April 2, 2008 - YOM HASHOAH - (27th of Nisan, 5768)

The saddest task I have all year is to write a sermon for Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Commemoration Shabbat. It is not only the saddest task; it is also the most challenging and the most infuriating. I come to this day with profound, endless mourning and a mood of deep devastation. Ever since my teenage years, when I first read about the destruction of European Jewry, I knew that there would never be a way for me again to regain a comprehensive confidence in humanity. For, if it were true that the world contained a majority of caring others, then how could this unspeakable nightmare in history have happened? Where were the just of this world when the Nuremburg Laws were promulgated, among other things removing Jews from all government positions and forbidding marriages of Jews to gentiles? Where were the truly faithful of any and all religions when word of the mass exterminations leaked out from the camps, onto the world scene? Where were the courageous and the righteous that should have spoken out on my people’s behalf? Who, indeed, stood up to the crimes, the indescribable crimes, that were being committed against the Jews of Europe?

When I first encountered the realities of the Holocaust, I was forever changed as a human being, myself. Never again would I fully trust humankind. Never again would I turn my life over to scientists, artists, musicians, statesmen…all who consider themselves and are considered by the world to be cultured; the intelligentsia. These types in Germany had all played a part in the Nazi Reich. What good did they serve or represent when the world needed to hear the voices of GOOD PEOPLE? From the moment that Auschwitz entered my consciousness, I felt as though I should always set aside some corner of my psyche for skepticism and cynicism. And as many stories as I have encountered throughout my life, whether they are recorded in novels like Leon Uris’ Exodus or Elie Wiesel’s Night, or Andre Schwartzbard’s Last of the Just; in myriad poems and photographs, in museums, like Yad Vashem and our Nation’s Holocaust Museum which are dedicated to preserving in film clips, posters and personal testaments the history of the world’s most murdered, most victimized people; as much as I have opened myself to the ghastly stories of the Holocaust, I have never come to terms with its impact on me. I do not believe that I ever shall.

I do not suggest that the Holocaust came about in order for me or the rest of humanity to understand the incredible evil of which we are capable. That would be altogether absurd. It would be to impute to the fates or to God some purpose for all of that suffering. But to witness what the world did in the 1930’s and 1940’s in Germany and Eastern Europe, and to have come away seemingly no more the wiser and no more resolved that such crimes against humanity would never again be allowed to happen is ultimately the most disappointing, the most disheartening aspect of the entire epoch. That mass murder is still occurring on earth boggles the mind and corrupts the conscience. It puts the lie to all the vows of contrition and the promises to correct the sickness that adheres to so many human souls. That there are those, even today, who deny that Nazi genocide ever occurred, is beyond comprehension…at least the comprehension of anyone who claims any attachment to and representation of decency and objective truth. That there are those who walk on the face of the globe, who would, if given the chance, engage in the same evil all over again, is altogether beyond credence. Neither is it deserving of the slightest iota of our tolerance.

One of the reasons that resides behind my reticence to write about the Holocaust is that there really is no hopeful note of which I feel capable when I do so. Other homileticians often try to bring their listeners to optimism or, at least, some positive element by citing the partisans who took up arms and bravely fought against the Nazis. True, there were those who displayed courage. And there were those Hasidei Umot Ha-olam who risked life and limb to hide Jews, to protect them from the Gestapo and from the clutches of the killers, both the Nazis and their collaborators in countries like Lithuania, Poland, and Rumania. But when the war came to an end, there was nothing left of the great European Jewish culture that had once flourished there. Often living in grueling poverty and amidst virulent anti-Semitism, these Jews had imbued their Yiddish culture into great art, literature and theater. After World War Two, virtually nothing of these as well as the vastness of Jewish learning survived.

I cannot so easily balance what was lost by what did, indeed, happen in the attempt to prevent it or what followed it in an attempt to preclude it from happening all over again. To try to do so seems disingenuous to me.

Periodically I compare notes with my rabbinic daughter. She urged me to bring something forward which could inspire us to change our world, for surely we each have within us the ability to overcome evil and to establish some good in this world. But, I explained to her that, for this given evening…and perhaps never again in my life time, I want to remain focused on the true devastation of the Holocaust and not to white wash it or to try to mitigate the horror by pointing to other elements such as the rise of the state of Israel. Israel’s existence and the celebration of its 60 years we shall have in the coming week do not remotely begin to compensate for what happened. As the survivors die off and the memory of what took place in Birkenau, Treblinka, Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz, Majdenek, and a host of other camps fades, it will be possible for human-kind to try to wipe the slate clean. But, for this evening, let the emptiness pervade and let the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters were systematically and mechanistically murdered sink in, and then…and only after then...let whatever resolutions we might make to somehow make something of those losses come to the fore some time in the future. But not now. It simply cannot and should not be that easy.

I believe that there are moments in life when we must permit lamentation its power. There are moments when grief and anger over the outrages we as a people have suffered should be our foremost emotions. There ought to be times when we don’t hide ourselves from the truth, when we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the horrific…not with any purpose of trying to purify our lives, but because this happened…and we have to acknowledge it, face it as best we can…and only after plumbing the depths of our own sorrow can we give ourselves permission to move on.

In preparation for this recitation, I turned to the Book of Lamentations. Here the writer-witness to the devastation of the lands of Israel and Judah bewails the awfulness of what had occurred. The sentiments he expresses for his age are similar to what we who are losing direct touch with the Holocaust are also experiencing. Now that the survivors are passing from the scene, we are the ones left to witness. And in order to do this, we must, to some degree, walk into the valley of tears and remain there for some few moments and disturb ourselves with the realization that for so many of the Ashkenazim of Europe there was no way out, there was no outstretched hand, there was no avenue of escape…there was only death in whatever form the Nazis chose to bring it to them and their loved ones.

It is only after such personal involvement, such moments of enlightenment in the element of pure evil that we can and must arise from our experiential sack cloth and ashes to rejoin the world and, perhaps, witness to it. Be aware, however, that the world is sick of hearing us. Beware that people will make every attempt to tune us out, to change the subject, to avoid the responsibility, the pain, the ownership of such intentions. They will cry out at us, “Enough! We are weary of your complaint and of your testimony. It’s over. Forget it. Give us some respite. Show some forgiveness. Pardon your persecutors. Relieve yourself of your anger and your victim-hood. Stop trying to make us feel guilty.

To all of this, I quietly say, “no.” No, I will not forget. And I shall not forgive. I shall not ever lose the anger over the atrocities committed against my people because they were Jews…however they expressed that allegiance to Judaism. The memories of what occurred are sown into my soul, they are part of the fabric of my being, and I shall continue to testify as long as I live because to be silent is to indulge and encourage indifference. And indifference is the greatest sin of all in any commemoration of the Holocaust because it was the world’s indifference that allowed it to happen.

So, for this evening, I lift my grieving voice to the Almighty and I invoke God and even as I praise God, I remind myself of my own burden to be a witness and never to forget that sense of purpose I must bring to this world to prevent anything like this from ever happening again.