Splendor is Given Them
In an article published in The Free Press, Ben Freeman, a British Jew, writes that he is leaving the UK and plans to move to Israel. He no longer feels safe in the country where his family has lived for generations. And yet Israel cannot promise him the physical security that he used to take for granted. Is there no better reason to come on Aliya? Can there be reasons that override concern for one’s personal safety? I think there are.
My daughter E. wrote poetry in her teens, publishing in an Israeli website called Bikurim, where she became acquainted with many young Israeli poets like herself. She wrote her high school senior thesis on the topic of “Holocaust Poetry of the Grandchildren of Survivors” (My parents survived Auschwitz). She collected over 500 Hebrew poems by the grandchildren of survivors, most published online, and analyzed a selection of them in her thesis:
The Holocaust happened in color.
There was green grass,
And yellow flowers,
And red bricks,
And the SS officer’s grin was unmistakable.
And the Jew in the photograph whose beard they cut off was a redhead.[1]
E. concluded her thesis thus: “Every poem written by a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor is a small victory over the Nazis, and all the poems of all the grandchildren join the great, powerful flood of Israeli culture created after the Holocaust. The prophet Isaiah (61, 3) promised ‘to place before the mourners of Zion – to grant them splendor in place of ashes . . .’ The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors all have relatives whose ashes lie unburied. Yet those relatives may take pride in the Holocaust poetry written by their direct posterity . . . Splendor is given them in place of ashes.”
E. is now married and a mother. After October 7 E’s husband was with the forces, somewhere in the belly of Gaza. He was incommunicado for weeks. At the time her youngest, S, was four years old. E. did her best to shield her children from exposure to the horrors of October 7, but as he walked with his mother to kindergarten every morning S. could not help but see the posters depicting the kidnapped and the slain. With the sensitivity of a clever child he refrained from confiding his deepest fears to his care-ridden mother; yet he confided to his kindergarten teacher: “I don’t want to be dead!”
E. has spent much of the war in conversation with so-called human rights organizations abroad, making Israel’s case with a patience and forbearance I could never muster. Here is what she writes about her experience:
“This is the first time that I have had such an intensive exposure to “polite” and “cultured” antisemitism. It’s not even active hatred, simply the lack of self-awareness of people that when they speak of human rights they exclude the Jews. I conduct long conversations whose subtext is antisemitism.
“I reflect that almost thirty years of my life passed before I was personally exposed to this antisemitism. What a great privilege we have had, we, the first generation to experience it, who grew up in a Jewish state with the clear understanding that we are whole, complete persons, not required to debate it with anyone. I thank Abba and Ima profoundly that you had the wisdom to raise us here in the State of Israel. I’m sure you had other opportunities but with clear common sense you did the right thing. Not that growing up in Israel is easy, and we all absorbed some of the consequences of violent antisemitism and deep hatred, but we were spared the daily poison of an environment of antisemitism. I also speak with Jewish communities abroad and I observe a little bit of the effects of this poison.”
My father’s older brother, Yossi, died when he was eighteen. In January 1945 the Wehrmacht retreated from Budapest. When they did so they behaved as retreating armies do and destroyed the resources they couldn’t take with them; they blew up the ammunition, burned the gasoline, and they lined up the members of Yossi’s slave labor battalion on the banks of the Danube and machine-gunned them into the river. Even in January 1945, if eighteen-year-old Yossi had been privileged to live in Mandatory Palestine he would have possessed some kind of weapon, and nobody, neither British soldier nor Arab fedayun, could have treated him in quite that way. But Yossi had no weapon in his hand when he died.
In thirteen years, probably after a year in a pre-army seminary, S. will take up the same green khaki uniform, ceramic armor and automatic weapon his father carries. His paternal grandfather wore that uniform, as did his paternal great-grandfather before him in 1948. S. won’t be safe. But he will be armed, and trained, and deadly, and anyone who wants to kill Jews will have to deal with him and his fellows first. There are things more precious than mere safety.
Kier Starmer and Emmanual Macron and Friedrich Merz and a host of others come to S’s father and ask the question Isaiah prophesied (63, 2-7):
Why are your garments red, your clothes like one who tramples out the vintage?
The answer, too, is prefigured:
I have trampled out the vintage alone, not one of the other peoples with me; I trod on them in my anger, and trampled them in my rage; their blood spattered my clothes, and all my garments are stained.
For the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my redemption come.
And I looked about, and none would aid me; I was astonished that none support me; but my strong arm has saved me, and my rage is my support.
I will speak of G-d’s beneficence, His praises, for all that G-d has granted us; and His great goodness to the House of Israel, that he granted us in His mercy and beneficence.
For S., and for my sons’ and sons-in-laws’ strong arms I am grateful; for the privilege of raising E. untouched by soul-destroying antisemitism I give thanks. They are something new and splendid under the sun.
[1] David Harbend, “The Holocaust Happened in Color,” “Bikurim,” Nisan 5767, http://www.kipa.co.il/bikorim/print_art.asp?id=36197. Retrieved 2012. Translated by the writer.
Translations from Isaiah are the author’s, based on the JPS translation but modifying it for accuracy and style.