Stories of Pain

My teacher once asked, “Can they be prayers after the Holocaust?”

Each catastrophe that has befallen us has had a major impact on our way of thinking. The Crusades with the terror of rampaging villagers burning, looting, writing, murdering we remember through the prayers and litanies that we recite on Tisha B’Av. That speak of the atrocities committed at York, Mayence, Speyer, Worms, the auto-de-fe’s of the New World are also included in this heartbreaking the liturgy.  In some towns they still recite the names of the victims from long ago. Each year they are read publicly.  On Yom Kippur, the prayers conjure up blood stained images of the martyrs-Rabbi Haninah, Rabbi Tarfon, Rabbi Ishmael, Rabbi Akiba….  We recall the horrific attacks in the Middle Ages on Jewish homes and Synagogues. For these things too, the memory of the Jewish people finds expression in the Kinot, poems and eulogies written by survivors; eye-witnesses to the atrocities.  We have specific mourning chants for each of the liturgies.

 What words, what testimony can be recited for the victims of the Shoah?

No prayers existed for decades. The poems had yet to be recorded. On the day of collective memory, Tisha b’Av, there is no mention of the Holocaust. Its pain, its proximity to us, makes all these other tragic events of history insignificant by comparison. A separate day of memorial had to be created the pain of the trauma was too overwhelming great.

The words describing the events of bygone epochs is insufficient grasp the enormity of Auschwitz.

Even the familiar biblical story of Isaac’s near death does not tell the story of one and one half million children who died in the camps. Instead, silence reigns.  In the aftermath of the inferno prayers were slow to emerge.  It took Elie Wiesel, the first real voice of testimony, nearly 15 years to tell his story. Survivors were still being urged to speak for decades afterward. Up until recently they had their dark memories and secrets behind locked doors. 70 years have passed and the terror is only now sufficiently distant to begin the process of hearing the stories and creating lasting memorials to the victims.

The closest biblical analogy we have is that of Aaron witnessing the death of his sons. When they perish, the Torah offers her most anguished and terse sentence, ‘Va-yidom Aharon,” “and Aaron was silent.”  It is the other silence of disbelief, shock and humility. Any words uttered would degrade the memory of the dead.

It is trying and nearly impossible to compose new prayers. Instead, we tell their stories. And that must be enough.

My visit to Poland

On the far side of the Nozek Synagogue in Warsaw, the last and only standing shul in the entire city, there was a slight man with the tender beard. He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. Wisps of hair rose like thin strands of cotton from his head. His eyes betrayed a nervousness that made him stand out. He looked like he was half trying to hide behind one of the shows calms and at the same time tempted to push them to the incoming group of rabbis. Shyly, he gazed at the visitors.

”Shalom,” I said, offering my hand. He returned the greeting. His Hebrew sounded good so I continued, “I do not understand. All the other shuls in Warsaw - some 35 of them  -  were razed by the Nazis. Why did they save this one?  Why is it still standing?”

He looked bewildered.

He spoke.  “Parlez vous francaise?”

God.  It was only decades ago that I studied French to the degree where I could ask, “Where is Jean-Pierre?”  I only wish I could remember something, anything. But no.

So we tried and tried again. Finally, he understood and using his fingers and making neighing sounds my companion indicated that the shul was a stable for the Nazi horses. The synagogue had no real value to them after they desecrated it so they turned into something useful.

Nothing else remained of this once magnificent Synagogue. It was stripped bare. Where the holy Torahs once rested in the regal splendor of the finest velvet and gold and silver ornaments, there now stood an empty cove. Shreds of prayer books littered the floor.

”I am Rabbi.”

He looked puzzled.  So I repeated, “I am a rabbi.”

“Ah.”

My thin companion looked brighter before leaning over and whispering to me, “My name is Christopher.  But,” he said after glancing over toward his teacher standing a few yards away, “My name is Israel.  Shhh.”

He was learning to become a Jew.  One of the last.

“Are either of your parents Jewish?”

“Well, yes … and no,” he answered.  “My parents were communists,” he practically whispered into my ear.

“I understand.”

I gave gazed at his face for a good long time. What words of encouragement or warning could I give this young man? He was on a journey to find himself. It was a long road ahead, perhaps it was best if he did not know how long.

”Good. Very good.”

He smiled. “Thank you.”

I held Christopher a moment longer.  “Do you know what the word teshuvah means?  Yes?  That is why you are here.  You are coming home, to the place where you once stood.  Returning is teshuvah.

His eyes grew moist.  “Goodbye,” he said.

Among the vast numbers of dead of Poland there are a few lives still tentatively reaching out from the depth of destruction.

As the living, it is our obligation to revitalize and renew what we possess.  Judaism.

Yom HaShoah

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.

A Favor

Few are the tales that escaped the flames of the camps.  That is because the remnants of once-vast Jewish community were so few.  It is also because the survivors that emerged tried desperately to forget.  Those that attempted to relegate it to he distant past were haunted by unrelenting demons of the night.  Remembering was too difficult; forgetting too painful.

            One of the handful of stories that came to us was of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman, who became rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto.  Many are the legends that surround the man...but they are the stuff of myth.  The Rebbe took children under his gentle arms and taught them while the unspeakable erupted all about them.  Daily he took the little ones and taught them Holy Torah while outside the walls the Torah was desecrated; menschlichkeit where there was inhumanity;  holiness in the depths of depravity.  An angelic grace hovered over the study hall, or so they said.

            After years of sifting through the ashes, one lone deformed survivor was found.  Reluctant to confront the ghosts of the past, he finally rested his old, frail body and began to tell a fragment of a Shabbes tale with the Rebbe: 

“We danced, hundreds and maybe thousands of children, and the Master was singing a song to greet the holy angel, and at the mean he would teach between every course. ‘Kinderlach, der grosser zach in de velt iz tuen emetzen a favor.  The greatest thing in the world in simply to do someone a favor’.”

            The Rebbe --along with all his holy students -- were murdered at Treblinka.  Five years in Auschwitz this lone, poor man saw what no human being should see, what no creation of G-d should endure.  And, still, throughout all the torments, despite all the depravity, when he wanted nothing else than to just die, the words of the Rebbe came back to him- precisely when he wanted give up, “The greatest thing in the world in simply to do someone a favor.” 

            From his perch resting his battered, crippled body, his eyes lifted to heaven with a radiance and he said, “Do you know how many favors you can do in Auschwitz?

            Perhaps we should all become disciples of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman.  Maybe on the edge of this year we could bring the heaven of the Rebbe into our own lives.  - from the tales of Shlomo Carlebach

Your Choice

Living in the past.  Reflection over words not spoken; things not done; moments not seized, occupy how much of our lives?  It is not possible to accurately gauge how much lost time we have accumulated throughout the years of longing.  In fact, I reckon that many of the times when we could have taken advantage of another moment -that might well be savored in the future- we miss because we are living in the past.

            Reflection is helpful where we analyze history in order to affect a change in our future action, reaction or inaction but where the past becomes a fixed image to be replayed and relived, it carries us away from life.  We miss the movie because we are still watching the commercial.

            Eeyore, the ever-pained donkey of Milne fame, is “stuck again” because he really never got “unstuck.”  Once upon a time Eeyore found himself in a place where he felt helpless.  Now, every new situation produces the same response.  He is stuck in the past.

            So much of Judaism is consumed with meeting the present.  When we eat we are supposed to bensch (bless) the food.  We wake to utter words of appreciation at our own rebirth.  In each of these ways and countless more, the mitzvot seek to wake us from a reverie and project us into the present.

            Eliezer Silver was an American chaplain who was at the infamous death camps at liberation.  He went from prisoner to prisoner consoling the desperate, lonely and emaciated souls.  Rabbi Silver tried to infuse them with hope, renewal.  Surprisingly, most were grateful and deeply thankful.  Few were embittered from their hellish experiences.  One man Rabbi Silver attempted to comfort was too angry to accept any consolation.

“I have no use for you!  I have no use for religion,” he exclaimed.

“Tell me why,” asked Silver.

“I will tell you.  In the camp there was death and continual torture.  But I tell you there was one religious Jew that had a siddur.  Do you know what he did with it?  If someone wanted to pray they had to pay him with bread to use it!  You should have seen all the bread he took for that siddur!  That is why I have no use for religious Jews.”

            Rabbi Silver looked at this man and said, “Why do you focus on this one man?  And not the many other religious yidden who paid such a high price just to hold and use a holy prayer book?”

            We may have no choice over our circumstances but we always control the way we interpret them.  In the same way, we have the ability to listen to the many voices of the present and abandon the vapid sirens summoning us to emptiness.