Kedoshim - Holiness and the Holocaust?
After about 3 hours sleep caused by being bumped off a flight, I had to write a sermon for a double B'nei Mitzvah... it could only be about the amazing and dark journey of the last week on March of the Living:
At Bo and Herbie’s B’nei
Mitzvah rehearsal, their dad, Jason, shared a remarkable fact with me. His
grandmother grew up opposite a park where each Sunday a man would come and
stand on a soap box to preach his rather mad ideas. His audience was small to
begin with but grew over time. In fact it grew well beyond the park from where
Bo and Herbie’s great grandma could hear him shouting. It grew to encompass the
Third Reich. That man was Adolf Hitler. It wouldn’t normally be my go to topic
for a joyous occasion such as a double B’nei Mitzvah, but connecting to this
part of your family history Bo and Herbie, has taken up my last week.
I have just returned, as many
in the congregation will know, from a trip to Poland known as the March of the
Living. Much of it had nothing to do with living, as we travelled from the
Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, through the town of Markova where we learnt stories
of righteous gentiles who took risks beyond anything we could imagine, and
sacrificed everything. We went to Lublin and the great yeshiva where the
practice of Daf Yomi – reading a page of Talmud a day - was first invented, and
to the forests where unspeakable acts were committed, against my own family as
well as so many hundreds of thousands of others.
The latter part of the trip
took us to Krakow, and from there to what is perhaps the most iconic symbol of
the Shoah, the Holocaust, Auschwitz-Birkenau. On Wednesday we toured the site,
and on Thursday we took part in the March of the Living – beginning at
Auschwitz 1 – a Polish barracks at the start of the war, built of brick rather
than wood. Together with around 2000 people from around the world (pre-Covid
this was closer to 12,000) marched together, sometimes arm in arm, often
singing, through the streets to arrive just over a mile down the road at
Auschwitz 2, or Birkenau. We walked along the train tracks that delivered so
many from all over Europe to this place of darkness, and many of us placed
wooden plaques between the rails – remembering loved ones who survived, or
naming those we never got to meet. Some wrote prayers or quotes. As we walked,
there was a huge shift in mood. From the somber nature of the day before, it
felt like an act of defiance, of resilience, of holiness to be there, alive,
and although we were not all Jewish, largely we were there keeping Judaism and
the Jewish people alive.
Holiness was a word that came
up in our tour bus a lot. And it is a part of the name of our torah portion –
kedoshim. I had the enormous privilege of being invited onto March of the
Living as a part of a bus of interfaith leaders – Sikhs, Hindus, Christians and
Muslims joined with Jews for this special trip. The Sikh participant and I
struggled together over whether the ground we stood on at Treblinka – a site
created only to despatch, not to house prisoners, was holy. She felt the
sanctity of life, so cruelly stolen from so many there, was held in the ground
and perhaps she shouldn’t be standing on such holy ground. I couldn’t associate
anything holy with these places, and yet the language so often used in the
memorials is of korbanot, sacrificial offerings, or Kiddush Hashem – martyrs
whose death sanctifies Gods name. I struggle with terms that sanctify what was
done in any way – of course their lives were sacred, but their deaths were the
most unholy possible. The places feel evil to me. At Treblinka I was asked to
follow a recitation of El Malei Rachamim – the memorial prayer – by reading a
Psalm. I couldn’t get through it without weeping – ‘my cup runs over, surely goodness
and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life’… how could I utter such
words when they feel like such a lie in the face of the Shoah.
From each of our faiths we saw
that which was holy to us, inverted by Nazism. For a Methodist minister it was
the sanctity of each individual death being acknowledged. For our Sikh friend,
the piles of hair – holy to Sikhi’s and never cut, collected together at
Auschwitz. Our Hindu colleagues reflected on the inversion of the holiness of
cremation, and for our Muslim participants – fasting as they travelled with us,
this holy act was turned into neglect and agony. I have often found that I am
affected by the sight of desecrated holy objects – burnt and ripped torah
scrolls, collected prayer shawls and tefillin confiscated from their users.
They somehow embody the absence and holiness of a life cut short.
We witnessed another form of
holiness, one that chimes with the lessons of our Torah portion which asks us
to care for the vulnerable and the poor. This holiness was performed by Polish
citizens of all kind - peasants who themselves had next to nothing, and
businessmen like the well known German – Schindler. In Poland (unlike anywhere
else in the Reich) helping or hiding a Jew was a crime punishable by death. And
yet all over Poland righteous gentiles (as they came to be known) risked
everything, and sometimes sacrificed everything, to help Jews – sometimes their
neighbours, sometimes strangers. My husband Gary and I have often discussed
volunteering with Refugees at Home to offer a room to a refugee, even before
the current Ukrainian crisis (of which there was a lot of evidence in Poland
where the population has increased by 10% this year!) But we worry about only
having one small bathroom, and whether a person damaged by war is safe around
young children, and where we put all the stuff that’s in the spare room…. It
feels pretty pathetic in the face of the holiness of these people who risked
their entire families to save one or two or 10 Jews. When faced with risk to
one’s own loved ones, it takes incredible courage to still do what is right –
such holiness I’m not sure I could ever achieve. Every life saved wasn’t just
that life but the lives of all their descendants. We saw this first hand on our
first night when we attended a ceremony honouring the families of two Polish Righteous
Gentiles who worked together to save the life of Max Ostro. His son, Maurice
Ostro, and grandchildren, gathered together to give thanks for their bravery
and to present them with a certificate from Yad Vashem honouring them as
Righteous among the Nations. Descendants who wouldn’t exist without their
bravery. As both the Talmud and Quran say, ‘Whoever saves one life, it is as if
they saved a whole world’[1].
This morning we heard Bo and
Herbie leyn an instruction manual for what it meant to be Holy as a society
3000 years ago. I’m sure today we might think of a few different things, but
many of them we would still value, from feeding the poor to respecting our
parents, being honest in business, and not going out of our way to trick or
trip someone up, physically or metaphorically. Holiness is something that
carries nuance, and means different things in different contexts – but
universally understood and appreciated for thousands of years are some of the
basics of living together well – acts that make us holy as much as religious
worship might, perhaps more. When that is turned on its head for the benefit of
one group over and above all others, holiness is turned on its head.
Bo and Herbie are here, as am
I and many of you, in defiance of a madman whose philosophies, shouted at first
to just a few, were able to build on centuries of anti-Semitism to create a
movement of a hatred that became an obsession. Marching through the most
notorious of the Nazi death camps this week alongside survivors was a powerful
way of answering his hatred. More harm was done than can ever be measured, and
it must never be forgotten. But we must also remember in order to challenge
hatred and the particulars of antisemitism. We remember so that we might add to
our understanding of what it means to be holy the importance of being an
upstander and not a bystander. We were not defeated, but there is still much to
do. Bo and Herbie, I am so comforted to know you are on this journey of living
as adult Jews alongside us, bringing your compassion, empathy and incredible
minds to the ever evolving beauty that is being a Jew, and being fully human.
Shabbat Shalom
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