming to rescue the people, Isaiah says God will do all this on God’s holy mountain. In ancient days, kings and queens ruled from castles on mountains. Mountains were places of prominence, power and control. They were visible to all the subjects down below and were a reminder of their subservience.
God will provide for the people on a mountain. It won’t be a mountain for military purposes, but one where “God’s hand will rest.” It will be a place of safety and security where God will feed the defeated and the hungry, protect them and overcome their enemies — especially dreaded death.
It is no wonder that Jesus often goes up to a mountain. From there he is moved with compassion for those searching and weary people who have followed him. He is not a king on a mountain exerting dominance and might over his subjects. Rather, he sees the needs of people and provides them what they can not provide for themselves — protection, healing and food.
In Jesus God is fulfilling Isaiah’s vision at this Eucharist. Here we feed at the feast God has provided God’s needy people. Gathered for a short time at worship, on this holy mountain, God has drawn strangers and friends together. We are in need of forgiveness and, as the prophet promised, God removes our reproach. We are hungry and thirsty for a food and drink that will sustain us in faith and God provides it from this altar, “a feast of rich food and choice wines.” Here our hunger for God is satisfied.
We don’t have to imagine food at some future time; God gives us the richest food and choicest wine today. What God has promised, God has fulfilled on this holy mountain. “The veil that veils all people” is destroyed. We are well fed and thankful here. We also have hope that one day all will gather at God’s banquet table, for a future feast is promised us that we can only imagine and wait in hope to receive.