Joy, Grief, and Jewish Peoplehood - Shemini Atzeret 5786
On the second yahrzeit of 10/7, let's resolve to settle with God over this one.
At a rally last Saturday night / motza-ei Shabbat in Jerusalem, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh was held in captivity until he was murdered by Hamas 11 months after October 7, said the following:
We are all elated and relieved for the families who will please, please, please, please finally get their children and loved ones back alive. It is what every one of us has worked and prayed for these 736 torturous and inexplicable days. And at the exact same time, we embrace with tenderness the families of children and loved ones who we pray will come back to be buried. How do we hold these paradoxical and yet appropriate sensations at the same time? Please, dear God, let us do it with delicate tenderness and holiness toward each other.
She captured what I believe to be the real tension in this moment: the overflowing joy of seeing the living hostages returning to their homes, families, and communities, coinciding with the awful feeling of knowing that the remaining 28 will return in body bags, if their bodies can indeed be found at all. And, as one people, we must have room in our hearts for all of their families.
This is one of the essential understandings of what it means to be Am Yisrael / the people of Israel: that we understand ourselves to be connected to one another across continents and politics. That we feel one another’s happiness and grief, and sometimes at the same time.
We read this morning in the Torah the passage in Deuteronomy (16:14-15) about Sukkot, that in this season we are supposed to be supremely joyful in this season. It has become the most popular song of Sukkot:
וְשָׂמַחְתָּ֖ בְּחַגֶּ֑ךָ… וְהָיִ֖יתָ אַ֥ךְ שָׂמֵֽחַ׃
Vesamaḥta beḥagekha… vehayyita akh sameaḥ
You shall rejoice on your holiday… and you shall have nothing but joy.
The Torah urges us to have nothing but joy on these days.
But of course, this day in particular, Shemini Atzeret, is also a day made much more complicated by the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in addition to the most recent events. We must continue to mourn those who were brutally murdered by terrorists on this day two years ago.
This day, laden with ancient joy, with current optimism for at least a ceasefire and perhaps normalization with a host of Arab nations, and of course made more painful by the events of the last two years and indeed the last two days, has become quite consequential in the arc of Jewish history.
Even as we continue to grieve for those nearly 1200 souls whose lives were stolen from them for nothing more than living in the State of Israel, I hope that we can also acknowledge the weightiness of the current moment for the Jewish people.
To help illuminate this, I am going to tell a brief story about a man named Moshe Ridler, whose life tells volumes about the Jewish people, framed by Torah and the landmark events of the 20th and 21st centuries.
He was born in Romania in 1931, and when he was ten years old, he was deported with his family by the Nazis on Simḥat Torah of 5702 / 1941. They were sent on a 300-km march to a ghetto, and then to labor camps. At age 11, Moshe remained in the ghetto for several months, but was ultimately able to flee. When the war was over, he returned to his home town, and waited and waited at his family’s synagogue to see if anybody else would return. Eventually his sister Feige and his father Zelig did so. His mother and sister did not.
In 1951, Moshe made his way to the newly-established State of Israel, where he became a prominent Tel Aviv police detective.
Later in life, he relocated to Kibbutz Ḥolit, in the Gaza envelope, where he was an active grandfather-at-large to the kibbutz.
On Simḥat Torah, 5784 / 2023, Moshe and his Romanian caregiver, Petro Bushkov, were murdered by Hamas terrorists. Moshe was in his bed at the time; he was 92 years old.
His story is captured in the collection by Haaretz journalist Lee Yaron titled 10/7: 100 Human Stories, as well as in newspaper accounts (like this one).
Simḥat Torah is a day on which we celebrate the foundational story of the Jewish people by completing the reading of the Torah and starting over once again from the beginning. Our history as a people is filled with stories – of individuals, of families, of groups – containing passages similar to that of Moshe Ridler’s life.
Our patriarch Avraham, who left his home in Ur Kasdim to start anew in Canaan, the place that would ultimately be renamed for his grandson Ya’aqov / Yisrael.
Moshe Rabbeinu, who fled Egypt, but must return there to free his people from slavery.
The exiles who were forced to leave Israel by the Babylonians, and returned a few generations later to rebuild the Temple.
Those taken as slaves by the Romans when they destroyed the Temple and laid waste to Jerusalem a second time, and the rabbis who took it upon themselves to create a non-Temple-based Judaism, which we continue to practice today.
The Crusades; the Black Death; the Chmielnitzki massacres; the Inquisition; the Hep-Hep riots in Germany in 1819; the Dreyfus affair; the Shoah: All forced us, in the wake of violence, to start over.
Those of us who arrived on these shores due to poverty, antisemitism, genocide, and those who sought new opportunities denied them in the old country.
The idea of moving and starting anew is not only heavily featured in our history, it is also baked into the Jewish calendar and Jewish ritual. Ours has been a history of upheaval and movement, often under threat of violence, always under the authority of others, never being allowed to exercise our own self-determination. That is, until the Zionist movement began in the mid-19th century.
Let us hope that the end of this war and, God willing, the re-starting of the process that will, we hope, lead to a two-state solution, will bring us all to a place where we can begin to heal and rebuild and rededicate and reconsecrate maybe even fulfill the dream of living in peace with our neighbors.
The story of Moshe Ridler is a tale for our times which captures the essence of Jewish peoplehood today. He was a survivor who helped build the Jewish state, and died a martyr at the hands of terrorists. His life was bookended not only by Simḥat Torah, but also by people who sought to kill the Jews; his fate determined by a loathing of our people.
What I hope for us all is that his story, an arc which has repeated throughout Jewish history, will not be yet one more retold in vain on Shemini Atzeret or Simḥat Torah. May it be instead a cautionary lesson for the future, and may it contain just a glimpse of a better time to come.
R. Levi Yitzḥaq of Berdichev (1740-1810 Poland/Ukraine) is known to have brought a “din toyre,” a heavenly lawsuit against the Qadosh Barukh Hu, the Holy Blessed One. He demands of God, why is it that we have to suffer? Why is it that the Babylonians and the Romans and the Germans and the British built tremendous, powerful empires, at the hands of which the Jews have suffered, and for everything that You have promised us, God, all the Jews have is Mourner’s Kaddish?
There is no conclusion to the din toyre; the Yiddish poem about it, set to music by the art song composer Yoel Engel (1868 Crimea - 1927 Tel Aviv), concludes as follows:
From my stand I will not waver,
And from my place I shall not move
Until there be an end to all this.
Magnified and sanctified be Thy Name.
Lo ozuz mimkoymi! ‘Khvel zikh fun ort nit rirn!
Un a sof zol dos zayn! Un an ek zol dos nemen!
Yisgadal veyiskadash shemei rabbo!
(Paul Robeson recorded Engel’s melody in English translation, although reportedly performed it in Yiddish as well.)
The most well-known midrash regarding Shemini Atzeret is that a King has been celebrating a seven-day festival with his subjects, and then they are about to clear out and go home, and the King says, “Wait! Stay with me one more day. Don’t let the party end just yet.” Whenever there is a king in a midrash, it is of course a stand-in for God, and the subjects are us. The midrash is saying, God wants us to stay for one more festival day, an eighth day. Shemini Atzeret.
Nobody asked me, but if R. Levi Yitzḥaq’s case against the Qadosh Barukh Hu is still open, our response should be, sure, God, we’ll stay another day. But we want assurances. In the vein of R. Levi Yitzḥaq, we need to push back a little on this one.
The Jewish people are tired. Israelis are tired. In the Diaspora, we are tired too. We want peace. We want our people to live securely, lihyot am ḥofshi be-artzeinu, to be a free people in our land. And we want to be safe and proud wherever we are. So God, we’ll settle.
We know that there is a long road in front of us with many details to be worked out. But the Jewish people need a break, and we need a homeland that is a safe haven, not just for the Moshe Ridlers who survived the Holocaust, but for all of us, and not just for the Jews, but for the Arab Muslims and Christians and Druze who are respected citizens of the State of Israel as well. We’ll settle for assurances of safety, of life, of thriving in the land of our ancestors.
May the qedoshim, the holy martyrs who were massacred two years ago on this day, on their yahrzeit, never be forgotten. And may our memory of them, of fellow members of Am Yisrael, drive us to a place of peace, a place where the cycle of destruction, of persecution, of hatred and murder comes to an end.
May we all be given the opportunity to start again, as we have done throughout our history. And then we should have nothing but joy as we celebrate and dance with the Torah.
That is the only thing that I will settle for as we move forward. Let’s make it happen.