"This was my town" (Boker tov, Boulder!)

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I thought I would re-post this (from May 2010) to honor remembrance of the Shoah.

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In my journey through someone's "begats" yesterday, I was looking at a certain town in Poland. There are tens, hundreds, I don't know how many such towns. There were pogroms there of course, and during WWII the town went back and forth between German and Russian control. Finally the Germans "won" the town and over the next year or two "almost all" the remaining population (those who did not flee to Russia with the retreating Russian soldiers) was deported to Belzec. Two months later, the last couple of dozen survivors who had remained hidden, were shot.

But that's not what I want to tell you, because that means no more to anyone than Ahmadinejad saying he wants to "wipe out" Israel, or wipe it "off the map." Jews know, at least on the surface of it, what it means to be wiped out. It means three out of every four -men, women and children- dead. That is, if you're lucky and you have "friends," and those "friends" win the war.

Maybe because the dimensions of the Holocaust are so hard to comprehend, maybe because it surpasses our capabilities to imagine it, but for whatever reason, the Holocaust seems to be viewed by us now with a sort of sad resignation... and maybe a little shame at being different. We were so very different that it was necessary to murder 12,000 of us a day, every day, for years on end, at one camp alone.

No wonder we seek assimilation, to hide among those who aren't different, the ones who won't be murdered. No wonder so many seek relief from the burden they cannot escape, their Jewishness. It's there every morning when we look in the mirror and see a Jew.

And so, in actuality, Never Again has come to mean never again will they know... Never Again will they choose me. If they come to my town, I will not look different, I will not sound different, I will not have different customs. I will be the same as the others. And so I will be safe. And my children will not get shot.

That is not what Never Again needs to mean, however. It should mean that never again will we allow ourselves to be treated the way we have been, the way we always have been, since Pharoah.

So now back to this little town in Poland... after the Holocaust. I came across the following passage in a book called, From a Ruined Garden.

".... Coming into the city, I was filled with despair. I was born in ["any" town] and lived there until the war, and now, walking around in broad daylight, I barely recognized the city....

The streets were paved with gravestones bearing Jewish inscriptions; this was itself terrifying and made everything seem like a vast graveyard.

I entered a store to buy some butter. It was handed to me wrapped in sheets of the Vilna edition of the Talmud. I stood as if petrified, remembering how hard it had been for a Jew to purchase a Vilna Talmud for his scholarly son-in-law.... On my way out, I threw the butter away and hid the holy scraps of text.

This was my town... after the great catastrophe. With tears in my eyes I departed."

How many American Jews can read that and not be infuriated? How can anyone read that and not think, "You bastards!!" ?

Never Again, boys and girls. Not my gravestone.

Maybe you don't have any holy books. Maybe you don't value holy books, but surely you can fathom the meaning of a gravestone. Will you have yours used to pave a street? How will you stop that from happening?

I'll let you in on a secret, and you can ask any ger, any convert, if it is true. No one in the world would tolerate being treated with such disregard. No one. You want to know why grannies are marching around America in red, white and blue t-shirts, with signs and slogans? Because they are incensed at being disregarded; they are not used to it. The perceived disrespect makes them Angry. You want to assimilate? Then assimilate that same attitude.

If it doesn't anger you to be disrespected (much less, being mass-murdered with great regularity), then all your efforts to assimilate are for naught. You can get all the plastic surgery in the world, you can buy a Christmas tree and drag it into your house, you can turn up your nose at Jews who look and act like Jews, but if you have no self-respect, then the goyim are not going to believe that you're one of them. They're not even going to believe that you're anything like them.

Which is precisely what (in their minds) allows them to do what they do.

Comments

As long ago as 1892, Ahad HaAm -- one of the most perceptive of all modern Jewish writers, and a thinker who is, sadly, neglected nowadays -- wrote that "Our greatest need is emancipation from self-contempt." There are, as far as I know, no statistical studies on this topic, but, if there were, I suspect they'd show that self-contempt among Jews is as prevalent today as it was in 1892 -- or maybe more so. The founding of the state of Israel was supposed to take care of this problem, but, even there, the self-contempt of much of the Israeli Left verges on self-loathing. In America, of course, the affliction now known as Beinartism is both widespread and, seemingly, viral. A condition this common and this long-lasting must have deep historical roots -- and that is certainly the case with Jewish self-contempt, the beginnings of which are intimately intertwined with the onset in the 18th century of the Jewish Emancipation movement. Moses Mendelssohn, a founder of the movement, strongly and proudly identified as a Jew; his children converted to Christianity. From that point on, Jewish self-contempt proliferated in a variety of directions. From the standpoint of Jewish history, there is nothing strange or even unexpected about an organization like J Street; Jewish self-abnegation has been a constant for well over two centuries. Speaking of centuries, we are now roughly 20 centuries away from Hillel, who asked: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" Sadly, one cannot be for oneself unless one first has a self -- a solid core of belief of which one is proud. Today, for many Jews, there is no such core; there is only a vague list of cliches and abstractions -- universalism, progressivism, one-worldism, multiculturalism, postmodernism -- all of which make the whole idea of being a part of the Jewish people sound provincial, narrow, and reactionary. We self-respecting Jews have been fighting against this way of thinking since Ahad HaAm's time and even longer. Plainly, we have a long, long way to go.

Posted by: Mannie Sherberg | Friday, 20 April 2012 at 11:33 AM