OUR HOLOCAUST, BUT NOT OURS ONLY

Huffington Post
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April 7 2010

This coming Sunday evening in Israel and around the Jewish world,
is the Holocaust Remembrance Day (in Hebrew, ‘Yom Ha’Shoah’). It
is a well-known, accepted and respected reality amongst the Jewish
people that the horrors of World War II and the atrocities against
the Jewish people are a national tragedy. Few, however, are aware that
this national tragedy became a de facto national strategy, as well.

A few years ago I addressed this concept in my book titled, The
Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes (Palgrave Macmillan
2008). In the book I argued that we must always remember the victims,
their hopes, prayers and legacies, but we should never allow ourselves
to live, or get permanently stuck, in that traumatic past. I fully
believe that we have to think about our today and tomorrow differently
than this terrible past. Therefore, I offered a new national strategy
in which we, as a people, can and must move from trauma to trust. Many
were incapable of listening to me and to such ideas and rejected it
outright, while others embraced it with enthusiasm. Of those who
accepted my proposal were my teachers and mentors; my children. I
would like to share with you several passages from the book that were
inspired by their wisdom. I hope to convey through these excerpts the
origin of my proposed strategy and the importance of implementing it
today for ourselves and for our future generations:

"I look at the photos that my children send me from their travels
around the world. I try to perceive the faraway landscapes from their
vantage point and to share their experience through the images. They
travel not only to distance themselves from the impure experiences
of an army, war, occupation, corruption and cynicism, but also in
search of other landscapes, spiritual ones. The new spirituality that
is revealed to them is contained in their letters home. We miss you,
Dad, we long and yearn to be with you, but we find here what we don’t
have at home. We love and want to love even more. We, the generation
of the new age, are open to and enriched by meetings and encounters
with whatever is different from us. We are not threatened and do not
keep to ourselves; on the contrary. My children, our children, seek
an encounter with worlds that have not been tainted with the bloody
Shoah. They search for a spirituality that is based on dialogue, not
trauma. They seek the calm of Buddhist countries and want to bring it
back home with them to put us all on a softer course of life that is
accepting and containing, not hostile, suspicious, sharp-edged and
rejects all. They are children who touch the spiritual even though
they are not religious…"

"The new paradigms that originated from the Shoah must be sensitive
and directed toward the creation of a better human and better humanity,
toward people and cultures that will never again produce slaughterers
like the Nazis and will not allow victimization. One law will be
in the land for the persecuted of the entire world, whatever group:
Armenian, Gypsy, Jew, homosexual, migrant, or a refugee from Rwanda,
Cambodia, or Palestine. The new theology, especially the Jewish one,
must break out of the boundaries of the old faith and make the faith in
the human, God’s creation, a tenet of its legacy and traditions, as a
mandatory basis for a dialogue between the believers of all faiths…"

‘Two people emerged from Auschwitz,’ wrote Professor Yehuda Elkana,
a wise man, a Shoah survivor, and an early mentor to me, ‘a minority
that claims ‘this will never happen again,’ and a frightened majority
that claims: ‘this will never happen to us again.’"

During this sad and moving weekend, when I will think about my dear
ones, the innocents who were perished at the hands of the Nazis, I
will be comforted by the wisdom of my children and my teachers. And
again, as in previous years, I will renew my vow: Never Again! Not
just for us — the Jews — only, but for all of humanity. "For this
is the whole duty of man" (Ecclesiastes, Ch. 12 v.13).