Remembering while striving for best society
The old canard says that: "It is not easy to be a Jew." Although the context in which this saying emerged is unclear to me, never do I feel the sting of its ironic and bittersweet truth more acutely than on Yom Hashoah, the annual observance of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Is there a way to understand the universal scope and implications of what occurred during the Holocaust without losing sight of the essential truth that it was the Jews exclusively who were singled out for mass extermination?
How can we come to terms with the horrific truths about the human capacity for evil and cruelty manifested during World War II without undermining the hope for a more ennobling vision that is an essential component of human progress?
Finding a balance
Is there a way to balance the mandate of "never again" with the belief in forgiveness and reconciliation that are at the core of all religious teachings? How can we teach the Holocaust in a way that will leave students with greater empathy for those who suffer and empower the students to be agents of change?
In focusing on the role of other faith communities, is the emphasis to be placed on their relative silence during our hour of need or on the very real effort to atone for those sins of omission that have characterized recent Christian pronunciations on the Shoah?
I am by no means in a position to offer definite answers to those questions. However, I would like to offer the following images as sources of reflection.
Several years ago, I brought to the Youngstown area Hannah Hoy and her father, Steven. Hannah is a teenager from Beverly, Mass., who was on the "Today Show" discussing her involvement in a national program sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League titled "No Place For Hate."
The program
In the program, local elected officials commit themselves by word and deed to becoming entities in which there is literally no place for hate. When the political leaders of her community refused to participate, Hannah refused to accept the rationale offered by her town elders.
It became clear to me that at the core of Hannah's efforts was a deep empathy for others and intolerance for injustice born of the experience of having watched the struggle for dignity and access waged by her physically handicapped father. It had transformed her into an individual who refuses to be intimidated by authority, who persists in subjecting the status quo to searing analysis and reflection and who measures the legitimacy of current policies against the benchmark of one basic question: Does this reflect the best that we as a society are capable of?
The second image I wish to share is drawn from modern Israeli literature. The writer, Haim Gury, retells the biblical story of the death of that arch-enemy of the Israelites, Sisera, and transforms its message. Gury's poem tells the story of Sisera's mother waiting in vain for him to return from battle.
Gury humanizes her and causes us to react to her plight with greater empathy by supplanting the information provided in the biblical account with the critical description that she was a woman "whose hair is a streak of silver." With the description of her physical characteristics, Gury causes this unknown and unnamed enemy to take on the persona of a real human being, of a real mother.
The enemy of empathy
Judith Miller, a New York Times writer, wrote a book "One, By One, By One," in 1990, in which she described how individuals in various countries remember the Holocaust. In the book's introduction, Miller helps us to see the victims as being more than mere numbers, but rather as real human beings whose loss haunts and challenges us. Miller reminds us that "abstraction is the enemy of empathy."
If we are to absorb the lessons of the Holocaust and respond to the challenges imposed upon us by this dark chapter in human history, we must combine a heightened sense of responsibility for what occurs around us with an expanded ability to empathize with all victims of injustice as members of the human family created by a common source.
XRabbi Simeon Kolko is the rabbi at Beth Israel Temple Center in Warren.