Whew! It’s time to take a deep breath – if circumstances permit! – as we take leave of a most unique and unusual series of holiday events. While we Israelis have become accustomed to pausing from our regular activities when we hear sirens signaling two-minute silences during Nisan, we had all we could deal with this year. The background “music” of warnings, sirens, and booms that accompanied these past three weeks will not soon be forgotten.
One of the lasting memories for me will be the Friday night praying of Kabbalat Shabbat with 50 other people as we huddled in a bunker on the Golan, in the program we run each Passover at the Ramot Resort. Who could forget our spirited singing of the Haggadah’s famous “V’hi She’amda” refrain as we waited for the all-clear signal: “And this promise is what has stood by our ancestors and us; for it was not only just one who rose up to destroy us. In every single generation, there are those who would seek our destruction, but the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.”
Passover perfectly sets the tone for the dramatic “made in Israel” special days that follow it: Holocaust Remembrance Day, Remembrance Day for the Fallen of Israel’s Wars, and Independence Day.
What is Passover if not a template for what we have experienced over the last 100 years? As the Haggadah so succinctly relates it, this epic story begins in tragedy, with our persecution, slavery, and suffering in Egypt, where we were demonized and degraded. However, it ends in glorious fashion, as we emerge, amid magnificent miracles, to declare our independence.
This is precisely the same pattern for the days that follow the holiday. Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the absolute depth of our history, as Germany led the murderous rampage to wipe us out, while few, if any, other people worldwide rose to our aid. Our survival was clearly in question; we were, in effect, slaves to the torrent of evil that swept the planet.
From the Holocaust to the State of Israel
But God did not desert us. Against all odds, we gathered up our courage, we banded together and marched from the death camps toward the Holy Land, just as our Israelite predecessors had done. We fought valiantly and we conquered our enemies, until we had replicated Joshua’s stunning victory of so many centuries ago. We reclaimed the stature and self-image we had lost, and we came back to life in our own land in the most graphic example of t’chiyat hametim, resurrection, the world had ever seen.
In short, we today – now – are living history all over again.
But while the piercing, mournful sirens beckon us to rise in respect for the martyrs of the Holocaust and the fallen of the IDF, I want to draw a distinction between Holocaust Remembrance Day and Independence Day.
First, let me state unequivocally that each and every victim of the Holocaust is kodesh, holy. By dying as Jews – even those who were unaware of their lineage – they gained a place in the highest corners of heaven. Though my parents were American-born, the mother of my wife, Susie, survived Auschwitz, and Susie’s father survived a slave labor camp.
I am humbled by their ordeal and their indomitable will to survive. It would be grossly disrespectful to attempt to “rank” their place in the “hierarchy of suffering” index.
But even they understood that there is a qualitative difference between dying in a mass shooting at the hands of evil villains, and willingly risking – and sometimes dying – in order to safeguard our existence in our ancestral homeland.
I have broached this subject many times before, such as when I told the story of Baruch Shapiro in the column titled “The Never-Ending Story” (The Jerusalem Post, April 19, 1996; reprinted on October 6, 2002, a week after our eldest son, Ari, fell in battle). But I want to revisit another story as well (with thanks to Rabbi Ari Kahn).
Rabbi Yisroel Zev Gustman, who passed away in 1991, was a renowned Torah scholar who headed a small yeshiva in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood. During the Holocaust, his young son Meir was taken from his hands by the Nazis and murdered. He related how, after liberation, his wife would stand by the living room window, staring into the distance, praying in vain that Meir would some day come back to them.
Rav Gustman was close with Prof. Yisrael Aumann, who was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics. In 1982, Aumann’s oldest son, Shlomo, fell in battle in the Second Lebanon War. Shlomo, himself a Talmudic scholar, once wrote that his IDF uniform “was akin to the holy garments worn by the kohen gadol – the high priest – in the Beit Hamikdash [the Holy Temple].” When Rav Gustman heard of Shlomo’s death, he rushed to the shiva and embraced Aumann. He said to him: “My Meir is a kadosh – he is holy; he and all the six million who perished are holy. But I will tell you what is transpiring now in the world of truth in Gan Eden – in heaven. My Meir is welcoming your Shlomo into the minyan and is saying to him, ‘I died because I am a Jew – but I wasn’t able to save anyone else. But you, Shlomo, you died defending the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. You achieved that incomparable honor!’ Yes, my Meir is holy – but your Shlomo is the shaliach tzibur [prayer leader] in that holy, heavenly minyan of kedoshim.”
All deaths at the hands of our enemies are tragic; all of them scream out for justice, sending a clarion call to all the good people of the world to stand tall against hatred and bigotry and fight for what is right. The current war being waged against Iran and its proxies – madmen who actively seek to create a global ring of terror that would send us back to the Dark Ages – is a challenge that cannot be ignored. No one has the right to be silent; no one can abdicate his or her responsibility to repair this damaged world.
So do not ask for whom the siren sounds – it sounds for all of us.
The writer, head of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana, directs cruises and tours of Jewish interests around the world and has led five trips to Poland and Eastern Europe; rabbistewart@gmail.com
Source:
www.jpost.com
