This evening begins Yom HaShoah, the day we remember the Holocaust and the tragic loss of one-third of our Jewish brethren, together with the generations unborn and uncounted that would have come from them. In the following piece, culled from the Destiny Foundation archives, Rabbi Wein speaks of what this day means to him, and of how he was able to find hope and resilience even among the ashes of the destroyed generation.
The advent of Yom HaShoah this week always engenders within
me an inner turbulence and discomfort. It is not only the fact that the
Holocaust destroyed six million innocent people simply because they were Jews—a
third of our nation and co-religionists-though
that alone causes me to have great angst in my soul. Human beings are somehow
built to withstand tragedy—even enormous indescribable tragedy—and to continue
with life. Rather, part of my discomfort is that I, and I think the Jewish
people generally, have not found a truly meaningful way of commemorating this
historic tragedy.
All the Holocaust
museums worldwide, and especially Yad Vashem here in Jerusalem, are magnificent
in their historic presentation of the awful facts of the Holocaust. But one
never leaves the museums with a sense of comfort or even consolation—let alone
closure. There is no museum that can speak to the soul of the Jew. It
speaks to our senses, even to our intellect, to our hearts, but somehow never
to our soul. And it is that emptiness deep within our soul that gnaws at us and
leaves us unfulfilled, no matter how magnificent the museum or meaningful the
memorial ceremony may be.
There are numerous groups within the Jewish society that do
not participate in Holocaust memorial days or events. Many reasons are advanced
for this seemingly insensitive behavior, none of which are satisfactory to my
mind or soul. Yet I feel, deep down in my being, that the spiritual and soulful
emptiness that always accompanies these commemorations reflects the absence of
so many Jews.
I say this not in criticism of any of the commemorations.
They have an impossible task and therefore one should almost expect them to
fall short of the mark. But the intellectual acceptance of this fact still does
little to quiet the turmoil in my soul.
I have always identified myself and our post-Holocaust
generations with the great imagery of the scene described by the prophet
Yechezkel. The prophet views a large valley covered by bleached scattered human
bones. The Midrash teaches us that these were the remains of the tens of
thousands of the tribe of Joseph who attempted to escape Egyptian bondage
before the actual redemption from Egypt by Moses took place. They had
fallen victim to the ravages of the desert and the enmity of the pagan tribes that
persecuted them. The prophet sees no hope for their revival. After all, by his
time they have already been dead for millennia. And the prophet also senses
that they have never properly been mourned and commemorated.
The Lord informs the prophet that these bones are symbolic
of “the entire household of Israel.” The household of Israel is itself
overwhelmed with its anonymous dead who have no graves or monuments to somehow
mark the fact that they once lived on this earth. The prophet despairs of their
revival or continuity. But the Lord tells him to prophesy over the dry
bones and restore them to their physical human form. Then the spirit of the
Lord enters them and they come back life and rise up from the valley floor as a
mighty host.
The prophet does not tell us what the end of this story was.
What happened to this mighty host of newly and miraculously revived Jews? The
Talmud offers two different insights on this matter. One is that the revival
was only a temporary phenomenon and that they all reverted immediately to being
dry dead bones. This opinion was contradicted by the sage Rabbi Yehuda ben
Beteira. He rose in the study hall and stated: “God forbid that we should
advance such a pessimistic opinion. Rather, they married, raised children and
lived a full life thereafter. And I am a descendant of theirs and as a proof of
the matter I hold in my hand the tefillin of my ancestors [that they
themselves wore.]”
I feel that the only closure that can reach our soul
regarding Jewish tragedy is the recognition of the continuity of generations
and tradition that binds the Jewish people together. Our past, those that are
gone and even those who are unknown to us whose ashes and bones litter the
landscape of a cursed continent, live on through us - through our achievements
and struggles on behalf of Torah and Israel.
We wear their tefillin, many of us literally, all of us
figuratively. This realization regarding the tefillin will always
speak to our souls and help us to truly commemorate the Holocaust and the
resilience of the Jewish people in overcoming a tragedy of even such
incalculable dimensions.
