Yom HaShoah 5780/2020
The Shoah (“catastrophe”) was not a plague or pandemic. It was caused by human beings and intentionally targeted specific groups of people. In the space of six years, 1/3 of all Jews living were murdered, starved or tortured to death, or died of disease. An unknown number took their own lives. Along with Jews, Romany, people with disabilities, queer people, and others were specifically targeted; and millions of other people, soldiers and civilians, suffered and died as well.
Jews in particular were systematically humiliated and degraded as well as murdered. While we were not the only ones who suffered, we occupied a central and horrible place in Nazi ideology.
Now, especially, we are reminded that what we thought was safely in the past may return. As with Amalek, an ancient Biblical enemy to whom the Nazis are sometimes compared, we are commanded never to forget. For if “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it,” then remembering what happened and honoring our dead is part of our survival — as Jews and as human beings.
This is the poem I read during the service:
The Vow
With the assent of my eyes which saw parents bereaved
And piled shrieks upon my overburdened heart
With the assent of my compassion which schooled me to pardon
Until there came days too terrible to forgive
I have sworn this vow: To remember it all,
To remember — and not to forget one thing.
Not to forget one thing — to the last generation
Until my humiliations subside, till they are over, till they’re gone,
Until all my painful lessons are completed for good.
Lest for naught shall pass the night of wrath
Lest in the morning I return to my fleshpot
Having learned nothing this time, either.
— written in the 1940s by Israeli poet Avraham Shlonsky,
translated by Rabbi Debora S. Gordon
A recording by Israeli singer Izhar Cohen: With Yom HaShoah iconography (candles, yellow star, barbed wire, Israeli flag, yellow Yizkor “remember” in Hebrew) or with a static view of the record album.
Zachor זָכוֹר Remember.
Liberty and Safety
May 15, 2020 by Rabbi Debora S. Gordon • Rabbi's Writings • Tags: BlackLivesMatter, COVID-19, entitlement, freedom, Love your neighbor, music, politics of fear, racism, safety, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Torah verse, video, violence • 0 Comments
I am still struggling to write a coherent post about the slaughter of Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged in Georgia; the death of British railway worker Belly Mujinga from COVID-19 after being spat at by someone who [claimed he] had the virus; and the sense of entitlement, fear, and intimidation that runs through the stories of their deaths, intersects with armed protesters in the Michigan statehouse, and is an essential part of systems of enslavement everywhere and at all times.
In the meantime I share this quotation from the current week’s Torah portion:
וּקְרָאתֶ֥ם דְּר֛וֹר בָּאָ֖רֶץ לְכָל־יֹשְׁבֶ֑יהָ Uk’ratem dror ba-arets l’khol yosh-veha
“Your personal liberty to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.”
(A history of the usage and attribution of this quote may be found here.)
The following photo was posted on Reddit on May 13, 2020. I reposted it a couple of days later when it appeared on Facebook, with the comment:
If liberty (or freedom) is to be shared among all the inhabitants of the land, nobody’s liberty can be boundless. And yet…
While looking up details about the Liberty Bell, I learned that this sign is a paraphrase of words attributed to Ben Franklin:
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Apparently no one who commented on my post recognized the origins of the sign any more than I did. One can imagine this quote being a basic tenet in some circles with the best of intentions. It has been adopted by groups that oppose the growth of government surveillance. But the application in this photo is fringe, appalling, and utterly lacking compassion. Under *no* circumstances should anyone’s physical health and survival be called “a little temporary safety”! Especially when it’s someone else’s safety and survival that one is denigrating, not one’s own.
But if you look at the 18th-century letter in which the quotation appears, these words are neither original to Ben Franklin, nor do they mean anything remotely like the unfettered freedom this sign claims for its holders. Franklin was writing about an earlier letter in which the statement was quoted by the Pennsylvania Assembly, as it feuded with the governor over sufficient funds to properly provision the army, maintain roads, etc. The governor, apparently under pressure from wealthy landowners, blocked them at every turn.
The politics of fear is not new
Will we never learn?
But I can’t end on that note. Including a nechemta, a comfort, is a tradition of Jewish leaders going back 2,000 years or more. Franklin’s words are reassuring as well as disquieting: We’ve survived fear-mongering top leadership before.
And let’s finish with Ella’s Song, which has been playing in my mind for days: