The Challenge of Yom HaShoah

May 6, 2005 
Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

Sixty years ago this season the guns fell silent in the European theatre. It would take two atomic bombs and until August until the same would occur in the Pacific. What was seen in the days and months following the collapse and demise of Nazi Germany? What was the Jewish response to a catastrophe nearly unprecedented in the three thousand and five hundred years of Jewish history?

When the clouds of smoke lifted from the killing fields and destroyed cities of Europe there was silence, even if there was sound. There was silence in the face of attempting to explain what had happened. Not only were there six million Jews dead, murdered in every barbaric way known to man, and some otherwise unimaginable. Millions upon millions more from every nation on the continent, and from England, Canada and the United States, combatants and civilians were dead. In the entire history of this planet, never had so many killed, tortured and maimed so many. No natural cataclysm has ever wiped out as many human beings and animals. In the face of this slaughter, there was silence.

There will forever be silence. No one can ever explain how human beings, born of mothers and fathers, could have descended to the depths of depravity evidenced in World War II. And as much as we live in a very noisy world, from the annoyance of cell phones to the blaring of TV's that automatically get louder during commercials, there is silence.

There is silence about how they kill in Darfur. There is silence if you do not know where that is.

There is silence when Palestinians blow up Israelis.

There is silence when Iraqis blow up Iraqis.

There is silence when people live in poverty and scavenge garbage cans and garbage dumps for scraps.

And no one can explain it.

Are we to say that after ten thousand years of biological development, that man is still a savage?

After all the stages of evolution, are we still no different that the animals?

Do we blame God and say He made us this way, and take no responsibility ourselves?

Are we silent and mute because the Shoah showed that the culture of Europe was a veneer that hid the absence of morality and the fantasy of its ethics?

Are we silent today showing that for all our exterior, our interior is no different?

When I drive by the tall United Nations building in New York City, I am silent. There are no words to explain us, our lack of humanity, and our human history. Elie Wiesel did not write for ten years, until fifty years ago, for he confronted all this, and responded in silence. From time to time I feel compelled to write a sermon on this topic and in these days. Sometimes I think that there is nothing left to write and nothing left to say. I feel like Aaron, who, in the height of his glory, looked at the corpses of his suddenly slain sons. The Torah says: Va-yidom Aharon – Aaron was silent. Even when we do speak, the sound must be pregnant with silence.

And yet I write. When the veil of destruction lifted, European Jewry was destroyed, even those who lived. The richness of Jewish culture, the hearth of Jewish literature, the teeming classrooms of Jewish study, the piety of every shtetl, the sounds of Hebrew prayer, of Yiddish language, of the fiddler's melody from the rooftop, vanished. And like the Jewish civilizations of Babylonia, Spain and North Africa, it would not and will not appear again. That world, its ta'am, its flavor, sights, sounds, smells, essence, which was destroyed forever. Even for those who survived. The history of world Jewry was irreparably altered forever.

What is the Jewish response to catastrophe? What did we do in the past?

We rebuilt.

We recreated.

We self - resurrected.

We refused to accept our demise and our condition.

No matter what, we refused to lose faith in ourselves or our faith in God.

After the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, the Jews exiled to Babylonia there built a center of Jewish life. And from them there were those who returned to build the Second Commonwealth and the Second Temple. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Jews of Eretz Yisrael recreated Judaism in the Rabbinic mode. That is the Judaism which we live, and has flourished for 2000 years. In different times and in different places, in North Africa, Spain, Southern France, Eastern Europe, after each evil turn of history, we were unshaken in our faith that God did not desert us, because we survived each chapter. We were undeniable in the quest for our destiny. We have created our literature, our music, our language, our theology. And we have built our State, Medinat Yisrael. In the face of tragedies and catastrophes throughout our history, and the Shoah in our time, the corporate body of the Jewish people has refused to be silent.

But what about us? Here? Now? Our Jewish lives? Here in America? Here in Richmond? In our homes? In our synagogue?

Are we silent or vibrant?

Are we committed or detached?

Are we disassociated or faithful?

Do we believe in ourselves, our religion, and devote ourselves to securing our Jewish destiny?

I offer this piece, from The Rabbinical Assembly's "Megillat HaShoah, the Shoah Scroll," a selection entitled "Yizkor for Yom HaShoah," translated by Rabbi Jules Harlow. 

We shall remember our brothers and sisters,

The city houses and the county houses,

The shtetl streets rushing like rivers

And the lonely inn on the country road –

The aged man and the features of his face,

The mother in her kerchief,

The young girl with her braids,

The child,

The people of Israel in thousands of communities

Among all the human families,

The entire assembly of Jews

Brought down to slaughter on the soil of Europe

By the Nazi destroyer,

The man who suddenly screamed

And while screaming died,

The woman, clutching her infant to her breast,

Whose arms gave out,

The infant groping for his mother's breast

That was blue and cold,

The feet,

The feet that sought refuge

Though flight was no longer possible,

And those who made their hands into a fist,

The fist that gripped the iron,

The iron that became the weapon of vision,

Of despair, and of rebellion,

And those, the pure of heart,

Those whose eyes were opened,

Those who risked their lives,

Though they lacked the power to triumph.

We shall remember the day,

The day in its brightness, the sun that rose

Over the bloody conflagration,

The lofty, silent heavens.

We shall remember the mounds of dust

Beneath the gardens in bloom.

The living shall remember their dead

For they are forever before us.

Look! Their eyes dart round and about,

Allowing us no peace, no peace

Until our lives become worthy of their memory.

Shabbat Shalom.