How We Live: Speech for Holocaust Remembrance Day
On the 20th anniversary of becoming bat mitzvah
A few weeks ago I received an email from a former student inviting me to speak at her high school’s assembly for Holocaust Remembrance Day. I was honored and so impressed that she had taken on a large leadership role in her school’s Jewish community. Of course I said yes. Today I gave the short talk (although it has been a few weeks since the official remembrance day, no matter!) and I want to share what I said here.
The topic is the Shoah. Many people call this horrific time in our not too distant past the Holocaust but each of these names has a different connotation. Shoah, in Hebrew, means calamity, or disaster, tragedy, catastrophe. Holocaust comes from ancient Greek and means burnt offering.
For those who know, a burnt offering in the Torah is a sacrifice to God. And often, but not always, it was something that was completely consumed in flames. Completely turned to ash.
Personally, I do not think this definition is all the way correct in describing the genocide of European Jewry (and of course, of other peoples with them) and it certainly does not align with my theology. For this reason, I prefer to use the name Shoah.
Was everything consumed in flames? I find whenever I’m learning or teaching about the Shoah I’m always toggling back and forth between what was lost and what remains. In what ways Hitler won and in what ways he lost.
In one very obvious way he won: European Jewry was destroyed. You may be able to point to groups of Jews living in Europe but the civilization that grew there over hundreds and hundreds of years was chopped down like a great old tree. When talking about this loss, Dara Horn, my personal literary hero, rattles off some of what we lost:
Books and theaters and yeshivas and newspapers and hasidic dynasties and political parties and youth groups and musicians and artists and writers I’d never heard of.1
Rabbi and Historian, Raymond P. Scheindlin writes,
When the war was over, there were virtually no Jews left in Germany, and eastern Europe, the center of world Jewry, had been turned into a graveyard, its Jewish institutions shattered, its inhabitants killed or dispersed. Jewish life in Europe had reached a dead end.2
In these ways, yes, all was consumed in flames. Entire villages. There once was a world. Yaffa Eliach named her 900-year chronicle of her home shtetl, Eishyshok, There Once Was a World. Once upon a time there was a village that lived for 900 years. And then, it was murdered.
Yet, in one very simple way not everything was burned.
Some Jews survived.
Jewish life lives on.
I first started learning about the Shoah when I was in 3rd grade. Growing up at at my synagogue, we learned early, often, and without much apparent filter, about what seemed to me at the time to be the most important time in Jewish history. Maybe even the most important thing about us at all. I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC very young. I read Maus, Night, and snippets from The Diary of Anne Frank. We watched documentaries, saw horrific images, read poetry written by children in the death camps. Met survivors in and out of my direct community, saw their tattoos, heard their stories.
But it wasn’t until college that I had my big moment learning about the Shoah. I was a junior at UCLA, studying English, and curious to get involved in Jewish life on campus. So, I went to the Hillel and learned about a program called Bearing Witness, in which I would meet with a survivor every other week for 10 weeks to have lunch and talk. There was no final project. No grade. No thing in particular to discuss. Just talk, they told us. Witness their story.
I was paired with a woman named Lily Weinberg. She had a horrific story of. As a teenager, she and her mother and sister were sent to a concentration camp. Her mother soon died. Lily and her sister were put on the death march. While huddling for warmth in a barn in the Russian winter, her younger sister died on top of her. Heart to heart. Finally, she was liberated from the death march and woke up 3 weeks later in a Russian hospital with typhoid fever. Her brain capacity had been seriously damaged by the illness. She had been an A+ student before the war, she said, but ever since the typhoid her brain didn’t work quite the same. She never went back to school because she couldn’t concentrate. And now, here she was, talking to me in Los Angeles in 2011. She had married, had children and grandchildren. Yet, she had never told anyone outside of her family about her story in the Shoah. She still, after all this time, suffered crippling panic attacks.
I called my parents crying. It was all too much to witness. How could I witness this true catastrophe? If I was truly listening, how could I bear it?
After this program, I wanted to do more at the Hillel. I wanted being Jewish to be so much more than this trauma and pain and few years of history, as unbelievably destructive as they were. Being the English major nerd I was, I wanted to go to Torah study. So for the rest of the year (and onto my Senior year), every week I would go and study. It would be me, the rabbi, and a few orthodox students, and rarely anyone else. I loved it. I felt alive and purposeful.
I learned and learned and learned. The more I learned about Torah and Talmud and Spanish Jewish history and Ancient Jewish history (and and and) the more the cloud that was my overwhelmingly central Holocaust education began to soften. To be sure, holocaust education is critical and it is horrifying how many people in this country and world deny this ever happened. In academia, we even have an entire genre of culture (literature, art, theater, etc.) that we call post-1945 because of how seismic the effect of the Shoah (and to be sure, the atomic bomb) truly were on human consciousness. It would be impossible to trace all the ways the Shoah changed Jewish life and really, the entire world. And people haven’t learned about it?
Even still, Dara Horn writes,
Jewish identity has never been about what other people did to the Jews but about a deep attunement to Torah and timelessness3
So to close out this talk, I figure we can learn together a little to remind ourselves of the wholeness and richness of Jewish life.
It just so happens that this weeks’ Torah portion is the same one I read on my bat mitzvah, 20 years ago. Parashat Tetzaveh. As a 13 year old I took the theme of sacrifice (oddly fitting for today) and I will pick up where she, my 13 year old self, left off, to offer a short teaching:
Sacrifice is a common occurrence in Torah. It was how the Israelites communicated with G!d. The Torah tells us that there were different kinds of sacrifices required for different reasons, but that offering sacrifices was to be unending. It was their spiritual way of life.
In my work as an educator, I see students are faced with making sacrifices everyday. Do I have time to study for this test or that test? Do I have time to hang out with my friends or practice my instrument or be more attentive to my family at home?
And when it comes to putting anything up against Jewish life, I find that often, not always, but often, especially in more progressive spaces it is Jewish life and peoplehood that is given up.
Often people want to make it all work. A thriving Shabbat practice at home AND going to a sleepover or party. Celebrating the holidays AND still going to school or sports practice on our holiest days of the year.
It occurs to me that sacrifice, as in the ancient times, is at the core of what it means to live a Jewish life. And this is not a bad thing, anything but. In my opinion, living a fulfilling Jewish life means prioritizing Jewish life and exploring the great meaning that can come from choosing it over something else. The spiritual clarity. The reward we get from engaging in Jewish life is so great– spiritual well-being, language and culture, community and joy, preserving an ancient wisdom tradition for the next generation and transforming it for our historical moment. Being a part of something bigger. Something so incredible cannot be free. It ought not to be.
I want to leave you with this thought. If we are to study how so many Jews died – how we were tortured and slaughtered in greater numbers than can ever be imagined – let us also study how we lived.4 And how we live. Let us not be only the victims in examples of the worst moments of history. Let us be the bearers of an incredible civilization. Of song and dance and food and humor and philosophy. And let us continue, after all this time, to live.
Dara Horn, Adventures With Dead Jews, Episode 1: Why Do People Love Dead Jews? September 1, 2021. Tablet Studios, from Tablet Magazine.
Rabbi Raymond P. Scheindlin, Ph.D. A Short History of the Jewish People: From Legendary Times to Modern Statehood. (Oxford University Press: New York, 2000), 213.
Dara Horn, Adventures With Dead Jews, Episode 1: Why Do People Love Dead Jews? September 1, 2021. Tablet Studios, from Tablet Magazine.
As specifically cited above, this sentiment is also shared by Dara Horn over and over again. Essentially this entire talk was inspired by and echoing her work. Thanks, Dara!