Generations
Each year, faculty at Beloit College publish “The Mindset List.” The list contains relevant information to help us understand the lens through which newly minted adults, college freshmen, view the world. In recent years we have learned that:
Vladimir Putin has been in the Kremlin for their whole lives
During their lives airplane tickets have always been purchased online
And…They have never known life without the Simpsons on television.
What if we were to create a similar list with a Jewish framework? When we consider the current generation of young Jewish adults, what formative factors are important to keep in mind? We could note that for this generation:
Women have always been rabbis
Interfaith families are normative
Adam Sandler has always sung Hanukkah songs highlighting famous Jews.
For this morning I’d like to focus on two particular truths relevant to this rapidly growing segment of our Jewish community.
The Holocaust has always been a matter of history.
Israel as a sovereign nation has always been a reality.
These two facts have shaped the Jewish experience and our identity for close to 70 years.
In his book, The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise From its Ashes, Avraham Burg addresses the intricate and complicated relationship that contemporary Israelis have with the Shoah. In it he struggles with his teenage daughter’s experience preparing to visit Poland. In what has become a rite of passage for Israeli students, she would join her classmates to learn the history—and fate—of Eastern European Jewry. “The school principal said we are all Shoah survivors.”
“We are all Shoah survivors.” The statement haunts me and I grapple with interpreting it for myself—for us.
I was not alive during the Holocaust, nor were my parents. My family was already mostly settled in the United States by the time Hitler rose to power. I have never had my life uprooted because I am Jewish. I have never feared for my life because I am Jewish. I have never been in a situation where it was dangerous to say, “I am Jewish.”
But, of course, the Holocaust is part of my story, just as it is an element of the story of every Jew living today.
Those of us raised in the second half of the twentieth century account for the majority of the adult population. We were raised in the shadows of the Holocaust. Some of us are children, or grandchildren of survivors. Some of us had parents or grandparents fight in World War II. —
My grandfather’s unit was responsible for the liberation of the Flossenburg concentration camp. Your family has its own stories of connection, some more direct than others, but all bringing the atrocities of the Shoah to light and personalizing it.
We have all known survivors. Many of us have lived with survivors. Some of us live AS survivors.
Growing up in the 1980’s the Holocaust was ever-present. It wasn’t something that we had to be taught about—although we were—it was a relevant part of our lives. I was trying to remember how I learned about the Holocaust, and the truth is, I am sure that I had an awareness of it in pre-school.
It sounds absurd to me to say this—I know that my own pre-schooler has absolutely no sense of this part of her history. But for me—and I imagine most of my age cohort—it was a fact of life.
I went to nursery school and Kindergarten at the Klein Branch JCC in Northeast Philadelphia. Twice a week in the winter, twice a day in the summer, we walked through the gym to get to the pool. We encountered the “regular” gym goers, mostly older adults. They would smile and wave to us as we passed by. Some would engage us in light conversation. We’d watch as they swam laps or played racquet ball.
Many, if not most of these gym regulars, had numbers on their arms.
We knew about the numbers. Those people had been in concentration camps. They were survivors of the war—the war in which all of my friends’ grandparents had been affected, either as targets of Hitler, or, as was the case of my grandfather, as the soldiers who fought against the Nazis. This is, of course, an incredibly simplistic view of the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust, but for a five year old it was more than enough.
A decade later I participated in United Synagogue Youth’s Poland Seminar/Israel Pilgrimage. For ten days we explored Poland, learning about the vibrant Jewish life that had existed there for generations and the horrific, tragic end to that era.
We walked the streets of Warsaw and Krakow, not terribly modern at the time, but still advanced enough that it made the events earlier in the century feel worlds away. We toured concentration and extermination camps. Some had been preserved or restored to bear witness to their stained and haunted histories. Others had been destroyed—covered over with grass and trees. Seeing bins and bins of shoes at Maijdanek was particularly harrowing for me. So was watching Polish youth playing soccer on the lush green fields that had once been the camp Sobibor. We said the mourners’ kaddish at camps, monuments, memorials and cemeteries.
Are we all Shoah survivors?
I am not a product of that era. I do not have the physical or emotional scars of the Holocaust. But the Jews survived the Shoah, and I am an inheritor of this legacy. As are you, your children and your children’s children.
We are entering a point in our evolution where the Holocaust is not an ever present element of our existence. There is beauty in this reality—during the intervening years the Jewish community has flourished and thrived. We are the last generations to intimately know the Holocaust. Future generations will come to it solely through the lens of history.
Knowing that my children will have to be taught this, and are not immersed in it, signifies to me that there is a generational shift.
The inevitable passing time was marked again this summer with the death of Elie Wiesel. His New York Times obituary remembered him as, “An eloquent witness for the six million Jews slaughtered in World War II …[Wiesel] more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience.” Barack Obama said: “He raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance in all its forms…He implored each of us, as nations and as human beings, to do the same, to see ourselves in each other and to make real that pledge of ‘never again.’”
Wiesel embraced and built upon the tradition of empathy that has become a hallmark of the Jewish experience. We are able to empathize because we have known hatred and homelessness, devastation and destruction.
The Holocaust and its unspeakable horrors were not our first experience with the destruction of our perceived world.
Our mode of practice, celebration, and observance–Rabbinic Judaism–is a response to such destruction.
The second Temple in Jerusalem, the center of worship for our ancestors, was destroyed in 70. It was met by unbridled mourning. Yet it eventually led to the evolution in observance of our holidays and rituals which has allowed us to remain vital. We became mobile and moved as circumstances demanded.
Our sages wisely restructured worship and observance in a manner that was not dependent on a Central Temple.
Like the destruction of the Temple was a catalyst for rabbinic Judaism, the Holocaust was a driving factor for the establishment of the State of Israel. The modern nation is inextricably linked to the events of the Shoah, yet our relationship with it can be seen as wholly separate from that tragic era.
Our collective relationship with Israel spans the ages. It is a central focus of our origin story. God said to Abraham, “koom heethalekh b’aretz l’arkah oolrachba ki lakh etnenah—Get up, walk about the land, through its length and its breadth, for I give it to you.”
Joseph, on his death bed in Egypt, said to his heirs, “God will surely take notice of you and bring you to the land that was promised on oath…when this happens you shall carry up my bones from here.” Indeed, our ancestors were slaves in Egypt. God redeemed us and delivered us to Israel, the Promised Land. Our history unfolded in Israel. Our liturgy and lore express our shared longing for the return to Zion and Jerusalem.
For close to 2000 years, much of our relationship with Israel stood frozen in time. The literal dream never died, but it took on a mythic life of its own—a return to Zion was the impossible dream.
Longing for Jerusalem is canonized is the psalm (137), written shortly after the destruction of the first Temple—al naharot bavel, sham yashavnu gam bechinu v’zocheret et tzion—By the waters of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we recalled Zion.
Three times a day, in the context of the Amidah prayer we say “Barukh atah Adonai boneh yerushalayim…Blessed are You, Lord who builds Jerusalem.” For generations this brakha was not one of gratitude, but rather a plea—our ancestors saying “we know You can do it—return us to our land.”
I have said these words, those of our prayer, our psalm and so many more that indicate our peoples’ shared hope, our sheer longing for a return to Israel.
But what I cannot imagine is saying these words without the knowledge and experience of Israel in the glory of our time.
Yet for most of our history this was the reality.
And then in 1948, something incredible happened. Israel declared independence. In the words of the declaration:
After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom…
Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland…
The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish state
By virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations general assembly, [we] hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the state of Israel.
This historic moment ushered in another dramatic shift in the story of our Jewish people.
Our understanding of Israel is no longer frozen in time, no longer limited to the category of dream. We are blessed with having realized hatikvah—l’hiyot am hofshi b’artzeinu. The hope—our hope—to live as a free people in our land.
How incredible is it that we know this reality?! Watching the desert bloom. Hearing Hebrew as a national language. Belonging to a nation that is a leader is hi-tech industries and medical advancements.
What was relegated to the realm of imagination for 2000 years is now real. Israel is a living, breathing, ever-evolving society. With this blessing comes the complex challenges of being a nation in the contemporary world.
Like any nation, she is subject to criticism. She does not always satisfy her citizens and stakeholders. To say that Israel struggles with her neighbors is clearly an understatement. From the moment that independence was declared, Israel has been in the position of having to defend herself against enemies that surround her.
This year will mark 50 years since the six day war. Fifty years of a united Jerusalem at the center of our land. This should bring us joy, and indeed it is a milestone to be celebrated.
But our joy is tempered by the knowledge that for fifty years Israel has been engaged in the occupation of the West Bank. A situation meant to be temporary, has, for lack of better solution, become permanent.
There was a time when we were led to believe that peace was around the corner, and that the rise of a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians would usher in an era of meaningful conversation and progress. That time has come and gone, yet the animosity between Israel and Palestine has not waned. Despite efforts on both sides, a solution remains elusive.
So here we are. 2016. Sixty-eight year into statehood, Israel is no longer seen as the scrappy start up nation in the eyes of the world. While this reality has been unfolding over time, never has it felt more present than this past week. The loss of Shimon Peres echoes that of Elie Wiesel in its representation of the passage of time.
His career was long and complicated, yet over time, by virtue of his experience and style he became the grandfather of the nation. His presence reflected the essence of Israel, and the memories of its entire modern history were sealed in the lines on his face. At the age of 90, Peres said, “After everything I have seen in my life, I earned the right to believe that peace is attainable.”
My first trip to Israel was in 1994, in conjunction with the experience in Poland. The program was designed to bring us from the incomprehensible depths of destruction to the joy of contemporary Israel—having seen where we had been we had a complex appreciation of Israel.
It was a time of relative peace in the region. During this time Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan met in Washington DC to negotiate an end to the enmity between the nations, famously shaking hands as President Bill Clinton looked on.
I hung this picture, commemoratively distributed by Bank Leumi, on my bedroom wall. I believed. Peace would come. Yihiye Tov, it would be good.
With each passing year, each senseless death of an Israeli or Palestinian, each act of anti-Semitism throughout the world, I believe a little bit less.
What I do believe is that the world needs Israel.
Israel is committed to be an influence for good, to, “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex…guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture…”
The world needs Israel as a consummate reminder of the Shoah, and as an example of the good that can be done in the world despite evil—of a people that rose from the ashes.
This is what the generation that experienced the Shoah set in motion. Now we, living in this generational shift must call to mind the memories that are not ours personally but are ours—as the Jewish people.
We have been refugees. Not only in our ancient past, but in the not too distant past as well.
When we are in the position to offer shelter and safety to the strangers in our midst, we must act.
That is why, as a congregation, we are proud to partner with Jewish Family Service as they prepare to resettle approximately 300 families in Washtenaw County in the coming year. Our congregants serve as volunteers, helping with a variety of elements of this incredible undertaking. In a few weeks we will hold our annual drive to collect basic supplies for families who arrive in our community, often with nothing but the clothes on their back. Additionally, we have partnered with JFS to host and maintain a Children’s clothes closet, which you will hear more about in the coming weeks.
This is what we do because it is right. This is what we do because we have known the unknowable.
One of the most important words in the Hebrew language is zachor—remember. It was the theme of my time in Poland. I don’t recall ever being told, “we are all survivors of the Shoah.” I do recall being implored “zachor,” remember.
Remember.
On this Rosh Hashanah, Yom Hazikaron—the day of rememberance, as it is referred to in our Torah, we remember.
Today we remember our individual pasts—our actions and the actions of others that have affected us.
We remember our collective past, reinforcing our link on this eternal chain that is the story of our people. We face the challenges of our world, with the wisdom of Elie Wiesel—“Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.”
In this way we sanctify the present and begin to imagine the future. And we conclude with the words of Wiesel, “without memory there would be no future.”
Shanah Tova