In my opinion, a professor at Hebrew University, when seeking in a New York Times opinion piece to divorce the Shemini Atzeres massacre from Holocaust references, missed the forest for the trees. The reason I think that can be read here.
Category Archives: Holocaust
The Jewish summer weeks of mourning
Summer, for religious Jews, isn’t all barbecues and vacations. And the fast days we observe are particularly timely these days, when the Jewish connection to Eretz Yisrael is overlooked, or even denied, by some. You can read my thoughts about the matter here.
Contextualizing the Holocaust
The effort to educate American young people about the hate-born evil that engulfed much of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s has been something less than a resounding success. I have a suggestion about what to replace Holocaust units with. You can read about it here.
President Biden Echoes the Haggadah
Something in particular struck me about President Biden’s October 10 speech about Israel.
To read what it was, click here.
A Nazi’s Revealing Order
There are railcars and there are railcars.
A document from a horrible moment in Holocaust history was recently discovered by a Tel Aviv University PhD candidate. You can read about it here.
Parshas Re’ei – Survivors
Kol yimei chayecha – “All the days of your life” – is a phrase we first meet in the Torah when Hashem pronounces the fate of Adam after the sin of eating from the eitz hadaas: “Cursed is the ground because of you. Through suffering will you eat from it all the days of your life” (Beraishis 3:17).
The phrase recurs in a seemingly unrelated context, about the mitzvah of eating matzah on Pesach, in our parsha: “…so that you will remember the day you left Egypt all the days of your life” (Devarim 16:3).
That pasuk, cited in the Haggadah, elicited a novel thought from Rav Avrohom, the first Rebbe of Slonim: “When recounting Yetzias Mitzrayim, one should remember, too, ‘all the days’ of his own life – the miracles and wonders that Hashem performed for him throughout…”
The generation before mine, the one that came of age during the Second World War, could well relate to that idea. My father endured years of forced labor in Siberia, courtesy of the Soviet Union. My father-in-law was a veteran of several concentration camps, and suffered the deprivations and tortures for which they are infamous.
And, I know, on Pesach, thoughts of their experiences were in their minds. My father and his friends pocketing and then hiding a few wheat kernels here and there, to be secretly ground and baked in the middle of the night into matzos. My father-in-law, in a Dachau satellite camp, reciting with a friend parts of the Haggadah they knew by heart.
But the Slonimer Rebbe’s thought is appropriate for every life, even lives of relative calm and plenty like our own. Because, as a result of the sin of the eitz hadaas, adversity and tragedy entered the world and came to define all humans’ lives, to one or another extent. We all have experienced things that were daunting or worse, and from which we were saved. We may not have been liberated from a literal gulag or camp, but we are all, on one or another level, survivors.
And we need to consciously recall that fact, all the days of our lives.
© 2023 Rabbi Avi Shafran
Sholom Aleichem and Mah Nishtana
Rosh Chodesh Nisan would seem a propitious time for a Kiddush Hashem. And one occurred this year, when a large group of Israeli anti-government protesters, mostly secular citizens aiming to “get in the face” of religious Jews, descended on Bnei Brak.
They likely wanted to express their anger at the fact that religious parties are part of the government coalition whose plans outrage them, but also to stoke locals’ anger in return. Many protesters wore helmets in anticipation of barrages of rocks or eggs. None, though, materialized, only a handful of young people who shot off harmless fireworks.
What did happen, though, was that some local residents set up food and drink stands, offering the protesters cholent, cookies and bottles of water, which many of the visitors gratefully accepted.
And, in one widely circulated (I prefer to avoid the word “viral” these days) video clip, some of the demonstrators seemed moved when the niggun “Sholem Aleichem” was played on loudspeakers. One older man was filmed taking off his helmet to wipe tears from his eyes as he mouthed along with the Shabbos night welcoming of malachei hashareis. Another protester excitedly accepted a sefer Torah from a resident and danced with it.
A resident who filmed videos of the unexpected happenings said that the man who removed his helmet and wept looked at her and said, “My father had love for every Jew and wanted everyone to be united. My father would roll over in his grave if he could see the hatred and conflicts among us.”
There are, to be sure and tragically, people who are so hardened in their secularism that they may seem impervious to reconsidering assumptions about Torah or those dedicated to it.
But the pinteleh Yid is always there, ready to be awoken.
After the Torah recounts the question that the Haggadah attributes to the rasha, it describes our ancestors as bowing down in thanksgiving about, Rashi says, the “news of the children.”
The Sheim MiShmuel, quoted in Eliyhu Ki Tov’s Haggadah, explains that, while resha’im in Mitzrayim perished, after yetzias Mitzrayim our ancestors were given the news that all of their descendants – no matter their actions as individuals – would still be part of the Klal. And that was what spurred their display of gratitude.
And the import of that news is that, no matter how far from their spiritual roots Jews wander, there is always a possibility of them finding – as so many have – a path home.
The seder is a particularly powerful puller of Jewish souls. Its memory is indelibly etched in many a less observant Jew’s soul.
My father, a”h, served as rov of a shul attended by both observant and non–observant Jews. One day a man came to Shacharis – to say Kaddish for a yahrtzeit – one of the few occasions we ever saw him – and received an aliyah.
He haltingly recited the brachah on the Torah but after “Asher bachar banu…” he hesitated. Then “mikol…” Then, to my immature amusement, “…haleylos shebechol haleylos anu ochlim…”
He was quickly corrected. But I realized that the man had just revealed that, distant as he was from Yiddishkeit, he remembered Mah Nishtana.
The distance between him and his heritage could not keep its words from tiptoeing in, unsummoned but determined. The seder was a part of him.
When living in Northern California and then in Rhode Island, I became acquainted with many Jewish families seemingly devoid of religious practice. I always made a point of asking whether they had a seder of any sort. Almost invariably, the answer was… yes, of course. Their sedarim may not have met halachic standards, but they were born of older sedarim that had, and that had left their seeds in the hearts of those present to germinate.
The sheer variety of bizarre “haggadahs” out there itself testifies to the Jewish compulsion to connect, no matter how tenuously, the “ism” du jour to Yetzias Mitzrayim. Forgetting that seminal event simply isn’t an option.
The birds of spring are singing. So are we Jews, singing our history at our sedarim. And even some who have fallen from the nest vaguely remember the song. We just need to refresh their memories.
© 2023 Ami Magazine
A Defense of Holocaust Remembrance Day
A piece I wrote about the uniqueness of the Holocaust was published at Religion News Service and can be read here.
Name, Rank, Courage
If you aren’t familiar with the story of Roddie Edmonds, a Tennessee-born non-Jewish sergeant who fought in World War II and was captured by the Nazis, you can read it here.
Ha’azinu – The Secret, Unveiled
Although I appreciate most humor, even jokes about Jews, I have always found comedian Alan King’s wry summary of Jewish holidays, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!” profoundly unfunny.
Not that we Jews don’t deserve a bit of mockery for our… enthusiasm… regarding things culinary. But the “They tried to kill us” introduction is too painfully true to be even part of a bon mot. Whether the “they” tried to kill us spiritually or physically, from ancient times in Egypt and Babylonia and Persia and Greece and the Roman Empire and the Crusades to more recent history including the Holocaust and Soviet Communism, there have been just so many they’s.
Mark Twain famously observed in 1898 – even before the the USSR and the Holocaust – that “Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of…
“He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.
“The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
The secret is Hashem, of course, and the merit of our forefathers. And our eternal survival is encapsulated in the parsha, in the words “I will exhaust my arrows” (Devarim 32:23). Which the Midrash, cited by Rashi, expands upon: “My arrows will come to an end but they [Klal Yisrael] will not.”
© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran