She snatched the book out of my hands and asked, in a scandalised tone, where I had found it.
"In the library!" I answered, hurt and puzzled at her reaction. I was a bit (okay, a lot) of a teacher's pet in those days, and this teacher in particular was very indulgent toward me. I expected a pat on the head for my curiosity, but instead I received a rebuke.
"Little girls should not look at things like that!" she responded angrily. "You should be enjoying your childhood!"
She refused to translate the words for me, saying that I didn't need to know "things like that."
But as I progressed into the higher grades, my religious studies teachers proved to have a rather different attitude. My school became more hardline and the newly hired Orthodox teachers were reactionaries, not intellectuals in the tradition of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom I admire very much. I am sorry to say that some of them taught us the Holocaust was a divine punishment for the Jewish people becoming secular.
Even at that young age, I didn't buy the divine punishment explanation. Then why were so many religious Jews murdered? I wondered (but didn't ask). And babies and children? And if God is full of mercy, then why would he mete out such a terrible punishment? And furthermore, were my teachers trying to imply that non-Jews didn't suffer as well? And weren't they God's creation too? And so on and so on.
No, this was not an epiphany. I did not decide to reject religion because I had some stupid, thoughtless teachers. I was a pretty religious child; my evolution toward secularism took place much later, in early adulthood - incrementally, with much thought, and not as a result of any specific incident.
I did not like the way we were taught about the Holocaust in school. I did not like the message that we Jews were a hunted, tragic people. But still, I was obsessed - for many years - with trying to understand that incomprehensible evil. My sisters used to laugh at me a little, because I went through a long stage of reading everything I could lay my hands on - from Anne Frank's diary to much more explicit historical documents that gave me nightmares. Once they asked if I could name all the concentration camps in alphabetical order. And it turned out that I could. (I can't, anymore).
I remember the time my mother whispered to me, at the kiddush lunch following a cousin's bar mitzvah ceremony, that the relative at the next table - the one who had just pinched my cheeks and told me what a beautiful young lady I was becoming - had been a Mengele twin. Where is his twin? I asked. In and out of mental hospitals, answered my grandmother.
Even today, I still see old people in Tel Aviv with the tell-tale tattoo number on their forearms. And I shiver every time.
I've given up trying to understand why it happened. I think I just undrerstand that not everything can be understood - like the human capacity to be cruel. And the power of mass psychosis.
I'm late with this post about Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day). Last night I was busy being depressed - because I always get depressed on the eve of Yom HaShoah - and watching the news about the horrendous terror attack on Dahab, which made me even more depressed. And today I was busy with more prosaic stuff. But I did purposely choose to have my morning coffee at the outdoor coffee bar on Rothschild Boulevard, so that I would be able to participate in that awesome collective moment - the siren that marks two minutes of silence, when an entire nation stands still and remembers.
But still, even though I remember, I am ambivalent about how we should remember - and so is my sister, as she wrote in this powerful post.
And as for the issues of God and faith after the Holocaust, I think that this article by Yair Sheleg in today's Haaretz sums things up rather well.
And Bradley Burston also wrote a nice piece, too. Read the full article here, and I'll end this post with an excerpt.
"Sixty years on, the Holocaust bears different lessons for all of us. Some believe that the lesson is do unto others before they do unto you. Others believe that the lesson has much more to do with compassion and tolerance even when it may seem undeserved, when the blood cries vengeance. War does that to you. It replaces compassion with hatred.
Just this once, however, it might be time to look at the Holocaust for what it remains - a wound that will never heal, an experience that is beyond our experience, comprehension, or puny, wrongheaded automatic comparisons to current events.
Just this once, after all these years, let us honor the victims and survivors with introspection, with compassion, with modesty, with respect, with awe."
