We Are All Suvivors - The New Israeli High Holidays and Jewish America©
One of the ways I observe Yom HaShoah is not just through ritual, as we did on Wednesday evening, but also by watching films about the Holocaust. My Holocaust movie this year is called, “The Survivor.”
The Survivor tells the story of Harry Haft who was a boxer in post-WWII America. The highlight of his career was when he went into the ring with a rising star in boxing, Rocky Marciano, and lasted three rounds before he was knocked out. His boxing ‘shtick’ was that he was the Survivor of Auschwitz, and he fought with a Magen David on his purple boxing trunks.
Around the time of his fight, a journalist interviewed him and shared his story of survival from Auschwitz which he never told anyone. In Auschwitz, he was forced to fight other emaciated Jewish inmates to the death to entertain German SS officers who would bet on each prisoner. Rocky Marciano was the only professional boxer to retire undefeated; Harry was also undefeated in the camps, he went 75-0, for were he to lose, he would not have survived.
This was the cruelty of the Shoah that we often times ignore; the life and death choices that Jews had to make on a daily basis.
In the movie, Harry tells a story to the journalist who interviewed him, who questioned his method of survival. He said, “every day, there is roll call in camp. If you weren’t outside, with your hat on, you were taken out of the line and shot. One day, a prisoner lost his hat; he went into the barrack and found someone else’s hat. So, he asked the journalist, do you pick up the hat, or not? The prisoner did, and then, five minutes after the roll call, he heard a gun shot. So tell me, what would you do?”
After the story was published, Harry was a pariah in the Jewish community because his method of survival was revealed.
This week’s parashah, Acharei Mot, is often times paired with next week’s parashah, Kedoshim. Read together, it means, “After Death…Holiness.”
This is a catch phrase that explains how we look at those who have passed:
After their deaths, they are holy. One of the definitions of Kadosh is to be separate. In other words, after death, it is as if they were perfect, that they weren’t fallible human beings in their life time.
There is a danger to this idea. When we canonize people, when we ignore the pain and yes, their faults, we make them two dimensional characters, and we actually endanger their legacy.
In our parashah, Acharei Mot, we read about the two goats, the goat for Azazel, and the goat that is sacrificed in the camp. We see the story of these two goats, which we read on Yom Kippur, in Leviticus 16.
The people would put all their sins on one goat and send it away, which is where we get the term scapegoat. The High Priest would lay his hands on the goat and confess the sins of the entire people, not his own sins or the sins of just the priests, and then, he would send the goat away into the wilderness, and the goat would never return.
I wanted to focus on one line, 16:22
וְסָמַךְ אַהֲרֹן אֶת־שְׁתֵּי יָדָו עַל רֹאשׁ הַשָּׂעִיר הַחַי וְהִתְוַדָּה עָלָיו אֶת־כׇּל־עֲוֺנֹת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאֶת־כׇּל־פִּשְׁעֵיהֶם לְכׇל־חַטֹּאתָם וְנָתַן אֹתָם עַל־רֹאשׁ הַשָּׂעִיר וְשִׁלַּח בְּיַד־אִישׁ עִתִּי הַמִּדְבָּרָה׃
Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness through a designated man.
The word Hitvadah, which means to confess, means to ‘reveal oneself’, the opposite of hiding something. The JPS commentary notes, “Originally, the confessional enumerated the various sins in order to expose them. Once isolated in this way - identified by name - the sins could be exorcised. Ancient people believed that sinfulness, like impurity, was an external force that had clung to them; it was necessary therefore to ‘drive out’ or detach, sins.”
Our national regrets were aired publicly, and then, after they were revealed, they were symbolically sent away. The idea likely was, if we send them away, then we are committing ourselves to not falling into the same trap.
I bring this idea up because we see that our people did something that was pretty remarkable - they aired their dirty laundry for all to see, dealt with their shortcomings, and then, were able to move on to hopefully become better.
The goat was never just one, it was all of us as a people.
I want to now transition to what comes after, Acharei Mot. In Israel, Yom HaShoah is part of the Israeli High Holidays. Rabbi Doniel Hartman from the Hartman Institute explains this idea:
Vis-a-vis Yom Hashoah, in the early Zionist narrative there was a deep rejection of the passivity and the powerlessness of European Jewry and an implied criticism of them in their complicity in their own deaths. For the Zionist, Israel was the antidote to the Holocaust, the land of the new Jew who did not go like sheep to slaughter, but who rather trained in the art of warfare and was capable of defending himself in times of danger. The move from Yom Hashoah to Yom Hazikaron and Yom Haatzmaut was a transition from the past which in many ways we remembered in order to forget, to the new Jewish reality which is Israel.
In other words, Yom HaShoah was a cautionary tale for Israelis - if we want to survive, we have to leave the old Jew behind. There was a tremendous cost to this idea - the survivors.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg wrote in his book on Jewish Holidays, The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays: “The innocent victims, abandoned and betrayed during the Shoah, were blamed afterwards for not being heroic fighters. The survivors who were living martyrs should have been gathered up lovingly and nursed back into life. Instead they were kept at arms’ length surrounded by silence, judged out of context, and made to feel guilty.”
We must come to terms with our complicated past so we can evolve. As I mentioned, the sending away of the goat was not a hiding of the past, but a metaphor that despite our shortcomings, we can move forward into the future.
I think Jewish America needs to hear this message regarding Israel. There was a recent news story about a synagogue in Chicago that voted to become an anti-Zionist. This is a big departure from being non-Zionist, ambivalent to the state of Israel. To them, Israel was a colonialist mistake, and the only solution is to dismantle the state of Israel.
But these anti-Zionist Jews have a huge blindspot in history. When you leave Ben Gurion airport, there is a mural with a quote from Theodore Herzl:
“I once called Zionism an infinite ideal...as it will not cease to be an ideal even after we attain our land, the Land of Israel. For Zionism...encompasses not only the hope of a legally secured homeland for our people...but also the aspiration to reach moral and spiritual perfection.”
Zionism is aspirational, it was meant to create a perfect Jewish society, but Herzl makes sure to include that is a legally secured homeland for our people. Before one can aspire for moral and spiritual perfection, one first needs a home where you can live without the daily fear that you will be kicked out or annihilated.
It seems anti-Zionists Jews forgot that on a very base level, Israel is a safe haven for the Jewish people. Because of the modern state of Israel, no Jew will ever be forced to be homeless.
This is one of the many ideals that Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, which will be celebrated next week, represents. Avram Infeld, a Jewish scholar and former head of Hillel International, taught that the word Jew used to be synonymous with refugee, but because of Israel, for the first time in 2,000 years, this is not the case.
We can look at the current war in Ukraine now and the refugee crisis with millions of Ukrainians looking for safe haven. For the first time perhaps ever, it is popular to be a Jewish Ukrainian, because at least one country will give you a safe haven, Israel.
The scapegoat teaches us that we must come to terms with our past, but we never forget our past. Our past is complicated; as we know, Zionists were not pure angels, they made mistakes especially regarding the Arab population of Israel and the disputed territories, and yes, continue to. We cannot ignore our sins, rather, we come to terms with them as a people. But, to those Jews who say that Israel is an unforgivable entity and must be dismantled, I say, but where will you go? Do we not deserve a place in our ancestral homeland, just like all other peoples? Do you forget the sins of every other nation on earth regarding the Jewish people? When they do this, they send away all of our ancestors, and yes, future Jews who will need a home when their countries fall apart or turn on them.
And we have to remember that even if you are a Jew surrounded by the comforts of the modern world, all of us are survivors.
Rabbi Hartman writes, “All Jews are survivors - This is the real meaning of Yom Haatzmaut following both Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron. It reshapes and redefines Israel as a family that mourns together, and through the memory of the price we have paid to be free Jews, it redefines the meaning of Israel. Israel must be that which remembers, and through that memory constantly commands itself to be worthy of the price we paid. It is a memory that commands us to embrace life and challenges us to live it to the fullest, to build lives individually and collectively of greatness. That is the task of Israel; that is the legacy of our past and the challenge of our future.”
Wishing you an early Hag Sameach as we celebrate 74 years of Israel.
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