Honoring the Legacy
Today we mark Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve’laG’vurah, the day of remembrance of the holocaust and heroism. While we often refer to this commemoration as simply “Yom HaShoah,” the full name of this day marks the horrible tragedy of the Shoah, and pays tribute to those who showed heroism during that dark time. When thinking of the “heroism” of the Holocaust, we often think of those few moments of overt bravery: the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the partisans who parachuted into the forests of Europe, and the escape from the camp at Sobibor. Yet this day commemorates not only the actions of those who, like the partisans, fighters, and resisters who rose up with physical strength, but also those who showed gevurah through smaller yet no less significant acts of bravery and spirit: the starving parent who gave a last piece of bread to a child, the elderly one who frozen and alone continued marching through the snow for hours. This day commemorates those whose bravery was the simple act of enduring such horrors. Yom HaZikaron laShoah u’laG’vurah marks this horrible tragedy while also recognizing the heroism shown by great and small, young and old, survivor and victim.
Stories. We have many stories of these acts of bravery. Admittedly, our stories are the survivors’ stories, but they remember those who are not with us to tell their stories as well. We must continue to tell these stories and allow their memories to live on. The survivors are dying, and soon, our children and grandchildren will know no one who lived through the horrors of the Shoah. Those of us who have been touched by the stories of these individual survivors - our family members, our neighbors, our synagogue members, and our friends - must continue to tell their stories. We must never forget them.
Yet many of us grew up with these stories forming the core of our Jewish identity. Our Hebrew school curricula focused on the Shoah. We read Newberry Award winning books about children living during World War II in our elementary schools. We dissected the works of Primo Levy and Elie Weisel in high school history classes. We enrolled in courses on the Holocaust, its literature, and the history of the Third Reich in college. An entire generation of American Jews has formed its identity on the fact that the Holocaust happened. We came away with the message that because the Holocaust happened, and it must “never again” happen, we must continue to live proudly as Jews.
I, too, fell into the trap of this education. As a teen I read everything I could get my hands on about Anne Frank and Hannah Senesch. I reveled in the movies and miniseries about Schindler’s Jews and the Escape from Sobibor. I sang songs of the Partisans in my Zionist youth group. In college I headed Penn’s Holocaust Education Committee, each year handing out yellow stars to passersby and participating in twenty-four hour name-readings on College Green, dutifully taking my slot at two in the morning. I knew that I must keep Judaism alive because so many people were killed simply because they were Jews. That yellow star became my silver star necklace, and I was thankful that I could now wear it proudly and of my own volition. But when my psychology professor, a refugee who fled Germany when he was a child, explained to me that he was agnostic and believed in neither God nor Jewish law, but was still Jewish because his family perished in the Holocaust, it hit me. Is this the identity we are forming for ourselves? Are we Jewish only because of the legacy of the Shoah?
The short story “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick begins as Rosa, a young mother, is forced to leave her home for a concentration camp. A seemingly magical shawl sustains and hides Rosa’s starving baby Magda in the long march and in the camp. The shawl’s magic nourishes little Magda when her mother’s bosom dries up. Even in the barracks of the camp, as long as Magda is wrapped in the shawl and suckling its cinnamon and-almond-scented threads, she is not only nourished, but protected, hidden from the guards who would certainly kill her if she were discovered. Day in and day out, Magda hides in the corner, under the shawl, and makes not a sound. Yet one day her shawl is taken away by fourteen-year-old Stella, who took it because she herself was cold. Suddenly without the shawl, unprotected, the once silent Magda ventures out of the barrack and start an unceasing scream. Emaciated and sickly, she is barely able to hold herself up, yet screams and screams, and is discovered by the guards. The end of the story, I don't have to tell you.
Is the Judaism that we hide under the shawl of the Holocaust like that little baby, spindly-legged and unable to sustain the weight of its air-filled, artificially distended belly? Once we remove that protective magical shawl, that thin cover - once it is gone, is the Judaism that lies beneath it strong enough to survive? Or, without that shawl, is our Jewish identity like that baby: naked, sickly, and so afraid to live that it screams and throws itself against the metal fence only to die underneath that very same ghetto-mentality of a Jewish identity that seemed to protect it all those years? As it turned out, that protector was fleeting and fickle; the shawl was too easily removed. Our Judaism cannot survive if its only reason for existence is this thin veil of Holocaust survivalism. We cannot ground our identity and our reason for being beneath such flimsy, floating gauze.
If we preserve our Jewish legacy for the sole reason that someone tried to take it away, then what happens when we are safe and living in a world where no one wants to take it away? How can we preserve something just because someone else seeks to destroy it? If there is no inherent value to our Judaism in it on its own right, then why not let it be destroyed?!
In a second short story, Rebecca Goldstein’s “The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish,” the narrator Rose is the daughter of survivors, and grapples with that legacy. Rose is a thoughtful narrator, and looks at her life through the lens of a philosopher. She understands that her very existence, as the child of Holocaust survivors, is itself a statement. With a touch of bitterness, Rose explains that her mother conceived and bore her not simply for all the reasons one might expect, but more importantly, for ideological reasons. For so many of the generation of the survivors, each child they bore was more than a child: each child was a statement. The Germans killed Jewish children, and so every subsequent Jewish child born into this world is a statement that they did not win. Likewise, the decision of those children to give the survivors grandchildren is also a statement that the Germans did not win. And the decision not to have children, one contemplated by our narrator, becomes a slap in the face of those survivors, as the Jewish line that they risked their lives to protect and secure will cease to be.
But as our narrator realizes, it is unfair to make a child’s very existence based on a statement. She struggles with the notion of whether “one was ever justified in bringing a person into being for some reason of one’s own.” Not only were the children of her generation a direct response to the work of the Nazis, but the very basis of their Judaism also becomes a response to the Holocaust. But does it have to be?
Although Rose feels that it is unfair to have a child for a particular point, once she has a child of her own, she realizes that the simple existence of that child and the inherent joy of child-raising trump any ideological reasons for which one might have had the child in the first place. She writes, “The ends for which one bore the child lose themselves in the knowledge of the child itself.”
Like a child, the reason we choose to preserve our Jewish identity must be lost in the knowledge of our Jewish identity itself. Even if we are motivated to preserve the customs of our ancestors only because the forces of Nazi evil tried to take them away, it is now time to lose those ends and experience the Judaism itself, for its own right. A child is beautiful an inherent delight. So is our tradition. We do both the victims of the Holocaust and our Judaism a tremendous disservice when we lost sight of that beauty. Even if we have chosen to preserve our Judaism because of this need to prove the Germans wrong, it is now time to preserve - and to celebrate - our Judaism because of its inherent beauty. The ends for which one bore the child must lose themselves in the knowledge of the child itself.
For the sake of those who showed heroism by simply living and surviving as Jews, we must do more than that. Our tribute to that heroism is to honor their memories by doing more than simply surviving as Jews. Our Judaism must do more than survive. It must thrive. We must live for the beauty of Judaism that is in its own right - the beauty they risked their lives to preserve. Our act of heroism is to preserve Judaism for its own sake, and not just for theirs.
As Hannah Senesch wrote, “Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.” Their heroism was to keep that flame alive; our heroism is to fan that flame so that it burns bright once more. In their memory, and as a tribute to their tragic yet heroic lives, we must cherish our Judaism for what it is. “Blessed is the match that burns in the kindling flame.” We light that match not simply because someone tried to snuff it out; we ignite it because of the light that it provides. Our tradition is that light. Those who perished for its sake are that light. May their memories be a blessing.
Stories. We have many stories of these acts of bravery. Admittedly, our stories are the survivors’ stories, but they remember those who are not with us to tell their stories as well. We must continue to tell these stories and allow their memories to live on. The survivors are dying, and soon, our children and grandchildren will know no one who lived through the horrors of the Shoah. Those of us who have been touched by the stories of these individual survivors - our family members, our neighbors, our synagogue members, and our friends - must continue to tell their stories. We must never forget them.
Yet many of us grew up with these stories forming the core of our Jewish identity. Our Hebrew school curricula focused on the Shoah. We read Newberry Award winning books about children living during World War II in our elementary schools. We dissected the works of Primo Levy and Elie Weisel in high school history classes. We enrolled in courses on the Holocaust, its literature, and the history of the Third Reich in college. An entire generation of American Jews has formed its identity on the fact that the Holocaust happened. We came away with the message that because the Holocaust happened, and it must “never again” happen, we must continue to live proudly as Jews.
I, too, fell into the trap of this education. As a teen I read everything I could get my hands on about Anne Frank and Hannah Senesch. I reveled in the movies and miniseries about Schindler’s Jews and the Escape from Sobibor. I sang songs of the Partisans in my Zionist youth group. In college I headed Penn’s Holocaust Education Committee, each year handing out yellow stars to passersby and participating in twenty-four hour name-readings on College Green, dutifully taking my slot at two in the morning. I knew that I must keep Judaism alive because so many people were killed simply because they were Jews. That yellow star became my silver star necklace, and I was thankful that I could now wear it proudly and of my own volition. But when my psychology professor, a refugee who fled Germany when he was a child, explained to me that he was agnostic and believed in neither God nor Jewish law, but was still Jewish because his family perished in the Holocaust, it hit me. Is this the identity we are forming for ourselves? Are we Jewish only because of the legacy of the Shoah?
The short story “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick begins as Rosa, a young mother, is forced to leave her home for a concentration camp. A seemingly magical shawl sustains and hides Rosa’s starving baby Magda in the long march and in the camp. The shawl’s magic nourishes little Magda when her mother’s bosom dries up. Even in the barracks of the camp, as long as Magda is wrapped in the shawl and suckling its cinnamon and-almond-scented threads, she is not only nourished, but protected, hidden from the guards who would certainly kill her if she were discovered. Day in and day out, Magda hides in the corner, under the shawl, and makes not a sound. Yet one day her shawl is taken away by fourteen-year-old Stella, who took it because she herself was cold. Suddenly without the shawl, unprotected, the once silent Magda ventures out of the barrack and start an unceasing scream. Emaciated and sickly, she is barely able to hold herself up, yet screams and screams, and is discovered by the guards. The end of the story, I don't have to tell you.
Is the Judaism that we hide under the shawl of the Holocaust like that little baby, spindly-legged and unable to sustain the weight of its air-filled, artificially distended belly? Once we remove that protective magical shawl, that thin cover - once it is gone, is the Judaism that lies beneath it strong enough to survive? Or, without that shawl, is our Jewish identity like that baby: naked, sickly, and so afraid to live that it screams and throws itself against the metal fence only to die underneath that very same ghetto-mentality of a Jewish identity that seemed to protect it all those years? As it turned out, that protector was fleeting and fickle; the shawl was too easily removed. Our Judaism cannot survive if its only reason for existence is this thin veil of Holocaust survivalism. We cannot ground our identity and our reason for being beneath such flimsy, floating gauze.
If we preserve our Jewish legacy for the sole reason that someone tried to take it away, then what happens when we are safe and living in a world where no one wants to take it away? How can we preserve something just because someone else seeks to destroy it? If there is no inherent value to our Judaism in it on its own right, then why not let it be destroyed?!
In a second short story, Rebecca Goldstein’s “The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish,” the narrator Rose is the daughter of survivors, and grapples with that legacy. Rose is a thoughtful narrator, and looks at her life through the lens of a philosopher. She understands that her very existence, as the child of Holocaust survivors, is itself a statement. With a touch of bitterness, Rose explains that her mother conceived and bore her not simply for all the reasons one might expect, but more importantly, for ideological reasons. For so many of the generation of the survivors, each child they bore was more than a child: each child was a statement. The Germans killed Jewish children, and so every subsequent Jewish child born into this world is a statement that they did not win. Likewise, the decision of those children to give the survivors grandchildren is also a statement that the Germans did not win. And the decision not to have children, one contemplated by our narrator, becomes a slap in the face of those survivors, as the Jewish line that they risked their lives to protect and secure will cease to be.
But as our narrator realizes, it is unfair to make a child’s very existence based on a statement. She struggles with the notion of whether “one was ever justified in bringing a person into being for some reason of one’s own.” Not only were the children of her generation a direct response to the work of the Nazis, but the very basis of their Judaism also becomes a response to the Holocaust. But does it have to be?
Although Rose feels that it is unfair to have a child for a particular point, once she has a child of her own, she realizes that the simple existence of that child and the inherent joy of child-raising trump any ideological reasons for which one might have had the child in the first place. She writes, “The ends for which one bore the child lose themselves in the knowledge of the child itself.”
Like a child, the reason we choose to preserve our Jewish identity must be lost in the knowledge of our Jewish identity itself. Even if we are motivated to preserve the customs of our ancestors only because the forces of Nazi evil tried to take them away, it is now time to lose those ends and experience the Judaism itself, for its own right. A child is beautiful an inherent delight. So is our tradition. We do both the victims of the Holocaust and our Judaism a tremendous disservice when we lost sight of that beauty. Even if we have chosen to preserve our Judaism because of this need to prove the Germans wrong, it is now time to preserve - and to celebrate - our Judaism because of its inherent beauty. The ends for which one bore the child must lose themselves in the knowledge of the child itself.
For the sake of those who showed heroism by simply living and surviving as Jews, we must do more than that. Our tribute to that heroism is to honor their memories by doing more than simply surviving as Jews. Our Judaism must do more than survive. It must thrive. We must live for the beauty of Judaism that is in its own right - the beauty they risked their lives to preserve. Our act of heroism is to preserve Judaism for its own sake, and not just for theirs.
As Hannah Senesch wrote, “Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.” Their heroism was to keep that flame alive; our heroism is to fan that flame so that it burns bright once more. In their memory, and as a tribute to their tragic yet heroic lives, we must cherish our Judaism for what it is. “Blessed is the match that burns in the kindling flame.” We light that match not simply because someone tried to snuff it out; we ignite it because of the light that it provides. Our tradition is that light. Those who perished for its sake are that light. May their memories be a blessing.