By the Grace of G-d
Dear Friend, Later today I will be conducting a funeral for a world war two veteran who passed away yesterday at the ripe old age of one hundred. Chester Davis was in the United States Air Force and participated in bombing raids against the Germans. Apparently he performed quite heroically. In a few days it will be the first Yartzeit of Mrs. Engel who lived the last years of her life with her son David in Thailand. Mrs. Engel was one of those heroes who survived the infamous Auschwitz death camp and went on to raise a Jewishly observant family. She was blessed to live to a ripe old age. I cannot help but reflect on the transitory nature of history. Lately, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has gotten into some ‘hot water’ over his responses to the question of whether Facebook should ban Holocaust denial. Google can give you hours of reading on this topic. I don’t want to state my opinion so much as to draw some parallels to other areas of Jewish life. The following quote on one of the online articles I saw, grabbed my attention. It is by Deborah Lipstadt, a noted Holocaust historian and professor at Emory University who has spent her career fighting Holocaust denial: “what Mark and Randi Zuckerberg don’t understand, and many other people with them, is that Holocaust denial is not a mistaken point of view, it’s an overt distortion of history.” For the late Mrs. Engel, the branded number that she received at Auschwitz was forever branded into her forearm. For Chester Davis, bombing ‘the hell out of the Germans’ was a necessary and holy act, eventually saving the world from dominion by the demonic and despotic archetype of evil that Hitler was. For me, as well as for many of you, the inexplicable and indescribable tragedy of the Holocaust is an undeniable fact. Some of us are children or grandchildren of survivors. The word ‘survivor’ in the Jewish community used to mean ‘Holocaust Survivor’ with no need to use the world Holocaust. But times move on. Today the word ‘survivor’ is often used in other contexts. Those that have survived dreaded diseases are also referred to as ‘survivors’. You can’t stop the march of history. As the generations move inexorably on, the first-hand reports of those who lived through the inhumane barbarism of the Nazis become scanter. Do the math. Anyone who was fifteen at the end of the war in 1945 would now be eighty-eight. This is a problem that is going to get worse with time. For people of my age and older, the thought of Holocaust denial is totally preposterous. For younger people it may not be all that clear cut. Sounds crazy but that is what the polls show. Even now, there are totally misguided people who make the case that the calamity never happened. Facebook is not sure if it should be banned. The elders of my generation would have only one word for it. A “Shanda’ (disgrace). A Jewish boy, Zuckerberg, giving a platform for avowed anti-Semitic based historical revision? There are other opinions, I know. Free speech vs legislation that would make it a crime. Pro’s cons. Sensible stuff, outrageous opinions. Here is not the place for me to air the discussion. One thing is clear to me though. And I believe that it is equally as clear to you. Whether or not the Holocaust took place is not a debate. It is a painfully clear historical fact! Now I would like to take this discussion three thousand three hundred years back. To something recorded in our weekly Torah reading of the portion called ‘Vaetchanan’. If you lived at Moses times when he gave his final ‘sermon’ to the Jewish people before his passing you would have heard Moses say: But beware and watch yourself very well, lest you forget the things that your eyes saw, and lest these things depart from your heart, all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children and to your children's children… the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb (Mt Sinai)… and He told you His covenant, which He commanded you to do, the Ten Commandments, and He inscribed them on two stone tablets… The Lord our God made a covenant with us… we, all of whom are here alive today… Face to face, the Lord spoke with you at the mountain out of the midst of the fire… If you were living at that time, or you had heard personal accounts of the Sinai revelation from your parents or grandparents would there be any way you could tolerate ‘Sinai denial’? I am asking a rhetorical question. Of course if we were only a few decades from Sinai no one would question the undeniable fact of Sinai. The way Judaism sees it, nothing has changed just because many many years have passed since them. Rational thinking still brings us to the conclusion that G-d’s revelation at Mount Sinai is a fact. Notwithstanding the ticking clock of history. The account of G-d’s giving us the Torah is as factual as anything else we know historically without having experienced it personally. (My father – may he be healthy and well – wrote an article on this topic several decades ago. Click here to read it.) It’s a telling contrast that shows very favorably on the Jewish people of today. Seventy years after the Holocaust there is a growing distortion regarding the topic. Three thousand three hundred and thirty years after Sinai there is still a consensus among Jews that G-d revealed Himself and communicated to us at Sinai. Not just we do we believe, we actually live our lives in twenty-first century based on that communication. And will be living our lives that way for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future. Take if from the New York Times…. Rhona Lewis wrote an article about the meaning of lighting Shabbat candles on Friday afternoon before Shabbat comes in. I am sharing the following excerpt which I found fascinating: Let us see to what extent candle-lighting has become associated with our nation. On January 1, 2000, the New York Times ran a Millennium Edition. It was a special issue that featured three front pages. One had the news from January 1, 1900. The second was the actual news of the day, January 1, 2000. And then they had a third front page—projecting envisioned future events of January 1, 2100. This fictional page included things like a welcome to the fifty-first state: Cuba; a discussion as to whether robots should be allowed to vote; and so on. And in addition to the fascinating articles, there was one more thing. Down on the bottom of the Year 2100 front page was the candle-lighting time in New York for January 1, 2100. Reportedly, the production manager of the New York Times—an Irish Catholic—was asked about it. His answer was right on the mark. It speaks to the eternity of our people, and to the power of Jewish ritual. He said, “We don’t know what will happen in the year 2100. It is impossible to predict the future. But of one thing you can be certain—that in the year 2100 Jewish women will be lighting Shabbat candles.” I can actually vouch for that story. By Divine Providence I recently met the marketing expert who had placed the Shabbat Candle lighting times for several years during the 1990’s. They were paid for by a Jewish philanthropist who was later unable to continue the expensive space on the front page of the NY Times. He had stopped paying for those lines by year 2000 but the NY Times included it in their millennial edition as the non-Jewish editor was quite sure that the Jewish people will continue to believe in G-d and His Torah and Mitzvot for eternity! Am Yisrael Chai! Shabbat Shalom Rabbi Yosef Kantor
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