Rabbi Rachel Kort
Temple Beth El of South Orange County
April 12, 2013
Talking about the Holocaust
Discussion Questions:

How do we view our own relationship to the Holocaust if we ourselves are not a
survivor or the child or grandchild of a survivor?

How can we work to promote memory of the Holocaust for the next Jewish
generation?
Sermon:
One of my favorite midrashim explains that all of our souls were present at Sinai for the
giving of Torah to our People. i Sinai was such a powerful event in our Jewish history that even
though our bodies were not yet created, our souls have memory of the experience.
I when I was a student of Jewish history as an undergrad at New York University, I was
taught to apply tools of scientific historical analysis to our Jewish past. But something always
seemed a miss to me. I understand that there is no historical evidence that my soul was at Sinai,
but I believe that my memory of Sinai gives more strength to the Jewish People than any of the
“facts” I have memorized about Jewish history. I believe that our People’s spiritual
understanding of historical memory, rather than a scientific understanding of history, has
helped our People write a history that is over 3,000 years old.
This past Sunday, we observed Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is not
accidental that Yom HaShoah is just after Passover. The pairing of the two holy days in our
Jewish calendar creates a narrative. The prominent Modern Orthodox rabbi, Yitz Greenberg
links the two in history:
“Passover joy is shadowed by Yom Hashoah. In effect, Passover is wounded but not
destroyed, which is the truth witnessed by Jewish life after the catastrophe. Wounding
but not destroying Passover is another way of saying the covenant is broken but not
defeated or replaced.”ii
There is another connection between Pesach and Yom Hashoa. Both are holy days that
are fixed in our calendar to help us remember or to never to forget events in our Jewish history:
Pesach, the Exodus from Egypt and Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust. Dr. Yehudah Kurtzer,
President of the Hartman Institute of North America and author of the book Shuva: The Future
of the Jewish Past, observes that while these are both days that ask us to remember historical
events, the observance of Passover and Yom Hashoah couldn’t be more different.
In a recent interview, Kurtzer discussed his own experience of these two holidays,
focusing on his witnessing survivor testimonial during Yom Hashoah.
“I grew up with Yom Hashoah being a day of listening, not speaking, about the
Holocaust. It is a somewhat crude contrast to compare how we remember the
Holocaust to how we remember the Exodus, but during the Passover seder, you don’t
hear anyone’s personal story…”
The Haggadah commands that
“In every generation it is every person’s duty to regard him/herself as though he/she
personally had come out of Egypt, as it is written: ‘You shall tell your child on that day:
This is on account of what Adonai did for me when I came out of Egypt.’ It was not only
our ancestors whom the Holy One redeemed from slavery; we, too, were redeemed
with them, as it is written: ‘God took us out from there so that God might take us to the
land which God had sworn to our ancestors.’”
And how does the seder help us create our memory of the Exodus? Kurtzer describes,
“we explain how others made meaning of it.” We don’t focus on the first hand account of
Moses, rather we read of seders past: “Once Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben
Azariah, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon were all celebrating the Seder in B'nai B'rak…”
Kurtzer is afraid that our remembering the Holocaust through witness accounts will not
help future generations of Jews take ownership of this collective historical memory.
“We have seen many op-eds about what happens when the Holocaust survivors aren’t
here. There’s an overwhelming programmatic response to that issue, which is to put the
stories on tape and archive them…”
Kurtzer has real concerns about this approach. He explains that
“historically, we [have] dealt with the passage of time by keeping certain things from
our past, rather than chronicling our past. We need to ask, what of the survivor’s story
matters and what is it supposed to mean.”
Kurtzer is worried that “the fact that [a survivor’s story] is on tape doesn’t give it any staying
power in terms of the preservation of Judaism, and [that the stories] won’t have the necessary
resonance.”
I share in the anxiety of so many in our Jewish community that we do not have the
appropriate tools in place to ensure that we truly remember the Shoah when the last survivor,
the last witness to Holocaust, is no longer with us. How do we keep their souls alive without
their physical presence in our world? I believe that for the sake of the future of the Jewish
people, we need to make the Shoah part of our individual and collective Jewish memories, just
like the Exodus, just like Sinai.
I don’t have an answer on how to do this. But inspired by Yehudah Kurtzer’s comparison
of Yom Hashoah and Passover, during this time in our calendar when we remember the
Holocaust, I invite you to not just listen, but also in rich conversation about the Holocaust.
Here are some questions to think about and talk about:

How do we view our own relationship to the Holocaust if we ourselves are not a
survivor or the child or grandchild of a survivor?

How can we work to promote memory of the Holocaust for the next Jewish
generation?
Yehudah Kurtzer begins his book Shuva with the following quote from Elie Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel
Lecture that I would like to leave you with this evening:
“The opposite of the past is not the future but the absence of future;
The opposite of the future is not the past but the absence of the past.
The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of the other.”
i
ii
Midrash Tanchuma, Nitzavim 3
“Early Proposals for Holocaust Commemoration,” The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays