Susan Sontag first saw pictures of the death camps when she was twelve. She writes, “When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.”
But her conclusion about the effect of these photographs is unexpected: “The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewing…The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote, inevitable…In these last decades “concerned” photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.
What Sontag describes is precisely the battle that Judaism fights with itself, and also the great fear that American Jews have about the disappearance of the last generation to remember, first person, the Holocaust: How does a people who have been inundated with immense tragedy, and who have sworn a solemn oath to preserve their memory, keep alive its context the hearts of those who did not watch it happen? “Never forget” is always a difficult proposition for those who have to be taught to remember.
If anything, our Tradition should be marveled at for its success in keeping us conscious of our tragedies. Our Torah marshals an impressive array of means to engender passionate memory in Jews: mitzvot for the body, books for the mind, songs for the heart - together bring the fullest possible experience for those in whom memory has to be engendered, not merely called to mind.
But it is, as those who commemorate Tisha b’Av every year can tell you, always a difficult proposition to connect with the immediacy of the destruction of Jerusalem - sometimes especially because of the frequency with which we mention it . Sometimes 2000 years, sometimes 60 years – according to the Talmud, 60 years is the limit of reliable memory – are just too far away.
Perhaps this is why we haven’t paid attention to the seeds of its recreation in our contemporary world. As I write this, the Haredi riots in Jerusalem (which, according to some reports, also spread to Beit Shemesh) are dying down. But trash bins are burning in Jerusalem with increasing, startling regularity. A few years ago it was the Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem, a couple of years before that the Disengagement, but the civil strife between elements of Israeli society is growing. These clashes will return.
Noah Efron, a professor at Bar Ilan University, writes with incisive insight on the relationship between secular Israeli society and the Ultra-Orthodox (an article brought to my attention by my teacher, Rabbi Sharon Brous). He concludes, “These headlines will come, and rocks will be thrown and trash bins will be set ablaze, because ultra-Orthodox and secular Israelis are locked in a macabre pas de deux that serves each group as it tries to negotiate its own depressing reality. For ultra-Orthodox and secular Israelis, decrying loudly the vicious vice of the other is one of the few ways each can still locate virtue in themselves.”
His point is that the issues inside Israel aren’t merely the actions of our most extreme co-religionists, but rather a pitched battle between two different world-views, each of which increasingly needs the other to reaffirm its own rightness. This is an old, old fight, no matter what anyone says, born three hundred years ago in the crux of the Enlightenment and the Emancipation. The news of the last weeks is the current, violent expression of a problem ignored for a long time in the face of more pressing security concerns.
But what everyone forgets about Tisha b’Av is that the destruction didn’t merely come from without. We first destroyed ourselves from within, and when what was essentially a civil war between the Jews of Jerusalem spread past any containment, we, the Jews, the Jewish people, invited the Romans in to help us end our own war. They did so with stunning brutality.
Perhaps the sliver of memory, kept for so long, was meant for moments like these. Even though we are slow to waken to the similarities between what was and what now is becoming, we have successfully preserved the fragment that, used properly, can change what seems like an inevitable conflict. I am not claiming that the internal conflict in Israel ensures another Tisha b’Av – I resent the casual metaphorical game that so many play with any contemporary Jewish issue (“a second Holocaust,” “finishing Hitler’s job,” “Jewish Nazis,” and so on). But I cannot forget that what finished us, even according to our own most sacred texts, was the sinat hinam, the baseless hatred, of each other, and therefore we have an obligation to keep a weather eye on any such hatred in our midst.
The same piece of Talmud also says that our Temple burned, our Palace was destroyed, and we were exiled because of the humility – humility, mind you – of one rabbi, Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas, who prevented his colleagues from acting from both religious and moral concerns. Such concerns likely occupy the one group of people who could work to build bridges between secular and Haredi Jews, and may prevent them from haavat shalom bein adam l’havero – the bringing of peace between people. During our learning, PLP Talent and team member Ilana Sinclair reminded me that the dati-leumi, those who are both religious and supporters of the state, stand in the breach between secular and Haredi. They are in the unique position to speak to both sides, and they should not let their humility, nor foreign policy concerns for that matter, prevent them from speaking on behalf of ahavat hinam – baseless love.
Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, an Orthodox rabbi here in Los Angeles,wrote brilliantly about the folly of seeking unity only with those like us. Rav Kanesfky showed the courage and leadership to speak to his own community, Orthodox Jewry, of the need to achieve ahdut – unity – with those beyond the Orthodox pale. We should imitate his example. For those who are secular or liberal Jews, we cannot let our profound disagreements with Haredi communities to allow the Jewish people to become another casualty in the war between Western Liberalism and religious extremism. For those who are religious, we cannot let our equivocation about the merits of either side to prevent us from speaking up. For all, we have to remember that the end of communal disagreement is communal destruction, and it is a price that, we have learned, will forever remain too dear to pay.
ישיעהו מ:א-ב
Isaiah 40:1-2
