How Should We Commemorate a Simchat Torah Massacre?

Increasingly, our Ask-the-Rabbi team has been fielding concerns around the brutal massacre that occurred last Simchat Torah. How will we commemorate it? How can we dance, sing, and celebrate with the memory of what took place on that day? Isn’t that what the Yizkor memorial ceremony is about? Should we all say Yizkor?

Some of these, at least in part, are halachic questions. We can shoot out an answer for those. But for all them, there needs to be some room for discussion. The gamut of subjective human experience has to be taken into account. Each of us experiences life differently, so that celebration and mourning have different meanings to different people.

At any rate, I don’t think that’s our job as rabbis—simply to act as Q&A input-output devices. Rather, it’s to facilitate learning and understanding and to bring us all to a deeper realization of what it means to be a Jew

So let’s look at how Jews have dealt with such situations in the past—and there has been no shortage of them—and find some guidance there.

Commemoration Versus Commiseration

First, a general observation:

Commemoration is very Jewish. Commemoration, however, is not commiseration. Commemoration sustains us a people. Commiseration strangles us.

Judaism relies on a shared memory that holds us together, a story that explains ourselves to ourselves. We live inside a story much as others live inside a country.

Take an Italian out of Italy, and within a generation or two, you’ve taken Italy out of the Italian. A Jew, no matter where in the world, remains a Jew. But a Jew who steps outside the Jewish narrative is a fish on dry land, a man on the moon without a spacesuit.

That doesn’t mean we live in the past. Quite the contrary, the fascinating thing about this story is that it is about our children much more than it is about our ancestors.

In fact, with a memory of an event that had not yet come, we became a nation. That’s the mother of all Jewish memory, so let’s revisit it.

When our masses assembled to leave Egypt, as the story’s climax was about to unfold, the grand march onward was still a dream, and the Promised Land a far journey. Brilliantly, Moses addressed the people and told them, “Remember this day.”1 Remember this present moment for what it will mean to your children yet unborn.

Moses didn’t tell us to ensure our children would know how Egypt duped us and oppressed us. He didn’t tell us never to let go of the suffering and trauma we had survived. He didn’t say, “Never forget the sting of Pharaoh’s whip!” He told us to remember the day we left all that behind.

He told us, in other words, that commemoration of the past isn’t about the past at all. It is about the future. It is a story we tell our children so that they will know who they are and carry our vision forward.

When the Adults Forget the Story

Commiseration, on the other hand, is entirely about the past. And it buries us there.

When I was a child, our community built a large, beautiful JCC. I recall stepping through the large aluminum and glass main doors as an adolescent. The first sight to assault my eyes was an enormous mural portraying skeletons and starving figures behind barbed wire.

Eventually, a youth lounge was designated. The mural was moved there, to cover an entire wall. Someone on the executive felt this was the best means to inspire the younger generation to be good Jews. But for me, it was only more material for nightmares.

And it stung us all with a question itching deep inside, if never spoken: Why would I want to be part of a suffering, persecuted people, a people who present themselves as dry bones in a wire cage?

The adults, quite clearly, had forgotten the story. The glory of liberation from Egypt, the promise to return to the land that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had tread, the covenant with the Maker of Heaven and Earth to be a holy nation—all had been tossed into the bin of legend and mythology for Charlton Heston and Cecil B. DeMille.

All they had left to offer was meaningless suffering. Because they got stuck in the past.

Betar and Thanksgiving

How, then, are Jews to commemorate a massacre?

One of the most horrific massacres of Jews, under the most disastrous circumstances, was the Roman butchery of the great metropolis of Betar. It occurred 52 years after the devastation of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple.

The Jerusalem Talmud paints a picture of Roman cavalry sadistically spilling the blood of every man, woman, and child until their horses were in it up to their nostrils. It was a calculated measure of the Empire to not only quash the Bar Kochba revolt but also to extinguish the final glowing cinders of hope for our nation.

But it didn’t. You can attribute that to the wisdom and foresight of our sages at the time.

The Talmud explains: Emperor Hadrian cruelly prohibited the Jews from burying the corpses of Betar. It was several years later that Emperor Antoninus, a beneficent monarch, granted permission. Miraculously, the bodies had not decomposed.

Until then, only three blessings were recited after a meal. Now, the sages of Yavneh added a fourth, to thank G‑d for preserving the bodies and bringing them to a proper burial.

How do we commemorate the massacre of Betar in our prayers? Every time we thank G‑d for the food and the good land He has given us, we include a long blessing praising G‑d, “who is good and does good.”

What about our tears? Our horror? What about our outrage with G‑d—if He is so good, how did He allow such a thing to happen?

They put all that aside. Because they knew the very existence of the nation was at stake. Tears and outrage have a place, but they won’t save a people from extinction. Gratitude for every ray of hope will.

Our sages knew: When you tell the story, think of what your children will hear.

Mourning for the Future

I will go as far as to say that we do not commemorate tragedy at all. Not in the way that the classic historians, beginning with Herodotus, thought of history—as a record of heroism and bravery, suffering and tragedy, “that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being.” Or as Ranke imagined history as “exactly what happened.”

We never commemorate the past for the sake of the past. We commemorate the past with purpose—for the future it will bring. That is the entire concern of all the books of the prophets, indeed, the entire Tanach.

What about Tisha B’Av?

On the day the Temple was destroyed twice in history, first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans, we sit on the floor, fasting and reading laments. We avoid any activity that brings joy, including any Torah study that is not about the destruction. We include laments composed following the massacres of the Crusades—since the Jews of that era saw their troubles as an outcome of our exile. For the same reason, some include laments composed following the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, Tisha B’Av has nothing to do with commemorating the past. It is entirely about the here and now. And the same with all the fast days of the calendar.

The sages of the Talmud say, “If the Temple is not rebuilt in your days, it may as well have been destroyed in your days.”2 As long as we are without a spiritual nucleus, we remain a people searching for our own soul. That is the core of our exile—exile from our authentic state of being.

That also sits at the heart of every tragedy that’s befallen us—which is why we heap all the mourning for all those events together on one day. Everything is about that search for our lost soul.

Why else would we visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem? The rest of the world visits their historical landmarks to see what is there. We visit this one to see what is missing.

On Tisha B’Av, we feel the pain of that loss more than any other day, as though the Roman legions were setting Jerusalem on fire before our very eyes. Pain has a purpose. It is a signal that something is wrong and needs to be healed.

On Tisha B’Av, we cease masking our pain, peel off the bandages of distractions, and fully expose ourselves to the pain of a shared inner emptiness. We feel the loss of something essential to our people as a whole and to each of us as individuals, and return to ourselves.

As the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, once put it,

Imagine the scene: They are setting the Holy Temple on fire. Standing nearby is a Jew – an ordinarily emotionless Jew, a completely stonehearted Jew–witnessing the destruction as it takes place.

Without question, he would turn his entire world upside-down to do whatever he could to stop it!

Says our Torah—the Torah of truth, the Torah that guides life: So turn your world upside-down today!

Ironic, but poignant: Tisha B’Av is called a mo’ed—meaning, a holiday or special time. To me, it has always felt surreally incongruous, even paradoxical: Along with all the practices of mourning are certain practices that mark the day as a joyous day.

The great kabbalist, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, explained that it is indeed a joyous festival that simply has yet to break out of its shell. Once the Moshiach comes and we complete our repair of all that has been broken, the fast days of the year will become festivals, and Tisha B’Av will be the most joyous of them all.

This is the optimism, the hope and the faith that we have lived by for all these thousands of years. With every disaster, we focus on what urgently needs to be done today to repair what has been broken. In every tragedy, we see the opportunity for a yet more joyous future.

The Joy of Yizkor

The same with a yartzeit. We honor the memory of those who have left this world for the next by leading the prayers, learning some Torah on their behalf, and giving charity on their behalf. We assist them to climb to a higher place in the higher world by lifting ourselves up in this world.

We live the Torah of life, and life means doing something now for the sake of the future. The joy of Simchat Torah is a powerful message to us and to our children: We are alive. Our Torah is alive. We celebrate our Judaism, our Torah, our lives. No matter what.

Yes, we also say yizkor, commemorating loved ones who have passed on to the next world. And that, too, is with joy. A solemn joy, perhaps, but a deep one—the joy that we have not lost our connection with them. That is why only those with a father or mother in the other world are permitted to stay in the synagogue—because for others, there is not that joy3, and on Yom Tov, there can only be joy.

Through Fire and High Waters

It was the eve of Simchat Torah, 1969, and Tzvi Hersh Gansbourg, only six days earlier, had lost his wife to leukemia. He brought his five children to a small shul in East Flatbush and danced with joy, a joy that infected even the dreariest of the congregants, a sincere, inner joy that lit other souls aflame.

Having exhausted the entire crowd at that shul, Tzvi Hersh went on to 770 Eastern Parkway. There, the Rebbe and his chassidim were still preparing for hakafot, the Rebbe speaking words of Torah with breaks for song and l’chaim. Tzvi Hersh was the man who always began the next song, so all eyes were upon him, all quite aware of what he had been through.

His strong yet gentle voice began a defiant Russian song:

I v’vodeh mi ne utonem, i v’ogneh mi ne sgorim!

We, in water will not drown, and in fire will not burn!

The crowd, set aflame by his fire, shouted out the song with fervor. The Rebbe stared at him with a piercing gaze and then jumped up, pushing back his chair, clapping and dancing in his place, fanning the flames of every soul in the room.

We, the Jewish people, are the burning bush that is never consumed. In water, we do not drown. In fire, we do not burn. We are here until all the darkness of the world has perished. We will dance and sing this Simchat Torah until the whole world dances with us.