Yom HaShoah Remarks

YOM HASHOAH REMARKS 5786        

Rabbi David Edleson, Temple Sinai

VEHI SHE’AMDA

Vehi She’amda l’avoteinu v’lanu.  

We read this just a few days ago at our Seders:

This covenant has stood with our ancestors and with us.  For not just once has someone arose to destroy us.  Rather, in every generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One of Blessing saved us from their hands.   

This prayer first appears in the Haggadah in the 800’s in Babylonia, under the Abassid Caliphate.  This was actually a age of cultural flourishing and relative security for that Jewish community,  so it is interesting that this prayer comes into the Haggadah during such a time of safety.  

And so early.  

This is before the massacres of Jews by the later Muslim caliphates,

before the expulsions from France, or Britain, or Spain. 

Before the Crusade. 

Before the Progroms. 

Before the Farhud in Iraq.

Before the Holocaust.   

How important it is in times of safety to remember those words!  To remember that safety does not last and we must use those times to prepare and build our community for the difficult times to come. 

Vehi Sheamda  was written before these past few years, when we, having lived in a time of relative safety and cultural flourishingh - and Jewish rebirth - now know more intimately the meaning and feeling of those words. 

Vehi She’amda is a Hebrew commentary on what comes just before in the Haggadah:  Baruch Shomer Havtachato L’Yisrael.  “Blessed is the One who keeps the promise to Israel”  This is the promise given to Abraham. God said that Abraham’s descendants would be strangers in a foreign land, but that God would bring them home and punish the nation that enslaved them.”

We who live after the Shoah know too deeply that this promise did not seem to stand for the millions of Jews were were annihilated in the Holocaust.  While we can’t know God’s ways and time any more than our ancestors in Egypt, living here now it is harder to trust that God will save us.  I am afraid of what might be coming, and I know some of you are. 

Looking around the world today, I find it easy to pray for God’s help and protection, but harder to hold on to. 

That’s why for me, if there is a divine voice, a teaching speaking through the horror of the Shoah, it is to say that we must hold two truths in tension:  That we must have faith that the Divine has a purpose for us and we will survive as a people, and that we must balance that faith with preparation, action, and the ability to stand up ourselves to what might come. We must not make an idol, a fetish out of passivity and victimhood.

And there is a another divine voice that comes through, that we must choose how we react and not let the inhumanity of others make us inhumane.  More powerfully,  as Victor Frankel realized in the death camps while looking up at the sky:  

For the first time in my life I saw the truth….- that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. 

Ken Y’hi Ratzon