As a People, we Jews have a historic memory that is thousands of years old. The Jewish calendar has aided our memory process throughout our long history. On Pesach we remember the Exodus from Egypt; Sukkot commemorates our ancient wilderness wandering; Shavuot reminds us of the Revelation of Torah at Mt. Sinai. Hanukkah and Purim each commemorate specific victories over evil forces who wanted to destroy us. Fast days along the map of our calendar remind us of the various stages in the Destructions of the Ancient Temple in Jerusalem.
Regarding commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, the following paragraph (I abridged it slightly) appears in the Shalom Hartman Institute Haggadah, A Different Night, 1997 (p.39): “When David Ben-Gurion appeared before the UN Commission Regarding the Partition of Palestine in the summer of 1947, he said: About 300 years ago a ship named the Mayflower set sail to the New World. It was an important event in the annals of England and America. Yet I wonder if there is even one Englishman who knows exactly when that ship set sail, and how many Americans know how many people were on that ship? And what type of bread did they eat when they left England? And yet, more than 3,300 years ago, before the Mayflower set sail, the Jews left Egypt. And every Jew in the world knows exactly on which day they left: on the 15th of Nisan. And everyone knows exactly what kind of bread the Jews ate: matzot. And even in our time, Jews all over the world eat this matzah on the 15th of Nisan and recount the Exodus… And they open [the Seder] with two statements: ‘This year slaves, next year free men; this year here, next year in Eretz Yisrael.’ This is the nature of the Jews.”
Rabbi David Golinkin, a former president of The Schechter Institute in Jerusalem, commented on this paragraph in 2002 saying, “ Ben-Gurion emphasized that on Pesach we remember the Exodus from Egypt by a religious act – the Seder – in order to remember and to relive the Exodus once a year. As a result, every Jew in the world is well-versed in this seminal episode in the history of our people.” In other words, we remember the victory of the Exodus through religious acts; and we remember the Destruction of the Temple through religious acts. In addition to Tisha B’Av and the other fast days connected to the Destruction of the Temple, the Rabbis decreed public fast days in order to commemorate other disasters in our history. For example, on the 23rd of Shvat, January 18, 749 a terrible earthquake struck the Land of Israel, destroying many cities and killing thousands of Jews and Arabs. A genizah fragment of a Siddur from Eretz Yisrael mentions that the 23rd of Shvat was declared a Ta’anit Tzibbur (public fast day) which was observed in Eretz Yisrael for hundreds of years.
Remembering the Holocaust, though, has been challenging, on a religious level. We have not yet even come close to uniformity as a People, in figuring out how to put our memorializing the Six Million slaughtered into a religious context. (And at some point, will there be a uniform way that the Jewish People commemorate October 7th?). Several suggestions have been made for religious rituals to be established to have a meaningful, uniform manner in which to annually commemorate the Shoah, including decreeing Yom Hashoah as a public fast day, making it a day of mourning with a special Yizkor and lighting a memorial candle (which thanks to the efforts of our Men’s Club, we have been doing this for many years), and having a special Megillat Hashoah and Kinnot/elegies (just as we have for Tisha B’Av).
An adage attributed to the Ba’al Shem-Tov conveys the importance of concretizing a religious ritual for Yom HaShoah: “The Diaspora was prolonged by forgetfulness, and remembrance is the secret of redemption.”
Until any rituals are uniformly established in the Conservative Movement or across the movements, we at CBI will continue as we do every year to hold our own meaningful program/service to commemorate Yom HaShoah. Please see the details in the email announcements for our commemoration on Tuesday evening, April 22. Let us join together in community to support one another in our collective sorrow as we remember such a painful time in our history and pray for six million innocent souls who were murdered only because they were Jewish. Never Again!!
Cantor Lorna Wallach
