Never Again... WHAT?

Yom HaShoah, a day of remembering the Holocaust, will begin at sunset. Jewish days always begin at night.

 "... and it was evening and it was morning, one day ..."

 

I feel very distraught about this, as the emails from Jewish organizations are starting to fill my inbox already:

"It's Yom HaShoah. Please send money."

If only it were that easy.  If only I could send a check and somebody out there somewhere would take care of it, would make sure for me that there is never another Holocaust. 

But that is a stupid pipe dream, my friends.  And we can't afford it.

Mark Prowisor writes:

Let's really give some honor to those that were taken from us... Let's expand on "Never Again."

"Never Again" ... will Jews be victims of violence and terror?

"Never Again" ... will Jews stand quietly by and be fooled by our enemies?

"Never Again" ... will Jews be evicted from their land?

 

My apologies to Mark... I changed it a little. I turned his statements into questions --  because when we make a statement, there's a risk that we might think we've actually done something. But questions haunt and taunt us, make us uncomfortable.  If we want to make a move, from one place to another, from saying 'Never Again' in the same way we say "How's the weather?" - to really meaning something by it, than we need to get out of our comfort zone.

Each and every one who dares to say "Never Again" should be required to expand on that -- to fill in the looming blank.  If we don't really mean to accomplish it, then there's no point - might as well kick back the recliner and watch the game. But if we hope to actually accomplish something, something as huge as preventing the next holocaust, then we very much need to think in specifics. We need to look inside and figure out what it means... for us... now... to say "Never Again."  We need to fill in the blank.

 

Never Again ... WHAT?

For those who want to give honor by making a personal commitment or statement, the comments section is open until sunset tomorrow.

"And God called the light day,

and the darkness He called night,

and it was evening and it was morning,

one day."

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

More than 3,000 years ago, Yael, we -- the Jewish people -- were given the only slogan we have ever needed. If we had only kept it in mind, we might not be in the fix we're in today. That slogan, of course, is: Remember Amalek. Very large numbers of American Jews have failed to do that. Many of our fellows do not even know who Amalek was or what Amalek did. Others do know, but think the Amalek story is ancient history, unfit for modern minds. And still others do not understand that -- especially in this era of image manipulation -- Amalek can wear many disguises. In 2008, Amalek appeared among the American people disguised as a friend of the Jews, insisting that his long and enduring friendships with an array of known Jew-haters had nothing -- absolutely nothing! -- to do with him. As a result, these naive (or stupid?) Jews played a large part in making this modern incarnation of Amalek the president of the United States. Indeed, one wonders if Obama could have run the sleek campaign he did without massive contributions from Jews like Steven Spielberg. And there are still other Jews -- like Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod -- who know Amalek when they see him -- but don't care that he's Amalek as long as they can use him to feather their own nests. So I suppose the answer to your question is that we don't really need a new version of "Never Again." What we need is to take the old slogan --- "Remember Amalek" -- seriously. I have no confidence that the mass of American Jews will do this, although I suspect a few of them who forgot about Amalek in 2008 are beginning to regret it -- and are coming to understand that they must never repeat their forgetfulness. They -- and all of us whose fondest wish is that "am yisrael chai" will still have meaning a generation from now -- must resolve that we will never, never forget Amalek; that we will never again let ourselves be flim-flammed by an Amalek masquerading as something else; that we will never again be played for fools and dupes and chumps. Until that happens, "Never Again" cannot and will not be a call to action; it will be a lie we tell ourselves to console ourselves.

[Kae Gregory]

You sound frightened. Yeah... me too. Not for me, but for my children. I’m frightened for the children of other Jews and for Israel and the children there, and for other Jews. In my weak mind, Jews have been the target of murderers for a lot of reasons, but one main one has been that when it became inconvenient to be constrained, or at the very least restrained by standards of conduct and morality, there stood the Jews, a human signpost placed by G-d to warn against straying from the road to humanity when all other roads lead to freedom from restraint and immorality and eventually inhumanity. Another reason was that when certain people needed something, normally someone to blame, there were the Jews - always a minority and nearly always without a fallback position. Convenient. And that is the state that we find ourselves again – a minority, with not our interests, but the importance of our existence it sometimes seems, being weighed against things like the interests of Islam, or Europe or even the U.S. If I were but fortunate to know the mind of G-d, but in my mind (weak mind remember) it is such an irony to me that possibly the main reason that humanity still exists at all is what so much of humanity wants to see destroyed and that we find ourselves today, so soon it seems after haShoah contemplating whether or not it is possible again in our day. But we have a fallback position. Israel. And they want to take it from us. And it is heart breaking that so many of us don’t seem to care all that much.