Nazis in the Streets. Shlomo Carlbach on the Roof

[music] [singing] >> I'm here in Austria and I want to tell you a story that happened not far from where I'm standing right now. It's hard to talk about Kabbalat Shabbat without noticing how many of the tunes we sing every Friday night trace back to one man Carlebach. And whatever you make of the fuller story of his life the melodies that he composed did something unusual. They didn't stay in one shul. They didn't stay in one community. They didn't even stay in one time. They became for a huge swath of the Jewish world the actual sounds that Shabbat makes. And it makes me wonder was there a moment, one moment in his life that explains why these songs out of every song written in the last hundreds years are the ones that carry so many of us into Shabbat? I think there might be. It happened right here in Austria when he was 11 years old. It's Austria 1939. The city is dark in a way that doesn't feel like night. It feels like something closing in. There's Nazis [music] that are moving all throughout the streets and they're hunting Jews. The doors are locked and voices are lower and people are scrambling to get out. And inside one house Reb Naftali Carlebach, the chief rabbi of the city, he gathers his family and this is not a normal gathering. This is survival. Everyone is accounted for. [music] Everyone except 11-year-old And at first it's confusion and then urgency and then fear and they're searching the apartment room after room calling his name opening doors like where is Nothing. His mother's moving faster. She's panicking. She's calling again and again each time they're more broken. Still nothing. Outside the world is not safe. Every minute matters and is gone. And suddenly his twin brother stops. I know where he is. He runs up the stairs past the rooms higher until he reaches the roof. And there, standing in the wind above the city, above the fear, above the chaos, is Carlebach, completely still. There are literally Nazis down in the streets below him. His father's voice calls out from below. "Shlomo, what are you doing up there?" He looks down. No panic, no confusion. He just says, "Tateh, the roof is closer to Hashem. And at a time like this, I need to be close to Hashem." Maybe that's the moment something opened up for him. A a channel that stayed open for the rest of his life simply because an 11-year-old refused to let distance from Hashem feel normal. And maybe that's what Kabbalat Shabbat is really is. Not something that you enter when life is calm. It's not something you sing once everything finally settles. It's something you step into even when life is still loud and messy and unfinished. Because Shabbat is not the stopping of your world, it's the entering of another world. [music] A world where the same rain can still fall and the same delays can still happen, and the same pressure can still exist, but [music] they no longer define you. It's a world where you're not measured by what you didn't get done, or by what went wrong, or by what's still unresolved, but by the fact that you're no longer rushing to fix it all yourself. And in that world, even the storm doesn't silence you. It becomes part of the song. You don't stop your life for Shabbat. You elevate your life into Shabbat. You walk into it with whatever you're carrying, with your stress and your confusion and your exhaustion and your darkness and your noise. And instead of dropping it all at the door, you bring it in with you and you say, "I'm still here. I'm still me, but I'm still singing." Each of us have our own armies >> [music] >> coming down the roads of our life, our own chaos, our own pressure, our own storms that feel like they're closing in on us. And we're all given the same choice. We can either go down into the basement, into distraction, into panic, into shrinking ourselves just to get through. Or we can climb onto the roof. Not because the world disappears up there, but because suddenly it's closer to us than >> [music] >> and with everything we have left in us standing above it all, we can do the only thing a Jew has ever really done in moments like that. And that is to sing L'chu Neranena Lashem.