When I think of my trip to Germany, I think of a quilt of many colors. I think of Shalom Rav sung to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’; sung by a German-speaking service celebrating Pride in the remaining wing of a Berlin synagogue left standing after Kristallnacht. The way remnants of one time, shards of the past, are interwoven to form a rainbow mosaic of a new era. The way contradictions and contrast interplay and flow and percolate and change in the zeitenwende of a new age as an aquatic prism fractures white light. I think of the emptiness of Sachsenhausen against the fullness of song and prayer at Fraenkenlufer- Without absence how can we know presence?
