In 1989, Rabbi Sanford Drezin (One of the great rabbis- slw) was an Army chaplain in Heidelberg Germany. He witnessed the following.

A small synagogue in Heidelberg hired a cantor for Rosh Hashanah. When the time came to take out the Torah, the cantor took the Torah from the arc and goose stepped with the Torah to the bima. Outraged, the congregants, many of whom were survivors, ran to the bimah, took the Torah from the cantor and fired him on the spot.

Why did the cantor do this? Goose-stepping in a synagogue in front of Holocaust survivors???

The reason he did it was that before the Nazis came to power, the German army goose stepped. It had nothing to do with Hitler because it had been a tradition long before he came to power. And there had been a tradition in synagogues that when you took out the Torah, strange as it now seems, goose-stepping with the Torah was a formal expression of respect.

But the problem was goose-stepping had become synonymous with Hitler and the Nazis. The cantor failed to recognize that goose-stepping was no longer a symbol of respect. It was a symbol of Nazi-ism.

So Rabbi Drezin, in his synagogue in Delaware in 2004, told the story and actually goose stepped across the bimah in front of 500 people including Holocaust survivors. What was his point?

Rosh Hashanah begins the 10 days of introspection of the high holidays. And Rabbi Drezin used this to make a very powerful point. Shana can mean year. Shinui can mean change. Mishne can mean repeat. In the 10 days we need to ask ourselves what have we been doing that needs to be changed? Are there things that worked for us in the past that no longer work?Mishne. Or the things that we have done in the past that we need to continue doing, repeating? The challenge is to intelligently reflect and know, as the song once said, when to hold them and when to fold them.

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