Yom HaShoah

Megillat HaShoah-A Guide for Ritualizing the Memory

Rabbi Josh Cahan, 5763

I would like to share some of my thoughts on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. More specifically, I will share a few thoughts prompted by Megillat HaShoah, a text commemorating and memorializing the Holocaust which was composed by a committee of scholars in Israel on behalf of the Conservative Movement, and which I urge all of you to acquire and to ponder.

It is always very difficult to know how to respond to tragedy, especially an event of such enormity. Every year on Tisha B'Av we find ourselves reflecting on an entire history of suffering - Temples burning, Jewish communities pillaged and destroyed. In the center of our observance stands Megillat Eicha. The megillah is many things at once: a description, recording the awful details of the tragedy; a theological struggle, asking very difficult questions about how our relationship with God can continue in the light of such horrible destruction; and on a more primal level, an indistinct wail, a voice paralyzed and stunned by the awfulness of all that has befallen it. Eicha is the story of only one tragedy, but in the timelessness of Jewish history it comes to stand for all tragedies. A litany of 2000 years of suffering would simply numb us, while the story of one terrible time can come to be the archetype for how we re-experience all of these dark times. Countless midrashim use verses in Eicha to tell stories and share reflections on a whole range of dark ages in Jewish history.

Eicha is also the story of just one person's experience. But that individual viewpoint, the questioning and workings of one mind struggling with the cognitive dissonance of such horror in a world ruled by a just God, moves us and represents to us an entire generation far more powerfully than would an opinion survey of survivors of the event. I had a similar experience watching the movie The Pianist. It is perhaps the most powerful Holocaust movie I can remember, precisely because it traced only one narrow viewpoint, making no pretense at encompassing the entirety of an unimaginable reality. This seems to be how we have come to memorialize the Holocaust year after year, inviting a survivor to come and share his or her harrowing and tragic story, leading to a miraculous escape and the grim awareness of how many were not so lucky. As important as these testimonies are, though, they also become numbing after a while, undifferentiated in our minds. To attempt year after year on the day to plunge ourselves back into the horror of what we have learned about the Holocaust requires a Herculean effort, with uncertain results. And already we hear the grumblings among Holocaust experts - awareness and memory of the Holocaust are fading in our minds as the years pass and more of the survivors pass away with the rolling time. We are not succeeding in continuing to be fully present in Yom HaShoah, to confront the fact that the truth of the Holocaust is a deep challenge to the order that we need to believe prevails in the world.

We have, right in this season, a tremendous model for the preservation of communal memory: the Seder. The Exodus from Egypt was so long ago that all actual traces of memory of the event have long since passed. And yet, we talk about the Exodus as perhaps the central, defining moment of Jewish identity. Why? Not only because in shul, we read the Torah which tells the story, but because the Seder itself has become a defining ritual, a moment when Jews across the world and across the religious spectrum loudly declare their intention to be part of the chain of tradition, to celebrate actively, through our lives, the freedom granted to our ancestors. It is as a ritual that the Exodus has been immortalized. In the composition of Megillat HaShoah, we have begun to make that transition. A select, precious few lines of testimony come to stand for the whole. It opens up the basic questions of what it means to try to make sense, let alone meaning, of this black pit of our history. In this ritual, it is the very act of reciting that declares our unbreakable connection, to the pain of what took place and to the memories of our family-for they truly were our family-who were taken so brutally from us.

יְהִי זִכְרָם בָּרוּך- May their memories be a blessing.