Today

At the remains of the Mila 18 bunker 

What a difference a day makes! Right?

Yesterday, the NFTYites and I awoke in a chilly, rainy Warsaw. We spent a full day visiting important sites and learning about the history of Warsaw’s Jewish community and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  Along with a new friend, I was also treated to some sites then group did not visit, including the main Synagogue in Warsaw. At day’s end we headed off to the airport for our overnight flight to Israel.  This morning we arrived in a hot and humid Israel.

Before leaving the Warsaw, I sat with another of the Eisner groups to listen in as they unpacked, not only their visit to Warsaw, but their entire Eastern European experience.  Yet again I found myself deeply touched and inspired by their words.  They reflected on Prague and Terezin, Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the many stories of horror and courage they heard along the way. They recalled specific moments and they remembered stories they’d heard. One young man called the experience “humbling.”  I dare say that few, if any, among the 79 Eisner participants, not to mention the other 140 others in our larger contingent left Eastern Europe the same people they were just a week ago when we touched down at the Prague Airport.

Over the final days of our visit, especially while we were at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I found myself recalling a poem by Avraham Shlonsky which was in the Gates of Prayer as a part of the liturgy for Yom HaShoah. It’s called “The Oath” --

In the presence of eyes

which witnessed the slaughter, 

which saw the oppression the heart could not bear, 

and as witness the heart that once taught compassion 

until the days came to pass 

that crushed human feeling. 

I have taken an oath: 

To remember it all, 

to remember, not once to forget! 

Forget not one thing to the last generation 

when the degradation shall cease, 

to the last, to its ending, 

when the rod of instruction shall have come to conclusion. 

An oath: 

Not in vain passed over 

The night of the terror. 

An oath: 

No morning shall see me

At flesh-pots again. 

An oath: 

Lest from this we learned nothing.

I had wished I’d had those words at our closing Tekes (ceremony) at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I was only able to recall the ending, which I shared.  I have little doubt that the young people with whom I had the privilege to share this pilgrimage will not forget what they have seen and learned.  Surely facts and details will slip from memory. Yet, I have faith that their hearts and souls, as well as their identity as Jews, committed Jews, has been deepened.  I pray that they – and I – will not only remember, but will weave what we have learned into the fabric of our lives, “lest from this we learned nothing.”

Today, my young friends are resting near Tel Aviv. I am sitting in one of my favorite cafes in Jerusalem as I await the start of my ten days of study at the Shalom Hartman Institute with some 150 rabbinic colleagues and some of the most important teachers I have ever had.  Tomorrow, our studies will plunge us into Israeli and Jewish history – and unavoidably the conflicts which are erupting all around our people, both here in Israel and at home in North America.  There’s so much work to do.  That’s for tomorrow and the days to come.

Today I sit and process the past week. As Miles Stern, an Eisner participant from my home congregation put it in our closing circle: The question we must ask ourselves is, “what impact has this experience had on how we see the Holocaust?” It was a magnificent reframe of the question put to our teens. Indeed, how has this experience impacted these young people – and I ask myself as well.  As I shared with the group, the answer lies partly in how that impact and that answer guides us as we live in this complicated world.

Tomorrow will come. Today, as it was a few days, ago I am feeling uplifted and hopeful from the time I spent with these magnificent young people. I am especially grateful to have shared this experience with many young people I have shared other experiences with over the years at camp. (I hope to see many of them back at camp on Yom Olim in August – if not on Jerusalem’s pedestrian mall at the end of Shabbat later this week.) For today, I send them the sweetest of wishes for the adventures that lie ahead as they travel Israel over the coming four weeks.