Sacred Sites: Sanctifying October 7 and Bondi Beach
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”
– Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln (November 18, 1863)
Leading a Jewish museum tour to Cuba, we hired an itinerant Guantánamo band to perform one evening. Before they began, the leader announced that all their instruments had been sanctified. Fascinated by his comment, when they concluded, I asked him what that meant.
To illustrate, he banged an unsanctified bongo: “You hear? It only makes noise. You forget it.”
He then struck its consecrated neighbor: “This one, however, makes music. You remember it.”
I’d be damned. I could actually hear the difference. I remember that.
The legendary Civil War battle that every American recognizes is Gettysburg. Many who cannot identify in what state it occurred (Pennsylvania) still recognize the name. Why?
More soldiers died there than in any other battle, but the single deadliest day of the war was at Antietam, which not many recognize. Gettysburg was unquestionably a pivotal battle that changed the war’s outcome, but so did Vicksburg, which few (outside Mississippi) realize.
Gettysburg is legendary not because of what occurred there July 1 – 3, 1863, but because of 100 seconds there 4 1/2 months later.
Abraham Lincoln was not delivering a speech at the dedication of the cemetery there, but offering a footnote to one, two hours long, by the leading orator of the time, Senator Edward Everett. Yet, Lincoln’s 271 words were so timeless, they are displayed in every American national cemetery. (Everett’s oration required 13,607 words and delaying the ceremony one month for him to prepare.)
Senator Charles Sumner, in his eulogy for Lincoln, presciently observed: “The world …will never cease to remember (it)… The battle itself was less important than the speech. Ideas are always more important than battles.”
Gettysburg is remembered centuries later, not because of Grant, Lee or Pickett, but because of Lincoln. Lincoln sanctified Gettysburg.
Similarly, the three-year Spanish Civil War, one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century (half-million casualties) is only remembered today because of a single painting.
Pablo Picasso’s monochromatic, 25′ x 11′ mural Guernica, considered his greatest work, not only single-handedly draws tourists to Madrid to see it, but also a full-size tapestry of it hangs prominently, permanently in the United Nations.
Because of Guernica, people discover that on April 26, 1937, the Nazi Luftwaffe, on behalf of General Franco, as “an experiment”, used the completely defenseless Basque town of Guernica for “target-practice”, slaughtering the women and children trapped there on Market Day. (They first bombed all the bridges exiting town, before machine-gunning its inhabitants.)
Guernica sanctified Guernica.
Four years later, September 29, 1941, Nazis gathered the Jews of Kyiv in a ravine called Babi Yar. In the single deadliest event of the Holocaust, the Nazis meticulously recorded murdering 33,371 Jews. Yet, because both the Nazis and the Soviets desired to cover it up, no one knew of it for 20 years.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem cried out: “At Babi Yar, no memorials preside… All the silence screams.” Adapted into a symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich, Babi Yar resurrected a massacre that had been erased from human memory. Only 50 years later, because of it, was a memorial finally erected there acknowledging the Jews who had been murdered at this sacred site.
Babi Yar sanctified Babi Yar.
I grew up in Washington Heights, a ghetto of Holocaust survivors. Each of them passionately proclaimed: “Gedenk! Zachor! Remember!” Yet, for two decades after the Holocaust, the very word “Holocaust” was never used. (Neither was “Shoah”, nor “Genocide.” The nameless atrocity was euphemized as “The War.”)
Not only didn’t a Holocaust Remembrance Day exist, but we didn’t speak of the Holocaust, even while we lived in its ineradicable shadow.
What changed? People finally began to invoke its memory. Two of the most critical were:
1- In 1960, Elie Wiesel published Night, his searing memoir of the death camps.
2- In 1993, Steven Spielberg produced and directed Schindler’s List, then used profits from the critically and commercially successful film to fund the Shoah Foundation, which videotaped survivors’ testimony for posterity (including my family’s.)
Why did it require Wiesel, Spielberg, et al., to sanctify a phenomenon as profound as the Holocaust?
Because current events, no matter how important they seem in the moment, are current. Art is eternal.
We focus on the news (occasionally obsess over it), because it is new; it is immediate; it is topical. We venerate art in any medium because it transcends time.
We are inspired by Lincoln’s words, Picasso’s images, Yevtushenko’s verses, Shostakovich’s melodies even if unfamiliar with what precipitated them.
How many people listening to the 1812 Overture are aware it was created responding to Napoleon invading Moscow? How many know “The Day the Music Died” in American Pie references the plane-crash killing Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper? Decades later, listeners are unaware that Abraham, Martin and John laments the assassinations of Lincoln, MLK, JFK and RFK.
Will a Lincoln, Picasso, Yevtushenko, Shostakovich, Wiesel or Spielberg arise to sanctify October 7 or Bondi Beach?
Will they find a medium that can adequately memorialize these atrocities?
If no one does, will our great-grandchildren be familiar with these sacred sites?
Or, will “The world little note, nor long remember what happened here”?
