We are the next generation.
We are the inheritors of books, reminiscences, recordings and even movies
telling the stories those who endured the horrors and survived the
Holocaust.
The voices of those who
passed through the gates of Auschwitz are mostly silenced now. We knew this day
would come. There may be a few strands of testimony left tucked away
behind some books in houses yet to be discovered but these will be few and
random in the course of the next few decades. Most of what has been recorded is
what is already in our hands.
Many who study the past question how such a conflagration could have happened. For those for whom faith in God is an integral part of their life they question how God could have allowed this. Why was there a Holocaust?
I just finishes reading the autobiography of one of the foremost Talmudic scholars, and a survivor of the Shoah, Rabbi David Weiss Halivni. He writes that when people inquire why the Holocaust happened it intimates that there was a reason for it. And if there is an answer to the question it then implies that the victims had some fault in it. Their sinfulness brought the death of six million.
You have heard or read this before: because of the irreligiousness of German Jews God brought destruction. Does that mean at all the Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Italian, Czech and French Jews died for nothing? Or that the destruction was necessary for Israel to be born? That God needed to eradicate European Jewry to make a fresh start? This kind of thinking impugns the integrity of the murdered victims of the Nazis. No right-minded person could find a reason for the murder of children.
We need to continue to study the extant words and testimony of the victims. This is axiomatic for the Jew and the humane. Yet, to ask why it happened is to say that the victims deserved what happened to them and that their sin made God want to kill them. Such thinking is perverse. It is also un-Jewish.
Yom HaShoah is here. Resolve to remember and honor the memory of the victims, learning their stories while vowing to fight for our people, Israel and the defenseless.
