Dan Sieradski remarks on Holoacaust Day
My friend and comrade Dan Sieradski gave the following remarks last night at a joint Yom HaShoah commemoration for several brownstone Brooklyn synagogues held at Congregation Mt. Sinai in Brooklyn Heights. He was preceded by his grandmother Peska, a Shoah survivor, and hsi mother Jeanette, a Holocaust educator, in offering an intergenerational view of Shoah survival. I reproduce his words here for their clarity and compassion.
The most pronounced element of my heritage as a descendant of Holocaust survivors is the intergenerational transmission of trauma.The trauma of the Shoah today looms whether one has any relatives who perished in the war, and thanks to the pop-culturfication of the Shoah, whether you’re even Jewish or not.
For better or worse, the Holocaust has been canonized in such a way so as to make it the legacy of the entire Jewish nation and the world as a whole, as opposed to being the sole legacies of the actual victims and perpetrators themselves. Certainly many nations bear responsibility for their culpability and non-intervention in the Nazi genocide, and that merits repetition as the world stands idly by, time and again, as brutal genocides unfold all about our tiny planet, as the victims, perpetrators and bystanders of the last genocide, and the last one before that, assert in memorials and remembrances, “Never again.”
However, it is also worth noting that, as a result of this canonization of the Shoah, that as a Jew today, regardless of my own family history, I am more likely to feel as though the Holocaust happened to me, than I would that I had been a slave in Egypt, as the Torah instructs me. I am inclined to reflect upon the implications of that perception.
I find it telling that the defining act for which Avraham earned the inheritance of Israel, that act for which he was promised a nation, was that of traumatizing his son Isaac by binding him to a sacrificial altar and nearly striking him dead. Or that our national symbol, the Menorah, recalls surviving our near-total destruction as a people. And that our entire culture has been summed up in the aphorism: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.”
Our historical and religious narratives — that which we tell ourselves — perpetuate a legacy and expectation of persecution: Each day one should view himself as though he had been a slave in Egypt; the Amalekites shall rise up in every generation to destroy us; pogroms, Crusades, expulsions, Inquisitions; 6 million innocents perished in the fires of Europe; we must defend Israel, no matter how morally deficient we may find its actions, lest another Holocaust befalls us.
As Shalom Auslander wrote recently in Tablet magazine, “I was raised on a steady diet of Holocaust films, books, newsreels, and stories. By ‘never again,’ it was clear that my teachers meant ‘again.’ They meant, ‘Bet on it.’ They meant, ‘Hide some cigarettes in your underpants, you can trade them for bread.’”
The primary characteristic of Jewishness itself has become the affectation and expectation of trauma. Jewish identity is no longer about loving Hashem, or loving your fellow — dvekus, limmud, chesed, tzedakah. It is living in fear and suspicion of the other. It is knowing that the whole world has your number and is waiting for the right moment to put the knife in your back.
This undercurrent of suspicion and distrust, this paranoia and in some cases blatant racism, has come to pervade Jewish thinking. While not historically unfounded, it has spiraled well beyond the realm of excusable and understandable defensive posturing. We have come to ignore our power and privilege in the 21st century, and our responsibility as survivors, and — like the Reichstag fire — use the Holocaust to justify any and all actions that can be frenetically cast as necessary for the preservation of the Jewish people, no matter the cost to humanity.The true causes of the Shoah — ethnic and religious hatred, unchecked government power, endless warfare against an amorphous enemy, the eradication of civil liberties — have become instruments in the prevention of the next Shoah.
The result is a cheapening of the memory of the victims and an evincing that we have learned little if anything. The Holocaust and antisemitism are now meaningless political slurs invoked against the enemy of the moment.
Never again, we say. Never again to us. But to the next guy? To hell with ‘em.Case in point: Rabbi Jack Wertheimer’s recent editorial in Commentary magazine impugning the American Jewish World Service for operating in Darfur while there are still Jews in this world who suffer.
I hate to break it to you, but if assimilation, intermarriage, and Israeli emigration rates are any indication, this is not an effective sales pitch for Jewish identity, peoplehood or statehood. In an age of heretofore unknown Jewish acceptance and affluence marked by unparalleled choice and opportunity, why should one willingly choose a trauma-based identity? Is it for this that my grandparents survived? What is the merit of our survival if we sacrifice our truest essence in the pursuit of that survival?
Because they hate us and want to kill us?If that’s all you’re selling, thanks, but no thanks.
If the Jewish people are to not just survive, but to thrive, we must move beyond our trauma and work not only to secure a better world for ourselves, but to ensure better world for everyone. We must offer a Jewish narrative not rooted in mere survival, but in our and the world’s redemption.