Tazria/Metzora 2009

Three days ago we commemorated יום השואה, Holocaust Memorial day. It always comes soon after Passover, because the people of the land of Israel did not want to be associated with the Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Those people, they said, were the old Jews of Europe. Weak. Pale. Scholars. Capitalists. 

We, said the Israeli Jews of the late Forties and early Fifties, are the new Jews. Tan. Robust. Powerful farmers. Socialists. Those old Jews would never have made it in Eretz Yisrael anyway, they said.

So when people suggested that this terrible atrocity be commemorated in some way, the majority of Israelis were hesitant. Finally someone had the idea that they could have a day to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when a few half starved Jews armed with a couple of .22s and some home made grenades held off the German army for days. That the Israelis could commemorate. Those were their kind of Jews!

It is common to blame the victim for a crime. It is a psychological trick on oneself to keep from being afraid. We blame a woman for being attacked by saying she was dressed provocatively. We are saying to ourselves ‘I will never dress that way, so I will never be attacked.’ We blame a man for being robbed by saying he was stupid to go into a bad neighborhood. ‘I would never go into a neighborhood like that, so I will never be robbed.’ And the Israelis blamed the European Jews for not fighting back, as a way of disassociating themselves from the horror.

When we say ‘Never again,’ is it a promise or a prayer?

So what does this have to do with the fact that יום השואה comes right after Passover?

The Nazis, ימח שמם, as an extra touch of cruelty, decided to wipe out the Warsaw ghetto on the first day of Passover. When the secular Israelis suggested that we create a Holocaust Memorial Day on Passover, the rabbis refused. Passover is זמן חרותנו, the time of our freedom, a time of joy. How can we have יום השואה during Passover?

The compromise was to have יום השואה right after Passover. But in a sense, that merely begs the question. And the question is this: Is Judaism a joyous religion, or a sorrowful religion? 

For many people, the Holocaust changed their concept of religion. Many people found it difficult to believe in an all-powerful Gd, or indeed a Gd who works in the modern world at all. For some people, the impetus to remain Jewish was what Rabbi Emil Fackenheim, a Holocaust survivor, called the 614th commandment: Do not give Hitler a posthumous victory. Do not allow the horror of the Holocaust to drive you from Gd, to cause you to leave Judaism, to take the world a step closer towards Hitler’s dream-- a world without Jews.

For many Jews of the 60’s and 70’s this was all they needed to bring them to services, or to send their children to Hebrew School. But eventually people began to feel something lacking. There had to be a better reason to remain Jewish than to rub a dead person’s face in the fact that he did not manage to kill Judaism off. Judaism must be more than a series of tragedies. There must be more to Jewish history than the expulsion from Spain, the Black Death Massacres, the Polish pogroms. People began to demand the joyous side of Judaism.

This week we have a double Torah portion, Tazaria and Metzora. In it we read about ways one can become טמא, usually translated as ‘impure.’ The negative connotations of the word ‘impure’ may not actually apply to the word טמא . טמא means only that you may not perform sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. We become טמא when we have a skin disease, but also when we perform such sacred tasks as reading Torah, giving birth, or burying the dead. 

It is clear that we are meant to go back and forth from purity to impurity, from טמא to תהר and back to טמא again. To remain pure forever is not to be human, but to be divine. Gd does not ask that we avoid the state of being טמא, only that we work to return to being תהר, pure.

So is Judaism sorrowful or joyful?

There was something I was going to tell you this evening, but I won’t, because it is too horrible. It was part of the story of a woman told me. When she was younger, during the war, she was hiding with her father. Her mother, sister, and baby brother were hiding elsewhere, and they tried to join her and her father. She saw her family caught and killed before her eyes. The part of the story I am not going to tell you is how they were killed.

Nothing has ever happened like the Holocaust, but sadly, the story I just told could have happened in any one of a number of places. In Bosnia. In Rwanda. In Cambodia. When we said ‘Never again,’ what did we mean?

Judaism will go back and forth between joy and sorrow, just as we go back and forth between purity and impurity, and just as the world goes back and forth between joy and sorrow. As it is our duty to bring ourselves from impurity to purity, so it is our duty to bring ourselves from sorrow back to joy. 

We remember the Holocaust not because it brings us sorrow, and not because it will keep us Jewish, but because it will help us to prevent sorrows in the future. Never again doesn’t mean no more sorrow, and it doesn’t mean we will be able to completely prevent the next tragedy. But it does mean that we will not be complacent. We will not fail to do whatever we can do to turn the world from sorrow to joy. We turn from Yom Hashoah to Yom Hazikaron, Israeli Memorial day, and then Yom Haatzmaut, Israeli Independence day. We turn from the burdens of our working week to the joy of Shabbat, and we know that this is a metaphor or a parable or a prophecy of the course of existence itself. הַזֹּרְעִים בְּדִמְעָה בְּרִנָּה יִקְצֹרוּ Those who sow in sorrow shall reap in joy. קן יהי רצון