Two full moons in March! Mickey tells the sweet story of being on kibbutz Gal On for Pesach many years ago, walking outside and seeing a huge full moon -- how beautiful! A year later he was still on Gal On, it was Pesach again, and he was astonished at the coincidence: another full moon! Yes, the first night of Passover always falls on the full moon, and Purim always falls a day before one. So this month of March is bracketed by Purim at one end and Pesach at the other.
I've probably commented somewhere in the past about the idea that Purim prepares us for Pesach. On Purim we get drunk and debauch and remember the threatened annihilation of our people in Persia. Then we sober up, sleep off our hangover, clean our house of hametz and sit down at the seder table to remember the threatened annihilation of our people in Egypt. Purim is the "corrupt" mode of remembrance and Pesach the "clean" mode. Then, just a week after Passover is over, we have a third holiday of remembrance in Yom Hashoah, the day of remembrance of the holocaust.
A month or so ago I was visiting with a friend -- not Jewish -- who had attended our Yom Hashoah service last year. He was deeply moved by it, and, or but, he made a comment which surprised me out of a certain kind of complacency. He spoke of hearing the very moving story told by our beloved Jay Frankston, about the portrait painted by Monique's father and returned to them decades after his death at nazi hands. My friend commented on the way that Jay shook with pain as he recounted the story. "That can't be healthy for him," observed my friend -- which was an interesting observation, because at that very moment, as we walked on the beach and conversed, our Jay was recovering from triple bypass surgery.
I don't tell this story to comment on Jay personally -- beyond saying how glad I am that he's up and around with us all again, recovering beautifully. Instead I tell it because it got me thinking from a slightly different perspective about historical memory in general and Jewish historical memory in particular.
Purim, Pesach and Yom Hashoah each recount the near-annihilation of the Jewish people. In each case the genocide was envisioned by a political leader to be carried out with the assistance of the host population. Scholars suggest these days that, while there is some archeological evidence of Hebrews residing in ancient Egypt, the mass enslavement and subsequent exodus is factually unlikely. If anything, it seems likely that all the non-native populations at the time of the building of the pyramids were taxed a certain amount of labor each year by the Pharaoh. The story of Purim seems to have no factual basis at all. Which is not to say that either story is "untrue" in the deepest sense. Obviously, even if not in Shushan or Egypt, the Jewish people have been enslaved and massacred over and over. Our vulnerability, especially when resident in foreign lands, is profoundly true. We might even say with the greatest sorrow that Yom Hashoah provides the factual, historical story for which the Pesach and Purim stories already prepared us through myth and archetype.
The question raised by my friend's comment is: in what ways is it "healthy" (or wise or good) to remember our experiences of near- or actual genocide? When he first asked me this question, it was almost impossible for me to respond. I laughed and said, "Well, there wouldn't be much left of Judaism if you took away the remembrance of historical oppression!" The mandate to "never forget" is so deeply ingrained in our tradition that it is almost impossible to imagine any other perspective. It's not just the three spring holidays, but Tisha B'av (recalling the destruction of the first and second temples and the consequent exiles,) the remembrance of the ten martyrs at Yom Kippur, prayers in every weekday Amidah cursing those of every generation bent on the destruction of Jews, the Torah portions recounting the Egyptian servitude and the treachery of Amalek -- not to even mention the documentation, art, literature, political advocacy, philosophical and theological connoitering which continue to emerge out of the experience of the holocaust -- not to mention the crucial work of defense against current antisemitism and the making of analogies in the mandate to defend against current genocides of other populations.
I am placing the holiday of Yom Hashoah right next to Purim and Pesach in this conversation, partly because they are right next to each other on the calendar. But Purim and Pesach differ from Yom Hashoah in at least one crucial way: whatever their factual basis, they recall events said to have happened thousands of years ago (the events of Passover are said to have happened roughly 3300 years ago, Purim's 2300 years ago.) We might ask ourselves what the remembrance of the holocaust will look like in 2000 years. Or what it should look like. We might note that the remembrance of the holocaust in our community and others today is in part at least about mourning individual people that we actually remember and comforting people whose lives were personally traumatized by the events of sixty years ago. So it is very different than ritually retelling a story that no one would remember were it not for the retelling.
Another crucial difference between the ancient holidays and the modern one is that the mandate of the tradition for Purim and Pesach both is to affirm that God saved us from annihilation, whether "with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm," as in the haggadah, or hidden, as in the miracles of Purim. When we reflect on the holocaust, by contrast, it is impossible to say that we were saved at all. That any survived at all is a great gift, but so much was lost as to defy gratitude or confidence.
But it is hard to be purely grateful or confident even in the recollection of Purim or Pesach. Even if the genocide was averted, we can certainly imagine the horror of the order to destroy male Jewish babies or the terror upon being informed that the king's decree of genocide could not be rescinded. And in both cases we have the deaths of our persecutors to contend with. Each year I flinch for a second when I hear that not only was the evil Haman strung up on the gallows of his own making, but so too were his ten sons (not to mention the 500 men of Shushan and 75,000 people of the provinces...) And of course the death of infants, even those of our enemies, is to horrible to be expunged by a drop of wine on our dinner plate. I have to believe that these sorrows lodge somewhere in our bodies, maybe in our heart muscles, with every retelling. I don't have an answer to this one, only more questions. The remembrance of our vulnerability in this world and of God's saving hand is the central truth of Judaism. It is the crucial issue, whatever the historical or personal particulars, that we are asked to reflect on in our lifetimes. Hopefully these reflections lead to hope and to generosity of spirit. Yet at the same time I think my friend is right. These remembrances also make us ill, weak and terrified -- individually and as a people. We are scarred by our holidays, as well as uplifted. Is it possible to have one without the other? Is it even desirable to go through life without these scars of historical memory? Something for us all to talk about at our seder tables, my dear friends. With all the complexity, I wish us all joyful holidays -- and a day to come when all historical suffering will just be a distant memory.
Copyright 1999 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Last updated 04/04/99 (rge)