Vayigash: Grief: Remembrance and Growth

October 7, 2023, Shabbat Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, was a horrible day for the thousands of victims, for the State of Israel, and for the Jewish people all over the world. The immediate reaction to that tragic day took many forms, since the events were indescribable even for the most articulate and fair-minded observers.

Given the extent of the horrors of that day, we are at a loss for how to react. The fact that the ensuing battle continues, hostages are still held captive, soldiers continue to be killed, the number of wounded mounts daily, and antisemitism infects the entire planet, words to deal with our emotions fail us, and we grope ineffectively for an adequate language to express our pain, our disillusionment, and, yes, our despair.

I have recently forced myself to read some of the reactions to the catastrophe written by journalists, government leaders, rabbis, and “ordinary” people of diverse persuasions. I’ve been hoping to find common threads in these reactions, phrases that can at least stimulate constructive thought.

I hope to put several of these common threads into my writing but will focus in this column on just one such phrase that is recurrent, frightening, and full of implications for our future. That one phrase, which appears repeatedly in almost exactly similar words, reads as follows:

“The worst such event since the Holocaust!”

As those of you who are familiar with my lectures, sermons, and writings are aware, I am obsessed with the Holocaust. I have a personal collection of books on the Holocaust which numbers several hundred volumes, and I have read most of them cover to cover. I have interviewed, formally and informally, numerous survivors of the Holocaust and have led many trips to Eastern Europe, visiting death camps and desecrated cemeteries. I have many questions, and few answers, to what the saintly Slonimer Rebbe, of blessed memory, author of Nesivot Shalom, termed the greatest tragedy in world history, bar none.

One of those many questions is, “When did the Holocaust begin?”

Was it with the rise of Hitler to power? Was it the Nazis’ decision to systematically eradicate every Jew from the face of the earth? Or was it something much earlier?

Was it World War I, which decimated many Jewish communities, and left the infrastructure of hundred of shtetlach in ruins? Or can it be traced to some of the dark and primitive antecedents of the German culture? Could it have begun with the pogroms in Czarist Russia, or perhaps in the massacres of 1648-1649? Or as far back as the Crusades? Or further still?

Not an easy question to answer. But a more difficult question to answer is this: “When did the Holocaust end?” With the defeat of the Nazis and the end of World War II? But what about the pogrom in the Polish town of Kielce in 1947, two full years after the war, which drove out of Poland a community of Jewish survivors who had hoped to recover and rebuild their pre-war community? I possess a scrap from a Sefer Torah that was recovered from the assault on the synagogue there, which I retain as a graphic reminder of the persistence of the Holocaust. The text of that fragment of parchment begins with the words “Thou shalt not murder,” from the version of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy.

October 7th reformulates my question from “When did the Holocaust end?” to “When will the Holocaust end?” Or even to a much more troubling question, “Will the Holocaust ever end?”

There is another question which is less speculative than the two I just mentioned. It can at least lead to action on our part. That is the question, “What can we do, in practical, do-able terms, in reaction to ‘holocausts’ of the distant and recent past?” For a fascinating and challenging answer, I turn to a passage in the Midrash Tanchuma on a verse in this week’s Torah portion, Vayigash (Genesis 44:18-47:27).

The passage describes the first conversation that Yosef had with his younger brother Binyamin. It reads:

“Yosef asked Binyamin, ‘Are you married?’ Binyamin responds, ‘Yes!’ Yosef: ‘Do you have children?’ Binyamin: ‘Yes, ten!’ Yosef: ‘What are their names?’ Binyamin: ‘Bela, Becher, Ashbel, Gera, Naaman, Achi, Rosh, Mupim, Chupim, and Ord.’ Yosef: ‘Who ever heard such strange names?!’ Binyamin: ‘I named all of them for my older brother: Bela, for he was swallowed (bala) by aliens; Becher, for he was the first born (bechor) to our mother; Ashbel, for he was held captive (nishbeh); Gera, for he was a stranger (ger) in a foreign land; Naaman, because he was so pleasant (naim); Achi, for he was my brother (ach), son of my mother; Rosh, because he was my superior (rosh); Mupim, for he was so handsome (yafeh); Chupim, for he did not see my wedding canopy (chupah), nor did I see his; and Ord, for he descended (yarad) into exile, and had a rosy (vered) complexion, and from the time he disappeared, our father came down (yarad) from his bed and slept on the floor, and, moreover, when we get together as a family, all my father’s children sit with their brothers while I sit alone with my eyes shedding tears.”

Note Binyamin’s poignant reaction to his own personal “holocaust.” His world was destroyed by Yosef’s unknown fate. He chooses to give his children names that preserve his recollection of his brother and refresh his anguish constantly. Every interaction with his ten sons provokes details of his long-gone brother. Like his father, Yaakov, he refuses to be consoled. He is desperately lonely and weeps copiously in solitude.

And yet, he looks ahead to the future with hope. His ten children represent an assured future, the prospect of a better time. His perspective is on the future, as is the perspective of every parent, and most definitely of every parent of ten children!

Binyamin is a model of appropriate grief. He understands that, however paradoxical, grief must contain two components: sincere and lasting sadness, coupled with personal growth associated with acceptance of reality and the courage to march forward to a better future.

I close with an interaction I was once privileged to have with a true Chassidic sage, now long deceased. I asked him why certain sectors of the Orthodox community do not recognize a Yom HaShoah, a Memorial Day for the Holocaust. He responded that such fixed public memorials stimulate remembrance, which is important and which we Chassidim do daily, especially by naming our children after those lost in the Holocaust. Every newborn helps us remember.

But, he wisely added, our goal must be to retain, recover, and restore as much as possible of what was lost. That can only be done in a growth-oriented atmosphere with optimism and hope, confidence and simcha. Such an atmosphere is absent on funereal memorial days.

To return to the moment: we must grieve for the victims of Simchat Torah 5784 and for all the painful losses we have experienced in the wake of that terrible day. But we must change courageously, constructively, confidently, and b’simchah. We must motivate ourselves to grow, as individuals, as a nation, and with the conviction that Grief has two components: Remembrance and Growth.

Binyamin was the youngest of the ten tribes. But I’ve come to believe that the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Temple, was situated in Binyamin’s territory so that just as the Temple is our spiritual center, so do we have a lot to learn from this “baby brother” and the names of his ten children!