This
coming Monday, April 24, is Yom Ha-shoah V’ha-g’vurah, Holocaust Remembrance
Day. (That last part, the Hebrew word v’ha-g’vurah, adds a reference to
those who bravely resisted and did what they could to impede the progress of
the Nazis’ war against the Jews. Why it is so routinely left off the day’s
name, particularly in the diaspora, is an interesting question in its own
right, one I’d like to address on another occasion.) But, whatever its full or
less full name, the day is almost upon us. Again. Where it came from is
slightly obscure, but not that interesting a tale: the need was felt early on
to create some sort of memorial day on which all those who left behind no one
at all to mourn their passing could jointly be remembered by the Jewish people
as a whole, and the date of the 27th of Nisan was set into Israeli
law in 1953 with an act jointly signed by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and
Israel’s second president, Yitzchak Ben Zvi, and quickly adopted in Jewish
communities around the world. It and I are therefore exactly the same age.
Readers who know me personally will find that more than reasonable.
Choosing
the right date was a contentious business in the beginning. The original idea was
to fix Yom Ha-shoah on the day in 1943 that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began.
The problem there was one of practicality rather than anything else: the
uprising began on Erev Pesach, and it simply didn’t make sense to establish a
national memorial day on the day before Passover when the entire Jewish people
would be otherwise occupied and majorly distracted. Other days were proposed,
among them Tishah Be’av, the midsummer fast commemorating the destruction of
Jerusalem both by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE and the Romans in
the first century CE, and the Tenth of Tevet, a minor wintertime fast day
associated with the onset of the siege against Jerusalem in biblical times. Neither
ended up being adopted in Israel, but other dates have gained currency outside
the Jewish world. Of these, best known probably is International Holocaust
Remembrance Day, recognized by the European Union since 1950 and by the United
Nations since 2005, and scheduled annually on January 27, the day Auschwitz was
liberated by the Red Army in 1945. Other
nations too have formally adopted the January 27 date, including Germany, the
U.K., Sweden, the Czech Republic, Greece, and Italy. Poland, for obvious
reasons, sticks with the date of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising according to the
secular calendar, April 19. Austria observes its Memorial Day against Violence
and Racism in Memory of the Victims of National Socialism on May 5, the
anniversary of the liberation of Matthausen by the American Army in 1945. A
handful of other nations have adopted still different dates; some Canadian
provinces have—in my own opinion rather touchingly—adopted the Jewish date, 27
Nisan, as an annual day to remember the k’doshim of the Shoah.
What
surprises me still, even after all these years, is the ambivalence with which
the Jewish world itself approaches the one day on the calendar that you would
think all would adopt emotionally and wholly unambivalently. Yet there
is no agreed-upon liturgy for the day. The Megillat Yom Ha-shoah (“Yom Ha-shoah
Scroll”) published jointly by the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in
Israel and the Rabbinical Assembly in 2003, is in use in some Jewish
communities but remains unadopted, even unknown, in most venues. There is no
agreed-upon addition to the prayer service akin to the paragraphs added for
other fast days, including minor ones, or for Chanukah and Purim. It is not
anyone’s custom to fast on Yom Ha-shoah, despite the fact that all the
days formally connected to the siege of Jerusalem in ancient times—days like
the Tenth of Tevet mentioned above—are observed in traditional communities
precisely as fast days. Nor has anyone invented any sort of ritual for Yom Ha-shoah
other than the custom within Conservative Jewish communities of lighting a
yellow twenty-four-hour memorial candle to memorialize the dead and to recall
the yellow stars so many were forced by their German overlords to wear before
being sent to their deaths. There are thus many Jewish communities, including
some otherwise characterized by intense devotion to punctilious observance, in
which Yom Ha-shoah passes more or less wholly unnoticed.
One
obvious answer, although not one I personally find all that compelling, is that
the 27th of Nisan is not the anniversary of any specific event and was
chosen primarily because it falls a few days after Pesach and a week before Yom
Ha-atzma∙ut, Israel Independence Day. That may sound a bit random, but the
choice was neither accidental nor arbitrary. Indeed, the parallel between
ancient and modern times was precisely the point: the week of Passover
celebrates the redemption of the Israelites from bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt
and their flight to freedom, and the week between Yom Hashoah and Yom
Ha-atzma∙ut was similarly meant to memorialize the passage from the depths of
catastrophe the Jews faced in Nazi-dominated Europe to the security offered by
the independent State of Israel and its mighty army. Even the specific Zionist orientation that
animates the notion of the Jewish people moving from near annihilation in
Europe to the exhilaration of independence in a free Jewish state in the Land
of Israel has its ancient parallel in the Passover story: the Israelites, for
all we Americans like to imagine them longing for freedom in the modern
American sense, specifically did not long to become free citizens of
some future Egyptian republic, but specifically wished to leave Egypt all
together and settle in the land that God had promised to their ancestors, the
Land of Israel, and there to establish themselves as a free people in its own
land.
Is the
ill-ease engendered by that kind of thinking about the perils of diaspora life
the reason our American Jewish community has failed to find a way to make Yom Ha-shoah
into the kind of annually cathartic day of remembrance it deserves to be? It
might be!
We—and
by “we” I mean particularly we American Jews—have, after all, managed more or
less totally to suppress the “real” meaning of Passover and to replace it with the
yearning for human rights and for personal freedom. Nor do we ever stress the fact that Passover by
its very nature promotes the view that the need for the Israelites to be
redeemed from slavery in the first place was a function of their own
ancestors’ tragic error of not returning to Canaan after the famine that
brought the original seventy to Egypt in the first place ended a mere five
years after their arrival.
When
Jacob died a dozen years after the famine ended, the Bible reports that a huge
entourage of Israelites—a maḥaneh kaveid me∙od—solemnly bore his body
back to Canaan. That story, generally skipped over by most as filler between
the extended story of Joseph in Egypt and the account of Israel’s enslavement
and subsequent liberation from bondage, is worth considering carefully. First,
we read of Jacob’s death at ripe old age, unimpressive only by biblical
standards, of 147. Then, after a forty-day mummification procedure and a
subsequent seventy-day period of formal mourning, Joseph approaches Pharaoh
obliquely through some palace officials to ask permission to return his
father’s body to Canaan for burial in Hebron in the sepulcher of his grandparents
and great-grandparents, and where Jacob himself had buried his wife Leah. Why
Joseph, the grand vizier of all Egypt and Pharaoh’s second-in-command, couldn’t
just address Pharaoh directly with such a rational, easily justifiable request
is not made clear. Nor is it explained why, after being approached obliquely,
Pharaoh doesn’t respond similarly indirectly…but the text couldn’t be clearer:
Joseph, strangely and uncharacteristically reticent, approaches Pharaoh through
an intermediary, but Pharaoh, seeing no reason for go-betweens, responds
directly to Joseph almost as a friend. “Go up to Canaan,” he says reasonably
and generously, “and bury your father as you swore to him you would.”
Nor
does the Torah omit to describe the entourage: Joseph went to Canaan
accompanied not only by representatives of the pharaonic court plus “the
elders of Pharaoh’s house” and “the elders of all Egypt,” but also
by the entire House of Joseph, including his brothers and his father’s entire
household. Indeed, the Torah makes a specific point of saying that every single
adult Israelite traveled to Hebron to participate in Jacob’s burial, leaving
behind only the livestock and the children.
By
leaving their children behind, they were obviously signaling their intent to
return. But was that the only course open to the House of Israel? Why couldn’t
they have taken the children with them and just not returned? They
weren’t slaves, after all, but still welcome guests at this point in the story.
And even if Joseph himself would possibly have found it difficult simply to give
notice and abruptly leave Pharaoh’s employ, surely a man of his unparalleled
power could have arranged for his family to return to their homeland. The
famine that brought them to seek refuge in Egypt, after all, was over!
And that surely had been the plan in the first place!
But
none of that happened. Joseph, his brothers, and their entire entourage simply
turned around after the burial and went back to Egypt. A few lines later, the
Book of Genesis ends. And then Exodus begins with the arrival on the scene many
years later of a Pharaoh who felt no sense of allegiance to Joseph’s people and
who, fearing their huge numbers and questionable loyalty to their host nation,
set himself to thinning their numbers and enslaving them. The obvious question
of why the Israelites chose to live on in Egypt instead of returning to their
homeland in the course of the scores of years that passed between Jacob’s death
and their enslavement is left unasked and unanswered. (Just to make that a bit
clearer, Joseph was fifty-six years old when Jacob died. He himself died
fifty-four years later…and the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites came to the
throne after—perhaps even long after—that. So there was a very long period of
time when the Israelites could have gone home. Yet none did. Nor is the argument that they had to
stay because God had predicted to Abraham that his descendants would be
enslaved in a land not their own for four centuries all that compelling; they could
surely have left if they had wished to and allowed the divine prediction to
play itself out some other way!
As we
pass from the last days of Passover to Yom Ha-shoah and then to Yom
Ha-atzma∙ut, I am always reminded of the way the past inheres in the
present…and how particularly this is true when I ponder the patterns that
repeat over and over in Jewish history. The State of Israel does not exist
because of the Shoah and would surely have eventually come into existence
anyway. But the notion that the precise circumstances that led to independence
were integrally related to the catastrophe that decimated European Jewry during
the Second World War does not leave me alone either. In the end, I think that
the 27th of Nisan was just the right date: commemorating no single
event, the date is suggestive of the Passover journey that precedes it and
the week that leads forward to Yom Ha-atzma∙ut. Both could be rightly
characterized by the Haggadah’s expression of a trajectory from g’nut to
shevaḥ, from degradation to redemption. And both deserve to be
considered thoughtfully and taken deeply to heart by all who would feel ennobled,
not merely damned, by thinking of themselves as situated at the precise fulcrum
between the past and the future, between history and destiny.
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