Sometime last year, I went with my father to a conference being hosted by three Rabbis, one Reform, one Conservative and one Orthodox. (Yes, I know it sounds like the set-up for a joke, but stay with me, here.)
The topic of discussion for the night was why younger Jews were increasingly leaving the fold to a state of spiritual indifference.
It wasn’t so much the fact that other religions (or even delicious non-kosher foods) were more appealing than keeping the faith. It was simply that, after a certain point in teenage years, those who went to synagogue stopped going.
Across the board, the message these young defectors sent was simple: “We’re not interested anymore.”
As a member of that early apostate group, I went to the conference expecting the usual talk from the three Rabbis: something about being more relevant to younger kids, something about what the Jewish religion offers, things of that sort. And there was some of that talk, treating these kids as if they were alienated customers of a product that needed re-branding.
And then the conversation turned to the Holocaust.
One audience member stood up and said that the murder of millions of Jews in Europe meant that future generations of Jews had to keep the faith. “You have a choice to be Jewish,” she said. “But then again, you really don’t.”
I remember my immediate reaction was to mutter “bull----” under my breath, and promptly heard some chairs shift audibly behind me.
The first and most important point to remember is that the Holocaust was meaningless. Those people didn’t die for any specific purpose. They didn’t “sacrifice their lives” for any specific purpose. Their lives were taken from them for no reason.
Second, I have no patience for anyone who uses historical tragedies to justify their own ends. Remembering the Holocaust is to remember the human capacity for evil, as well as the sheer unimaginable loss of so many people.
To remember the Holocaust is to remind oneself how easy it is to treat others as less than human, and that one always has to questions one’s actions and motivations. Being absolutely sure about something is the easiest way to do evil.
And you don’t need to be a member of any Jewish sect to recognize the collective death-cry that sits in the call of the shofar on Yom Ha'Shoah.
I think it’s safe to say that, not a single person lost (or, God forbid, gave) their life so that a secular Jew in South Carolina would go to synagogue. Anyone who says so is trying to use an incomprehensible event for their own reasons.
The young Stephen Dedalus said it best: “History is a nightmare.” If the reason the majority of young Jews choose to keep the faith is because of guilt stemming from an unimaginable tragedy, then Judaism will become a religion not worth one’s time.
The Jewish community shouldn’t diminish the Holocaust by fetishizing or manipulating it for any purpose. If it does, it shouldn’t be surprised when no alienated Jewish kids find their way back to it.
Because even an apostate like myself can recognize that, in the end, Judaism is about joy. It is about living with the other people around in the life that we have.
Judaism recognizes how horrifying death is, because life is about living in harmony with others and with God; to lose that is to lose everything.
As it says in the Talmud, when a single soul is destroyed, it is as if an entire world has been destroyed.
So if we are going to continue celebrating life, we have to leave the memory of the dead alive and unmolested, even for the most noble purposes.