"Oktoberfest is coming this Thursday!" read the subject line of an email I recently received. It was good news for beer drinkers, I suppose, but what really got my attention was the sender--a group in Los Angeles called the Temple Beth Am Men's Society. The email cheerfully went on to ask:
"Do you like to have fun? Do you like to eat? Do you like beer? Do you own your own lederhosen?"
Apparently drawing inspiration from the original annual 16 day Oktoberfest held in Munich, a group of guys at this large, urban Conservative temple (I am a member) were organizing a night of beer drinking on the temple roof. There was even a picture of a guy dressed in lederhosen, and on the site a promise of "Bavarian music."
Hey, I like beer, eating, fun (sorry but for leather apparel, all I had was a suede jacket), so then why what looked to be like a night of harmless fun with the boys making a warning light in my head blink "Achtung!" There I was, living in a century advanced from the Holocaust, wondering why a simple night of German beer hall festivities had popped the top off of something more complicated.
Perhaps this was this just a generational thing. At the dinner table, my father who enlisted in the Navy in WW II to "Fight the Nazis," would tell us that "The Germans didn't suffer enough for what they did." For Oktoberfest at the temple, he definitely would have been a no show, but for baby boomers and beyond, the fizz now seemed to be off those feelings of anger.
To some it might seem quaint, or touched with xenophobia, but for me, an Oktoberfest at a synagogue really pushed a button. Call it the "Sie verlangsamen," "Please slow down" button. It's right across from the one marked, "Mach Schnell," and it didn't take a beer to see reasons why this temple Oktoberfest was pushing both.
Slow down! Remember the history of the rise of Nazism in the 1920's: Hitler's and his storm troopers attempt to take power in the Bavarian, "Beer Hall Putsch."
Slow down! What about all that singing of "Deutschland über alles," "Germany above Everything" over steins of beer?
Hurry up! This was just going to be night of a little cheer, one that has even made its way to Israel-- there's an Oktoberfest celebrated in the Christian village of Taybeh.
Hurry up! Recall that major breweries both here and in Germany have a history of being owned by Jews, and today in Israel there's even an emerging craft beer movement.
Wasn't my aversion to a German themed beer party similar to a generation's long resistance to buying Volkswagen's and other German cars, or even traveling to Germany? Yet, for many years, the roads of Israel are filled with German made cars, and in the U.S. who wouldn't want to own a Mercedes?
Maybe it was finally time to "Hurry up" into the future, and make the "Slow down" button to the past obsolete. Oktoberfest on the temple roof, to use a German expression, might just be a beery "zeitgeist;" the result of a receding past fermenting to create an easy-to-swallow brew.
And if there's any singing up on the roof of the temple that night, I know it won't be "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," from "Cabaret," probably more like "To Life!" (L'Chaim!) from Fiddler.
Still I wonder how Oktoberfest at the temple or at any Jewish venue would go down with those who lost family in the Holocaust, those who are survivors, or are their children, as well as those who fought the Germans in WW II.
As for me, I think I will take it slow that night and raise a glass to "memory" at home.
Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate.In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."
