Again and Again and Again
BH
Many years ago, the Dalai Lama reached out Eli Wiesel with the following question:
“Mr. Wiesel, your people were sent into exile over 2000 years ago, yet amazingly, you survived and are still here committed to your tradition.
My people just left our homeland. We are in exile.
Can you teach us how to survive?
How did you do it? How do you continue to do it?”
To my mind, the answer to the Dalai Lama’s question can be found the following directive from G-d, conveyed in one of Moses’s last sermons to the Jewish people:
“This day…I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. You shall choose life, so that you and your offspring will live.”
But why does Moses need to add the imperative: “You shall choose life?”
If given the choice, who in their right mind would choose death over life?
Perhaps Moses was speaking to the future of the Jewish people, one which would be riddled with exiles and expulsions, Inquisitions and intifadas, Cossacks and concentration camps, and what he was really conveying to the Jewish people was G-d’s directive not simply to choose life over death, but to choose life in the face of death, again and again and again.
Never in our lifetime has this message been more pertinent.
In the aftermath of October 7, so many of us found ourselves flailing to make sense of the unthinkable.
After all, how is it humanly possible to process the depths of evil that was perpetrated by modern day Nazi’s upon their innocent targets, from toddlers to teenagers, from pregnant mothers to holocaust survivors.
And yet, when faced with the darkest period of our living memory, the reaction of the Jewish people the world over was simultaneous and immediate: Am Yisroel Chai.
The Jewish people live on forever!
Amidst the darkness and chaos, this single refrain kept ringing loud and clear.
Part anthem, part prayer, it was heard online and on the streets, from every corner of the Jewish community. In the face of death – we choose life!
Interestingly, the phrase Am Yisroel Chai does not originate in the Torah, Tanach, or Talmud.
It was first articulated in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, when a group of emaciated survivors were liberated and began to sing a song of hope.
When the song ended, there was a brief silence, and the tear-filled voice of British Army Chaplain Rabbi Leslie Hardman rang out: “Am Yisroel Chai!”
The Jewish people lives on!
Throughout the generations, our ancestors have stared down death and chosen life, again and again.
Just last week, former hostage Doron Katz demonstrated this in her Instagram post sharing that she was pregnant.
Doron was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists along with her 2 daughters Raz (5) and Aviv (3) and they were released in the hostage deal after 49 days. Her brother and mother were murdered on October 7th.
In her post, she wrote:
“To bring life to the world after almost losing my life myself, is the biggest gift we could ask for the new year. My sunshine in the darkness.”
Ubacharta Bachayim – choose life, in this case literally.
And then there’s Emily Hand, the little girl who was initially presumed dead but was actually taken hostage and then thankfully released.
In a powerful interview Emily’s older sister Natalie shared some of what Emily went through while in Hamas captivity, and the way it changed her as a person.
One thing she said was particularly striking – following her release from captivity, at every meal, before nine-year-old Emily eats anything, she looks at the people around her and asks if they are hungry, and offers them some of her food.
Where did Emily develop this habit?
Emily learned it during her hellish captivity, when she and the hostages she was with were barely given any food.
Any time they got anything to eat, the adults would first give from their own portion to the kids and the elderly.
Emily learned kindness from the adults with her, and would offer her own food too, before eating anything herself.”
What a powerful reminder of Victor Frankel’s words in his book, man’s search for meaning:
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.
They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing:
The last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
In his words Frankel echoed, and in her actions Emily embodied, the Biblical directive, Choose Life, choose freedom, choose kindness, again and again.
A final story.
In the early days of the war, a young soldier by the name of Dvir Ressler was killed by a grenade while using his body to shield another soldier from harm.
While the Ressler Family was sitting shiva, Dvir’s father, Amichai, was told that the soldier whose life was saved by his son’s heroic act was on his way to the house to offer his condolences and was 20 minutes away.
Amichai understood how difficult the visit was going to be for this young man.
Amichai thought to himself, “We cannot allow him to feel such sadness or guilt!”
What did he do?
He went running to the homes of his neighbors and he said to them, “In 20 minutes, be at my house, and when that soldier walks in, we are all going to join hands, and we are going to sing and dance!
I know I’m sitting Shiva, but that is what we are going to do!
“I won’t allow this boy to feel pain or guilt over the fact that he’s alive and my son gave his life to protect him!”
And that is what happened.
The neighbors came.
They all joined hands and, yes, in a house of mourning, they started singing,
“Mitzvah gedolah lhi-yot b’simcha – it is a great mitzvah to be joyous!”
They danced with that soldier, so that he would feel the joy of Jewish survival and continuity – a joy that no enemy in the world can take away from us.”
To my mind, this is how we’ve survived and thrived throughout the millennia – with tears in our joy, and joy in our tears, choosing life, choosing unity, choosing joy, again and again and again.
A week from this Thursday will be the holiday of Simchas Torah – the Yahrzeit, one-year anniversary on the Hebrew calendar of the atrocities of October 7.
The question is, how will we mark a day traditionally observed with unrestrained singing and dancing in celebration of our tradition, knowing that on that black day – just one year ago – so much suffering was inflicted upon the Jewish people?
Can we dance with broken hearts?
The answer is: We can – and we must.
We must for ourselves, but especially for those who can no longer.
If you’ve never done so before, join a Simchat Torah celebration this year. Bring your families and friends and most of all your children and grandchildren!
Let them see what “Am Yisrael Chai!” looks like – in real life, in real time!
Let them see how we celebrate our enduring legacy of resilience, light, and redemption, so that they can one day pass it on to their children and grandchildren!
The enemies of our people and civilization made clear that if given the possibility to choose death, destruction and darkness, they would perpetrate October 7th again and again and again.
Our response is to do the very opposite.
If there is one way we can honor the memory of those who were brutally taken from us, if there one way we can generate protective merit for our hostages and chayalim as we hope and pray for their safe immediate speedy return, if there is one way we can pay tribute to all the children who lost parents, and all the parents who lost children, and if there is one way we can each contribute to building a better world and future, it is through strengthening our resolve to choose life, courage, resilience, and hope, freedom and faith, unity, love, light, compassion and kindness, again and again and again.