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Chapter 10 A Call to Humility and Jewish Unity in the Aftermath of the Holocaust Rabbi Shmuel Jakobovits I am profoundly challenged, indeed humbled, by the task of presenting, in this collection of important essays, a distinctly haredi perspective on the terrible Nazi Shoah—and in particular on its ramifications for Jewish unity today. The Shoah and the question mark hovering over Jewish unity today, for many with implications for their very survival as Jews, are both subjects fraught with agony and—in the absence of actual prophecy—with perhaps totally unfathomable perplexity. I am keenly aware that my thoughts and emotions on the two subjects are intensely personal and subjective, exceedingly finite and inadequate. I offer them here in the belief that our very participation in this discussion together is a powerful statement that underlying Jewish unity is alive and kicking, and in the fervent hope that my few words may strike a responsive note in some minds and thus contribute , even if only minutely, to a new consolidation of Jewish unity. For, to the best of my awareness, even sixty-five years after Nuremberg and fifty-five years after its fearful sequel had run its searing course, the threat to Jewish unity originally unleashed by the Emancipation remains the most basic and fateful issue facing us as a people today. Allow me a reference to my sainted father, hareini kaparat mishkavo, who was a recent president of our host organization, the Memorial Foundation , for several years. He was fond of contrasting the two mitzvot of counting sefirat ha’omer, the yearly counting of forty-nine days, and sefirat ha’yovelot, the counting of fifty-year cycles. The counting of the omer is done by every individual, while the counting of the yovelot is done only by the Beit Din Hagadol. This is to teach you—my father would say—that 202 the layperson is bound to look at the short term, whereas a spiritual leader must have a purview that spans fifty years at a time. But, in our context, more than fifty years have already passed since the trauma of the Shoah ended, and still no one—not layperson and not spiritual leader—understands. Apparently, this is different. My father would also often point out that Yetziat Mitzrayim (the exodus from Egypt) followed a veritable Shoah, wherein, according to a midrash incorporated by Rashi in his commentary on the verse vahamushim alu B’nei Yisrael me’eretz Mitzrayim, four-fifths (!) of the Jews had perished . Yet the survivors did not, morbidly, make the calamity their prime focus of self-awareness; rather, they looked to the future and sang, az yashir Moshe uv’nei Yisrael et ha’shirah ha’zot leimor—“yashir,” in the future tense, “leimor,” that future generations might continue to sing. Perhaps it was because the calamity—that aspect—could not be understood . Not by B’nei Yisrael; not even by Moshe . . . Coming back again to our own traumatic experience: what seems most noteworthy about our reactions to the Shoah is the almost total lack of reaction. To be sure, there have been remarkable bursts of new energies, whether in the realization of Zionism by Zionists or in the revitalization of Torah learning and hassidut by the b’nei Torah and the Hasidim. But there have been no sweeping changes of heart, no dawning of new direction, no new shirah. Even the silence seems sadly lacking in profundity. Now, this may be partly due to the general spiritual superficiality that is growing inexorably on modern humanity. But (and no doubt in a reciprocal relationship of cause and effect with this factor), it is also a measure of the endless depth and of the numbing enormity of the Shoah; the Six-Day War, and even the Yom Kippur War, evinced vastly more significant responses . At least as religious Jews, we have been painfully aware that, in the Shoah,our community was spiritually decimated and thoroughly orphaned. Another keenly insightful midrash (Yalkut Shim’oni, Parashat Hukkat) describes B’nei Yisrael on leaving Mitzrayim as unable to give appropriate expression, on their own, to their surely overwhelming, but perhaps numbed or incoherent, feelings. “Even as a child repeats his parasha verse by verse after his teacher, so did Moshe Rabbeinu have to say the shirah with B’nei Yisrael.” Hence, az yashir Moshe uv’nei Yisrael—Yisrael with Moshe. Only after forty intensely educational years in the wilderness did the next generation “come...

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