Blissful Tea With Sempo Sugihara and Zach Golden

\Zach’s View

This Sunday, I am due to fly to Tokyo for my week-long vacation to Japan. 

I am very excited about this for several reasons: 

1. It’s a vacation. I haven’t been on one of any significant length in literal years.

2. I could afford the ticket. I found a massively discounted airfare, and from what I understand, Japan is far more affordable than the US once you’re there.

3. It’s in such a different time zone, I would like to think that I will truly be able to escape.

4. I like Japanese culture. I often visit Little Tokyo to relax, not very far away from Der Nister. But moreover, when I visited our friend (and Japanese tea master) Laurie Deutsch to experience a part of a tea ceremony, she told me very pointedly: “Japan really is good to go to.” I didn’t need to hear that twice.

The tea ceremony itself taught me so much about the joy of timelessness. She emphasized that tea has a motto attached to it, that there is nothing before or after the tea ceremony, there is only the tea ceremony. There are the minute details, perfectly executed, washing the utensils, sipping the cup — and in these smallnesses, I felt a great depth.

I wonder what I will be able to learn in Japan about this. 

I remember that when I traveled across Europe and the Middle East, visiting Jewish communities, I saw how they lived, taking so much pleasure in the combination of their cultural and religious lives. I was so inspired by what I saw there, I wanted to bring it to America, which I thought needed and deserved this. 

Though I felt that as good as it was to learn, I was learning for work, not for my own life. I want to learn how to find peace and tranquility in my own life, and I saw glimpses of this with Laurie.

5. Japan is why I’m alive. Well, specifically, my grandmother Shulamis and her parents were saved by the diplomat Chiune Sugihara’s mass writing of visas to Imperial Japan, as the Nazis were closing in on the Lithuanian territories when she and her family lived.

“Sempo” Sugihara’s visa writing was against the wishes of his Axis-aligned government, though curiously, they only recalled him, and did not cancel any of the documents.

My grandmother traveled the Trans-Siberian Railroad and was interned in Japan for six months, before being able to sail on to Seattle. (The US was not yet at war) Many visa recipients ended up in the Shanghai Ghetto that Japan created, but not them.

There is still a family story that circulates about how my great-grandfather Meir, a rabbi, did not know what day to hold Yom Kippur, because Japan was not a settled question in Jewish Law regarding where Japan falls on the Halakhic dateline. The Halakhic dateline does not (under most opinions) follow under the international standard, which itself is arbitrary. 

It was understood in Talmudic times that the day began in China, but Japan was not known about — and whether it should be considered a contiguous part of China or part of the other side of the world where the day ended was not settled. The question lingered, unanswered by the rabbis in Europe, and Meir had to make a decision. He chose to say that it was part of the New World.

My bubbe (grandmother) claims that this was because he felt like he already was looking forward not backwards. Halachic authorities, when they did reach him, ruled in accordance with him — though since then, it is a minority opinion to consider Japan on the other side of the Halakhic date line.

The idea that at the time, against what I would consider proper Talmudic logic, they decided that Japan was not part of the world they left behind is powerful to me.

I found it strange that I had grown up never knowing, only hearing stories about a country that seemed to have nothing to do with Jews, yet was the center of our family story of survival. Yet stranger was that it was a country which at the time committed horrific atrocities, while never believing they should be directed at Jews, as their Nazi allies did. Even stranger was that this was orchestrated by one man given enormous power and even greater courage, to save thousands of Jews.

I grew up idolizing Sugihara. I enjoy spending time with his statue in Little Tokyo, where he sits on a bench handing out a passport. Some of my most emotional memories linger with that statue.

I wanted to become a diplomat because of him. I so believed that by becoming part of the levers of power, I could one day use my position to do good in the world. I set out to Macalester College in Minnesota to study international politics, guided by the idea the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had gone there, and that the school flew the UN flag.

Upon graduating, I wanted to go to the Peace Corps. (I passed the first round of the US Foreign Service test, but didn’t make it past the second.) I realized I needed to go do foreign service before I could join the diplomatic corps. But one thing led to another, and paperwork drowned my dream of the Peace Corps, and I had to find something else — some other system to join and subvert.

That ended up being the rabbinate, which did not come easy either. After ranting about Maimonides on the phone to a Ziegler dean for a half hour, he told me I needed to be “socialized” and told me to go to Israel to study before considering becoming a rabbi. I did, for a difficult half a year, and got in after that. But I didn’t get the sense I was more socialized.

Rabbinical school was hard for me, because my beliefs were too strong to allow myself to be molded by anyone. I also grew disillusioned by my new concept, that religion could make a better society than politics was capable of. (This is what I used to transition myself out of the Sugihara dream.)

When rabbinical school took me back to Israel, I got kicked out of Talmud class for being furious that I couldn’t keep up. So began my disengagement from it all; I chose a new direction.

I started working with a Russian tutor in Tel Aviv to keep up my momentum I got from my eye-opening trip to Russia. I bar mitzvahed and taught kids and young adults in Siberia, also also learned that, perhaps, there is more to defining Judaism than religion alone. I joined a Yiddish group taught by Dr. Miriam Trinh to keep up my Yiddish from the summer I spent on the immersive Yiddish Farm (an experience, which I was told at school was a “waste of time.”) I strategized more with my Turkish friend Kerem on bringing Turkish products, and just as importantly, culture to America. 

And I just couldn’t stop until I left all of my old ideas about changing systems from within behind, and thought more about creating new ones.

Maybe that was not the lesson I should have been drawing from Sugihara in the first place. After all, his was a unique situation which I cannot imagine being replicated. It was a miracle from God and a triumph of the human will.

I want to go to Japan, because perhaps I’ll get the chance to know more about who he was, not just what he did. What really lies within a person is the cause of what makes them act, and it goes beyond the circumstances of what their act entailed. I know that my great-grandfather decided that Yom Kippur was a different day than what it would be held on today, maybe because inside, he was looking forward, beyond the Nazis and the world that he once called home, into a toward a place of new life— and it was only a moment of truth before God that this was revealed.