TODAY IS YOM HASHOAH

Today Jewish communities throughout the world are observing Yom HaShoah / Holocaust Memorial Day.

Unlike the United Nations’ International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Yom HaShoah is primarily observed by Jews. Timed to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it is our collective yahrzeit observance. By tying our Jewish remembrance to that revolt, we honor those Jews who fought back.

Humanistic Jews derive wisdom from the human and Jewish experience. One of the most important lessons of both is to take responsibility for our own fate. Or at least to try. Ironically, this lesson is contradicted by the most iconic prayer recited at Yom HaShoah memorials.

Adapted from the traditional Jewish burial service, the elegy “El Malei Rachamim (God Who Is Filled With Mercy)" says this:

God who is filled with mercy, who dwells on high, grant perfect rest to the souls of our brethren who were murdered in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the other camps of Europe…

May they rest in paradise ... and may the Master of Mercy shelter them in the shadow of his wings for eternity, binding their souls in the bond of life.

Whenever I hear it, I wonder where that mercy was before the catastrophe. More to the point, why would anyone expect mercy to now be granted in death when it was so clearly absent when it was most needed?

The Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai, a nontheistic Jew like us, posed this dilemma in verse:

"God who is filled with mercy"

If God were not so full of mercy

There would be mercy in the world, not just in him …

A few years ago I composed a version of the “El Malei Rachamim” for use in Humanistic Jewish settings. In memory of those who were so mercilessly slaughtered, I offer it here:

Let us pray no more to the “one who is full of mercy.”

There is no shelter for those whom we have lost

Under divine wings.

Mercy is for the living.

For those who were slaughtered, there is only memory.

So let us preserve in Jewish memory the precious ember of those whom we lost to the evil of Jew-hatred.

May it never depart the psyche of our people.

Or of humanity.

For there is no heavenly Master of Mercy

On whom we can prevail to shelter the victims forever in peace.

They are gone.

They do not rest in peace or in paradise.

All that remains of them are the lessons we take from the conflagration that robbed them of the possibility of sweet and pleasant lives.

May those lessons be bound up with us forever.

May they remind us to become our own masters of mercy.

And let us honor their memory with this sacred oath:

לעולם לא עוד!

L’olam lo od!

Never Again!

The concluding words, "Never Again," emerged in the wreckage of the Shoah as a distinctly Jewish vow, the cry of liberated prisoners at Buchenwald. In the name and memory of the victims, the Jewish People have used it to assert that our fate must never again be dependent upon the whims or mercy of others. It was and is a sacred oath, an inviolable pledge to honor the memory of the Six Million by learning from our history.

For some, however, the words carry a more universal meaning. The Jews and non-Jews who invoke the oath in this way apply it to war, hatred, prejudice, and the general protection of all human rights.

To be sure, the tragedy of our people does suggest universal lessons to be learned and applied. I sat at the feet of many a Holocaust survivor who solemnly invoked this understanding. But rarely did they stop there. Having barely survived the rise and apex of twentieth-century Jew-hatred, they recognized its reverberations in the present. Their openness to universal applications to the idea of "Never Again" did not translate into a rejection of our own Jewish pledge to protect our people from future disaster. They believed that both ways of thinking were compatible. I believe that, too.  

That said I have become quite concerned about much of what is being done with the language of our people's history. This concern grew in me during the days following the October 7 Massacre when cries of "Never Again" and genocide—a word invented to describe what happened to us—were turned into anti-Jewish accusations. Even before any Israeli response to the worst attack on Jews since the Shoah, protestors were denouncing Israel's so-called genocide. It only grew worse once the war began.

These kinds of accusations are part of a phenomenon called Holocaust inversion. It is a deliberate distortion of Jewish history—increasingly popular on both the far right and far left—in which the memory of the Shoah is turned on its head, portraying Jews as the new Nazis. By falsifying the present and the past, it strips us of our history by using what was done to us as a weapon to hurt us yet again.

All of which takes me back to our prayer.

I wrote my Humanistic version as a reminder that mercy, which can also be understood as compassion, is an exclusively human quality. I ended my version with the pledge of "Never Again" as a reminder to us that we must never again allow our people to be taken to the verge of destruction.

As the world continues to deny responsibility for what has and continues to happen to Jews, it is our obligation to honor the memory of those who fell by doubling and re-doubling our obligations to the Jewish collective. Not to negate the reality that to say, "Never Again" should always apply to any real atrocity. But to take seriously our responsibility for the welfare of our extended Jewish family. To raise our people up in dignity and in safety.

As a Humanistic Jew, I believe that we alone are responsible for our fate as a people. This grows out of my belief that there is no divine source of mercy, compassion, or protection.

There is only us.