It's not the Journey; It's the Destination

Friday June 27, 2025/ Rosh Chodesh Tamuz 5785/Parashat Korach

Hevre/Friends,

After our fascinating and meaningful (and fun!) Rabbi on the Road adventure in Basque Country came to an end last Sunday, Andi and I were looking forward to a chill flight home - a few good movies and some chocolate to go with them. True to form, we ended up choosing a film that enveloped us in yet another dimension of the historic Jewish struggle we had been exploring all week with our group: how to navigate the tensions between identity and survival.

We watched “The Brutalist”, a movie about a Hungarian architect named Laslo Toth - a fictional character based on two great Jewish Hungarian architects, Marcel Breuer and Erno Goldfinger. Laslo survived the Shoah and went to America to try to rebuild his traumatized self, his marriage, and his career. It’s a story about the secrets we keep to ourselves and the lies we tell to others. It’s a story about the lies we tell to ourselves and the secrets we share with others. Watching it after immersing ourselves in the terrible and terrifying choices medieval Spanish Jews - and even some contemporary ones - made between their Jewishness and their future, we realized yet again that this is a story that animates generation after generation of our people, in circumstances both extreme and deceptively benign.

The characters in the Toth family exude pain, strength, heartbreak, hope, and surrender. Facing existential stakes of both physical survival and personal coherence, the decision to either maintain their Jewish identity or transform themselves into someone else’s image unfolds deep and bitter conflict both within and between themselves. It surfaces haunting, vexing questions.

Can our fictions ever conceal our truths? Can our truths ever succumb to our fictions? Can the future ever be untethered from the past? And why is it that after making cruel choices in the hopes for a better tomorrow we often turn on the ones closest to us, whether conversos turning on suspected crypto Jews, or survivors who erased their Jewishness abandoning those who remained Jewish? It’s not only the choices themselves that are brutal; it’s the task of living with them once they’re made, feeling implicated or condemned by those who chose differently, betraying our enduring internal conflictedness. 

In the very last line of the movie, Laslo Toth’s niece, Zsofia, whom he and his wife helped save and bring to America and who eventually assumes responsibility for his legacy, offers the most searing words of all: "No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey."

Millenia of Jewish wisdom conveys how core the process of building and negotiating our Jewish identity is and explaining why the Torah devotes so much more attention to wandering in the wilderness than arriving at the Promised Land, including the very book we’re reading through now - Bamidbar/In the Wilderness. And yet, Zsofia forces us to confront an uncompromising truth: it matters who you are. Your identity is key to your destiny. Your destination is the setting that enables you to live your truth.

Facing certain death, it’s impossible to judge those who chose life over faith. What about our generation facing a harsh, hate-filled, and unforgiving world, facing 630 days of Israelis in captivity, facing death and suffering in Israel from enemies sworn to our destruction, facing disappointment and disillusionment with our own leaders, but also facing dramatic, if complicated, hope for Israel in renewed partnerships and possibilities across the globe? 

Struggle? Unavoidable. Doubt? Endless. Fear? Undeniable. Trauma? Indelible. Anger? Natural. Jewish identity? 

 The choice should be obvious. Am Yisrael Chai.

With continued prayers for our ability to bring home all the hostages, protect the soldiers, heal the injured, comfort the bereaved, and build a lasting peace in Israel and around the world, and with blessings for a Shabbat Shalom,

Dini

Photo Courtesy of Ronen Avisror