Holocaust Memorial in Israel: Of Trauma & Trust

Last Saturday night I saw a documentary called Hiding and Seeking which describes the attempt by Menachem Daum to leave his children an ethical legacy in a Shlomo Carlebach ‘love every human because they were all created in God's image' type of style. Overshadowing everyone's relationship in the film is the specter of the Shoah, which destroyed much of the Menachem and his wife Rivka's parents' families (although Rivka's father spent 28 months hidden in a pit under a haystack in the farmyard of a non-Jewish Polish family, the Muchas). And while the past (unsurprisingly) causes their parents to be suspicious of 'the goyim', what worries Menachem is how the Holocaust has also reinforced his children's' ambivalence towards the secular non-Jewish world and anything outside the four cubits of Jewish law.

In a moving journey to discover more about their past, Menachem takes his sons on a pilgrimage to Poland, ultimately finding the family who hid their ancestors and discovering that wars not only bring out the worst in people but also the best. The film concludes with a Yad Vashem ceremony in which Honorata and Wojciech Mucha are presented with a righteous gentile award and the two families forge an inter-generational bond.

While the film deals with the Holocaust's role in affecting individual Jews, the question of how the trauma has shaped us on a national level has also been in the news. Last month Mohatma Gandhi's grandson wrote of how Jewish identity is locked into the holocaust experience and that we have become a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs. On a different but related note, Avrum Burg recently argued that the experience of the Holocaust has become the primal, meta-fear of Israeli society and that unless we move from trauma to trust, Israeli society has no hope of preventing national disaster.

One doesn’t have to agree with Ghandi and Burg completely (and I don’t) to realize that our 'checkered' past with the outside world has a subconscious influence on our approach to foreign policy. In fact, early Zionism was an attempt to liberate Jews from what was perceived as an ontological status of exile, of caring too much what the Gentiles thought of us (something Amos Oz describes beautifully in his book A Tale of Love and Darkness).

The creation of the State and a new Hebrew Sabra who would no longer care what the world thought was supposed to finalize this process. As Ben Gurion quipped in the 1950, ‘it no longer matters what the goyim say, but what the Jews do.’ An echo of this approach can still be heard today (often at Shabbat meals I attend) by those claiming that a proud Jewish leadership would stick two fingers up to the world (who stood by as we were being slaughtered) and do what's good for the Jews.

We mark the unimaginable evils of the Holocaust on the 27th January, 10 days after the anniversary of the disappearance of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who saved thousands of Jews during the war. Both days reflect the potential of the humanity. Yet we seem to concentrate more on one than the other.

So as Israel marks this years' international Holocaust Memorial Day with continued comparisons between then and now, perhaps we - as citizens of the state with the most powerful regional army, an assumed nuclear capacity and the support of the sole global superpower - should consider whether continued distrust of the outside world is liberating us or actually handicapping us from taking our rightful place in the family of nations.

It’s inevitable that the wounds of the past scar us, and the existential fear of many Israelis (including mine) over our future here is legitimate. But 60 years on, maybe we should harness the memory of Wallenberg and the countless other righteous gentiles like the Muchas to inspire us to become open and confident enough to begin the process of learning to trust again, of believing we can take risks.

Because ultimately, perhaps its this that marks the completion of our ongoing Zionist journey from an exilic past into a genuine independent free and sovereign future.

p.s anyone who thinks this blog should be updated more often should read this story