Today is Yom HaShoah vHaGvurah, the Day of Catastrophe and Heroism.
If Israel were to enter therapy, she would perhaps start by talking about the many blessings she has. First, of course, she has her beauty. How beautiful the fields, the desert, the mountains, the wildflowers, the waterfalls. How beautiful the land, the shore, and the sunsets over the sea.
And then perhaps she’d talk about her accomplishments: in technology, medicine, literature, fashion, music, the arts. And then, feeling poetic, perhaps she’d tell her favorite story of the long arc of her memory of exile, and of the covenantal promise of the return to Zion as the end goal of Jewish history. But as she got more comfortable, relaxing into the couch, she would suddenly stop talking. She would taste the tear suddenly dripping, as if from nowhere, down her cheek. A long, silent pause. “What did you remember?” the therapist would gently ask. “Is that something you’d like to explore?”
And then, this polished, brash patient would let out a great sigh, and begin to sob. It is always there, here, this mourning, a bottomless pit of sadness and despair. It’s easy to miss, with the start-up nation this and the ICC that, but the truth is, to understand Israel, one has to see the country in her naked, painful and vulnerable truth: she was birthed on the smoldering ashes of the Shoah. Her founders’ resolve was so fierce because it was forged in Europe’s fiery furnaces.
Who can understand the will to live, even against impossible odds? Individually, and collectively, this country was founded by hundreds of thousands of people who looked death, starvation, beatings, the greatest miseries humans can endure, squarely in the eye and said, with a steeliness that is truly impossible to fathom, no. No, I refuse to die.
I will hide in a forest, or in an attic, or behind bags of flour in the back of a bakery, for years on end. I will be left for dead underneath a pile of asphyxiated bodies, or in a pit with men who have just been shot, and yet I will live. I will marry, bear children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. I will hang a family picture on my wall with a dozen children sitting cross legged in the front, couples with arms draped casually around each other standing behind them, and me and my spouse smiling at the camera with a glint of defiance. Their existence is my revenge. I will spit on your evil. I will repopulate my people. My descendants will live in their own land, and forge their own destiny.
In most countries, the death rate from the Covid pandemic has hovered around 2%, which means 98% of us have been lucky enough to come through it alive. In the Holocaust, by contrast, almost 70% of all the Jews in Europe were slaughtered. Those who managed to make it out early had a better chance at survival. In the camps themselves, about 96% of the Jews died. Only 4-5% survived.
I don’t know what to do with this knowledge, except to imagine 100 people: my family, my colleagues, everyone who I have ever considered a close friend. That’s about 100 people, I suppose. I imagine lining up all of them, lining up my universe of love, and pulling four children to the front. The rest of us, including myself, my husband and all my children, are sent to be slaughtered, a punishment for the crime of being born under a Jewish star.
And yet, miraculously, Israel has flourished. What started as a dream has now become a nation like other nations, with political squabbles, infrastructure challenges, and a memory that is usually kept under wraps, for all but one day a year.
But for one day a year, today, the country’s 6.8 million living, loving Jews let themselves mourn.
But how? How to commemorate the attempted genocide of one’s own people?
In two ways, it turns out.
First, through stories. National TV devotes itself only to Holocaust stories: Schindler’s List. The Piano. Sophie’s Choice. The Zookeeper’s Wife. I click through the channels and see only SS uniforms and yellow stars and gaunt bodies dying in the streets. The rest of the channels are not running programming, out of respect for the dead.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of people participate in living room discussions with one of Israel’s 180,000 survivors, as part of an organization called Zichron BaSalon, Memory in the Living Room. Many more, myself included, tune in to the country’s annual televised ceremony, in which the President and Prime Minister mark the occasion and reflect on its significance, followed by the lighting of 6 torches by six survivors to symbolize the 6 million. The audience watches a condensed, made for TV version of each survivor’s harrowing story of survival, escape and rebuilding, and then that survivor lights a torch. I sit on the couch with my 12 year old. He tries to snuggle into me, his rapidly growing body almost bigger than mine. Is he old enough to listen to these stories? I decide yes.
And for my other four children, they too are spending two days immersed in stories of complacency, evil, and in a few precious cases, redemption. The stories are told in their classes, in school assemblies, on TV and radio, in the newspapers, on social media, anywhere that stories can be told. Because without stories, Never Again becomes a trite slogan, devoid of an exhortation to take responsibility to stamp out darkness.
That Israel marks Yom HaShoah with a national outpouring of stories is not surprising. What is more surprising is that even a country of Jews recognizes that for a tragedy of such magnitude, words are never enough. They can never be enough. Because sometimes, memories are so precise and so painful, that words will not do justice. The only adequate scream can be that of a shofar, a siren, and the only call must be the call of silence.
In a few minutes, the siren will sound. Everyone in the whole country will stand at attention for one full minute. And we will mourn. And then, we will consider how to make the memory of 6 million into a blessing.
Pomegranate Dreams 