Refuse To Be A Bystander

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our Saturday morning service on February 1st, when Rabbi Steven shared about his recent rabbinic mission trip to Poland where he learned about the long history of Eastern European Jewish culture, a legacy nearly eradicated by the Holocaust. Many survivors owe their lives to non-Jews who refused to be bystanders. As Jews, we are called to do the same for our neighbors in this time of division and prejudice, but how do we balance that call with the very real need to care for ourselves as well? 

****

For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar, and see our Accessibility & Inclusion page for information about our venues. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook for more updates.

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Last week, I was in Poland on a trip with eight other rabbis from Chicagoland, along with a few staffmembers of the JUF. The purpose of this rabbinic mission was to expose us to the long history of Jews in Eastern Europe, a history that is alive today in many members of our communities, while building relationships with one another. Before the trip, I had a vague knowledge of Polish Jewry. What we uncovered over five (very busy) days was a thousand years of civilization, which produced scholarship and literature and ritual and song and prayer that continues to shape the way we practice Judaism today. In Warsaw, we visited the resting place of S. Ansky whose writing showed that Yiddish could be a language of poetry and politics (Ansky wrote the anthem for the socialist Bund). In Lublin, we stopped at the burial site of Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Horowitz – known as Ha’Hozeh MiLublin, or the Seer of Lublin – one of the leaders of early Hasidism. And in Krakow, standing around his grave, we studied the words of Rabbi Moses Isserles whose halakhic treatises still dictate how we observe ritual law. Poland was the birthplace of great rabbis and revolutionaries, the home of a rich and living history that ended suddenly, swiftly in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is a shadow that darkens every synagogue and cemetery that we visited in Poland. For 90% of Polish Jewry, it was the final punctuation point to centuries of people living and working and struggling and dreaming and thriving in city centers and thousands of small shtetls dotted across the Polish countryside. We encountered a few glimmers of Jewish life (our group was lucky to have dinner with two young Jews in Krakow, who were involved with the local JCC), but Poland is no longer the beating heart of European Jewry.

We visited three death camps while we were in Poland: Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is impossible to describe the feelings that weighed on my heart in these places. I was reminded of Lawrence Langer, a Holocaust scholar, who wrote: “Conventional vocabulary limps through a situation that allows no heroic response, no acceptable gesture of protest, no mode of action to permit any of the participants… to retain a core of human dignity.” Instead of words, I keep coming back to certain images: the trees surrounding Treblinka, which bore quiet witness to so much death, or the blue stains of Zyklon-B in the gas chambers of Majdanek.

Each of the death camps was unique. As the Red Army bore down on them in the summer of 1944, the Nazis burned Treblinka to the ground. Today it is a collection of monuments, surrounding an open pit where the crematorium once stood. In contrast, Majdanek was mostly intact: rows of wooden barracks and watch towers lining a long gravel road (I learned later that this was by mistake, an error by the deputy commander of the camp but one that provided vital proof of Nazi war crimes). When our group visited, we were the only people there. It was quiet and cold, as we walked from the showers to the gas chamber to the crematorium. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, some structures are original and some have been restored. All of this is surrounded by gray concrete buildings, reminiscent of Yad VaShem or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There is a hostel, a cafeteria, and a gift shop. And it was busy: groups of teenagers wrapped in Israeli flags; a chaperoned trip of young kippah-wearing men from the US (I’m guessing Chabad); tours happening in dozens of languages; there a woman crying and there teens taking selfies and there a couple holding hands, bewildered by what they’re seeing, and among them, a delegation of nine rabbis from Chicago.

And so comparing the experience of Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, I found myself asking the question: how do we memorialize these places – and for what purpose?

One of my colleagues, R’Benjy Forester at AES, wondered – because of their horrible history, the millions of people murdered there – if the death camps are consecrated or desecrated? If it is holy land, do we dare walk on it? Do we build monuments and memorials, restore the camps’ fallen buildings – or let them stay untouched, until they are slowly reclaimed by nature? And if this land is a dark reminder of our species’ depravity, do we preserve it, force each of us to witness it lest humankind repeat the sins of the past? Or do we destroy the camps, erasing the memory of the Nazis as our tradition commands us to do with Amalek, the first individual to attempt genocide against our people?

Walking between exhibitions in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I asked our guide, Wanda, what she thought about the preservation of the camps. Pointing to a huddle of teenagers on their phones, she offered that most people need to be confronted with history to pay attention. But whether it’s the statistics or the stories or standing in the bunker of Crematorium I, once they have been awakened to the past they can’t help but become aware of its possibility in the present. I was reminded of a magnet that I used to have, which I bought from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, that read: The next time you witness hatred, the next time you see injustice, the next time you hear about genocide – think about what you saw.

Perhaps the purpose of memorialization is not so much how it changes a place, but how it changes us. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once taught that, generally speaking, Jews are not as concerned with the preservation of monuments as the safekeeping of sacred moments. He writes that when we say “I believe,” what we really mean is “I remember.”

When we open the Torah this week, we read about the moment our ancestors were freed from slavery in Egypt. The tenth plague – the death of the first born – descends on the Egyptians, and in their heart wrenching grief they finally let the Israelites go. And so packing up what they can, without enough time to let their dough rise, our ancestors depart. After centuries of slavery, the Israelites are free. And as they take their first steps into the wilderness, God offers instruction: that when they finally reach a land to call their own – when the Israelites are settled, living in abundance, and the hardship of the past has faded from memory to myth – they will eat matzah for seven days in remembrance of the Exodus. This is the holiday of Passover. And when a child comes to them, looks around the seder table, and says, “Why are we doing all of this?” we are obligated to respond, “B’hozek yad hotzianu Adonai mi-Mitzrayim, mibeit avadim – with a mighty hand God brought us out of Egypt, out from the house of bondage.”

The rituals of Passover, which help us tell and retell the story of the Exodus, are not meant to be a pantomime – but lived history, actively experienced by us in the present. The historian Yosef Chayim Yerushalmi writes, “Memory here is no longer recollection, which still preserves a sense of distance, but re-actualization.” God’s command to remember our flight from Egypt, at the very moment we are fleeing Egypt, is not satisfied by commemoration. We are not allowed to be observers of history. Instead, we experience the past within the present, as if we were running into the wilderness with everything we own on our back, ourselves – “with a mighty hand God brought us (that is, you and me) out of Egypt.” And so alongside the Israelites, loosed from the shackles of slavery, we suddenly become aware of the fact that the way things have been (even if they’ve been that way for centuries) is not the way things have to be. Like the child at the seder table, we begin to ask questions. In memorializing the Exodus, we are changed. It is not just our bodies that have become free – but our dreams and our desires as well.

On this, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote that Judaism is the “rarest of phenomena: a faith based on asking questions, sometimes deep and difficult ones that seem to shake the very foundations of faith itself.” As Jews, we are commanded to look at the world and ask: is this how it is meant to be? A curiosity and an imagination that borders on the audacious is both a gift and obligation of our freedom. The Baal Shem Tov – who lived and worked in the Kingdom of Poland – taught that during our exile in Egypt, knowledge was also in exile. How could we envision anything beyond the chains that bound us? But once free, how could we limit our dreams of what the world might become?

In one of the barracks of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there was a looped video of a speech offered by Roman Kent – a survivor – on the 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation (we marked the 80th anniversary a few days ago on January 27). He said:

“To remember is not enough… deeds, as well as thoughts, are crucial.”

It is not enough to simply look back on the past as a distant observer. Instead we must be fundamentally transformed by it. Kent continues:

“I feel so strongly about this point that if I had the power, I would add an Eleventh Commandment to the universally accepted Ten Commandments: you should never, never be a bystander.”

You should never, never be a bystander. As Jews, we refuse the role of the bystander by asking questions – brave questions, that apply our memory of the past to our experience of the present. The work is both internal and external. It is just as important to interrogate our own biases as it is to question the structures of inequality and oppression that surround us. But I sincerely believe that by refusing to let our heads and hearts become hardened (like the Pharaoh of our Passover story), we become better, more capable agents for change. Turning a critical eye inward is something we should do regularly, especially when we find our curiosity or compassion has become dulled. Because once we have stretched and strengthened our hearts, we can’t help but notice where things are starting to break around us, warning signs that demand we pay attention.

And so looking outward in this moment, where do we recognize the patterns of the past? Now, I am wary of false equivalencies. And I understand that for many, the scope and scale of the Holocaust is incomparable – and to make connections between it and any other tragedy does a disservice to both. But I’ve been sitting with an observation offered by another one of my colleagues, R’David Chapman of Congregation Beth Shalom, on the trip: we don’t have to skip to the end of the movie to know that it should have been paused at the very beginning. Or to paraphrase the three-step admonition on my magnet from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, we don’t have to be confronted with genocide to be vigilant in the presence of hate and injustice.

And so in this moment, when hate hardens the hearts of those in power and injustice threatens the very structures that made this country a safe haven for our people after the Holocaust – we must not be afraid to ask questions, even the “deep and difficult” ones. Especially the deep and difficult ones. When the president blames diversity, equity, and inclusion for a terrible tragedy, when executive orders attempt to reinforce a false binary of biological sex, when schools are forced to stop teaching about gender and sexuality, when all mentions of transgender people are erased from government websites including State Department travel advisories and the CDC - we must ask questions. Attacks on the trans community are only one of many places we must be vigilant. We cannot be bystanders to the mistreatment of our most vulnerable. We know that this is where hate and injustice fester, before it infects an entire nation.

As Jews, whether by birth or by choice, each of us carries the redemptive possibility of the Exodus and the painful fact of the Holocaust. By reenacting memory – in the stories we tell, the holidays we observe, the prayers we sing – this history lives within each of us. And this past demands that we ask of the present: is this right, is this just, is this how the world is meant to be – or is a better future possible?

Now, a word on how we do this for the next few years. I saw a post on Instagram, making its rounds on some of my friends’ stories, that read: “We have a moral duty to those we are advocating with and on behalf of to not burn out. The collective is not asking you to exceed your capacity.” We serve no one, ourselves or the people we are trying to help, by exceeding our capacity. So while we are obligated to remain aware (remember the eleventh commandment) – we also need to rest, to reconnect with our loved ones, to take time for the things that inspire us, motivate us, bring us joy. Or put another way: practice Shabbat. Whether it’s actually on Shabbat (sundown Friday through sundown Saturday, aka right now) or not, take time for Shabbat. There’s wisdom in this ancient spiritual technology.

And when you’re ready to face the world again, remember you don’t have to do everything (redemption is a group project, after all). The rabbis teach that while we may not be allowed to throw up our hands and do nothing, it is not upon any of us to do it all. Pick your issue. Find your question. Understand what is within your capacity to challenge or change – and not only accept it, embrace it. After the presidential election, the theologian Anne Lammot shared the counsel of a Jesuit friend, Father Tom Weston, who – when facing the seemingly impossible – reminds himself: “We do what’s possible.” And lest we underestimate the significance of doing what’s possible, we only need to remember the lessons of the past: to look back at someone like Pharaoh’s daughter, who did not have the power to remake Egypt, but in pulling Moses from the river ensured that the structures of inequality would be dismantled. Or the many Righteous Among the Nations, who took in children or hid their neighbors or forged papers or engaged in small acts of protest against the tyranny of their time – none of them turned the tide of WWII, but each of them ensured one more person, one more precious and sacred life, made it to the other side.

And so this is my blessing, for each of us: to allow the memory of our past be a reason to act in the present, that we may never be a bystander to hate and injustice and do what’s possible to secure a better future, knowing that what we do – however great or small – matters.