Erev Yom HaShoah Meditation

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 7 May 2024

Meditation

EREV YOM HASHOAH 5 MAY 2024

אלהינו ואלהי כל הדורות our God and God of all generations

On this Yom HaShoah in particular we bring conflicting emotions. We have gathered here to remember genocide. It is a word we have heard recently being used, sadly, in a way that devalues what ‘genocide’ really is. It’s not a competition of numbers; the deaths in Gaza are appalling. But we know that the number of people killed there in the past 6 months could have been killed in a single day in the Shoah. Genocide is an outpouring of calculated, intentional, murderous hatred directed against one people.

It is nigh on 100 years since the madness we remember tonight seized Europe. Over the years we have listened to the testimony of survivors, stood in awe at their courage and forbearance, marvelled at how, since then, so many have rebuilt shattered lives. But we know there are fewer and fewer left to bear witness.

As also are there fewer of the חסידי אומות העולם those righteous non-Jews who saved Jews, doing what must have surely been the most anti-social thing imaginable at that time; while in our time, we are not surprised by the rhetoric of our enemies, but we are surprised by the silence of our friends.

In the Torah we read of Amalek who attacked the Israelites as they passed through his territory. Amalek became the archetypal enemy of our people. We readזכור את אשר עשה לך עמלק remember what Amalek did to you (Deuteronomy 25:17) But we also read תמחה את זכר עמלק wipe out the memory of Amalek which is followed by אל תשכח do not forget. As Jews we live with that paradox of remembering and forgetting. “There are events of such overbearing magnitude” wrote Rabbi Israel Spira, “that one ought not to remember them all the time; but one must not forget them either.” To forget would be to betray our past, dishonour those who died solely because they were Jews; yet to remember all the time would be to blight our Jewish present and our Jewish future. Each Yom HaShoah we are confronted with this paradox – this year, perhaps, particularly acutely.

More than two millennia ago, the prophet Zechariah (9:12) described us asאסירי התקוה  ‘prisoners of hope.’ In 1943 Hirsch Glick a young poet in the Vilna Ghetto wrote a poem which became the song of Jewish partisans throughout Eastern Europe. It’s opening words are zog nit keynmol! “Never say that you’re going your last way.” It is the song which expresses Zechariah’s  – and our – impossible hope in which we are trapped as Jews; that vision of a world where ‘genocide’ is a word only to be found in the lexicon of obsolete words. במהרה בימינו