Rabbi Barry Leff Digest
Number 78  Date  4/18/04

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(This was delivered at a Vancouver community Yom HaShoah commemoration on April 18, 2004)

When confronted with unspeakable tragedy, words fail us. Yesterday
in the synagogue we read of how Aaron lost two sons in one day—a day that
otherwise would have been a day of great triumph and joy. The Torah
tells us his reaction: vayidom Aharon, and Aaron was silent.

In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust (Shoah, or “utter
destruction” in Hebrew), there was a kind of silence. Our people were too
numb, too in shock, to try to make sense of the experience. Six years
after the shattered remnant was liberated from the death camps, the
government of Israel passed a law establishing Yom HaShoah as a day of
remembrance. However, when I was in Hebrew school in the mid-1960s, we
spent very little time talking about the Shoah. Perhaps the reality of
what happened was still so raw that people instinctively felt that young
people should be protected from hearing of the depths to which humans
could sink.

Now, sixty years later, that has changed. Most major cities with a
substantial Jewish population have a Holocaust museum. Our children learn
about the Shoah in Hebrew school, in Jewish day schools, and in secular
schools. Last year a group of scholars, rabbis, and survivors in Israel
published Megillat HaShoah, the Shoah Scroll, a telling of the story of
the Holocaust in a traditional Jewish form.

Megillat HaShoah opens with a description of how through centuries of
exile “the monster of Jew hatred” would arise again and again. The
description continues: “What befell the people Israel in Nazi Europe,
however, is beyond classification, and what confronted its sons and
daughters defies description. Untold numbers were forced out of their
homes, torn from their families, trampled in the dust, worked to death. 
Six million created in the divine image were strangled, cremated, shot,
buried alive; they died of starvation, of thirst, and of the cold. This
time the monster stretched open its mouth beyond bounds, with a
blood-curdling shriek and with stinking breath, and sought to eradicate
everything.”

With the passage of time, when we gain the ability to speak of the
unspeakable, the questions come. “Where was God in the Holocaust?” No
answer satisfies. The traditional responses to the question of
suffering—that it is either punishment for sins, or an “affliction of
love” that spares one suffering in the world to come—fail when confronting
horror on the scale of the Holocaust.

Richard Rubenstein said that God died in the Holocaust—or, more precisely
that our conception of God, our way of understanding God, our picture of
God as benign and just, died in the Holocaust. For Rubenstein, our notion
that we are the Chosen People of a personal deity doesn’t make sense
anymore.

Another response is to say that God was right there in Hell with us. The
prophet Isaiah proclaimed “m’lo kol ha’aretz k’vodo,” the whole world is
full of His Glory. Rebbe Nachman of Bretslav, a great Chasidic rebbe of
the early 19th century said that God is found everywhere, even in the
depths of the pit. Survivors tell me they have trouble with this as a
response to the question of where was God in the Shoah. The problem many
survivors have is they felt abandoned during those dark hours.

The philosopher Emil Fackenheim answers the question differently. For
Fackenheim, the State of Israel is collectively what every survivor is
individually: “a No to the demons of Auschwitz, a Yes to Jewish survival
and security.” Fackenheim formulated the famous “614th commandment.” 
"Jews are forbidden to give Hitler posthumous victories" -- we are
forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish. For
Fackenheim, regardless of where God may have been, we are not allowed to
give up on God.

The Israeli government itself has connected the Shoah and the founding of
the State. In the decision of the Knesset to establish the 27th of Nisan
as The Day of the Shoah and Ghetto Revolt Remembrance Day, Mordecai
Norouk, in the name of the House Committee of the Knesset said “perhaps by
the merit of their blood spilled like water, we achieved a state and the
beginning of redemption.”

But somehow tying together the Holocaust and the State of Israel—with the
implication of suffering and reward—is also unsatisfying on many levels. 
Who asked the six million—who asked us?—if it was worth the price? 

Ultimately, we cannot ever answer the question of where was God in the
Holocaust. All we can do is to continue to struggle with the question—to
wrestle with God.

The question of where was God is a question each of us must struggle with
as individuals in the context of our own personal relationship with God. 
But there is a question for us to struggle with as a community. That is a
question formulated by Milton Meltzer in his book “Never to Forget,” where
he remembers that as a child living in America he heard of politicians in
Germany saying “the Jews must die.” Meltzer writes “I shuddered. “That
could never happen here, could it Pa?” His father looked up, then smiled
to reassure him. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hitler and those
Nazis of his—they won’t last long.”” And they didn’t. Only twelve years.
But those twelve years were long enough to annihilate 6 million Jews and
to totally destroy European Jewry. 

We must be ready to answer when our children ask, “That could never
happen here, could it Dad?” 

The original purpose of Yom HaShoah was to commemorate the martyrs who
died. But the enduring purpose of Yom HaShoah must go beyond
commemoration. It must be to help us answer our children and
grandchildren, and to be able to tell them, “No, my child, that could
never happen here.” But we could not with complete honestly give that
answer. Yet. There are those in the world who still want to destroy the
Jews. As evidenced by the recent arson at a Talmud Torah in Montreal,
even here in Canada anti-Semitic violence is far from eradicated.

Yom HaShoah needs to be a time not just for remembering and honoring our
dead, but to remind ourselves and the world of the need to have a
conscience. Hitler succeeded because millions of Germans accepted his
demands for blind obedience. Goerring said “I have no personal
conscience; Adolf Hitler is my only conscience.” If fewer Germans had
relied on Hitler to be their conscience, there would have been no Shoah. 
One of my teachers from rabbinical school, Dr. Zev Garber, says “The
message of the Shoah for the generation after and for future generations
is not survival alone. There is something more important than survival,
and that is preventing moral bankruptcy.” As long as children anywhere in
the world are being taught to be morally bankrupt, to blindly follow
demagogues into the cesspool of hate, our children’s and grandchildren’s
future is not secure. 

We must teach our children to make the right decisions even when in
difficult circumstances. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor
Frankl said “In the concentration camps, for example, in this living
laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of
our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has
both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on
decisions but not on conditions.” We must teach the children of the world
that there are no excuses for evil. You can’t blame it on the leaders or
society – or claim that our enemies force us to make evil choices. Each
individual decides where he or she stands in the struggle between good and
evil. And the stakes are frighteningly high. As Frankl put it, “Since
Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know
what is at stake.”

Today we remember those who perished. Megillat HaShoah says “For these
do I weep, for infants who never learned to say “Mommy,” for boys and
girls whose youth was stolen from them, who withered before coming to
blossom; for young men and women who never were blessed beneath the
wedding canopy, for the elderly denied the privilege of a gracious old
age; for the orchestras and the music, and for all the world’s beauty
whose rainbow of colors was lost, replaced by only brown and gray and
black. For all these do I weep.”

The Talmud tells us that silence is the best medicine. In remembering
unspeakable horror, it is appropriate we conclude with a moment of not
speaking.




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