70 Days for 70 Years

Kvod HaRav, Mara D’Atra, Rabbi Robinson, may I thank you and your wonderfully warm and generous community for hosting this event this evening. I thank you, Rabbi Robinson, for always making our visits here so interesting. We've had three snowstorms in the last visit, a volcanic cloud… what do you have planned for next time? I have no idea, but it's always really interesting and exciting. And we so thank you for hosting us this evening. 

Rabbi Dunner, we thank you and your wonderful community for helping to sponsor this project here in America. Rabbi Steve Burg of the Museum of Tolerance was going to host it, who has joined us this evening. And above all, of course, Rabbi Andrew Shaw, whose idea this was 20 years ago and has carried the project through until it has become an extraordinarily global thing. I thank everyone who participated by writing the essays and so on.

But above all, I want to thank all of you and everyone else around the world who is going to join with us together, so that Jews right across the world can be joined in an act of learning and remembering the one-third of our people, two-thirds of Europe's Jews, who were gassed and burned and turned to ash, and the one and a half million children murdered simply because they or their parents or their grandparents happened to be Jews. “Al eila ani bochiya.” For these we weep.

“Eini eini yarda mayim.” Our eyes run with tears. “Ki rachok mimeni menachem.” And there is no one to comfort us.

This was an act of inhumanity with no precedent since homo sapiens first set foot on earth, a black hole in human history that swallows words and turns meaning to dust. 

This year, though, is a specially significant one.

70 years, a lifetime, since the Russians liberated Auschwitz, and for the first time the world began to realise what had happened in the heart of Europe, the heart of civilised Europe. And until now the key voices at these moments have been the survivors, eyewitnesses, people who lived through it. And from here on, those voices are becoming, will become more few and more frail.

And we and our children and grandchildren now have to undertake the sacred act of memory.

I found it incredibly moving to read yet again in last Shabbat in Parshat Bo, of how Moshe Rabbeinu on the brink of the Exodus, his people have been slaves for 200 years, he gathers them together as they're about to leave. What does he say to them? 

He might have spoken to them about liberty. He might have spoken to them about the destination that lay ahead. The “Eretz zavat chalav u'dvash,” the Land flowing with milk and honey. He might have spoken about the ordeal that faced them. What Nelson Mandela called “the long walk to freedom.”

Instead, Moshe Rabbeinu did none of those things. 

Three times, he turned to the duty of parents to hand on the memory to their children. [Exodus 12:26-27, Ex. 13:8, Ex. 13:14]

“You shall teach these things to your children.” Why? Because to defend a country, you need an army. But to defend freedom, you need education as the handing on of memory across the generations. So that we and our children and our children's children to the end of time will never forget what it tastes like to have to eat the lechem oni, the unleavened bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery. Because forget that and we will lose our freedom. 

The battle for freedom, for the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life, has to be fought in every generation, including ours. And so we stand at this moment when eyewitness testimony passes to memory and we have to know and it has to be written on our hearts.

So just as Chazal said, “Chayav adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza miMitzrayim,“ - we have to see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt. So we personally have to see ourselves as if we too were liberated from Auschwitz and Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen and Dachau and the other camps of destruction. That is the mitzvah that now falls on us and those generations who come after us.

Zachor, remember. Lo tishkach, never forget. Why is Judaism so committed to memory? A word that appears 169 times in Tanach, what do we do by remembering? That's simply what I want to explain today. I think there are three reasons why the mitzvah of memory is so fundamental to the Holocaust.

Number one, we have to remember and bear witness that these things actually happened. I'm sure you know this, that many decades after Auschwitz was liberated, they excavated the ground in Auschwitz itself and there they found dozens, hundreds of messages left by people who died in Auschwitz. They had buried these messages underground so that one day somebody would come and dig them up and hear their voices.

And from those buried messages, we hear one thing again and again. 

They were afraid that the world would forget. They were afraid that nobody would believe these things actually happened. They believed that people would say such things could not be. 

They feared that the world would never know.

And the reason they feared this is that denial of the Holocaust began from the very beginning.

It is frightening to realise just how that determination not to know was written into German culture. There was no one in Germany, Austria and Poland who did not know what was happening. Hitler had said so publicly in a famous broadcast address in 1939.

He said if war breaks out, this will result in the “vernichtung,” annihilation of the Jewish people. He said so in unequivocal language and he repeated that statement several times in broadcast addresses over the next couple of years. 

And yet who protested? 

I find it extraordinary that the justices and the judges of Germany from 1935 onwards presided over courts that oversaw the removal of all human and civil rights from Jews from 1935 onwards, the Nuremberg Laws.

No judge protested. 

Studies of the time tell us that the Supreme Court of Germany was even extra zealous in ensuring that Jews lost their rights. 

No one protested.

The doctors of Germany who had made their Hippocratic Oath - the sterilisation programme, the euthanasia programme, the concentration camps themselves, were doctor-led enterprises from beginning to end. 

No one protested. 

One half of the doctors in Germany joined the Nazi Physicians League.

Academics in Germany stood and watched, and no one protested, as they saw all their Jewish colleagues dismissed overnight and their books banned. The people who joined the Nazi Party included some of the greatest minds in Germany - the greatest Bible scholar, Gerhard Kittel, the greatest legal scholar, Carl Schmitt, the greatest German philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, were all active members of the Nazi Party. Konrad Lorenz, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for his studies in animal behaviour, wrote clinically about genocide, mass euthanasia, in a Nazi journal.

41% of the officer corps of the SS were university educated. In a Germany where on average only 2% of the population went to university. More than one-half of the people who sat around the table in January 1942 and came up with the Wannsee Declaration, the Endlosung, the Final Solution to the Jewish problem in Europe, the extermination of every one of the 11 million Jews in Europe, more than half of the participants carried the title ‘Doctor.’ They were either medical doctors or they had postgraduate academic qualifications. 

They saw and they said nothing. 

The tragic fact is that we know historically that had somebody protested it would have had an effect.

This euthanasia programme, which was killing handicapped people - not Jews, just generally handicapped people physically and mentally - the churches in Germany protested in 1940 and in May 1941, the euthanasia programme was stopped. 

Let nobody believe that protests would not have been effective. We know that the one protest that was made was effective.

They knew this. They didn't speak. They didn't protest.

They stood idly by the blood of their neighbours and “kol d’mei achicha tzoakim li m’ha’adama,” they heard their brother's blood crying to heaven and they did nothing. 

The first reason we have to remember is for the sake of truth and honesty and humanity, because whatever can be denied will be denied. 

The second reason, zachor, remember, because although we cannot bring the dead back to life, we can bring their memories back to life and let them live on in us and our children.

I believe that every single Jewish act of affirmation of Jewish life today defeats a little bit of the darkness in the heart of the human condition. And every single candle we light to the memory of those who died brings a little light to a world that is often very dark. 

For 22 years as Chief Rabbi of Britain, I could hardly stop myself weeping every time I went into a primary school because in every Jewish child, I saw Techiat HaMeitim.

I saw some child taken from this world too young, brought back to life somehow. Every Jewish child brings something in our people back to life again. And is an affirmation of the power of the human spirit to defeat the worst tyranny.

Though evil may flourish for a moment - “bifroach reshaim k’mo eisev” -  when we see evil flourishing momentarily, for a moment, nonetheless we know - and all our history is testimony to this - that so long as we remain free and strong, freedom always wins the final battle. 

And so every act that we do to honour the memory of those who died brings something of someone back to life. 

And I congratulate you, Andrew, on adopting this idea, that each of us will remember one neshama, so that somebody who died did not die in vain.

But thirdly, the most powerful reason of all. Most cultures, memory is about the past. But you know that the word Yizkor appears three times in Bereishit.

Listen to this:

“VaYizkor Elokim et Noach.” God remembered Noah.

“VaYizkor Elokim et Avraham.” God remembered Abraham. 

“VaYizkor Elokim et Rachel.” God remembered Rachel. 

In each case, it was about the future, not about the past. 

God remembered Noah and brought him out to dry land.

God remembered Abraham and saved his nephew Lot. 

God remembered Rachel and gave her a child. 

In Judaism, we remember for the future. Never in my lifetime has that been more relevant than now. 

Because we have seen, to our sadness and astonishment, that antisemitism has not died. It has mutated into something new.

It is sometimes said in Britain - a Member of Parliament even said it today - that this is not really antisemitism. This is about Israel. 

Forgive me. The Jews who were murdered in a supermarket in Paris two or three weeks ago were murdered not because they were Israeli. They weren't. They were murdered because they were Jews. The Jews killed last year in a Jewish museum in Brussels were killed because they were Jews. The rabbi and three young school children murdered in Toulouse in 2012 were killed because they were Jews. The terrorists who walked away from their attack on Mumbai and travelled to a Chabad house to murder the rabbi and his six-month pregnant wife, Rachmana litzlan. This was about Jews.

This is antisemitism, purely and simply. 

Why do people hate Jews? This is something we have to clearly understand. Antisemitism is about Jews. But really and truly it is about something much deeper. 

The first recorded antisemite of all time, Haman in Megillat Esther, says to Achashverosh, destroy these people because “Yeshno am echad mefuzar umefurad bein ha’amin, v’dateihem shonot mikol am,”  there is one people scattered and dispersed among the people whose laws are different from anyone else. 

Jews were hated because we were different.

Antisemitism is the paradigm case of dislike of the unlike. 

But the truth is every one of us is different. Every one of us is unique.

That is what makes us human. 

Even genetically identical twins are unalike in 50% of their attributes. That means that none of us is replaceable. None of us can ever be replaced. 

That is what Chazal meant when they said “Nefesh echad k’olam malei,” one life is like a universe. 

That is why life is sacred.

And because an attack on Jews is an attack on our humanity, the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. 

It wasn't Jews alone who suffered under Hitler. It wasn't Jews alone who suffered under Stalin. And it will not be Jews alone who suffer under radical Islam. 

So therefore, for the sake of humanity, let us focus our minds and hearts and thoughts and prayers for 70 days, on those 70 years, so that what one-third of our people died for, we will live for. To be true to our faith and a blessing to others, regardless of their faith.

So that every single one of us, Jew and non-Jew alike, regardless of colour or culture or creed, can live without fear. Because though we cannot change the past, by remembering the past, we can change the future. 

So let us learn together and be united in mind and spirit with Jews across the world.

May those who died, live on in us. And may what we do down here on earth, bring some comfort, nechama, to their souls, their neshamot, up there in heaven. There is no greater mitzvah we can do.

May Hashem join us together in this mitzvah. Bimheira B’yameinu, Amen.