Clergy Sermons

Reeh - Seeing What Might Be - The story of Henrietta Szold

Today I want to tell you stories of an extraordinary woman, who may be one of the most influential people in the 20^th Century – but many don’t know her story. My hope is that her story will etch on our hearts and inspires as to who we can be and what we can do. I hope you will tell her story to others.

The woman is Henrietta Szold, who is renowned as the founder of Hadassah – known for its hospitals and cutting edge medical care, but there is so much more to her. She helped shape the education, health and social services programs in what was Palestine and became the state of Israel. She was a pioneering feminist. Her Zionism sought to improve the lives of both Arabs and Jews. For her, Zionism was not just the ingathering of exiled Jews to their ancient land, but a revival of Jewish culture. It is a Zionism that can speak to this moment.

Henrietta Szold was born in 1860 in Baltimore, the eldest of five living daughters of Rabbi Benjamin and Sophie Szold. One of her memories is being present at the funeral of Abraham Lincoln – where her father lifted her up to see his casket as it passed by. This woman, who never married or had children, became known as a mother in Israel for the thousands of Jewish children whose lives she changed when they got to Palestine in the 1930’s and 1940’s. In her honor, Mother’s Day in Israel was celebrated for many years on the anniversary of her death. Her legacy is as a woman with an outsized sense of duty and an amazing capacity to get things done. She altered our world in ways that still resonate.

She got involved in Zionism at a young age and was a leader – often the only woman – in organizations that helped build what became the state of Israel. A piece of her Zionist activism developed more deeply in 1909, when almost 50, she traveled to Palestine for the first time with her mother and visited the Zionist agricultural settlements. It was not an easy visit. What she found was not the Promised Land a land of milk and honey and people thriving – but the Jews living there suffering from poverty and sickness. What she saw changed her. In many ways she embodied the first verse of this week’s portion: Reeh – Look; Anochi notein lif’nachem hayom bracha u’klala – I have put before you today blessing and curse. Then we are told to bring blessing by doing mitzva and not curse by avoiding mitzva and turning to idols.

Why is the word Reeh – See – used? Often Deuteronomy tells us to listen – shma – but here we are told to see. When we witness reality – often pain and suffering for ourselves, we are moved to help bring about change; to see and imagine what might be. With eyes wide open, we can decide how to bring blessing and transform curse in blessing. That is what Henrietta Szold did following her trip to Palestine. She saw what was and imagined what might be – and acted. That is what we are called upon to do right now.

She created Hadassah in 1912 – a women’s Zionist Organization that still is making a difference. Under her leadership, Hadassah chapters opened in cities across America. This was a place where women’s leadership flourished and where meaningful changes occurred because of the activism the groups created. In America, Hadassah created schools for new immigrants and filled key social service needs.

From the beginning and continuing over the decades, Hadassah connected the Diaspora and Israel - providing medical support for every need: dental, medical and x-ray clinics, hospitals, hygiene awareness, infant welfare stations, a nursing school in Jerusalem. She saw the need for Jews and Arabs to move forward as equals and the need for women to have doors open. In addition to medical institutions, she founded what became the School of Social Work at the Hebrew University. She was a visionary who saw blessing amidst curse and made it happen. She made a difference!

She came to Israel in 1920 to organize Hadassah’s work with medicine. She organized social services to distribute food to the hungry. Later she helped reform the educational system. The achievement for which she is most famous was organizing the Youth Aliyah programs for refugees and kids experiencing difficulties in the 1930s. She was perceptive in ways many closed their eyes to about Hitler’s threat and came to believe that there needed to be waves of immigration. She was not the first who saw youth Aliyah as a means of rescuing young people from Nazi Europe, but she was the one who understood the administrative complications and how to cut through them and the social and emotional problems the children would have and how to solve them. I want you to know about this program and to illustrate it I want to share the story of one person who I had the honor to read about in a book put together by our congregant David Ron, who as a gift for his mother Bilha’s 95^th birthday collected, printed and presented to her these beautiful writings from over the years.

Bilha was born in Palestine – before it became the state of Israel. In the introduction David writes that Bilha’s parents were young Zionist pioneers fleeing from the pogroms of Russia, settling in the Land of Israel in 1922 full of optimism and dreams for a new future. Raised in this realization of the Zionist dream, Bilha fell in love and married, Sam, a survivor of the Holocaust who, like her parents, had left his life in Europe behind to start a new life in Israel. Together they started a family at the same time as Israel started as a new country. This set the stage for her life. It formed her values that gave her direction.
 One story was a story about her friend Hannah Dagan and how Henrietta Szold impacted Hannah’s life. Hannah was the beloved nurse in Bilha’s school in Hod-Hasharon, Israel. On a visit to America years after this story occurred – Hannah told Bilha her story. It was a story she had not shared before. In her story, Bilha quotes Hannah directly: "My family, Nieman, was very wealthy and well-known in Germany. In 1935, as Hitler came to power, my parents responded to the call from the Jewish Agency to rescue Jewish children and send them to Israel.” This was Henrietta Szold’s program. Hannah continues: “At the age of fifteen I was taken to a train, separated from my loving parents, and send to a strange land that was far away. My younger sister was sent into the arms of strangers in England. Along with a group of other German-Jewish teenagers, I was settled into a kibbutz in Northern Galilee. Each of us was bewildered and frightened. We faced a new language, culture, and lifestyle. Many of us were confused and depressed. I remember that when I sent my clothes to the kibbutz laundry, everyone would tease me about my fancy silk underclothes.” She continues that one day they heard that Henrietta Szold was coming to the kibbutz to see how she might help. Hannah continues: “I will never forget how this gray-haired, beautiful, older woman with remarkable, engaging eyes spoke to each and every one of us. She asked me why I was so stressed and how I saw my future. She also asked me how they could help us. Tearfully, I replied that I want my parents and that I wanted to study to be a nurse. This caring woman hugged me and said, "When the war is over, we shall search for your family; but now, I plan to take you to the Hadassah Nursing School." While she did not find her parents – they perished on the killing fields of Europe, Hannah became a nurse.

Reeh – Look; Anochi notein lif’nachem hayom bracha u’klala – I have put before you today blessing and curse. Henrietta Szold saw the blessing of each individual, traumatized child. She knew what to ask and how to respond in order transform curse into blessing. In writing the story Bilha noted that she was born at Hadassah Hospital in Tel-Aviv in 1930. She met her husband Sam in 1947 where he was recovering from wounds suffered in the War of Independence and Bilha was a nursing aid. Sam also was a child survivor of concentration camps in Poland who came to Israel as a Youth Aliya leader.

Some people can look and change everything by what they see and how they respond. And when we act that way, it ripples. That is the story of Henrietta Szold – and we too have that same power. Let’s go back to the sentence we are focusing on. The commentator Or HaChayim says to translate the first two words reeh anochi as “Look at me.” Moses is teaching that we all have the potential to become his equal. “Look at me” – I can do it – so can you.

We can look out, like Henrietta Szold did in 1909 and see things that are painful to witness – and there are many things like that. We can either close our eyes, turn away and ignore what we see; or we can see potential solutions and act. We many not have the impact of Moses or Henrietta Szold – not many do; but like them, we can do something, anything and begin to turn curse into blessing. Let’s look. Let’s act.

Biographical information on Henrietta Szold from Jewish Women’s Archive, articles by Francine Klagsburn and book by Bilha Ron