History, Memory and Armistice Day
Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 13 November 2023
I was a volunteer in Israel at the time of the 6 Day war in 1967. A memory, still vivid with me – sadly in terms of what has happened since – is of meeting a young American, also a volunteer, who was handing out postcards with a map of the Middle East showing Israel from Egypt to Iraq. He belonged to Betar, the youth-wing of Jabotinski’s Revisionist party. That young man argued that Israel’s victory in 1967 was simply the first step towards the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham – we read about it a couple of weeks ago – that his territory would stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18.) I was horrified. With that sort of view, I remember thinking, what hope could there be for peace in the Middle East?
If you were to go into a yeshiva and look at what they study, you wouldn’t find history on the syllabus. They might tell you that they do teach history and show you their textbook: it’s the Tenach, the Hebrew Bible. For them, it contains all of Jewish history – past, present and future.
A traditional understanding, then, of history, doesn’t see time chronologically as we do. We know, for example, that last Sunday’s Bonfire Night commemorated the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and we know that it came after the Spanish Armada but before the Great Fire of London and so on.
In Jewish history, as we know, both Temples were destroyed on the 9th of Av, Tisha b’Av, even though the two events were some 600 years apart. Historians tell us they were destroyed because the Babylonian and the Roman armies respectively were militarily superior. The yeshiva bochur will tell us that it was because Israel had not remained faithful to the covenant. Michael Portillo has been doing a TV series on Andalucya and while in Granada mentioned the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. No surprises to learn that traditionally the decree of expulsion came into effect on a date which corresponded to the 9th of Av. More surprising, perhaps, is another coincidence of date: the people are in the desert, on the threshold of the Promised Land. Moses sends 12 guys to spy out the land of Canaan. They report back. 10 of the 12 say the inhabitants of the land are too powerful and we’ll never be able to conquer the land. Losing heart, the people clamour to return to Egypt – which would have been a total negation of everything the Exodus stood for. So it shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that for midrash, this happened on Tisha b’Av – even though it was some 6 centuries or so before even the First Temple was destroyed.
There were instances in the Middle Ages, when antisemitic mobs attacked Jews, parents preferred to kill their children and then themselves rather than die at the hands of the mob. It happened in the Rhineland during the Crusades, it happened in York in 1190. Subsequent generations saw it as a cruel retelling of the Akeda, the binding of Isaac. Unlike the Akeda, however, fathers did kill their children and God provided no ram, at the last moment, to be offered in place of Isaac.
When rabbis looked at the past they weren’t concerned with verifiable facts but with a sort of mythic reality. The meaning of an historical event – how it related to generations past, present and future – was more important than a straightforward relating of events.
Perhaps this is the difference between ‘history’ and ‘memory’? History is what happened to somebody else; memory is what happened to me. Memory is what we do with history, with the story.
There’s no historical evidence, for example, that the Exodus happened. Yet we sit around our Seder tables, retelling a story that might – or might not – have happened some 3000 years ago and feel personally involved. The story of those slaves is our story. We came out of Egypt, we stood at Mount Sinai and so on.
Some of us here today had fathers who fought in the First World War. My father did. Nobody who fought in that war is still alive. If he were, he would be 129 years old. It was the war of our great-grandparents who, 105 years ago this morning, would have been celebrating the end of the Great War.
Even the Second World War is increasingly the war of our grandparents. Until the events of October 7th, we could have given thanks for the fact that war has not directly touched so many of us for so long.
In 1975, Paul Fussell, the American cultural historian, published a wonderful book entitled The Great War and Modern Memory. Just what is it, he asks, that continues to grip the imagination about that war? He looks, for example, to Christmas Day 1914, when English and German soldiers got out of their trenches, played a game of football in No-Man’s Land and exchanged gifts. “It was,” Fussell suggests, “the last twitch of the 19th century: the last public moment when it was assumed that people were nice; the last gesture that human beings were getting better the longer the human race goes on.”
Maybe that’s why the Great War continues to fascinate? The 19th century had been seen as the Age of Progress, a progress which seemed set to continue unabated into the 20th century – until the slaughter of the trenches. A slaughter which continued, though now death was no longer confined to the battlefield. Death had become a reality for civilian populations also.
The First World War took on the quality of an Akeda, a Binding of Isaac, but now one more akin to those medieval reworkings of the story, where the father did kill the child. Is war not always what happens when those too old to fight send off those too young to die?
Wilfred Owen, one of the great war poets, died on November 4th 1918 – though his parents only received the telegram on Armistice Day itself. He based his poem The Parable of the Old Man and the Young on the Akeda. The Old Man is offered the Ram of Pride to sacrifice but, as the poem ends, “would not so, but slew his son – and half the seed of Europe one by one.”
Isaac’s ashes remained on the altar in a metaphorical sense in 1918. A generation later, actual human ashes lay scattered on the fields around a small Polish town called Oswiecim.
We read the Akeda at the end of last Shabbat’s Torah reading. The last verse says that Abraham returned to Sarah at Beersheva. No mention of Isaac being with him.
Today’s sidra begins with Sarah’s death. A midrashic tradition has her dying now because she sees Abraham coming home without Isaac. She believed Abraham had indeed sacrificed Isaac – the death, literal and metaphorical, of every mother grieving for a child whose life has been taken prematurely.
The Shabbat service closest to November 11 inevitably becomes something of a service of remembrance. It’s a time of reflection: for those who lived through a time of war it’s a moment to remember fallen comrades; for those born after the event it’s a time of gratitude, perhaps, for those who gave their lives so that we might live. For those who fought – a time to remember, to re-member, to put together the ‘members,’ the parts of what it was they were fighting for. For those born after the event – a time to reflect, without cynicism, on the values for which people fought and died.
Whatever other reasons governments might have had for engaging in the Second World War, it was, at some level, a straight fight against a force which threatened to return Europe and the world to chaos and void. And how can we not reflect that what is currently happening in Gaza – however awful, whatever questions it raises for us – is precisely about that struggle against forces of darkness and inhumanity.
As always, we are left with the need for memory. For if we can’t see it, in some way, as something that happened to us then it becomes mere history – which we can observe from a distance but not feel it is part of who we are, feel challenged by, it, even interrogated by it to make us think “where do I stand?”
And with that, the need for the prayer: “may their sacrifice not have been in vain and may such sacrifices no longer be necessary bimheirah b’yameinu speedily and in our days.”