Yesterday as the world marked World Holocaust Day, I reached out to some Holocaust survivors and their family members and had some deeply meaningful conversations. I also reached out to some people who I hadn’t spoken to in quite a few years (although we have been in touch via email) and had some very uplifting and moving conversations.
In one of the conversations, the individual began to cry as he recalled the pain that his father carried throughout his life when he would relive his experiences as a soldier in the US Army who helped liberate a Concentration Camp. He told me that his father always refused to talk about what he had seen when they liberated the camps, yet he lived with a tremendous amount of pain that left him scarred for life from what he had witnessed. Yesterday on World Holocaust Day, besides crying for the victims, he was crying for the pain of his father, who never recovered from what he saw in those first moments.
Another person I spoke with, spoke of the suffering of each one of his four grandparents who were all survivors of different Concentration Camps. They had all come to the shores of this country, with no family and deeply scarred, yet determined to rebuild their Jewish lives and bring another generation into the world, and rebuild they certainly did.
At our weekly Torah Study Group, a lady shared how her grandfather built and ran a hotel in Paris, for all the Jewish refugees that were fleeing from the East. He fed them and gave them lodgings at no cost, so that they could have a chance to move onwards and survive. Eventually he and his entire family were turned in to the Nazis and sent off never to be seen again. Her father was the only remaining survivor who was hidden in a barrel and smuggled on a train to the south of France.
He survived the war and even though he had no schooling from the age of fourteen, he became a teacher in a university, and eventually moved to Israel, where he built an institution to help disadvantaged children get extra education. As sad as she was as she recalled the loss of her family and the pain of her father, she was emotionally proud of what they stood for and how her father rebuilt and helped the next generation.
Each one of these conversations and the many others that I had yesterday, told me that the pain of the Holocaust runs very deep in the veins of the Jewish people of this generation, and often in the blood of their children and grandchildren too. Yet at the same time, I saw a continuing theme in each conversation, which is that despite the pain, there is something else that runs far deeper in the soul and veins of each one of these individuals, which has helped them rise above the pain and be able to build, teach and give to the world.
It is the power of the Neshamah, the soul, that runs through their body and spirit and connects them to generations of giants who have come before them. It is a pulsating strong energy and attachment that connects them to our people, our heritage and Torah, to our faith in the Creator and to the values we seek to live by. There is no storm in the world that can shift or move or dislodge this spiritual anchor, because it is connected to a rock that is inherently immovable and indeed unshakable.
This bedrock of strength goes back thousands of years ago to the moment we all stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and declared with absolute faith “we will do and we will hear (understand)”, no matter the circumstances. It is declaration and dedication that has withstood the tests of history time and time again, where we commit through our words and our deeds, that we will do and we will act as we need to, while at the same time constantly learning to better understand the why, how and relevance of the timeless message of these words.
The journey of our ancestors may have begun at the foot of Mount Sinai thousands of years ago, and the generations that have come and gone in between, have all been torchbearers of this powerful message of bettering the world, by living the way G-d intended us to live. Many have come and gone, and the torchbearers of today, are our parents, ourselves and our children and grandchildren, but the message is the same, and we are still on a journey of living by these values and working on our shared mission.
If there is one thing, that I can learn from each of those conversations that I had yesterday, it is “we will do and we will hear” no matter what and no matter when, and no force in the world as painful as it may be will ever overcome and negate us or what we represent.
Shabbat Shalom
Yisroel