Thoughts on Remembering the Past

‘’Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’’  That famous quotation by philosopher George Santayana seems frighteningly apt in these times.  Earlier this week we completed the celebration of Passover a holiday that marks an event going back some 3500 years that we continue to remember year after year.  The Passover seder meals revolve around the mitzvah of telling the story to our children, reminding them that we were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, but now we enjoy freedom.  Not only do we tell the story, we taste foods that remind us of the story and, beyond that, our sages insist that in every generation a person must see him or herself as if they had personally come forth from Egypt.  We are to put ourselves into the story and relive it year by year.  Every week on Shabbat as we recite the Kiddush marking the beginning of the weekly day of rest, we note that this day is not only a reminder of the works of Creation and God’s ceasing from His creative activities on the seventh day, but it too is linked to the Exodus, Zecher l’tziyat Mitzraim, it is a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt.

Throughout the Torah, this remembrance is reinforced.  You know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Because of that experience we are called upon time and again to show compassion to the stranger, to those in need, those who may be estranged from our society, different in some way from the norm, as if there ever were a norm.  The Torah tells us that though each of us is unique we are all a representation of the Divine image.  In all our glorious diversity, every one of us was created in the image of God, modelled on divinity.

Remembering is a central principal in our faith.  At the end of the morning service in many traditional prayerbooks you will find a list of things that we are called upon to remember.  Remembering the Exodus is at the top of the list.  Not all of the Ten Commandments are negative for we are called upon to Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.  Several weeks ago, we marked Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance on which we turned to the book of Deuteronomy and read the commandment to remember what Amalek did to our ancestors as they departed Egypt, a reminder to continue to fight evil and oppression. We’re told not to forget the day when we stood at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah.  Other events and miracles of the journey through the wilderness are also in that list which concludes with the pledge from Psalm 137, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither…if I do not place you above my greatest joy.”  The breaking of a glass at the end of the wedding ceremony is a reminder not to forget our past and what might yet be our future.

On Wednesday night and Thursday, this week, we marked Yom HaShoah, commemorating 80 years since the end of World War II and the liberation of those Jews who had survived the Holocaust. At our annual commemoration this week, we noted that the number of survivors, people who had first hand knowledge of those times, who witnessed and experienced the horrors of the Shoah continue inevitably to decline.  Last summer the last survivor in our community, Nancy Apfelroth, passed away just short of her 97th birthday.  For many years she, and before her, her late husband Ulrich, bore witness to the events that they personally experienced under the Nazis. On Wednesday night, once again, a poem by another survivor who is no longer with us, Odette Denton, mother of our Temple president, Julie Bossert, was read as well as a poem Julie herself had written.  Dr.Susan Rose, sister of our Adult Education chair, Amy Rose, a psychotherapist in New York, spoke to us about second generation trauma experienced by children of Holocaust survivors. We noted that as the generation of the survivors approaches its end, it becomes even more important that we their children, their grandchildren, their family and friends remember and never forget what took place.  It is essential that we make certain that the world remembers the evil perpetrated upon our people and upon millions of others at that terrible time as well as the response of too many collaborators and bystanders who failed to intervene and even joined in the slaughter of the innocents.

I mentioned in my remarks on Wednesday that this commemoration was set for this time of year because of its proximity to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising where for three weeks beginning on Passover, lacking in weaponry, about 700 residents of the Ghetto mounted a brave resistance against the Nazis as they attempted to transport the people of the Ghetto to the death camps.  Though ultimately some 7000 residents were taken to Treblinka to be murdered and a similar number died fighting or hiding in the Ghetto, this was the most significant act of resistance against the Nazi regime at that time.  However, as we have learned it was far from the only uprising or resistance.  Contrary to popular belief, the Jews did not go meekly, like sheep to the slaughter.  There were similar acts of resistance throughout Poland and elsewhere where the Nazis controlled territory.  This too we remember thanks to those who in the midst of these uprisings buried diaries and other papers documenting these events so that we might know about them today.

We remember as well those righteous among the nations who did not stand idly by as these crimes were perpetrated but in various ways, often at the risk of their own lives, they reached out and saved many Jewish lives. There were those who received and adopted Jewish children sent out of Germany on the Kindertransport.  Others who hid Jewish families in their homes or barns.  Some smuggled them across the Swiss border.  There were the diplomats like Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara, who at personal risk provided documents that allowed thousands of Jews to escape the Nazis. They and many others are recalled at Yad VaShem, the Israeli memorial to the Shoah, with trees planted in memory of these righteous gentiles of all faiths who did what they could to save some lives.  We remember year after year and it has become another essential mitzvah to keep the memory of that history and the events of those years fresh and alive even as those who lived through that period depart this life. We urge our members to join us on May 18, when a group of us will be visiting the Holocaust Museum in Skokie. If you plan on joining us, please register by next Wednesday.

Those who can’t remember the past… that’s one thing.  However, beyond that we are witnessing the rewriting and falsification of the past by various government agencies and officials in this country. We all know that despite our righteous self-image as a nation, our history includes many shameful episodes and horrendous crimes against various individuals and groups.  Omitting these events or rewriting them, tearing out pages from our history books, deleting files on websites, does not change the facts.  We still are well aware of the crimes against the people kidnaped from Africa and enslaved for centuries on these shores and even after liberation, denied many of the rights of citizenship they are entitled to.  We know about the decimation and the massacres of the native populations that preceded us on this continent.  We have not forgotten the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the persecution of Chinese immigrants before them and of other groups who were perceived as different and somehow inferior to white European Americans, also the children of immigrants.  The rise of antisemitism once again in this country and around the world is deeply troubling to us all though we should be concerned as well when those who claim to be fighting antisemitism use it as an excuse to attack and to destroy important institutions in this country.  We are concerned as we see the continuing actions taken against immigrants legal and otherwise under the present administration.  We forget at our peril that we are a nation of immigrants and deleting files and records about the achievements of people from certain groups diminishes us.  What became of that ideal of taking in the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?  Should we remove the plaque with Emma Lazarus’s poem from the pedestal of the statue and send Miss Liberty back to France?

Remembering the Exodus, remembering the Holocaust, remembering the past is a basic element of our faith.  One must remember and one hopes that out of that remembrance we might learn and work for change and strive to better our society. We do not wish to repeat those sordid episodes in our past and, while the Warsaw Ghetto ultimately fell to the Nazis, it remains a powerful symbol of resistance, of the willingness of people to stand up to oppression, to protest injustice and to support those who are being victimized by a lawless regime. Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  We remember the past and are deeply troubled when we see people who are determined to repeat it.  It is up to us to resist that effort and do all we can to remind the world of the values that made our nation truly great.  As we approach the 250th anniversary of this nation which Lincoln described as conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, that does not seem to be the proposition of those who claim they want to make America great again. It becomes our duty to work to put America back on the path of true greatness, to serve as an exemplar to the world of the foundational principles of this nation and of the actual teachings of the religious faiths we profess.  Let us remember who we are and what we might do if we truly wish to make America great again. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Edward Friedman