Roots and Leaves

I have this huge, beautiful tree outside my dining room window. When the siren went off today in memory of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, I was working from home. I stood, as the siren blared, looking outside my window.

As the leaves gently blew in the breeze, I started to imagine what a tree with six million leaves would look like. Six million leaves.

We can’t even conceptualize such a thing. How many leaves are on this tree? Fifty thousand? One hundred thousand? Let’s say two hundred thousand.

Six million.

When the siren finished and I returned to work, I asked chatgpt to create an image for me of a tree with six million leaves. I knew what the answer would be. “Do you want it to symbolize that number (since rendering 6,000,000 actual leaves in a graphic isn’t practical for most formats)?”

Yes, I replied. Let’s symbolize the six million since it would be virtually impossible to actually create a graphic showing such a number.

Virtually impossible.

Here is my graphic which, as expected, can’t possibly begin to illustrate what six million looks like.

chatgpt generated image

Each, an individual leaf with hopes and dreams; family and love; homes and community.

Each a world unto themselves, a world that should have put down roots and added many, many more leaves to the tapestry of our lives.

One of my sons wrote to me last night that he was having trouble knowing how to mourn; he was having trouble conceptualizing the Holocaust and understanding it.

Of course he was. Because we simply can’t understand six million. It’s inconceivable.

What do we do?

We ensure that our children hear the stories of the horrors that our people endured; we watch movies and read books about those horrors and continue to educate ourselves and our children; we commemorate this day every year and keep it sacred.

When the siren rang this morning, as I was admiring and contemplating the leaves, I had one son in reserves, standing next to the security truck near our neighborhood; another son standing on the cusp of Gaza, heading in; and a third son standing on a train, returning from his first army week.

And that, that is also how we commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Holocaust. We honor those who couldn’t fight back and those who tried to fight back; we honor those who perished and those who survived. We do so with our Israeli flags, our IDF uniforms, our homes and our feet on Israeli soil; we do so as we continue to fight each day for our present and our future.