It was 4:30am and Yosef Gutfreund was sleeping peacefully in his room, when suddenly he heard a scratching on the door to his apartment in the Munich Olympic Village. Yosef who was a wrestling referee rose to investigate and saw the door begin to open and masked men and guns about to enter. He shouted a warning and threw himself against the door in an attempt to stop the intruders and hold them off for a while. His warning and holding down the door gave several athletes the time to escape and survive the massacre. Ultimately though, he was killed in the bungled rescue attempt by the German security forces and was one of the eleven Israeli athletes who were murdered in the infamous attack.
“His last act was typical of him, he spent his whole life helping others,” his widow, Rachel, said.
Yosef was born in Romania in 1931, and as a teenager he was imprisoned for distributing “Zionist propaganda”. At age 17, he travelled to Israel and served in the 1956 Sinai War and the Six Day War in 1967. He was wounded while on tour in Gaza but refused to be evacuated until the cease-fire was reached. He also tended the burns of a group of Egyptian soldiers abandoned by their officers, and gave them food and water.
Yosef was just one of the eleven lives snuffed out on that day, and he deserves to be remembered.
This year’s Olympic mark forty years since that attack and many of us would have liked to have seen a moment of silence to remember the victims. Many of us view consider asking for just one minute of the twenty two thousand minutes that span the Olympics to be a valid and normal request. Yet apparently, not everyone shares that sentiment and ultimately the Olympic Committee decided not to hold the moment of silence. Much has been written and said about this story and there are many great articles which discuss the ramifications and implications of the decision.
Others say, why make a big deal about this, just move on in life and stop thinking about the past. In fact the Palestinian Authority congratulated the Olympic Committee for not allowing this distractive and divisive issue to be brought into the Olympics.
What does Judaism have to say?
They say that, Napoleon was once passing through the Jewish quarter in Paris and heard sounds of crying and wailing emanating from a synagogue. He stopped to ask what the lament was about and he was told that the Jews were remembering the destruction of their Temple. "When did it happen?" asked the Emperor. "Some 1700 years ago," was the answer he received. Whereupon Napoleon stated with conviction that a people who never forgot its past would be destined to forever have a future.
This Saturday evening and Sunday Jews around the world will mark the 9th of Av, a day marked by fasting and mourning that remembers the destruction of the Holy Temples in Jerusalem over 2000 years ago and several other major tragedies that occurred before and after on that same day. In addition, many communities read special prayers and readings that remember other tragedies that have occurred in our long history and including recent tragedies such as the Holocaust.
Don’t you ever wonder why are we mourning an event and era that took place 2000 years ago? Why can’t we just focus forward and get with it? Why do we have to enter this memory into so many areas of our lives? Why for example do we smash the glass under every Jewish Chupah to remember the destruction, aren’t we trying to enjoy a mighty celebration?
In truth however, as Jews we are taught that our strength and vitality comes through remembering the past and using the memory to propel us forward. In other words, understanding, connecting and learning from the past, is the way to grow and make the most of the future.
We believe that we can change the world for the good, and make the world into a great and G-dly place, but it is not going to happen by itself. Remembering the past is the way to the future. Learning from our mistakes, reflecting on our internal mistakes as a people, realizing where our external enemies found the loopholes in our morality, spirituality and national unity, are all part of the tool set that will help us grow and succeed as a people and enable us to live up to the divine mission we have been entrusted with.
Remembering is important!
In this week’s portion of Devarim, the Jews are preparing for their final step of their forty year journey as they stand on the banks of the Jordan river and prepare to enter the land of Israel. Yet instead of rallying and surging forward, Moshe takes 37 days to speak to the Jews to remember each occurrence that had happened in the last 40 years. What failures happened in this place, where the Jews slipped morally in another place, where they had gone to war, and made sure to remember and remind them of every incident that had occurred to them. Precisely since they wanted to march forward to the new exciting phase of entering the land of Israel, the knowledge and lessons of the past were all the more essential and vital. It is precisely those memories that allowed them to achieve a successful mission in the practical, moral and spiritual sense.
This Saturday evening and Sunday we will observe Tisha B’Av and remember our past losses and destruction. We will mourn the loss of the Temple and of tragedies that have befallen our people throughout our history, and we will make sure to remember the eleven Israeli Athletes who were massacred at Munich. We do so because we believe remembering is important, because remembering ensures that we as a nation do not forget them, because remembering ensures that the world around us remembers, and because remembering ensures that the world learns from what happened so that they don’t recur again. It is precisely from this memory and reflection on our past that we will build our future of goodness and betterment of ourselves and of the world around us.
This Shabbat is also known as Shabbat Chazon, a time when we reflect on the betterment of the world and on readying the world for the Third Temple. May we merit that our remembrances of the past serve as the catalyst that will truly bring the positive change that is needed to this world to fulfill the ultimate prophecy of Isaiah, that “Zion will be redeemed through justice, and those who return with Tzedaka”