I never know what to do on Yom Hashoah. Some students read names in the library foyer – a powerful experience, especially in a room with vaulted ceilings where sound reverberates throughout the entrence of the building. Some educators strive to reach out, to teach the messages of the Holocaust so that everyone, not just Jews or people who have been affected, will understand the implications it carries. Some honor a relative affected by the tragedy. And I sit in silence, waves of pain and recognition crashing down, wondering if there’s anything I can do to wrap my head around it.
Usually, I cope with disaster by intellectualizing it. Economists explain behavior in terms of rational utility maximization – I name social, political, economic, psychological factors in a way to explain the inexplicable. Nearly every facet of Jewish culture post 1945 grapples with the Holocaust in some way. And that’s because there are some things that you can’t assimilation. Some things so horrible that you will never be able to understand, no matter how many justifications are given, some things that are so painful that long after trials at Nuremberg, reparations and condolences have been doled out and forgiveness supposedly granted, you still wonder why.
And then they tell you it didn’t happen. Which shouldn’t matter, except it does, because, well, how could it not? They can believe whatever they want:it’s not the denial itself that I have a problem with, but rather the incontrovertible suppression of sentiment. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – how dare you tell me I don’t have the right to be upset. Regardless of religious affiliation or practice, regardless of race, ethnicity, or any of the other divisive walls we’ve enacted as a society to celebrate our own differences, this is not a Jewish tragedy. This is a human one. As are all genocides, rapes, and other violations of human rights both past and present.
So maybe that’s why I will never know what to do. As a writer, I’m supposed to be able to comment on every situation. But some depths of humanity render me speechless, and until we, as a collective, learn how to address our urges to maim, torture, and kill each other, I think I’ll keep my mouth shut.
