Post by Rabbi Neil on Jul 8, 2017 0:17:04 GMT
There are people who come into our lives whose very presence changes us forever. One such person was Andreas Hinz, who was born in Germany in 1965. His mother was Jewish, but due to the fact that no formal proof of her status could be found he went through a formal conversion with the European Beit Din in 1997. To me, there was no question that Andy’s mother was Jewish. He once told me of the story where she called him in the middle of the night and his partner answered the phone. “If Andreas doesn’t call me in the next hour,” she said, “I am going to kill myself.” That’s a Jewish mother if I ever heard one. The joyful ending of that little story was that his partner responded to her by saying, “I’ll tell him in the morning,” and then hung up the phone!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Andreas, or Andy as he was better known, earned a degree in Literature, Theology and Linguistics at the university of Wuppertal, before becoming a research assistant at the universities of Wuppertal and Osnabrück, before then completing a Masters in Literature and Theology, achieving top grades. He was truly an extraordinary intellect, and I think he was fluent in four differing languages, including ancient Greek. He started getting involved in the Jewish community in 1984, particularly in publishing. He realised that the Rabbinate was for him and started to prepare for a profound change in life direction. At the time, the Geiger College in Germany needed a poster boy and the pressure on him to study there was immense. He resisted. One prominent individual in the community threatened to out him if he didn’t study there, and his response to that threat was very simple – that he would out them in return! So, his choice to study at the Leo Baeck College was not a simple one, it showed real commitment. As a mark of the kind of young man he was, once he decided to close his publishing company after running it for over ten years, he made sure that every employee had a job. The idea of making somebody redundant just so he could become a Rabbi was impossible to him, so he waited an entire year to close down the company and find his employees jobs. That is how he and I ended up in the same class together.
As a student, Andy was extraordinary. I remember a class on Torah in the first year where he gave a presentation that was so above and beyond anything the teacher had expected. It wasn’t just a presentation, it was a lecture with handouts and flowcharts of underlying themes in the sidrah, and more. It set the bar for the rest of us. If Andy didn’t get a 1st in an essay or an exam, there was a really valid reason why not.
Many people remember Andy for the soft way he spoke. He was a very gentle soul. He was startlingly innocent, naive one might say. I remember him once coming back home just before the sun came up one morning and I asked him what he was doing being out so late. He told me that he had missed the last train home so he had decided to walk across London at night. This in and of itself might not have been problematic but it was the fact that he did so while wearing a kippah on his head that alarmed me. He never considered the possibility that someone might attack him late at night for being Jewish. And him wearing a kippah was because he saw me do it, and we used to spend hours together talking about his spiritual development. He would ask me why I wore kippah, and after his late-night foray through London I had to explain the times when I wore kippah and the times when I wore a cap. But he didn’t consider the possibility of being attacked that night because I think he truly believed in the goodness of people. He knew some people had issues, but I think he believed that fundamentally the world was a good place. Knowing him helped me believe that sometimes too.
Andy had an extraordinary sense of humour. We had a class every week called PC&CS where we learned pastoral counseling skills. It was Purim and Andy and I were in a mischievous mood. Every week at PC&CS we had to share things that were affecting us and we had to counsel each other, while supervised. The teacher for the class wasn’t Jewish, so he had no idea that it was Purim. So, over lunch, Andy and I came up with a plan to make up the most outrageous things. I can’t remember what mine was, but I realised that I was going to laugh and give the game away if I carried it on, so I mentioned it but did not explore it. Andy, however, was in his element. Student Rabbi Tony Hammond asked him how he was this week, and Andy explained that he had been very troubled because that week he had gone to an orthodox synagogue and seen an animal being sacrificed and it was so profound and so religiously moving for him that he was questioning whether or not he could remain a Reform Jew. Of course, the teacher had no idea that that kind of thing didn’t go on in an Orthodox synagogue, so he sat quietly and observed and Andy spilled his soul, or seemed to. Andy spoke about how watching the animal bleed to death was so raw and so real that it was real Judaism, not like our sanitised version. Tony and Andy kept it going for at least twenty minutes, without the hint of a smile on their faces. The other two classmates, Student Rabbi Misha Kapustin and I, had to do our very best to not smile. It was torture because it was so brilliant. Finally after about twenty minutes, Tony asked how Andy felt about all of it. Andy said that he felt troubled because he had been talking total bull for the last twenty minutes. That was our cue to roar with laughter, for me to bring out cake, and for us to explain to our teacher what Purim was. But that wasn’t the only time Andy and Tony held a room together. At a Jewish-Christian-Muslim conference in Germany, I remember an entire room howling as Andy and Tony reenacted a true story from Andy’s life. Moving to England, he decided to bring his Jewish paraphernalia with him. He actually had his own Torah scroll and it turned out the German customs officials weren’t so happy with it because it was made of animal skin. They asked for it to be opened up and for him to read from it. But then they came to the shofar. Of course, carrying an animal horn through customs is a big no-no so Andy sputtered an explanation of how it’s actually an instrument. If it’s an instrument, said the German customs officer, play it then. But, of course, Andy couldn’t, so in the middle of the airport there he was blowing raspberries into a shofar trying to convince the customs officer that he wasn’t smuggling animal parts. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a room of people roar with so much laughter as when he and Tony reenacted that story. It wasn’t often that we got to see that performer side of him, but certainly his humour came through in continual puns and wordplays in conversation and in class. And before he died, I did actually teach him how to blow shofar so he could avoid that situation ever again.
I also remember Purim with Andy for another reason, not just because of the PC&CS class. Andy and I went to the fancy dress shop because we were determined to get good costumes for Purim. I went with Darth Maul from Star Wars and he with a Star Trek officer’s uniform. I came home from services and walked in with a small tape player snuck away so that Darth Maul’s theme music played as I entered. Andy was already there with other student Rabbis talking and drinking. As they all slowly left, Andy and I kept talking and drinking into the long hours of the morning. The next morning, Rabbi Mark Solomon’s class had one fewer student. Andy had totally drunk me under the table and I was too hung over to even move out of bed. But Andy explained to Rabbi Mark that last night I had fulfilled the mitzvah of Purim, so I was excused.
Andy was a keen environmentalist. He helped me work on The Noah Project, which was a London-based Jewish environmental group that we tried, in vain, to expand across the UK. He was prepared to go all around the UK to set up local Noah Project groups but, in the end, the people in charge of the project wanted to take it in another direction. In his environmental work, though, he raised over 1 million Euros to create an eco-friendly synagogue in Europe. He was deeply committed to the future of the planet.
Andy was extremely popular at the Reform Chavurah, which was a monthly gathering of young adult Jews at the Sternberg Centre. Over 100 Jews would attend every month, and we would sing our way through the service and then eat food that a few people had prepared. I will always remember the moment that I announced that he was missing to that group. Andy was so central to the group that the room was in deep shock. It was 48 hours after I had first called the police to notify them that Andy was missing. I led the community in prayer, asking God to protect Andy if possible but if not then to at least be with us, and at the end I remember reading “Baruch atah adonai, shome’a t’fillah,” Blessed are You, Eternal God, who listens to our prayers.” And then from out of nowhere the loudest single rumble of thunder that I had until that point ever heard boomed from the heavens. And the entire room froze because at that point because it seemed like the universe was acknowledging that this was a cosmic event.
Andy’s loss was not just to us in the British community or at the Leo Baeck College, although the trauma there was profound. As a Rabbinical student, Andy was already in charge of twelve communities back in Germany, whom he would go back and visit as often as he could. He was not only politically astute but because of his warmth and his learning, he would no doubt have been one of the greatest Rabbis of this generation. As one of my colleagues recently wrote about him, “he would have transformed the rabbinate in Germany which so desperately needs his integrity, joy and love of the Jewish people. Not only was he cheated of his life, German Jewry has been cheated of a much needed independent and scholarly leader and is vastly diminished because of it.” He was going to work in Hanover after ordination, which was still three more years on from when he was killed. People flocked to him because he was caring, gentle and thoughtful, and a good listener. He was really there for people, helping them explore their passions. He truly would have been a world-wide name in Jewry.
But there was another side to him, too, that lots of people didn’t know about. Andy was profoundly lonely. That, combined with his naivety, is why he ultimately went home with the wrong person that final fateful night. He so profoundly wanted to be loved. Andy knew that he was never going to have children, so he told me that he did everything he could when he taught children, such as those at Belsize Square Synagogue in London, because he saw them as his children in a different way.
The last week of his life in July 2002 was a terrible week. He was helping someone with a piece of writing and that accidentally downloaded a virus onto his computer, thereby wiping many of his files, including the original piece of work which he then had to try to rewrite from memory. I remember him buying software to try to get rid of it but it spread and soon all his devices were infected. He was also helping run Summer Study Week with me at the Leo Baeck College and he was stressed beyond belief. He had told a friend he would pick her up from Heathrow Airport on Wednesday morning before returning to lead a class at Summer Study Week. But he was so stressed that on Tuesday evening he decided to go into London to not be overwhelmed. I dropped him off at Finchley Central Station, and remember that Walking on the Moon was playing by The Police as he stepped out of the car. That was the last time any of us ever saw him. When he didn’t pick up the friend from the airport on the Wednesday morning, I immediately knew something was wrong. Andy would never let anybody down. It just wasn’t in his nature. I immediately called the police. I remember that afternoon taking a walking tour through Jewish London with Bill Fishman, which was part of our program for Summer Study Week. I pretended to listen to Bill, who was famous for these informative tours, but really I spent the hours tormented, fearing the worst. For a few days, we wondering if Andy had had a nervous breakdown, if he had just snapped from the stress of that terrible week. By Sunday, though, I knew deep down what had happened, and so did the police. A few days later, through an extraordinary twist of fate, his body was discovered and that allowed the police to eventually put his killer away for the rest of his life.
In my Installation address to this community back in November of 2014, I said this of Andy – “Andy taught me what it was to love someone for who they are, not despite who they are. He was a mensch and a scholar and still every day I remember him and am inspired by him to be a better Rabbi.” But that was just scratching the surface. Most homophobes don’t realise that they are homophobes, but I came to realise through Andy that I was. I had never really spent time with a gay Jew before, I had never heard that particular struggle, I had never realised how I had inadvertently helped contribute to the oppression of other Jews. I thought that queer studies was just apologetics, bending Torah to suit a particular mindset. I was wrong. Andy showed me that, gently. I remember sitting with him discussing the Bible and homosexuality and him providing differing explanations of how Leviticus 18 could be read and me explaining that I had not found them that convincing. And then he said, “Even if Torah does condemn it, so what?” It was a question I had never even considered as a Student Rabbi. So what if Torah, a document from a world totally different to ours, condemned homosexuality? So what? Judaism isn’t just about Torah. In fact, it’s often openly about reinterpreting Torah in brazen ways to suit the needs of the time. That was a transformative moment for my Judaism, and for my Rabbinate. It was the moment that ultimately led me to come here to Santa Fe. It was the moment that made me profoundly aware of all the baggage I had been carrying as a white British heterosexual cis male Student Rabbi. So, when I stand in front of this community, in a very real sense, Andy does, too.
Fifteen years on, the loss to the Jewish community is still profound. A light was extinguished that should never have gone out. At the memorial service that I led in our home once Andy’s murder had been confirmed, I started the service with the story of the lamplighter. Being a lamplighter is the occupation of the Jew, says the story. If we do not see lamps that need to be lit, we need to cross the ocean to find them. But first, we have to light the lamp within ourselves by removing our coarseness. Then, and only then, can we go out into the world to light the lamps of others. Student Rabbi Andreas Hinz was a lamplighter. He was a pure soul. He would selflessly go anywhere he was needed to light lamps. He lived for other people. There is a Jewish tradition of the lamedvav tzaddikim, the 36 righteous people on whom the world depends. As one dies, another is born, and our society keeps going just because of the righteousness of these 36 people. If there is any truth to that idea, then I was lucky enough to know one of them. This evening, on the fifteenth anniversary of his death, I share some of my memories of this extraordinary human being who touched the lives of so many Jews around the world so that my community can know that when I teach, Andy teaches and when I pray, Andy prays. It is important for a community to know the chain of teaching of their Rabbi, and Andy was one of the most important links in my Rabbinate. Zichrono livracha, his memory shall always be for blessing, for inspiration, and for good.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Andreas, or Andy as he was better known, earned a degree in Literature, Theology and Linguistics at the university of Wuppertal, before becoming a research assistant at the universities of Wuppertal and Osnabrück, before then completing a Masters in Literature and Theology, achieving top grades. He was truly an extraordinary intellect, and I think he was fluent in four differing languages, including ancient Greek. He started getting involved in the Jewish community in 1984, particularly in publishing. He realised that the Rabbinate was for him and started to prepare for a profound change in life direction. At the time, the Geiger College in Germany needed a poster boy and the pressure on him to study there was immense. He resisted. One prominent individual in the community threatened to out him if he didn’t study there, and his response to that threat was very simple – that he would out them in return! So, his choice to study at the Leo Baeck College was not a simple one, it showed real commitment. As a mark of the kind of young man he was, once he decided to close his publishing company after running it for over ten years, he made sure that every employee had a job. The idea of making somebody redundant just so he could become a Rabbi was impossible to him, so he waited an entire year to close down the company and find his employees jobs. That is how he and I ended up in the same class together.
As a student, Andy was extraordinary. I remember a class on Torah in the first year where he gave a presentation that was so above and beyond anything the teacher had expected. It wasn’t just a presentation, it was a lecture with handouts and flowcharts of underlying themes in the sidrah, and more. It set the bar for the rest of us. If Andy didn’t get a 1st in an essay or an exam, there was a really valid reason why not.
Many people remember Andy for the soft way he spoke. He was a very gentle soul. He was startlingly innocent, naive one might say. I remember him once coming back home just before the sun came up one morning and I asked him what he was doing being out so late. He told me that he had missed the last train home so he had decided to walk across London at night. This in and of itself might not have been problematic but it was the fact that he did so while wearing a kippah on his head that alarmed me. He never considered the possibility that someone might attack him late at night for being Jewish. And him wearing a kippah was because he saw me do it, and we used to spend hours together talking about his spiritual development. He would ask me why I wore kippah, and after his late-night foray through London I had to explain the times when I wore kippah and the times when I wore a cap. But he didn’t consider the possibility of being attacked that night because I think he truly believed in the goodness of people. He knew some people had issues, but I think he believed that fundamentally the world was a good place. Knowing him helped me believe that sometimes too.
Andy had an extraordinary sense of humour. We had a class every week called PC&CS where we learned pastoral counseling skills. It was Purim and Andy and I were in a mischievous mood. Every week at PC&CS we had to share things that were affecting us and we had to counsel each other, while supervised. The teacher for the class wasn’t Jewish, so he had no idea that it was Purim. So, over lunch, Andy and I came up with a plan to make up the most outrageous things. I can’t remember what mine was, but I realised that I was going to laugh and give the game away if I carried it on, so I mentioned it but did not explore it. Andy, however, was in his element. Student Rabbi Tony Hammond asked him how he was this week, and Andy explained that he had been very troubled because that week he had gone to an orthodox synagogue and seen an animal being sacrificed and it was so profound and so religiously moving for him that he was questioning whether or not he could remain a Reform Jew. Of course, the teacher had no idea that that kind of thing didn’t go on in an Orthodox synagogue, so he sat quietly and observed and Andy spilled his soul, or seemed to. Andy spoke about how watching the animal bleed to death was so raw and so real that it was real Judaism, not like our sanitised version. Tony and Andy kept it going for at least twenty minutes, without the hint of a smile on their faces. The other two classmates, Student Rabbi Misha Kapustin and I, had to do our very best to not smile. It was torture because it was so brilliant. Finally after about twenty minutes, Tony asked how Andy felt about all of it. Andy said that he felt troubled because he had been talking total bull for the last twenty minutes. That was our cue to roar with laughter, for me to bring out cake, and for us to explain to our teacher what Purim was. But that wasn’t the only time Andy and Tony held a room together. At a Jewish-Christian-Muslim conference in Germany, I remember an entire room howling as Andy and Tony reenacted a true story from Andy’s life. Moving to England, he decided to bring his Jewish paraphernalia with him. He actually had his own Torah scroll and it turned out the German customs officials weren’t so happy with it because it was made of animal skin. They asked for it to be opened up and for him to read from it. But then they came to the shofar. Of course, carrying an animal horn through customs is a big no-no so Andy sputtered an explanation of how it’s actually an instrument. If it’s an instrument, said the German customs officer, play it then. But, of course, Andy couldn’t, so in the middle of the airport there he was blowing raspberries into a shofar trying to convince the customs officer that he wasn’t smuggling animal parts. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a room of people roar with so much laughter as when he and Tony reenacted that story. It wasn’t often that we got to see that performer side of him, but certainly his humour came through in continual puns and wordplays in conversation and in class. And before he died, I did actually teach him how to blow shofar so he could avoid that situation ever again.
I also remember Purim with Andy for another reason, not just because of the PC&CS class. Andy and I went to the fancy dress shop because we were determined to get good costumes for Purim. I went with Darth Maul from Star Wars and he with a Star Trek officer’s uniform. I came home from services and walked in with a small tape player snuck away so that Darth Maul’s theme music played as I entered. Andy was already there with other student Rabbis talking and drinking. As they all slowly left, Andy and I kept talking and drinking into the long hours of the morning. The next morning, Rabbi Mark Solomon’s class had one fewer student. Andy had totally drunk me under the table and I was too hung over to even move out of bed. But Andy explained to Rabbi Mark that last night I had fulfilled the mitzvah of Purim, so I was excused.
Andy was a keen environmentalist. He helped me work on The Noah Project, which was a London-based Jewish environmental group that we tried, in vain, to expand across the UK. He was prepared to go all around the UK to set up local Noah Project groups but, in the end, the people in charge of the project wanted to take it in another direction. In his environmental work, though, he raised over 1 million Euros to create an eco-friendly synagogue in Europe. He was deeply committed to the future of the planet.
Andy was extremely popular at the Reform Chavurah, which was a monthly gathering of young adult Jews at the Sternberg Centre. Over 100 Jews would attend every month, and we would sing our way through the service and then eat food that a few people had prepared. I will always remember the moment that I announced that he was missing to that group. Andy was so central to the group that the room was in deep shock. It was 48 hours after I had first called the police to notify them that Andy was missing. I led the community in prayer, asking God to protect Andy if possible but if not then to at least be with us, and at the end I remember reading “Baruch atah adonai, shome’a t’fillah,” Blessed are You, Eternal God, who listens to our prayers.” And then from out of nowhere the loudest single rumble of thunder that I had until that point ever heard boomed from the heavens. And the entire room froze because at that point because it seemed like the universe was acknowledging that this was a cosmic event.
Andy’s loss was not just to us in the British community or at the Leo Baeck College, although the trauma there was profound. As a Rabbinical student, Andy was already in charge of twelve communities back in Germany, whom he would go back and visit as often as he could. He was not only politically astute but because of his warmth and his learning, he would no doubt have been one of the greatest Rabbis of this generation. As one of my colleagues recently wrote about him, “he would have transformed the rabbinate in Germany which so desperately needs his integrity, joy and love of the Jewish people. Not only was he cheated of his life, German Jewry has been cheated of a much needed independent and scholarly leader and is vastly diminished because of it.” He was going to work in Hanover after ordination, which was still three more years on from when he was killed. People flocked to him because he was caring, gentle and thoughtful, and a good listener. He was really there for people, helping them explore their passions. He truly would have been a world-wide name in Jewry.
But there was another side to him, too, that lots of people didn’t know about. Andy was profoundly lonely. That, combined with his naivety, is why he ultimately went home with the wrong person that final fateful night. He so profoundly wanted to be loved. Andy knew that he was never going to have children, so he told me that he did everything he could when he taught children, such as those at Belsize Square Synagogue in London, because he saw them as his children in a different way.
The last week of his life in July 2002 was a terrible week. He was helping someone with a piece of writing and that accidentally downloaded a virus onto his computer, thereby wiping many of his files, including the original piece of work which he then had to try to rewrite from memory. I remember him buying software to try to get rid of it but it spread and soon all his devices were infected. He was also helping run Summer Study Week with me at the Leo Baeck College and he was stressed beyond belief. He had told a friend he would pick her up from Heathrow Airport on Wednesday morning before returning to lead a class at Summer Study Week. But he was so stressed that on Tuesday evening he decided to go into London to not be overwhelmed. I dropped him off at Finchley Central Station, and remember that Walking on the Moon was playing by The Police as he stepped out of the car. That was the last time any of us ever saw him. When he didn’t pick up the friend from the airport on the Wednesday morning, I immediately knew something was wrong. Andy would never let anybody down. It just wasn’t in his nature. I immediately called the police. I remember that afternoon taking a walking tour through Jewish London with Bill Fishman, which was part of our program for Summer Study Week. I pretended to listen to Bill, who was famous for these informative tours, but really I spent the hours tormented, fearing the worst. For a few days, we wondering if Andy had had a nervous breakdown, if he had just snapped from the stress of that terrible week. By Sunday, though, I knew deep down what had happened, and so did the police. A few days later, through an extraordinary twist of fate, his body was discovered and that allowed the police to eventually put his killer away for the rest of his life.
In my Installation address to this community back in November of 2014, I said this of Andy – “Andy taught me what it was to love someone for who they are, not despite who they are. He was a mensch and a scholar and still every day I remember him and am inspired by him to be a better Rabbi.” But that was just scratching the surface. Most homophobes don’t realise that they are homophobes, but I came to realise through Andy that I was. I had never really spent time with a gay Jew before, I had never heard that particular struggle, I had never realised how I had inadvertently helped contribute to the oppression of other Jews. I thought that queer studies was just apologetics, bending Torah to suit a particular mindset. I was wrong. Andy showed me that, gently. I remember sitting with him discussing the Bible and homosexuality and him providing differing explanations of how Leviticus 18 could be read and me explaining that I had not found them that convincing. And then he said, “Even if Torah does condemn it, so what?” It was a question I had never even considered as a Student Rabbi. So what if Torah, a document from a world totally different to ours, condemned homosexuality? So what? Judaism isn’t just about Torah. In fact, it’s often openly about reinterpreting Torah in brazen ways to suit the needs of the time. That was a transformative moment for my Judaism, and for my Rabbinate. It was the moment that ultimately led me to come here to Santa Fe. It was the moment that made me profoundly aware of all the baggage I had been carrying as a white British heterosexual cis male Student Rabbi. So, when I stand in front of this community, in a very real sense, Andy does, too.
Fifteen years on, the loss to the Jewish community is still profound. A light was extinguished that should never have gone out. At the memorial service that I led in our home once Andy’s murder had been confirmed, I started the service with the story of the lamplighter. Being a lamplighter is the occupation of the Jew, says the story. If we do not see lamps that need to be lit, we need to cross the ocean to find them. But first, we have to light the lamp within ourselves by removing our coarseness. Then, and only then, can we go out into the world to light the lamps of others. Student Rabbi Andreas Hinz was a lamplighter. He was a pure soul. He would selflessly go anywhere he was needed to light lamps. He lived for other people. There is a Jewish tradition of the lamedvav tzaddikim, the 36 righteous people on whom the world depends. As one dies, another is born, and our society keeps going just because of the righteousness of these 36 people. If there is any truth to that idea, then I was lucky enough to know one of them. This evening, on the fifteenth anniversary of his death, I share some of my memories of this extraordinary human being who touched the lives of so many Jews around the world so that my community can know that when I teach, Andy teaches and when I pray, Andy prays. It is important for a community to know the chain of teaching of their Rabbi, and Andy was one of the most important links in my Rabbinate. Zichrono livracha, his memory shall always be for blessing, for inspiration, and for good.
