Category Archives: Jewish History

The Siren

Posted on April 16, 2013 | 4 comments

Twice in seven days, all Israel stands still for two minutes of silence. Pedestrians stop walking, and drivers and passengers exit their cars and stand at attention. The first is for Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism, and the second for “Yom Hazikaron l’challelei ma’archot Yisrael v’nifg’ei pe’ulot eiva,” “Remembrance Day for the Casualties of Israel’s Campaigns and Victims of Acts of Hatred.” That unwieldy name encompasses all the victims of Israel’s wars and Arab terror – almost 24,000 soldiers of the IDF, Air Force, Navy, underground, intelligence, police and prison officials, and the more than 2800 victims of Arab terror that has not yet ended. Hashem Yikom Damam.
Of course, what makes the moment extremely powerful, even haunting, is not the silence. There is no silence. An intense, sonorous, booming siren rings for exactly two minutes throughout the country. It builds to its crescendo within three seconds, retains its decibel level, and then winds down in the last three seconds. I have often heard criticism of the siren – and even more of and by the handful of religious Jews who do not honor it – as a non-Jewish custom, as inherently meaningless, even as Bitul Torah. How foolish.
Two minutes is a long time (the siren that heralded the start of this Yom HaZikaron lasted just one minute). It took me a few seconds last week to realize that what I was hearing was the modern equivalent of the shofar – a tekia gedola that never wavered or weakened and that penetrates the heart of the listener, if only he is open to it.
There is no silence. The siren carries the cry of all the sacrifices made to create, sustain and defend this land, and all the tears and heartbreak of the loved ones of the casualties. It is impossible not to think of them – as the tekia is a cry as well. Interestingly, and somewhat controversially, Remembrance Day joins together soldiers and civilians in a fraternity of people whose blood was shed by the enemy who seeks our destruction. In some quarters, it could be argued that there is a fundamental difference between a soldier who loses his life on the battlefield, and a victim of Arab terror killed in a marketplace or on a bus.
That argument is also misplaced. The “suffering” with which the land of Israel is acquired (Masechet Berachot 5a) does not distinguish between those killed with guns in their hands and those sitting in a coffee shop, between those killed by “friendly fire” and those murdered because they are Jews living in the land of Israel. To combine the two groups is inspired and unifying; the television shows (like on the first Yom HaZikaron, there is no news or entertainment on TV for 24 hours) are interspersed with accounts of the lives and deaths of soldiers and terror victims. Each story is searing, even heroic. Children who did not know their fathers, including some whose fathers were killed while their mothers were still pregnant and who know of their fathers through large pictures that grace the walls of their homes. Young widows who have aged and whose eyes sparkle at memories of their husbands, and fathers and mothers whose sons are forever young. Every bereaved family carries within it a void that cannot be filled. The day and the stories are relentless.
Last week, a group of bereaved families petitioned to detach Yom Hazikaron from Yom Haatzma’ut, arguing that the transition is too painful. (An advertisement featured a mock dialogue, from Yom Ha’atzma’ut Eve: “Why are you still crying?” said someone to a bereaved father. “Didn’t you hear the siren ending Yom Hazikaron?”) It is hard not to be sympathetic to their cry; the pain of loss is overpowering. In PM Netanyahu’s speech at Har Herzl Military Cemetery, he made that clear. Some losses define a person’s life. One can persevere, but one never forgets or overcomes.
You think of them during those powerful two minutes.
And you think of the self-sacrifice that is unending. I visited the Shomron on Sunday as a guest of the One Israel Fund, and saw the dedication and altruism first-hand – new communities being built, living under constant threat but with an inner joy and contentment that is unsurpassed elsewhere. I watched as the indefatigable One Israel Fund representative distributed medical and security equipment to various individuals whose gratitude was enormous and heartfelt. The first aid kits, and other material handed out to soldiers, civilians and security personnel has saved lives and will save more in the future. Veteran security chiefs are filled with gratitude at small things that will make their lives easier.
To see the new farms and vineyards, built, planted and maintained by people without any illusions as to the future but simply because they live with the overpowering reality that God gave this land of Israel to the Jewish people and brought us back here after two thousand years of exile, is to be inspired as few things can in our jaded, materialistic world.
“Those who sow with tears will reap with song.”
One thinks of the famous poem of Natan Alterman – Magash Hakesef (The Silver Platter) – that graces the wall of the Bet Eliyahu Museum in Tel Aviv that we visited today, that ends:
“Full of endless fatigue and unrested,
Yet the dew of their youth. Is still seen on their head
Thus they stand at attention, giving no sign of life or death
Then a nation in tears and amazement will ask: “Who are you?”
And they will answer quietly, “We are the silver platter on which the Jewish state was given.”
Thus they will say and fall back in shadows
And the rest will be told in the chronicles of Israel.”

All these thoughts pass through the mind while listening to that two minutes’ long siren, that awesome tekia that mourns the sacrifice but also heralds the coming redemption.
And when it ended – and the shofar was again silent – I realized that two minutes was simply not long enough to feel the pain, the gratitude and the appreciation – for those who paid the ultimate price, for those who continue to live and build, and for the Creator who made it all possible in our time.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel, Jewish History

Remembrance Day

Posted on April 11, 2013 | 3 comments

There are few days on which the bonds of shared identity are felt as strongly in Israel as on Yom Hashoah, officially – and quite properly called here – “Yom HaZikaron laShoah v’laGevurah,” the Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust and the Heroism. It is interesting that in America, the day’s name is shortened to “Yom HaShoah,” the almost-macabre sounding “Holocaust Day.” Here, it is a day of remembrance, framed a week later by “Yom Hazikaron l’challelei Tzahal,” Remembrance Day for the Fallen of the Israel Defense Forces.
The nation is captivated by the day. Places of entertainment closed this past Sunday night, television shows for 24 hours dealt only with the Holocaust. Movie channels, except those showing Holocaust films, were on hiatus. Each show, each interview, each documentary, was more fascinating than the next. There is no story of survival that is not fascinating; there are no other stories outside the Holocaust genre that are more fascinating. Each tale is filled with sadness, courage, inspiration, grit and some sort of faith.
The enormity of the Holocaust was such that its dimensions are limitless, and therefore a consistent mode of commemoration has yet to be formulated. The official ceremony at Yad Vashem involved, as always, torch lighting by survivors preceded by an account of their survival. But the Yad Vashem service always focuses more on the “heroism” than on the “Holocaust.” All of the torch-lighters were fighters – in the ghettos or with the partisans – or escapees. The narrative of modern Israel demands a de-emphasis on the Holocaust itself and the immensity of the slaughter, and an over-emphasis on the stories of resistance. It is not that those stories are untrue or uninteresting, indeed, the opposite. It is that the attempt to turn the Holocaust into a tale of resistance rather than extermination is misleading.
In keeping with the basic theme, the Prime Minister spoke about the looming Iranian threat and the lesson of the Holocaust: a refusal to rely on other nations for Israel’s national defense. Again, it is true, but is that really the main focus of the Holocaust? Resistance was part of the Holocaust but a relatively small part – and official Israel in its ceremonies emphasizes the physical resistance and completely downplays other forms of resistance, especially spiritual. Those stories, thankfully, abound in the media and other sources, and are testaments to the inner strength of the Jew.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in such accounts of spiritual tenacity – of the seder in Auschwitz, of Torah study in the ghettos, of striving to keep kashrut, of Jews maintaining their inner dignity in their treatment of others and not succumbing to the attempts at dehumanization. I learned this week of a museum called “Shem Olam,” located in Kfar Haroeh for over a decade and awaiting the construction of their new facility, which painstakingly documents Jewish religious life before and during the Holocaust. (The name is taken from the continuation of the verse – Isaiah 56:5 – in which “Yad Vashem” is mentioned: “In My house and within My walls I will give them Yad vashem, a place of honor and renown, better than sons and daughters, shem olam, an eternal renown, I will give them which will never be terminated.”) There are numerous artifacts and manifold accounts of the spiritual heroism that was also part of the story of the Holocaust. One recent find came during a dig at Belzec – a shard from a seder plate brought there by Jews who assumed that, wherever they were being sent, Pesach was coming and they would be celebrating it somewhere. They never got to celebrate that Pesach, and all that remains from their plate was a small piece inscribed with the last three letters of “Maror,” the bitter herbs. It is an eerie sight.
It is as if there are two worlds – or more – commemorating the Holocaust. One discordant note was sounded by IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz who saw fit to say in Auschwitz on Monday that “in our generation, we have the IDF. There is no other magen (shield) for David, no other chomah (protective wall) for Zion,” essentially transposing two praises of God found in our literature (Pesachim 117b and evocative of Zecharia 2:9, respectively) for the IDF. It is no disrespect to the IDF and their competence and valor to suggest that a price is eventually paid for such hubris, and perhaps has been paid already.
The official ceremony is a reminder of the old Israel where religious involvement was limited to “functions” – Tehillim, Kaddish, etc. – that are tacked on to the end of the ceremony. No other religious participation or perspective was included. The secular-religious divide is unfortunately part of the Holocaust story as well, especially in light of the inability of the religious world to also find appropriate and enduring means of commemoration. This is likely temporary, and it stands to reason that as the years pass, the secular world will be increasingly detached from the Holocaust era even as the religious world embraces it more and more, and derives great inspiration from it. Our local Holocaust commemoration contained an excellent and emotive power point presentation of the spiritual struggle during the Holocaust.
Nothing illustrates the secular struggle with the Holocaust more than a new movie that features, in part, one of the more revolting Holocaust commemorations imaginable. The movie, “Numbered,” tells the moving tale of how various survivors dealt with the tattoos on their arms. (One woman, in a clip that I saw, says she was asked years ago: “Why don’t you remove it? Aren’t you ashamed to have that on your arm?” She responded: “Why should I be ashamed? The people who did this to me, they’re the ones who should be ashamed!” Bravo for her.)
The movie, at a certain point, introduces a recent development in Israel that was featured in the NY Times last fall, found at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/world/middleeast/with-tattoos-young-israelis-bear-holocaust-scars-of-relatives.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&. Young Israelis are tattooing their grandparent’s numbers on their arms in order to feel a greater connection to them. Certainly, they are oblivious to the Torah prohibition against tattooing, but is that any way of showing honor and identification? Such a hideous act meant to dehumanize is not made any better when done voluntarily; it just shows a complete lack of propriety. When I saw the Times article that discussed the movie, I couldn’t help thinking that in some concentration camps, the Nazis fiendishly offered the Jews more food on Yom Kippur – an extra ration of pork. Would these young Israelis then decide to identify more closely with their grandparent survivors by eating pork on Yom Kippur? I shudder to think that I have put such a thought in their heads.
I have not seen the movie, but I would like to think that this account of the young Israelis is a small part of it and not its focus.
Nonetheless, the great strength of this Yom Hazikaron is that it does bring together all Jews, with all the commonalities and all the differences we have. And perhaps the Holocaust remains so enormous, and so evil, that it can be no other way. Everyone sees it from a different angle. It remains personal and raw. Words still fail to convey the horror of both the Holocaust and the Second World War unleashed by the Germans that cost more than fifty million lives.
Apropos of that, it is worth quoting a line in the conclusion to “The Storm War,” by Andrew Roberts, a history of World War II. In an Italian cemetery where British soldiers were laid to rest, one tombstone, of a British private, 30 years old, reads: “Beautiful memories, a darling husband and daddy worthy of Everlasting Love, His wife and Baby Rita.”
Roberts, the dispassionate historian, continues: “Even two-thirds of a century later, it is still impossible not to feel fury against Hitler and the Nazis for forcing baby Rita to grow up without her father…”
Jews, certainly, tertiated by the Nazis, have a special reason to feel fury, to remain vigilant against our enemies, to grow in faith and connection to God, to find the way to strengthen Torah across the Jewish world, and do what we can to hasten the redemption.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel, Jewish History, Machshava/Jewish Thought

The New Nationalism

Posted on March 25, 2013 | 3 comments

We recite every year in the hagada and experience the rest the year one of the challenges of Jewish life: “it is not just one who rises against us to destroy us, but in every generation, they rise against us to destroy us.” It is not the cheeriest thought, but still perplexing. Why do they rise against us in every generation? And who or what is the “one”? A person, a nation, or what?
What makes it even more bewildering is that the people and the nations differ greatly in their ideologies. The ancient pagans (Egyptians, Philistines, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans) hated us, the medieval Christians hated us, modern Muslims hate us, and the political atheists (the Communists) hated us. The royal classes hated us and the peasants hated us. There is no common denominator for those who rise against us to destroy us; often they hate each other as well. What they have in common is that they wish to destroy us. So why is that?
There are some among us who harbor the illusion that today it is all about Israel – that if Israel just compromised and conceded then all the problems of the world would disappear, and we would live happily ever after because no one – no one – would have any issues with us anymore. It is a delusion.
“It is not just one who rises against us to destroy us” means that there is not one ideological foe that confronts us, but that each generation has new reasons to be antagonistic. It is the ideology that changes – but there is always an ideology that is hostile to Torah and to G-d. So what is it in our generation? After everything that we have endured, and even in recent memory, Jew hatred is again a pressing concern in many parts of the globe. So what do they want from us? The Islamic hatred is at least comprehensible – religion, land, designs for global domination – but why should Jews be targets across the world, and evoke so little sympathy from the International Left – who should see Israel as a modern progressive state that supports most of the same causes they do, and is often the first to help emergency victims across the globe, friend or foe?
The Exodus from Egypt was unique for many reasons. It was G-d’s very public entry into history, the reaffirmation of G-d as Creator, the introduction of His moral law and expectations to mankind, and others. But one is especially important: “Has G-d ever before extracted a nation from the midst of another nation, with sign and wonder, as G-d did to you in Egypt before your eyes?” (Devarim 4:34)
The Exodus was the creation of a nation from another nation – the only time that occurred in all of history. Individuals or groups can be liberated, people can throw off the shackles of oppression and become free (or, as is happening in various places today in the Arab world, throw off the shackles of oppression and become even less free) – but for a nation to emerge from another nation, that has never happened, before or since. Only G-d can do that – and what G-d did was create a new model of nationalism – the Am Hashem, the “nation of G-d.”
Of the various ideological currents that swirl about the globe in any one era, recent times have seen the decline of nationalism – almost the revulsion of nationalism. The Arab world has long flirted with the idea of one Arab union, which fortunately they can never implement, and has now been overwhelmed by waves of repressive rulers. Europe has tried to implement it – one union, one currency – and that has been a notable failure of both economics and culture. Despite the Euro, it seems that Germans and Greeks, Spanish and Portuguese, Italians and the French, are really not as similar as they thought they were. Cyprus is the latest country to fall onto hard times. America is in decline because a culture of individual responsibility and entrepreneurship is being replaced by the intrusiveness of government that will purportedly to relieve all discomforts and solve all problems, at the expense of seizing the work product of the successful and industrious.
The Exodus from Egypt was the formation of a “nation from a nation,” the creation of a new form of nationalism formed to represent the Creator in His world. Therein lies the hostility of the Left – we are the last bastions of the national idea, and one that differs dramatically from the national ideas of East and West, left and right – a nation based on “and He gave us His Torah,” a nation in which every individual finds satisfaction and ultimate purpose, a connection with the Creator.
In Orot Hatechiya (44), Rav Kook wrote that the decline of the national idea is part of the birth pangs of Messiah. It is a spiritual discontent that will afflict mankind as it searches for meaning and contentment, and it will be the cause of this generation’s attempt “to rise against us to destroy us.”
But, as before, “and the Holy One, Blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” Their discontent – especially in seeing the rebirth of nationalism in the Jewish state, its prosperity and success, with the majestic sight of an entire nation preparing to celebrate the Pesach of our freedom – will fester, and they too will eventually overcome their hostility, avert their own self-destruction, appreciate the true nature of the Jewish people, and guide the world to the era of redemption and fulfillment for all mankind.

Chag Kasher Sameach to all !

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Holidays, Israel, Jewish History

Sacred Violence

Posted on January 29, 2013 | 4 comments

The Torah is filled with violence, although it doesn’t always seem real to us. Imagine if there would be today a “splitting of the Red Sea,” and Egyptian soldiers would be killed by the thousands, even myriads. Wouldn’t it be unseemly to sing and dance over their destruction –“the horse and its rider were tossed in the sea… the mighty sank in the water like lead”? I am not referring to the Talmudic comment that G-d admonished the angels for singing; that is a different point – in the ideal world, every human being would be engaged in Divine service and to that extent the death of every human being is a loss. But we recite Az Yashir ¬– Moshe’s song celebrating the miracle at the Red Sea and the destruction of the Pharaoh’s forces – every day. Every day we recount the downfall of our enemy. But how do we react to the violence? How do we not become desensitized to it?
It is not the first or last time this matter is confronted in the Torah. In Sh’mot, Moshe saw an Egyptian beating a Jew – and he killed him, buried him in the sand, and the next day had to flee Egypt. Moshe killed him. Who kills people? The Torah doesn’t even say that the Egyptian was trying to kill the Jew, only that he was hitting him. For that you kill someone?
And all the accounts of the plagues visited upon Egypt – one after another and culminating with the Red Sea – begs the question: does anyone feel sorry for them, at any point? Should we? Does the Torah ever command us to feel sympathy for our enemies? (Mishlei 24:17 deals with personal enemies, not national ones; besides, numerous other verses contradict it – e.g., Mishlei 11:10). There’s even a children’s song I remember that makes the divine plagues visited upon the Egyptians seem entertaining – about the frogs that afflicted the Egyptians. Or do we simply rely on G-d’s justice and exult in that “G-d is my might and my song, and He is a salvation for me… G-d is the Master of war, G-d is His name.”
Master of war? Rashi comments that G-d is the Master of War – and even when He takes vengeance on His enemies, still “G-d is His name,” He remains a merciful G-d who can wage war and provide for the domestic needs of His servants. But how do we even feel about G-d being “Master of war?” We are accustomed to depicting G-d as compassionate and gracious. But the “Master of war?” Why are we never commanded to have sympathy for these victims of sacred violence, of which there are legions in the Bible?
Sympathy is usually an unreliable tool to measure either people’s character or their moral aspirations. I’ve noticed over the years that, like many things in life, there is a Bell Curve that accurately charts the people’s parameters of sympathy for others. There are some who feel bad for everyone – or almost everyone; they are “extreme sympathizers.” Even if the predicament is of the person’s own making, they will still feel bad for them. They’ll even feel bad for bad people, although maybe not real evil people.
Others are at the opposite extreme – they are “sympathy-challenged.” They believe in self-help and initiative, that people naturally suffer for their own mistakes, and that most bad situations are avoidable – most, not all, and they reserve their sympathy for the absolutely unavoidable. And the majority of people are found somewhat in the middle of the Bell Curve – they’ll sympathize with most but not all victims, but with one remarkable dimension: very often reasonable people will differ as to whether some victims deserve sympathy or not.
Take this case: Do Pharaoh’s armies that drowned in the Red Sea deserve our sympathy? Each of them was certainly a child of someone, and probably a father and a husband as well. Their deaths were undoubtedly tragic for their families and communities. But they don’t seem real to us, and are ancient in any event. Nonetheless, more modern cases present: Gazan children killed inadvertently by Israeli rockets targeting terrorists who build their infrastructure in residential neighborhoods seem to provoke much more international sympathy (contrived and hypocritical, to be sure) than did the children of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Dresden. Those killed – almost all civilians – did not seem to provoke as much hand-wringing then (less than seventy years ago) as they unquestionably would today. So, are we more moral – or less moral – than we were seventy or 3300 years ago? Are we more sensitive to human suffering or perhaps just less judgmental about absolute evil?
I think the latter, and the answer to all these questions comes down to values. American society is adrift in sporadic violence and seeming dysfunction, and not because there is more violence today than ever. It only seems that way, but in fact violent crime has dropped precipitously in the last two decades. What has changed is the type of violence – from violence directed at victims of crimes from which the perpetrator hoped to derive some material benefit to random shootings of strangers for no discernible reason. That dysfunction suggests that large sectors of a nation that has lost touch with the G-d of the Bible, and no longer perceives people as created in the image of G-d. That detachment nurtures an avalanche of violence in the culture – books, television, movies, video games – that has a greater impact on people, especially those with defective souls or defective minds, more than anything else. The killing doesn’t seem real to them, and just like the violence in the Bible, it doesn’t really register. The disconnect with G-d added to the cultural celebration of violence and combined with one other volatile ingredient – that fame is more important than accomplishment, regardless how the fame is achieved – engender these sporadic eruptions of violence. If self-debasement is the ticket to fame, so be it; violence is just another form of self-abasement.
But the Bible contains epic scenes of violence; how is it then that Jewish society is less violent than others – still – and even with our children being reared on the stories in the Torah? It is not that there is no violence in Jewish life, but it is exceedingly rare and always lamentable. I think it is because we are also taught the value of every human being created in the image of
G-d, and especially because we internalize “G-d as the Master of war.” We have been given a system of absolute good and absolute evil and the capacity to distinguish them – and therefore we also recognize that reckless compassion and wanton sympathy are inherently dangerous: “He who is compassionate to the cruel will eventually be cruel to the compassionate” (Midrash Kohelet Rabba 7:16; Tanchuma Metzora 1) – and that distorts our entire value system.
And one more reason – we have been given the gift of optimism, of looking forward to a brighter and more peaceful era.
In one of the cryptic questions posed by the Wise Men of Athens in the Talmud to R. Yehoshua, trying to test his wisdom and to concede the superiority of Roman culture and values over those of the Torah – they asked (Bechorot 8b): “How do you cut a field of knives or swords? He answered: “with the horn of a donkey.” They retorted, “does a donkey have horns?” to which R. Yehoshua replied, in classic Jewish fashion, “Is there a field that grows knives?”
The dialogue is enigmatic but brilliant. Of course, our world today is a field of knives and swords and guns and weapons. Mankind has always struggled with a disregard for human life; we are just more aware of its failings today because they are broadcast into our homes. What keeps us striving, and what gives us confidence that goodness will ultimately prevail, is the horn of the donkey – the donkey that brings Messiah, who “rides on a donkey,” and whose “horn” (pride) will be uplifted and symbolize our salvation and that of the world. The Messiah re-introduces to the world the notion of an objective morality – absolute good and absolute evil. It is the task of good people even today to enunciate those values. Civilization is undermined when such people are timid, reticent and withdraw from the fray.
That is why our spiritual giants were always warriors – despite rumors we hear today from some quarters – Avraham, Moshe, Yehoshua, David and others. They did not hesitate to take up arms and to act forcefully when necessary. The Jewish spiritual heroes were always warriors – but always reluctant warriors. They embodied a code that has a great respect for all life but also great contempt for injustice and evil. That is why we sing daily of the death of the wicked at the Red Sea, and the wicked everywhere, not because they died but because we saw evil perish and justice triumph – and why, even today, with each such triumph over evil, we move the world ever closer to the day of when “G-d will reign forever.”

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Posted in Chumash, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel, Jewish History, Machshava/Jewish Thought