Rabbi Berg Delivers Vice President’s Mezuzah
History was made as a mezuzah, loaned by Atlanta’s oldest Jewish congregation, was affixed to the Naval Observatory House.
Dave Schechter is a veteran journalist whose career includes writing and producing reports from Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Many months ago, Rabbi Peter Berg of The Temple received a telephone call from someone who said they were calling on behalf of a high-profile couple who recently had moved to Washington, D.C.
Thinking it was a prank call, the rabbi nearly hung up.
The caller assured Berg that the inquiry was legitimate, and that the couple in question were seeking a mezuzah for their new home. “They want it to be meaningful. They want it to have historical significance,” the caller told Berg, who related the story to the AJT.
Berg guessed, correctly, that the mystery couple was Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, who is Jewish.
That was the first step on the path that brought The Temple’s senior rabbi to Washington, for a private ceremony on Oct. 7, during which a mezuzah that had been affixed to a front doorpost at The Temple was nailed to the front doorpost at the vice president’s official residence, the Naval Observatory House.
This is the first time that a mezuzah — which contains a tiny scroll with texts from the Book of Deuteronomy, denoting the house as a sacred space — has hung at an American executive residence. The injunction to post a mezuzah — “inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” — is found in Deuteronomy 6:9.
Berg led the blessing for the mezuzah and the Shehecheyanu prayer, which recognizes the importance of the moment. Emhoff nailed the mezuzah to the doorpost on a diagonal, in keeping with a thousand-year-old rabbinic determination.
“It was a small private ceremony, a really personal moment,” Berg said, including just Harris, Emhoff, and Emhoff’s parents, Barbara and Michael Emhoff, who had not seen their son throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. “They had never seen him in this role in person,” as the Second Gentleman. “That’s why the service was so emotional. The Jewish parents standing there, shepping naches for their son, the Second Gentleman. It was such a beautiful moment,” Berg said, using the Yiddish phrase for “deriving pride.”
Berg said that he spoke about the significance of The Temple and “the Vice President and Second Gentleman spoke off the cuff about what this meant to them personally, to the United States and to the Jewish tradition.”
“It was great to do something in Washington that was not political. It was just a beautiful private, religious ceremony. It was an honor to be able to do it,” he said, stressing that he would preside similarly, regardless of a recipient’s leanings.
Though the mezuzah was presented on Oct. 7, the White House released that news on Nov. 18.
But after that initial phone call, Berg heard nothing for a while. Then, in June, the rabbi was invited to speak with Harris during her June 18 visit to Atlanta to promote COVID-19 vaccinations. Given 15 minutes, Berg “did what any rabbi would do,” and talked with the vice president about Israel and anti-Semitism. As her handlers brought the conversation to a close, the rabbi asked, “What about the mezuzah?”
Berg quoted Harris as replying: “If I’ve told my husband once, I’ve told him a hundred times, we have to pick the mezuzah already.”
A decision was made, and The Temple has loaned the vice president and her husband a mezuzah. “I was told that The Temple had been selected because of our history. Because Leo Frank was a member. Because The Temple was bombed by white supremacists. Because of our commitment to social justice. Because of our support for Israel. Because of the work we do combatting anti-Semitism,” Berg said.
In the capital, Berg met with Emhoff at the latter’s office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. “We grew up 15 minutes from each other, in New Jersey, so we played Jewish geography. I talked about Israel, about anti-Semitism, and our social justice work,” Berg said.
Berg, senior rabbi at The Temple since 2008, said that the rabbinic colleagues around the nation that he has heard from “are just excited that this happened. What’s great is that people aren’t looking at it as a political thing. It’s just nice to focus on that [the mezuzah] and what that means.”
Though Harris was sworn in as vice president in January, she and Emhoff lived in Blair House, the presidential guest quarters across the street from the White House, while repairs took place. The project — said by the White House to involve chimney work, maintenance, and floor repairs — took several weeks longer than anticipated, thus delaying Harris and Emhoff from moving in.
A second mezuzah, to go on a doorpost within the Naval Observatory House, was a silver mezuzah from the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley.
For us, and for everyone, Thanksgiving is a time for reflection on the past year. One of my favorite memories was when our family visited and together we hung a mezuzah on the front door of the Vice President’s Residence. pic.twitter.com/Lj5jYM4Hic
— Douglas Emhoff (@SecondGentleman) November 18, 2021
Emhoff posted photographs of the ceremony on Twitter, saying: “For us, and for everyone, Thanksgiving is a time for reflection on the past year. One of my favorite memories was when our family visited and together we hung a mezuzah on the front door of the Vice President’s Residence.”
The Temple posted photographs on Facebook with this comment: “Rabbi Peter S. Berg had the honor of blessing the Second Family’s residence in a ceremony with the family and hanging a mezuzah on the front door. Our congregation is proud to loan our mezuzah and we are inspired by the Second Family’s decision to ask The Temple for it in recognition of our unique, historic and continued involvement with civil rights and social justice.”
That involvement dates back to the 1950s, when then Rabbi Jacob Rothschild delivered sermons supporting the civil rights movement. The bombing of The Temple on Oct. 12, 1958, was believed to have been the work of white supremacists opposed to Rothschild’s message. In more recent years, The Temple has engaged in a number of initiatives, including homelessness, criminal justice reform, record expungement, and human trafficking.
In a letter to the congregation, Kent Alexander, president of The Temple, wrote: “This is a proud moment for our congregation and Jewish faith.”
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