R. Johanan said: This righteous man [Honi] was throughout the whole of his life troubled about the meaning of the verse, A Song of Ascents, When the Lord brought back those that returned to Zion, we were like unto them that dream (Psalm 126:1). Is it possible for a man to dream continuously for seventy years? One day he was journeying on the road and he saw a man planting a carob tree; he asked him, How long does it take [for this tree] to bear fruit? The man replied: Seventy years. He then further asked him: Are you certain that you will live another seventy years? The man replied: I found [ready grown] carob trees in the world; as my forefathers planted these for me so I too plant these for my children. (Babylonian Talmud, Taanit 23a).
70 years. The seeds we sow today may only truly mature and bear enduring fruit in 70 years time. 70 years. 70 years ago seeds were not being sown in the land. 71 years ago on the 25th January 1940, the Nazis first considered Auschwitz as the site of a concentration camp. 66 years ago the place now almost synonymous with the long night of the 20th century, the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Russian forces, on 27th January.
In less than ten years, it was not trees that were planted but individuals’ lives and whole communities that were chopped down. In five years it was not seeds that were sown for the next generation, but ash and remains which were buried and dispersed in mass graves.
We who live on, 70 years later, have had that memory, and for some the real experience, implanted in our psyche. As the generation of witnesses, survivors gradually dwindles we see ever more clearly what it meant to Honi the Circle drawer – who slept for 70 years and upon waking was not recognised by anyone. In 70 years it is not just one new generation, but two. The effects of devastation, human cruelty and evil still reverberate through our world – for Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, people with disabilities, the echo transverses from specific places of remembrance, to nations, to the whole global community.
Of course it is not 70 years, but more since Hitler’s rise to power. Since societies were overcome with a will to unimaginable violence.
If only it were unimaginable. It was not aliens who inflicted such harm on other human beings. It was not robots receiving their programmer’s command. They are not unimaginable to those victims who survived or who witnessed the depths to which the human race can sink. If only it were unimaginable – nothing was beyond the imagination of the evil doers who perpetrated the acts of the Holocaust.
The systematic annihilation and extermination of a people – the machinery, the planning, the literal execution – that is what for the Jewish people makes the Shoah unique and yet at the same time places it alongside the murderous intent of other unique genocidal acts that have taken place in human history.
How do we, as a Jewish community, cope with the memory? A memory that has rooted itself in the subconscious so firmly that it will never be plucked out – nor do we wish it to be.
Rabbi Professor Arthur Green, an outstanding theologian, teacher and scholar begins a chapter on evil in his book, “Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow” in the following way:
“Jews have other memories as well, not all of them so good or uplifting. We are commanded to remember what the nation of Amalek did to us on the way out of Egypt, the way they attacked the rear of our lines and killed off the weakest and most defenseless among us. Unfortunately, too much of Jewish history has confirmed and underscored such memories. A sense of victimhood, real and potential, seems to accompany Jewish identity. In our days, this is linked inevitably to memory of the Holocaust, an all-too-real even that becomes a symbolic link for us to the entire legacy of Jewish suffering. More than half a century has passed since the end of Hitler’s war against the Jews, but the wounds are still far from healed.”
The wounds will never really heal, though the memory of their existence may be dulled. We are commanded to blot out the memory of Amalek. Perhaps what this enigmatic command tells us is that the memory of Amalek can be deep seated and almost invisible – forgotten in a sense. By blotting it out we are commanded to never let it be forgotten and subconscious but for it to be deliberately obscured in favour of a different way of self-understanding. We must not allow victimhood to dominate our sense of identity – in blotting out we promise never to forget and never to be defined by powerlessness and oppression. We are a people who believe in redemption and who believe in hope.
Never wildly optimistic, but always unimaginably forward looking to a future, that we will be part of, that will be better. That is what it means to be a Jew.
In a sense that is why I have always viewed the 27th January (International Holocaust Memorial Day) with slightly raised eyebrows. A day on which Jews, and let us not forget others, were liberated from Auschwitz by a world which perhaps could have done more. What does it mean to be part of remembrance of a dark and desperate time by the idea of your own liberation by a foreign power? Put like that it sounds more like an international community trying to come to terms with its own guilt and having not quite come to terms with the existence of the minorities who were persecuted. Even a reflection of how the West views its role today – as protector of the powerless and of those whose human rights are violated – the greatest example of which is the powerless Jew of the mid-20th Century. For that reason alone, I feel, regardless of ideological considerations, more connected to Yom Hazikraon laShoah velaGevurah commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising than I do to Holocaust Memorial Day.
We do not define ourselves by our own victimhood and nor can we allow ourselves to be defined by our victimhood and powerlessness. And we also cannot allow ourselves to view the tremendum, the churban, as a betrayal of the enlightenment values which led us to believe we would never be treated in the way we were in the Shoah. However, our commitment to universal values is now coupled to our own sense of particular self.
My teacher, Rabbi Albert Friedlander, in his anthology of readings, ‘Out of the Whirlwind’ writes in the introduction:
In the literature of the Holocaust, there is conveyed that which cannot be transmitted by a thousand facts and figures. We learn to suffer in these pages; and we learn anger. It is that anger which must serve to instruct us. For if we are angry, we care. And if we care, our concern must outstrip the fact, once again. We learn to ask questions. And we also learn that sometimes there are no clear-cut answers which reason can give.
As we move from scholarly reports to literary accounts, our minds and hearts are touched by moral values which are a reality in human existence. If we are pessimists, we can say: “It is not enough!” And it is not enough—not nearly sufficient to permit implicit trust in a better future. It is enough, on the other hand, to affirm human existence; it is enough to have the courage to be.
If we are optimists, we can acknowledge the world for what it was; we must not try to explain away the terror and evil of that time. It did happen; and the veil has been torn away from the face of evil which is one aspect of humanity. We cannot sustain the old belief in man, nor the old belief in God and His moral ordering of the world, but we can search for new beliefs. And once we have wept for man, we can also glory in the indomitable spirit of man which yet endures. As we turn to this dark period, we recognize that in confronting the worst, man has produced the best within himself. We look at the Age of Evil and we come to celebrate the vision of man’s goodness, the songs of the night that join together with the morning stars and sing of the crowning glory of God’s creation—the human soul.
When Dante left the “Inferno,” he once more looked up at the stars. The stars have moved further away from the world since then. But, as we enter the inferno of the Holocaust, we know that it is a journey which we cannot avoid. We will look for the stars when we emerge.
Some 70 years after the ashes of our ancestors were ploughed into the earth new roots have once again taken hold. We have not been annihilated, in spite of the efforts of our enemies. We are reminded of Honi the Circle Drawer and his encounter with the man planting the carob trees for his descendents 70 years down the line. Our families, those who lived and those who died in the Shoah, set in motion Jewish life today. The remnant of the People of Israel has once again grown from the stump that was left decimated in the darkness of the long night. The stars referred to by Rabbi Friedlander have once again begun to emerge and we must ensure that they truly shine. The bright light of Jewish life, the dazzling sparkle of humanity.
In a dream we live seventy years and discover, on awakening, that it was a quarter of an hour. In our life which passes as a dream, we live seventy years, and then we waken to a greater understanding which shows us that it was a quarter of an hour. Perfect understanding is beyond time. (Chasidic, from Forms of Prayer – full attribution unknown).
[Adapted from a sermon delivered at Finchley Progressive Synagogue in 2010]
