Kol Nidre is a prayer-moment that joins the personal and the communal. We gather in great numbers for a public ritual that carries significant personal and private meaning for us. As we recited Shehehiyyanu together with the Hazzan and Choir, we attune ourselves to this berakhah and its meaning for us this year.
So too with certain civic moments. The public rituals, ceremonies and testimonies related to the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 spoke powerfully and personally to us. Many of us could recall where we were when the plane crashes occurred. I remember that exactly a week later I briefly stopped our Rosh Hashanah services at the times that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit. Each of us has been changed by the terrorist attacks and by the governmental and individual responses that will affect us for many years to come.
This past April 11, I was in Jerusalem when the country marked the fiftieth year of the trial of Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann. I stood outside what is now the Behar Center in downtown Jerusalem thinking about the man in the glass booth.
At the time of the trial, 25 per cent of Israeli Jewry were Holocaust survivors. It was the bar mitzvah year of Israel and national need had demanded that the half-million survivors divert attention from their terrible and tragic past to the primary task of state-building. In a society that valued valour, self-reliance and the romantic ideal of a New Hebrew tied to the soil of the Land of Israel, there was little space for the Shoah.
The trial of SS member #45326 had multiple goals. It was intended to bring Eichmann to justice, to assert the strength of Jewish sovereignty capable of capturing and bringing to justice a Nazi war criminal, and to emphasize the futility and humiliation of living in Galut/Exile.
Gideon Hausner (whose daughter will be our guest speaker during Holocaust Education Week) was Israel's attorney general and the senior prosecutor for the trial. In his opening remarks, Hausner made his mission clear: "As I stand before you, judges of Israel, to lead the prosecution of Adolph Eichmann, I do not stand alone. Six million accusers stand by my side. Their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I will be their spokesman ..."
Eichmann sought to portray himself as a gray bureaucrat without authority who merely followed the orders of those above him. Hannah Arendt accepted this perspective, forever labeling it the “banality of evil”. But documentary evidence and testimonies showed that, in addition to the technical flow of the death camps, Eichmann brought a particular perversity to his task. "I was no ordinary recipient of orders," Eichmann boasted in an interview with a Dutch journalist, "If I had been one, I would have been a fool. Instead, I was part of the thought process. I was an idealist."
By mid-December 1961, High Court Judges Moshe Landau, Yitzhak Raveh and Benjamin Halevi, all former German Jews, handed down a guilty sentence. By then, the trial had begun to transform Israeli society and Jewish life in the Diaspora.
Hausner made a key decision that was legally unnecessary for the case. Before the wide dissemination of Elie Wiesel’s book, Night; ahead of Gerald Green’s TV film, Holocaust; prior to Steven Spielberg’s project to record testimonies; and in advance of Holocaust museums; the Eichmann trial became the first time that Holocaust survivors were called upon to tell their stories in public day after day.
According to Deborah Lipstadt, in her recent book, The Eichmann Trial, this was the moment the survivors acquired their moral stature, the first time that the world had heard from them at such length. And their testimony was the reason the Eichmann trial so shook the world.
Israelis came to understand that but for an immigration decision or a bureaucratic determination, they might have died during the Shoah. A younger generation, many of them born in Israel, came to realize that the Jewish Diaspora culture that had been lost was deep and diverse. The trial also affected North American Jews, many of who began to define their identities in relation to the Shoah and the European Jewish experience.
The personal accounts of survivors were broadcast by radio – at a time when this was the dominant medium- and were read in Israeli dailies when newspapers still commanded an audience. The testimonies made it evident that Jews had not "gone like sheep to the slaughter" and that the limited cases of physical revolt were against incredible odds.
In Hebrew there are two words for strength: ko’ah is physical power and gevurah is inner courage. Israelis came to understand that there were thousands of examples of gevurah, heroic acts-of-the-spirit, through which European Jews had maintained their identities and their humanity.
As many of you recall, Hazzan Joseph Cooper died erev Yom Kippur seven years ago. He had planned to chant Kol Nidre to mark the anniversary of his liberation from the Nazi death camps. Hazzan Joe often reminded me that not all the Jews were righteous or valorous, that many who survived simply had mazal. But he also said that making challenging moral decisions under great stress was a hallmark of the Jewish experience during and following the Shoah. He would say to me that he “chose life”.
One of the great rabbis of the 20th century, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, distinguishes between fate and destiny when facing evil and suffering. Fate, he says, is an “existence of compulsion. The [person] of fate has no free will, nor ability to choose [a] life path. Things happen to this person.… Destiny, however, is a different form of existence. It is true that ‘Against your will you are born and against your will you will die’, but you live of your own free will”. An existence of destiny is a life of choice, innovation, strength, and action. (Kol Dodi Dofek, Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust,54).
In a similar, but non-theological vein, Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psycho-analyst helped to re-frame our understanding of the experience of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. He wrote: “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life –daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk or meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to … fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” (Man’s Quest for Meaning, 122)
Prior to the Holocaust, Naftali Stern had lived in Satu Mare, Romania, together with his wife and four young children. Deported to Auschwitz, Bluma and the children were murdered. Naftali was sent to Wolfsberg, a forced labor camp. As Rosh Hashanah approached, Naftali sold his daily ration of bread in order to obtain a pencil and some cement sacks. He tore the paper sacks into small squares and wrote, from memory, the entire Rosh Hashanah service. A Nazi officer allowed the inmates to hold prayers in lieu of breakfast. Naftali led the services from these pages which he hid on his body until his liberation in 1945. Each Rosh Hashanah until shortly before he died, Naftali used those pages in his mahzor. When Naftali donated them to Yad Vashem, he stressed that he wanted future generations to understand that in spite of the survivors’ harrowing experiences during the Holocaust, they maintained their spirit, embraced their Jewish identity and never lost hope.
Two contemporary phrases, “whatever” and “It is what it is” convey a sense of apathy, that one can’t do much. In contrast, when we recite Kol Nidre, we take responsibility for what we say and do, engaging in a process that shifts us from fate to destiny, from avoider to actor.
The process of teshuvah, not only on Yom Kippur, but throughout our lives, involves a willful effort to move from a fated life, where we have no control, to a life of destiny where, as much as possible, we choose how to live – however challenging or limiting the circumstances we face. When we say, “inscribe us in the Book of Life”, we hope for ongoing physical vitality and a life of moral responsibility.
This coming summer, the Cantor and Aliza will be leading a special trip to Germany and Israel. As a nation, Germany has made an active effort to acknowledge what it did to Jews during the Shoah, to express shame and regret, and to engage in sincere efforts at reparations. In contrast, some other countries find it difficult to admit their complicity in the Holocaust.
This past spring, I met a group of Germans visiting Jerusalem. They had come to meet with the descendants of Jews who had once lived in their home community. This effort at teshuvah was stimulated by a deep feeling that until these Germans - none of whom had lived during the Holocaust- had seen and spoken directly to those affected by the actions of their parents and grandparents, they would not be able to quiet their souls. Teshuvah involves an active decision to take responsibility to make amends.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks links the fate/destiny distinction to the two covenants mentioned in Genesis: the Noah covenant of survival after the Flood and the Abraham covenant promising family and land. He suggests that all humanity shares in the Noah covenant which links us all in efforts to preserve our environment, avoid nuclear conflict, and protect vulnerable populations – such as in East Africa- from plague and famine. The promise to Abraham reminds us that each religion has particular pathways to follow in pursuit of its promise. On Yom Kippur, we take responsibility for our shared fate with all people as well as affirm our just Jewish destiny and promise.
Israel is a national effort on the part of the Jewish people to exercise self-responsibility and to choose life. We may disagree among ourselves about policy choices and differ about political decisions, but we should not lose sight of this larger picture. A significant aspect of the conflict with the Palestinian people is because of reluctance on their part to recognize that Jews have a collective identity, a national narrative and a shared destiny.
My colleague at the Hartman Institute, Yossi Klein Halevi, published an essay in the Globe and Mail on Thursday. I placed some copies around the synagogue. He puts it very clearly:
Since ancient times, Jews have identified themselves as a people practicing a particular faith. … Palestinian media routinely dismiss the Jewish narrative: There was no ancient Jewish presence in the land of Israel, there was no temple on the Temple Mount, and the Holocaust has been exaggerated or entirely invented. The denial of Jewish history and identity … can’t so easily be uprooted…. When Palestinian leaders acknowledge that the Jews are a people and that their state is called Israel, the way will be open for the creation of a state called Palestine.
Let me be clear: The return to Zion, the cultivation of land, and the building of cities and settlements were all part of an effort to move from a life where the collective lives of Jews were often subject to a fate beyond our control to a society where we would determine our national destiny. One of the many reasons that we have Israel Bond drives to offer our financial support to the State of Israel is that we want to link our dreams to the aspirations of our people for life.
My Monday night seminar, using educational material from the Hartman Institute, will be about deepening our understanding of issues facing Israeli society and exploring our relationship as Diaspora Jews with the Land. Rav Harvey and Cheryl will be leading a study mission in spring to focus on the transition from Temple to Synagogue in ancient Israel. But even the study of the past will have implications for contemporary life. We have planned many special programs this year to highlight these issues and I hope that many of you will use these events to broaden and deepen your engagement with Israel.
Although we repeatedly pray to be inscribed in the Book of Life, paradoxically Yom Kippur is a day which brings us into deep reflection about death. Steve Jobs, the media and technology visionary who died this week, spoke at Stanford University in 2005. In that address, Mr. Jobs told his audience that “death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.”
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
The benefit of death, he said, is not to waste life living someone else’s choices. In Jewish terms, the process of teshuvah involves reflecting on our personal mortality to help attain moral clarity for our lives.
The Nazis sought the degradation and death of the Jewish people. The testimonies in the Eichmann trial, 50 years ago, told, in graphic detail, about efforts to demean and destroy us. But the survivors also revealed how Jews refused to accept the choices of others, how they fought against becoming victims fated to die, and even how they sought to die as Jews. Equally important, after Auschwitz, survivors - and the Jewish people as a whole - brought a life-surge of creative energy to the world. I believe that our destiny still lies before us- both in Canada and in Israel.
On this Kol Nidre night, as you think about your challenges: choose life. Your destiny still lies before you. “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Uvaharta ba’hayyim. Choose life, so that you and your children shall live”.
http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/rosh_hashana/museum_collection01.asp
The Eichmann Trial, Deborah E. Lipstadt. (Nextbook/Schocken, 2011).
