A Benediction, from the 2019 Ohio Governor's Holocaust Commemoration

I hope you will allow me the luxury of speaking in the words of my own tradition, to share some sentiments I hold, as a member of my people, as a third-generation survivor, as I continue to struggle in a post-Holocaust world.

———

What prayer, what praise, does one offer for the “honor” of having one-third of his people murdered? From Prague to Poland, from Pittsburgh to Poway, our people has born enough suffering in one century for at least a millennium; enough in two millennia for an eternity. And yet we persist. We persist in the face of danger, we persist in the face of hate. We persist because that’s all we know how to do. Because it’s in our blood. Because our blood has been spilt to allow us to persist, and persisting is our only option.

In the traditional words of our people: Our Lord, our God, blessed are you for giving us life, for sustaining us, and for allowing us to reach this day. But did it have to come only after so many deaths—our sisters, our brothers, our aunts, our uncles, our husbands, our wives, our mothers, our fathers, our daughters and our sons?—after so many were forced to die in your great name? … may it be exalted and sanctified. A Jew must ask: Was it really our blood that needed to be dashed on the altar, that we should be tortured at the feet of your throne of Glory?

Our people is no stranger to struggle, we know it all to well—it is a Cain to our Abel. We have never shied away from suffering for our beliefs. Indeed, for centuries of our history, we have seldom had the choice except to suffer for them. Certainly, we must have earned respite by now. But here we are, witnesses to the continued slaughter of our brethren. Should a heroes death really be the only way to save the life of a rabbi? – may Lori Gilbert Kaye’s name be forever blessed – Should we really need to carry guns on Shabbat to stay safe in shul? How can that be?

Could it be that the edifice of humanity, all of it, burned down in the Holocaust? That we Jews were the kindling, but we weren’t alone? Suffocating in the gases of cowardly indifference to human suffering, our humanity would never really have stood a chance. But it cannot be: Somehow, defying existence and nature and reality, we all remain in the broken world we inherited; the mutilated world that we perpetuate. We are all first-, second-, third-, fourth-generation survivors. Eternally, we all are survivors, forever horrified, breathlessly telling the world of what we learned in the ghettos. In our haste, we hope the world learns, that it doesn’t repeat its mistakes. That it doesn’t all burn down once again.

The poet, the survivor, Aaron Zeitlin relayed his version of the message. He wrote:

In a sealed boxcar of death
wrapped with barbed wire,
a Jew stands up and talks to God:
I’m carrying candles. You see? I am lighting them.
All of us in this car will recite Kaddish[, a death psalm,]
for ourselves.[…]

Without tears
everyone recited the Kaddish for himself or herself—
and God began
to recite Kaddish for the world.

The God of Aaron Zeitlin was premature, it seems: God needn’t yet recite the Kaddish for our world, because it still lives. Perhaps we are not thriving, but we endure. There is a season for everything and a time for every purpose under heaven, and, now, it is a time to mourn, to heal, and to build… a time, too, to learn: to shape our future with lessons of our past.

We pray, our God, that we be receptive to this message. O Source of life and Creator of all beings—El Malei Rachamim—God filled with mercy, God Most High, may the beloved souls of the six million Jews and eleven million others who have gone into eternity find the gift of perfect peace in Your embrace, together with the holy and pure, whose light shines like the radiance of heaven.

Compassionate God, hold them close to You forever. May their souls be bound up in the bond of life eternal. May they find a home in You; and may they rest in peace.

Kein yehi ratzon.
God, may that be your will.