Acute Angles: Never Again vs. Am Yisrael Chai

Rabbi, I have always been mystified by the phrase “Never Again!” Who coined it? And what does it mean? Kol Tuv, Uri.

Shalom, Uri!

In 1927, Yitzhak Lamdan wrote an epic poem about the 2^nd-century siege of Masada entitled Never again shall Masada fall. However, the phrase was first employed as a rallying-slogan by the liberated prisoners at Buchenwald extermination camp in 1945 to denounce fascism. One can just imagine the piteous physical state of these barely-alive men and women when they were first liberated. Yet they were possessed of a superhuman moral strength sufficient to command the world that no oppression like their oppression must ever be allowed to happen in the future!

Subsequent uses of the phrase were less inspirational. The secular kibbutzim adopted it in the late 1940s to mean “never again will Jews go like lambs to the slaughter!” Many saw this as a gross distortion of the brutal murder of six million Jews and an insult to their memory. Later, in the Sixties, Elie Wiesel, passionate Holocaust-chronicler though he was, universalized the phrase by calling for “never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence”. At the other extreme, Rabbi Meir Kahane hyd adopted it as the title of his manifesto in 1972 as a call to arms as the only means of prevention of a repeat of the Holocaust. Militant that he was, he certainly would not have been comfortable with the term being adopted by a gun-control campaign! The phrase has also been used in relation to martial law, military coups and climate activism.

From the above, it is clearly evident that that Never Again is not a unifying mantra. Different individuals, different groups of opposing political persuasions, different generations have utilized the slogan for a multiplicity of different causes and with many different inflections – an imperative, a prayer, a quasi-oath, an imprecation or just a piteous cry.

You asked who first coined the phrase. Well, Uri, surprise, surprise – it was G-D!  After emerging safely from the Ark, Noah brings an offering in gratitude for his survival, whereupon G-D vows “never again will I curse the soil because of man ….and never again will I strike down all life [by means of a flood} as I have done” (Gen 9:11, also see 8:21). The repetition of the phrase “never again” turns the promise into a Divine oath (see Shevuot 36a).

Here is the nub of the issue. Only G-D can meaningfully declare “never again”! We are, sadly, not in control of global events and trends, and it is not in our hands to eradicate antisemitism.

To my mind, the slogan “never again” does not define who we are. However, there is another rallying cry that was first coined in song by the legendary Shlomo Carlebach at the height of the Soviet Jewry campaign in 1965 and has become ubiquitous at Jewish gatherings particularly since 22/7 – Am Yisrael Chai! The nation of Israel lives on!

This is a unifying and affirmative cry. For both of these reasons, it deserves to stand head and shoulders over Never Again! Particularly when we add the oft-forgotten second phrase of Reb Shlomo’s song – Od Avinu Chai! “Our Father in Heaven lives!”