Why? A Drash for Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) 27 April 2014

I was living in Europe in the year 2005, for the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe.  There were celebrations as well as solemn services.  Veterans of the war, from both sides, gathered to remember.  As the only rabbi then assigned to US forces on the European mainland, I took part in several of these gatherings.  In each one, ambiguous feelings about the ear and its aftermath were expressed.  This was a reflection of the ambiguity that had engulfed the Continent 60 years before.

In 1945, for a continent at war for almost six years, it was as if the darkness had finally lifted and ‘normal’ life could resume.  But there would be no return to ‘normality’ for Europe.  There was too much destruction, there were too many dead and displaced.  And there were too many unanswered questions.

          For the Western Allies, the cause of the war was totally unambiguous.  The totalitarian Nazi regime in Germany had sought to rule the entire continent, and very nearly succeeded.  The British and Soviet Empires alone held out to fight back.  And later, when the Americans joined the battle, the Nazi machine was overwhelmed.

          So the question of why the war had taken place, was not difficult to answer.  But other questions eluded the intellect.  And they still do.  How could such a hateful, racist ideology engulf and motivate an entire ‘advanced’ nation?  So much so that it is often said, the Nazis’ obsession with the Jews and other racial ‘enemies’ of the German Volk, was what lost them the war by consuming resources that would otherwise have been brought to bear against the Allies?

          During the war, there were rumours and eyewitness accounts of Nazi atrocities.  And there was credible word of the death-camps, after the Wannsee Conference resulted in their establishment.  But it was not until the Western armies began to break through eastward, and the Soviets westward, that the enormity of the industrialised regime of abuse, killing and destruction became clear.  And if the enormity of the crime could not be quite comprehended then, the ensuing 69 years have not brought much more clarity.

We have gained a better understanding of how the Nazis managed to destroy the world of the Jews of Europe.  We understand the mechanics of how it was done.  We understand how the Nazi propaganda machine made the Jews into Public Enemy Number One.  We think we can begin to understand the totality of the terror, and the enormity of the suffering of the victims.  But we still can’t seem to comprehend the why of it all.

          If the passage of time has not brought any more clarity, then recent events only worsen the confusion.  Despite everything, despite that the Shoah was the culmination of centuries of persecution of the Jews of Europe, some remained and rebuilt their lives.  Even in Ukraine, site of perhaps the worst example of a local population participating gleefully in the destruction of the Jews.  Of cooperating, in the matter of the Jews, with their hated occupiers.  Today in Ukraine, the estimated Jewish population is 67,000.  This, from an estimated 2.7 million Jews in Ukraine on the eve of the Second World War.

          But last week, masked men handed out leaflets to Jews emerging from the remaining synagogue in Donetsk.  These leaflets, calculated to evoke terrible memories, ordered the Jews to register with the local authorities, on pain of losing their citizenship if they did not.  Who exactly were these masked men?  Nobody’s claiming them as the world expresses its ‘revulsion.’  But in reality, it isn’t that important who they were.  The important point is that, almost 70 years after the Shoah, some local forces sought to use the Jews as objects for terror, and to use them as a wedge in the dispute between the pro-Russian and pro-Western factions.

          Last week, I wondered why there are any Jews still living in Ukraine.  I said it then and repeat it now, realizing that I am flirting with controversy by doing so.  How can I say that we should give in to evil forces that want to make vast swaths of the world Judenrein?  But my point is not that we should capitulate to evil.  Rather, those who live in such places should ask themselves; how long must they continue to live with the misery of never quite belonging to the place of their habitations?

          But that’s a question that only Ukrainian Jews can answer.  I cannot, but I wish I could intellectually grasp an answer.  Just as I wish I could grasp an answer as to why, nearly 70 years on and with such a tiny remnant still there, someone in Ukraine should seek to single out the Jews to use as a wedge in this way.

          But intellectually grasping an answer to this question will have to wait.  As will grasping an answer – a really, good answer – as to why the Jews would merit the persecutions of centuries of Europeans at all.  Culminating in the Ultimate persecution, the Nazi Death Machine.  But sadly, an intellectual grasp is not yet forthcoming.  Today we cannot yet understand why.  Today we can only remember.