This year, Yom HaShoah, a memorial dedicated to the murder of
six million of our people, will be observed on Monday, April 8. My suspicion is
that most Jews will mark the occasion mentally with an awareness of its
existence, but without any real dedication to its observance. Can you blame
them? This Jewish genocidal campaign is a horrific memory, and it is only human
nature to avoid pain. Furthermore, why draw attention to this darkest of all
periods in our history? We are sometimes charged with whining too much about
anti-semitism and its effects. Perhaps the best way to snatch victory from the
Nazi’s mechanized murder enterprise is to reduce 1933-1945 to a few brief
sentences in our consciousness, paying it as little attention as possible, not
dignifying it or its perpetrators with the memory it does not deserve. But to
ignore it seems an enormous insult to those who could not, and if Jews do not
perpetuate their memory, there’s little hope that anyone else will.
There is no doubt that the Christian teaching of contempt for
the Jews, blaming the Jews contemporaneous with Jesus for his death, and then
claiming that every Jew thereafter is thus tainted with the crime of murder,
laid the ground work for innumerable blood libels, national expulsions,
porgroms, all of which culminated in the mother of all pogroms, the Shoah. The
Church has officially repudiated the teaching of Contempt, for which we are
grateful, though historically, the damage has been profound. Beyond this
Christian detour from reason, there are reasons why others may view us as a
threat, or dangerous, or worthy of contempt. And we should be proud of them
all.
Jews tend to be arty, at the cutting edge of music, visual
arts, and literature. But acting as the avant-garde is almost always synonymous
with challenging accepted standards and norms. The blazing of a new trail often
means damaging an accepted or comfortable space, and the general public is not
always happy about, let alone receptive to, change. Our own creativity is a
mirror of divine creativity, which is the Bible’s first lesson to us about what
it means to be godly. And in moving people tothinkg differently, to see
differently, etc., comes a resistance that can itself morph into resentment. There
is a price to be paid for creativity and Jews don’t seem to care. Thank God for
that.
The success that Jews enjoy tends to give us headlines far
beyond what our paltry numbers should allow. There are plenty of impoverished,
dim-witted, and untalented Jews. But there are plenty who are not. Motivated by
sociological forces that would humble us or driven by a deep-seated cultural
energy of achievement, we produce success stories worthy of everyone else’s
attention. We need not be embarrassed by the technological advances we create,
or the new truths we discover, or the wealth we accumulate. These achievements
are legitimately ours, but success easily breeds jealousy. We do not control
the arts, the banks or the media, but there is no denying the tremendous
influence we wield in these very human areas of activity—and there is no shame
in that.
As the oldest of the ethical-monotheistic traditions, we so
often seem cast in the role of world conscience. We have been unafraid to
challenge the status quo—whether in areas of race relations, sexual relations
or human/civil rights in general. Our tendency to challenge is so all-embracing
that our own institutions and leadership cannot escape our sometimes caustic
critiques, and thus Jews who challenge Israel’s political stances or the
Federation or the Jewish establishment in general. Beware Jews situated next to
apple carts—those carts will not be upright for long. But average people like
their apples in the cart, no matter how damaged the apples, unstable the carts,
or corrupt the merchants. We gain no friends in playing this role, yet dare not
abandon a role so integral to advancing the human condition in the world today.
Finally, skirting personal responsibility by blaming others
for one’s plight is as old as human history itself, and when searching for the
perfect scapegoat, a minority group is a risk worth taking. There is, as the
old adage goes, strength in numbers, and our numbers (less than one tenth of
one percent of the world’s population) is rather pathetic. If there is one area
of human experience in which our ineptitude is evident, it is in the area of
reproduction. It is, very simply, easy to hate Jews because with a population
as scant as ours, it’s difficult to strike back in any substantive way.
Jew-hatred and Jew-scapegoating can be carried out with relative impunity, all
of which brings us back to the Shoah.
Hitler figured out a way to promote his power base in a Germany
not necessarily enamored with his politics. Blame all the country’s ills on a
helpless minority that is already despised by many. Convince the public that
only by controlling these vermin can the nation’s ills be resolved. Finally,
remove the vermin once and for all. Kill every Jew possible and all will be
good. And so, Yom HaShoah is not only a day to remember the evils of
anti-semitism, but to ponder the reasons why tht hatred is so difficult to
excise from the world.
This year, on Yom HaShoah, make sure to light a yahrzeit
candle. The flame, most obviously, is in memory of the six million, but even
more so a symbol of Jewish passion—artistic, moral, political, and academic—the
light that others would so readily extinguish, the light that we must so
passionately guard.
