Yom Ha-Shoah

Yom Ha-Shoah, the day of rememberance for the Holocaust (in Hebrew, the "Shoah” [destruction], a more sensible term than the word “Holocaust” [sacrifice]), began last night.

At night, we went to Moreshet Avraham, one of Jerusalem’s Masorti (Conservative) synagogues, for their reading of “The Shoah Scroll” (Megillat Ha-Shoah), a text written by Avigdor Shinan that attempts to portray some of the horror of the Shoah in a form that can be read by communities on an annual basis. It’s a fairly chilling and effective text, a portion of which incorporates the cantillation used to read the Book of Lamentations. It seems to me to be one of the most effective efforts to compose such a text, though I think that there are others that are also quite effective, and I have no doubt that the Jewish people will continue the process of creating other texts that might be equally good at preserving the memory of the Shoah.

After the reading of Megillat Ha-Shoah, we watched an incredibly powerful documentary that left both of us with tears streaming down our cheeks: “Tak for Alt: Survival of a Human Spirit,” the story of a Holocaust survivor named Judy Meisel. Even though we’ve heard these sorts of stories many times before, we were still shocked by the un-human cruelty that characterized so many Nazi soldiers. What could possibly motivate soldiers to have such glee as they made people dig their own graves, as they killed everyone too weak to keep up with forced marches, as they dashed out the brains of babies on the ground in front of their parents?

This morning, at ten o’clock, the entire country came to a standstill as it does every year on this day. An air raid siren goes off, and everyone stops moving and becomes instantly silent. Katy stood with her ulpan class on King George Street, one of the major streets in Jerusalem, and saw the cars stopping in the middle of the street, the pedestrians stopping in the middle of crosswalks, conversations abruptly coming to an end. The ritual acknowledges that, on many levels, a moment of silence – pierced by the shofar-like cry of a siren - is the only appropriate response we can have.

At noon, we spent an hour at the Conservative Yeshiva with Rabbi Pesach Schindler, a Holocaust survivor and a dear teacher of both Katy and I, contemplating the place of self-examination by the Jewish people after the Shoah.

I’ve spent the day fasting, following a practice advocated by one of my teachers, Rabbi David Golinkin. I decided to do so despite three reservations about the practice:

1) the traditional view of fasting as a practice to raise consciousness of our sins and to stimulate our repentance. Fasting on Yom Ha-Shoah could seem to suggest the false theological conviction that tragedies like the Shoah came about because of our sins, something that no one should be thinking.

2) the widely-held sense that the response to the Holocaust should be a response that affirms life, not a practice of denial like fasting

3) if indeed some sort of abstinence is an appropriate practice for the day, I agree with my teacher Rabbi Ira Stone that a ta’anit dibur (abstinence from words) is preferable to a ta’anit ochel (abstinence from food). Jewish tradition teaches that initiating speech is unacceptable in the presence of a mourner because our speech often serves to trivialize tragic events. It is important to respond to tragedy with words as well, but it is important to make space for silence. Silence on Yom Ha-Shoah might also be an appropriate way to experience God’s absence – the blotting out of God’s presence and God’s image by the perpetrators of evil. On the other hand, fasts of speech are not easy for people to carry out in the course of their daily activities.

Despite these thoughts, though, refraining from food since last night seems to have been an effective practice for me for three reasons:

1) The repentance and self-examination associated with fasting are not totally out of place in response to the Shoah. Reflecting on one’s transgressions should not be linked with an admission of guilt for being a victim; but, rather, we should emerge from experiences of tragedy by reflecting on how we can be more effective at fighting evil in the world. As Golinkin argues, “we need to repent for our criminal apathy and silence which allowed the Nazis to progress towards the Final Solution unhindered and ignored.”

2) To quote Golinkin: “It is impossible for us, who did not experience the Holocaust, to imagine what it was like. But a common motif in almost every diary and memoir about the Shoah is that of hunger. Many suffered from acute malnutrition; all experienced hunger. One of the ways in which we can attempt to identify and empathize with the victims of the Shoah is to fast. By fasting we will remind ourselves in a tangible way of the hunger and suffering of the Six Million.”

3) In Jewish tradition, fasting goes hand in hand with giving of oneself to help others. Among other things that we’re doing is giving money saved by fasting to causes working to eliminate suffering in the world, in accordance with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s assessment that

Giving tzedakah is central to this day. Giving reasserts the value of human life. Taking responsibility for others repudiates the indifference of the bystanders which made the Holocaust possible. Thus authentic Jewish memory leads to acts of loving kindness rather than to hatred or revenge.

We’ve also spent some portion of the day thinking in practical terms about what can be done to prevent widespread denial of the Holocaust (especially a problem in this part of the world), steadily-increasing anti-Semitic violence, and preventing genocide from taking place in our own day. The Jewish community around the world is, not surprisingly, especially focused on the events in the Sudan today and taking action accordingly.