| | "These Bones are the Whole House of Israel": Reflections on my Daughter's Journey
A Weekly Briefing on Israeli and Middle Eastern Affairs
March 13, 2006 Dr. Eran Lerman
Director Israel/Middle East Office Early this morning my daughter Yasmin came back from her long-awaited journey to Poland, and all other pressing issues that crowd my day-the din of political rivalries at election time; the rising threats of radical Islamism; even the day-to-day practicalities that surround the upcoming AJC Board of Governors Institute Centennial event in Israel next week-were pushed aside for the moment: My wife and I just wanted to hear what was on her mind. Tired, a bit overwhelmed, reflective, she admitted, "I thought I knew a lot; I thought I understood"-and indeed, literature about the Holocaust, survivors' stories, novels, and documentaries have been by her bedside since she became a bat-mitzvah- "and yet now I feel that I understand less than when I went." It will take time for the full impact to register. For now, first in her thoughts are the remarkable people who went with her group, an excellent young Israeli guide and the two witnesses-Holocaust survivors who now see it as their mission, perhaps their last purpose, to accompany these school excursions: Yehiel, an 84-year-old man who sat on his bunk in Birkenau and cried; and Dalia, who as a small child, born in the Land of Israel, went to Europe for a family visit and was swept into the vortex of ghetto confinement and the struggle for survival. Then came the fierce pride that went hand in hand with the pain: She spoke of herself and her friends leaving Maidanek-where bone shards were still visible amid the heaped ash of humans-with their heads held high and with their Israeli flags spread wide; of standing, 360 strong, at the Warsaw Ghetto monument, reciting poetry, singing Hatikva; of what it meant to come home, away from the place where the shadows of hate still haunted them everywhere. It is precisely this surge of pride and this sense of attachment-not only to the friends with whom she shared the experience, but to the story of our survival as a people, to the fate of Jews as such-which continues to trouble observers, in Israel and beyond, who fear that this "narrative" will feed a narrow nationalist outlook. But can there be any reckoning, any understanding, of who we are and what drives us, what underlies the almost urgent intensity of our life-indeed, of our joy of life, our joie de vivre-here in Israel, without this peek into the abyss? Ezekiel comes easily, powerfully, to mind: "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say, 'Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost; we are doomed.'... And I shall put my Spirit in you, and you will live, and I will place you in your own land" (Ezekiel 37:11-14).
Translated into the language of our present realities, what has made this prophesy so vivid for our time is not simply that the heartrending powerlessness of the Jewish people a mere two and a half generations ago has now been replaced by the sovereign might of an independent state, the physical ability to defend ourselves and to offer refuge-complemented by, and interdependent with, the organized political influence of the other wing of the Jewish people of today, in the United States. It is not only power that matters here: It is the moral redemption from the bottomless pit of degrading helplessness. This is the ultimate insight imparted by this journey, to the daughters and sons of a free people in a free land, for whom the gifts they enjoy as a birthright would not have been quite so meaningful were they not given to see where we came from: "And behold, there were very many in the open valley" (Ezekiel 37:2). Moreover, there is nothing wrong with reminding ourselves that the powerful intellectual poisons that gave rise to the project of exterminating all Jews through the industrialization of mass murder are still with us. The circumstances of Israel's birth-and of the Palestinians' tragedy-are directly related (even if some Israelis, let alone Palestinians, try to suppress this fact) to the manner in which the Palestinian leadership of that time allied itself with Adolf Hitler. Saddam Hussein and many in his generation saw the Nazis as their models. Today the Hamas covenant, written in 1988, and still upheld and inculcated through education and propaganda, borrows heavily from the Nazi interpretation of history. So does Muhammad Ahmadinejad's perversion of Shi'a Islam. Across the globe, Holocaust-deniers and exterminatory anti-Semites are still at work.
And yet, as my son is always keen to remind me-based on his own powerful reflection on the same journey, which has become an essential, indeed a central, part of the year for eleventh graders all over Israel-we must not lose sight of the universal lessons; we must remember those who perished side by side with the Jews-gays; the retarded; the local intellectuals and elites; Roma people ("gypsies")-or suffered similarly under the Nazi yoke. Indeed, we must redouble our efforts to see what can be done to stay the hand of those who still harbor genocidal purposes-in Darfur and other tribal conflicts in Africa; the "insurgents" in Iraq against all Shi'a, men, women and children; some totalitarian regimes, from North Korea to Zimbabwe, against their own people or at least large segments of them. Our own transformation, the immense distance we have traveled from that valley, can serve to remind us, and not us alone, that our actions can make a difference.
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