Sermons and Divrei Torah
Hiroshima & Auschwitz: 60 Years Later
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Yom Kippur 5766)
For some reason, and I don't know why, my family loves things Japanese. Japanese art and calligraphy, ikibana, Buddhist monasteries, sushi—we may be the only Ashkenazi Jewish family that does "roll your own sushi" for Shabbat dinner. So this summer my family and I took a long-awaited trip to Japan. As we took off on the airplane, though, I could hear my late father's American voice in my ear. Japan? What about Pearl Harbor? I fought the Japanese in World War II. You, who haven't expressed the least interest in going to Germany or Auschwitz, never been to Poland, haven't chaperoned The March of the Living as many rabbis do, haven't led a trip to Israel via Prague, why would you go to Japan?
Because not only is my family drawn to Japanese culture, but because I felt this year I had to go to Hiroshima; I had to see not only what had been done to me, but what I have done to others. This past year marked the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. It also marked the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Hiroshima and Auschwitz : the two iconic pillars of growing up American and Jewish.
I have to admit, I have never really felt ready to visit Auschwitz. I have, however, spent many hours at Yad Vashem in Israel. I have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. They are both extremely moving. Last December, on the Kolel family tour, I took the group to Yad Vashem just as it was getting dark. The sun was setting and the museum was closing so I hustled everyone on the bus to get to the Valley of the Communities while we still had a few minutes. The gate to this stirring structure of pillars for each community, almost a desert prison, was swinging closed. When I told the guard, a seasoned old Sephardic guy who had seen his share of tourist buses, that I had Bar Mitzvah kids on the bus who wished to pay their respects, he swing the gate back open. I asked the kids to reflect on what being a Jew meant, and then to sing Hatikvah. Their voices echoed eerily in the now-dark valley, and the guard stood at attention and wept.
I want those kids who came with me to Yad Vashem to understand the enormity of their own history, and to understand that they are the last generation who will have witnesses to that horror. Their children will not have grandparents who were there. Their children will look at the Holocaust as ancient history, like the destruction of the Temple or the Spanish Inquisition. We will be the last generation to hear the last of the stories from the last of the eyes that saw them, to see the last of the photos in the hands of those who can name the faces therein, to hear the last of the poems from the mouths of those who wrote them. There have been conferences for children of survivors; recently I've seen conferences for children of children of survivors. We are entering a new definition of memory. I was struck in Japan that there, too, is the last generation of witnesses, the last generation of those who looked up into ther sky and saw the bright mushroom cloud that forever changed warfare and national relationships. There too, the survivors, called hibakusha, draw pictures and write poems for the children, and tell the last of the stories.
In Pirke Avot, the Sayings of the Sages, we read a list of ages: at 20 for marriage; at 30 for strength etc. "At 60 comes the wisdom of old age." What wisdom could Hiroshima give me in the light of Auschwitz 60 years later?
At the Peace Museum in Hiroshima I learned more than I ever expected, and was touched more deeply than I ever could have imagined. I asked for the wisdom of those 60 years to understand my place as a Jew in the future of human history. And as a Jew, I wanted to understand another people's cataclysmic suffering and learn from their responses and their bearing witness.
I know- I know the Japanese were not allies. I walked the halls of the Hiroshima Museum with mixed feelings, because it is true that the Japanese started an aggressive campaign, they were militaristic and willing to prolong the war for their own internal glory and imperialist plans. It is true they were Nazi allies. We learned in China that when the Japanese invaded China, they were as cruel and anti-semitic as the Nazis themselves, imprisoning and oppressing the small community of Holocaust survivors who had fled to Shanghai from Germany and were living peacefully among the Chinese. It's true that the Japanese army was the first to employ what we would call today "suicide bombers"- kamikaze. It is true that the atomic bomb ended the war, and saved many lives. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in the Washington Times on the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, "The truth, as we are reminded so often... is that usually in war there are no good alternatives, and leaders must select between a very bad and even worse choice. Hiroshima was the most awful option imaginable, but the other scenarios would have probably turned out even worse."
It is also true that the original émigré Jewish scientists who developed the bomb—Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Albert Einstein— believed that the fruits of their research were intended for an explosion over the Third Reich. The four scientists had already written the now-famous letter, signed by Einstein himself, to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, describing "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" that could have devastating effects. It was fear of a German bomb that prompted the Americans to build their own. One of the most astonishing finds in recent years is a document containing the minutes of a May 5, 1943 meeting of the high-ranking Military Policy Committee, whose members decided that dropping the atomic bomb over Germany would be too risky. The explosive device could turn out to be a dud, thereby unintentionally providing the Nazis with valuable information to use in developing their own bomb. So instead of Germany, they sent it off to Asia. An interesting turn of history in the light of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I think. And terrifying to imagine what would have happened if Hitler had gotten this knowledge first. All this is true.
But as I said on Rosh Hashana, I have the privilege and the curse of being able to see different truths. Therefore this is also true: the bomb claimed 242,437 lives, almost all civilians. The effects of radiation were immense, painful, debilitating, and long lasting. Those who didn't die immediately died slow, awful deaths. Many, many were innocent children. And the Japanese, like the Jews, mourn those lost children. So I want my children, and those children who saw Yad Vashem, to see the enormity of Hiroshima as well. I want them to weep for the radiated dead, and the children incinerated, and the housewives evaporated. I want them, in the words of Edmund Fleg, to be a Jew who weeps wherever humanity weeps.
If they weep wherever humanity weeps, then they willunderstand that from the Holocaust to Rwanda is a short trip in lessons learned and lessons still to learn. In Rwanda almost a million people were killed in the space of just a hundred days. I want my children to understand that from the Holocaust to Darfur is a short trip in lessons learned and lessons still to learn. Over a million people, driven from their homes, facing death from starvation and disease as the Government and militias attempt to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching them. I want my children to understand that it can happen again and it has happened again and it will happen again if we as Jews are not vigilant about our role as witnesses to cruelty.
My kids said the Hiroshima Peace Museum felt eerily like Yad Vashem. While the Japanese were not targeted because they were Japanese, nor was there a systematic program aimed at their cultural destruction, still we felt strangely at home there as Jews. We saw the pictures of corpses piled up, skin and bones wandering the streets with arms outstretched, and heard the videotaped testimonies of survivors sharing their horrific memories. We looked at little purses and shoes and schoolbooks and notebooks of the dead behind glass museum displays. We cried at the hundreds of colourful cranes begun by a young girl named Sadako Sasaki, who died of leukemia ten years after the atomic bombing. She was two years old when she was exposed to the A-bomb. She had no apparent injuries and grew into a strong and healthy girl. But nine years later when she was in the sixth grade, she suddenly developed signs of leukemia. Inspired by a legend that folding 1000 paper cranes would help her recover, she kept folding them to the end, until October 25, 1955 when she died. We read the poem she wrote to pass the hours while folding her cranes: I will write peace/on your wings and you will fly/all over the world. We felt strangely familiar with her story of childhood innocence lost and courage gained.
So, 60 years to the wisdom of old age. Hiroshima and Auschwitz have taught us terrible lessons. What did Hiroshima teach me as a Jew that I can use in my own thinking about Auschwitz?
First, that the most important thing we can do is continue to be witnesses. Unfortunately the Christians use this term much more freely than we do, and we often bristle at the word. Why should we? Rape victims have learned that "giving voice" to your victimhood is the beginning of healing. We should not be afraid to keep being witnesses, to remind the world, no matter how much the world seems tired of hearing it. A friend of mine told me a story right before Rosh Hashana about a Polish woman she met who said to her, in all innocence, "Poland didn't really do anything to its Jews. It wasn't really involved. Were there many Jews in Poland affected, anyway?" and then, after being told the staggering facts and numbers, said, "Well, that was then and this is now. You people make much too much of that, and it gets tiresome to hear about it."
In the Torah scroll, the words Shema Yisrael appear in Deuteronomy. In every Torah scroll in the world the last letter of the word Shema- the ayin- and the last letter of the word Echad- a daled— are enlarged. Many commentators point out that the two letters ayin and daled spell "ad" which means witness. We are commanded to be witnesses for our history.
The second thing I learned at Hiroshima is that a balance of living in memory and living in the present is critical. I know so many people of my age group who grew up hearing over and over again that the reason to be Jewish is not to give Hitler a posthumous victory. I've said it before and I will say it again: that's not enough of a reason anymore. My Judaism has to be more than just a hollow "I told you so" to Hitler; it has to be more than just a thumb at the nose of anti-Semitism; it has to be defined as something positive, not as something negative. Eva Hoffman, daughter of survivors and author of four books on the Holocaust and memory writes, "...the Holocaust has been an enormous history-altering event, but it can't be a foundation for identity."
So how much should the past determine the future? It should be a teaching tool, one step back to take two steps forward. We cannot forget the past but we cannot afford to live in it, either. Edward A. Dougherty, on writing about the Hiroshima Museum, said, "How the past is taught can deepen wounds or begin to heal them...we must find a way to make our mutual pain a positive gift for the future." To make our mutual pain a positive gift for the future: the city of Hiroshima hosts a memorial each year attended by over a million people- and then the mayor writes letters in protest of nuclear testing and nuclear armament. Do our Holocaust memorials and Yom Hashoah remembrances help us make of our pain a positive gift for the future? This year the chief Rabbi of Great Britian instituted the "60 days for 60 years project" which encourages people to learn about different aspects of Judaism for 60 days in memory of the 60th anniversary. I encourage you to make your own 60 days for 60 years project. We at Kolel will be happy to help you make a 60 day commitment to study and grow in your own Judaism as a response to the planned destruction of Judaism 60 years ago.
The third lesson of Hiroshima is the most important. In Japan I learned that being a victim gives you two very different choices. One is the inward choice: you remain forever victimized, you turn inward with fear against the "other" who is always out to get you; you become paralyzed into protectionism. But another reaction to victimhood is activism. You take your trauma and move it into a place where it no longer frightens you: you control it, and it no longer controls you. You take your righteous indignation and you turn it outward with a force into a force for healing for all people; you take your history and you bring it to the front of the protest, the front of the rally, the front of the picket line. Hiroshima is now known as the most pacifist city in the world and the centre of antinuclear activity. The survivors hold their country up for self-scrutiny in its role in the bombing. As Yukio Yoshioka writes, "I feel it's important to try to make sure it never happens again. We were the offending side, but also the victims. We harmed people in China, Korea and South East Asia. But the A-bomb was dropped on us, so we understand how difficult and terrible war is. We can understand how other people feel. We can see their point of view." Can once being a victim enlarge our Jewish point of view?
Can Darfur, and Rwanda, and AIDS, and nuclear non-proliferation, and violence against women, and a host of other causes become Jewish causes? I want my children to understand that "we were strangers in the land of Egypt" is the great gift of the Jews. Every Pesach we remind ourselves that we were slaves in Egypt. But it's not working- Egypt is too far away, too long ago. We have forgotten the bitter taste of slavery that lingers in the mouth and causes you to understand why no one else should ever taste it. Just sixty years ago we were slaves in the munition factories and the quarries and still today there are slaves in the Sudan and sex slaves in Israel. What do we need to help others spit out the bitter water of slavery that we ourselves have drunk? The Jewish cry of "never again" should be loud enough to reverberate not only to Jerusalem but also to Africa and Pakistan and Guatemala.
So let me tell you about Guatemala for just a moment. There have been horrific rains and mudslides in San Marcos province, deep in the jungle, that have cause 95 percent of the 515 small villages there to be partially or totally destroyed. 200,000 people have been affected, homes (really, hovels) and jobs destroyed. But with Pakistan and New Orleans, Guatemala has gotten no press, no media attention for its troubles. So a week from Sunday, G-d willing, if the roads are passable, Adrienne Rosen and I will travel to Mexico City, and from there to Tapachula, where we will cross the border at Tecun Uman into Coatepeque to offer real, practical help and financial aid. This border crossing is named for a Mayan hero, but the Spansih words also are Hebrew words: Tecun (Tikkun) mean repair, and Uman, coming from the same root as Amen, means faithful! So we will be doing faithfulk repair work as Jews in a little village deep in Guatemala. Please let me know if you would like to help us.
Now, some Jews will choose to remember only Auschwitz, and they will think that I have overstated universalism. I would remind them that you can only hear the shofar's sound from the wide end when you blow in the narrow end. And some Jews will choose only to remember Hiroshima, for they are uncomfortable with their own people's suffering and identify only with that of others. I would remind them that in a few moments, when we will recite yizkor, the quintessential Jewish service of remembrance, each of us will say it with the face of a real loved one in front of us: a husband or wife, a sibling, a parent, even a child. You cannot lose your own arm without feeling pain.
The yizkor service is meant for us to stand in solidarity with each other. It teaches us that our private melancholy does not erase the communal universality of mourning; at the same time, though we weep in community, each of us truly knows only the depth of our own sorrow. Yizkor reminds us that if I weep for you, my tears for my own loved ones are not diminished or any less real. And if I weep first for myself, I know you will understand that it doesn't mean I won't weep for you afterward. I sense on this great holy day that we are part of one family, and I link hands with that family on my own most important day across time and space and experience in an embrace of comfort. I say yizkor for my own father and for the fathers of the Holocaust and the fathers of Hiroshima and in doing so, I pray that "never again" will be the watchword of a new generation, with its echoes felt in every corner of this planet that we share.
And I would like my late dad to know, that after seeing Hiroshima, I am now ready to go see Auschwitz.
Shana Tova.
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
