Yom Hashoah Sermon April 30, 2011

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Yom Hashoah Sermon - Parsha KedoshimBernie Farber

At the very beginning of todays Torah reading we are provided

with an example of how one should make an offering to Hashem,

and one of the conditions under which such an offering may be

considered to be inadequate. These are referred to as rejected

offerings, or piggul.

In the course of this discussion our Sages make the very

common-sense observation that it is not enough to carry out the

commandments mechanically; one must perform them with the

right intentions. No big surprise, But here is the further thought

that really made me think:

The Talmud teaches that a rejection of an offering based on

piggul only occurs when the outward form of observance is

perfect, but the intent is flawed.

In other words, not only does intent count but so does the

alignment of inner intent with outward practice. It is almost as if

Hashem is saying You act perfectly because people can see

what you do, but you dont give a 100 per cent when only I can

see whats going on. How can such service be acceptable?

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We are being told something very important here. In our everyday

lives we speak of observing the spirit and/or the letter of the law

as if these represent two separate and viable choices. The Torah

begs to differ: outward observance without inner intent is a sham;

the spirit and the letter must coincide.

I must tell you my friends that this is a daunting message,

especially so since we are only a few days away from YomHashoah, and my heart is full, as it always is at this time of the

year, with the stories that my father told me of his experiences

during the war. It is at this time of the year that I feel the

heaviness of history upon me, and reflect on the truth of the

adage that we may sometimes feel that we are done with history,

but that history is never truly done with us.

Tomorrow, in Toronto, 3000 people will come together at Earl

Bales Park for the communitys annual commemoration of Yom

Hashoah. I do not have to tell those of you who have attended in

the past how meaningful this event is. For those who have neverattended I encourage you to do so.

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Held as it is in the shadow of the Holocaust Memorial, literally in

the shadow of the chimney, it represents a precious opportunity

for reflection, meditation and mourning both public and private.

But it also represents a challenge for us, the very challenge that

Parsha Kedoshim sets out for us in the form ofpiggul. I can

assure you that every element of the program has been

considered and implemented with the proper degree of

commitment and sensitivity. But what will we bring to the service?Will we see this as an opportunity to honour our precious

survivors and our perished brothers and sisters or will we fret

about the cold (or the wet) and shake our heads because the

sound is to loud or too soft. Will we bring the proper intent to this

moment? It is an opportunity to transcend the moment, to rise

above the moment, and to be in the moment. It requires a

supreme act of concentration that we do not always achieve.

The Torah understood understands - that we are not perfect.

One of the ways that our all too human nature reflects itself is

through a consideration of the Hebrew word for holiness. Wespeak of Kodesh holiness but we must contrast it with

Kadaysh immorality.

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The similarity of these words suggests to me that holiness and

immorality are not simply opposites but rather they exist at

opposite ends of the same continuum.

The difference of a few vowels explains the ease with which we

can slide from one extreme to the other. But what it also suggests

to me is that while we can never take our current status for

granted, we can also hope and work to improve our status. We

can renew ourselves and perfect our service in both letter and

spirit.

But there are challenges to be faced. Our very language gets in

the way.

Primo Levi spoke about the failure of language to fully convey

what was experienced by the men and women who found

themselves trapped within the Nazis Kingdom of Death.

Just as our hunger is not that of missing a meal, so ourway of being cold has need of a new word. We say'hunger', we say 'tiredness', 'fear', 'pain', we say 'winter'and they are different things. They are free words,created and used by free men who lived in comfort andsuffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer anew, harsh language would have been born; and only thislanguage could express what it means to toil the wholeday in the wind, with the temperature below freezing,wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket andtrousers, and in one's body nothing but weakness hungerand knowledge of the end drawing nearer.

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The profundity of this statement was brought home to me just a

few weeks ago when I attended the funeral of Esther Freiman, themother of our National President, Mark Freiman.

Mark told his mothers story, from her youth in Jaroslav to her

desperate survival in Sambir, and the life that followed here in

Canada. What struck me about Marks eulogy was not that he

was repeating the story that his mother had told to him, but rather

that he was recounted a story that his mother had never told him;

one that he had only over the years been able to piece together

through chance comments and his own research. In the Book of

Job, a servant comes to Job and tells him of a terrible disaster:

Thy sons and daughters were eating and drinkingin the house of their eldest brother, when therecame a mighty wind and beat upon the corners ofthe house, and it fell upon the young people andthey are dead; and I alone have escaped to tellthee.

In the Shoah there was no tale to tell. Those who had seen knew

that there were no words to truly describe what had befallen them,

leaving those who had not seen with imperfect words to describe

what they could not possibly understand.

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And those who survived the darkness must ask, as did my father

a survivor of a small Polish shtetle, How could this have

happened? Why me? What does it mean? What lessons can we

learn?

Almost 2,000 years ago the poet Ovid sadly observed how much

blind night there is in the minds and hearts of men. The

observation is true, yet it takes us no closer to the truth of the

matter. Perhaps Elie Wiesel brings us closer when, in one of his

essays, he suggests that there is little point in asking the question

where was G-d when a far more important and answerable

question is where was Man?

This is a question that has occupied me for my entire life. My

father, Max (of Blessed Memory) was one of two Jewish survivors

of Botchki, a small Polish town whose Jewish inhabitants were

transported by rail to Treblinka, and to oblivion. Included in that

transport was my fathers first family, including two half- brothers I

would never know Yitzchak and Sholom.

I mention their names today, in your presence, because at times

such as these it is important, beyond my ability to describe, to

replace numbers with names.

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Each victim of the wider Kingdom of Death, of the European war,

had a name, felt love, was loved. Laughed. Cried. And ultimately

was murdered by the Nazi hordes. Were all the names of these

victims known I would say to you, let us sit on the ground, pour

ashes on our head, and read these names until, weary with

speech and parched of throat, we would fall into silence. And in

that silence, in that absence of speech, we would come to

feelingly know what it is that has been stolen from us.

I stand here before you, and I am deafened by the silence. The

silence of a murdered generation. 1.5 million Jewish children.

The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietsche, once observed that

you needed to be careful when staring into the abyss, because

sometimes the abyss would stare back. This emptiness is all

around us. It is in the shoes at the Auschwitz museum that wait

for their owners to reclaim them, in eyeglasses that lie in tangled

piles without human sight to animate them. It is in places like

Treblinka, the death-place of my Fathers family, where nothing

remains but a simple monument and a field of jagged stones setinto the earth like the broken teeth of a mouth forever held open in

a silent scream.

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Stand in Treblinka or in Chelmno or Auschwitz or any other

outpost of the Kingdom of Death and you will feel the silence

press down on you, robbing you of speech.

The Shoah is the triumph of Nothingness. We perhaps cannot

realize today how nearly complete that triumph was. It was only in

1993 that I finally learned the fate of my fathers family, and the

approximate day of their death at a chance meeting in Bad

Arolsen Germany with the director of the International

headquarters of the Red Cross. It was there where I found myfathers DP Camp file with bits and pieces of information I never

knew before. A few years later I was overwhelmed when casually

browsing through the London Jewish News Book Review to find a

book on my fathers shtetle written by a former Jewish inhabitant

who left Poland years before the Holocaust began. The postscript

to the book written by the authors daughter after his death and

just prior to publication reads as follows:

Wellie Farber has not figured by name in this book, but was

one of Dovids English students in the late 1920's. He and

one companion jumped off a transport train on the way toTreblinka and hid in the forests for the remainder of the war

after which he obtained a visa for Venezuela, together with abrief transit visa for the United States. While there, he

managed to locate my father in Washington and told him of

the fate of the Botchki Jews. All had been transported to

Treblinka on November 2nd 1943. So far as he knew all had

gone immediately to the gas chambers. There were no other

survivors.

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Wellie Farber was my fathers nephew. While foraging for food

outside the Ghetto that fateful November night they were captured

by the Gestapo and put onto the cattle cars to death. He and my

father were the only two Jewish survivors of the Bocki ghetto.

Sadly, Wellie lost much of his memory of that horrible time and

was never able to tell my father his story of survival after they lost

each other in the woods of the Bielski forest. When my father

found him years after the war living in France he was no longer

the man he use to be.

With this information I was able, finally, to mark the yahrzeit of

my unknown brothers, indeed all the Jewish inhabitants of the

village, with the ancient words of the Kaddish. Can I even tell you

how painful it was for my father to carry the memory of his family

in his heart for his entire life and have no day on which to pray, no

place at which to kneel, no stone to lean against and weep?

It is too late for the murdered Jews of Europe. The world had its

opportunity to save them and did too little, too late. The deeds of

the righteous among the nations, represent a flickering spark of

humanity in a world gone dark, and offer a sharp rebuke to those

who say we had no choice or we did not know or it was not

our business.

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No words of mine can bring meaning or sense to the Shoah. But

commemorating the Shoah can bring hope to those who survived

and those who remember. We do not have to hate. We do not

have to kill. We do not have to destroy. We are not, as individuals

weak. We are not, as individuals, powerless. We can, as

individuals make a vital difference in the world around us. And in

so doing, we can at least show the victims of the Nazi madness

that their deaths had some effect on us, caused us to reflect,reconsider, and dare I say it, hope?

We must honour the graves of our parents, our brothers, our

sisters and our neighbours. And we must do this with forthright

action and with a commitment to ensure that never again will

murderers walk so freely among us. Never again will the demons

of the human spirit gain ascendancy. Never again will we turn a

blind eye to the torment of others. Only then will our words of

regret and hope be heard by our G-d and by the spirits of those

who surround us.

And today as we remember I am honoured to say that many

survivors, like my dear father, found a haven in Canada.

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They were and are the true heroes of this sad epoch in history.

Through their courage they found the strength where little was left

to start over again; to build new families and to leave a legacy of

hope, love and determination for their children and their

descendants to follow. To you I say thank you. To you I say Kol-

HaKavod. May your spirit and strength be as a light unto the

nations and a clarion call for all of us.

In the end my friends, we must show a fidelity to history andmemory - we must ensure that the mitzvah ofTikun Olam - the

exhortation for Jews to strive to repair the world remains

steadfast. We do this for ourselves, we do this for those whose

echoes were so murderously silenced - we do this for the

Yitzhaks and Sholoms - whose still small voices call out from the

grave Zachor- remember.

Shabbat Shalom

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Yom Hashoah Sermon April 30, 2011