What Remains: Between Fire and Word

There are moments in the calendar when what remains does not lie in the sequence of days, but in the tension between what burns and what is spoken… And yet, at times, something else emerges, not a hidden design, not a mystical alignment, but a proximity that unsettles, that obliges one to remain attentive, because certain elements, placed side by side, refuse to remain indifferent to one another.

Such is the case when, in the Jewish calendar, the date associated with the death of Joseph Goebbels appears with a certain hesitation of transmission, being historically situated on Iyyar 18 – (1 May 1945 = 18th of Iyyar, 5705) coinciding with Lag BaOmer – while noted in Chabad calendars on Iyyar 19, so that from the very beginning the event does not rest in a single, fixed inscription, but already passes through a slight displacement, quiet, almost without comment, yet not without consequence. Or the individual died after sunset…

The date, however, does not stand apart, nor does it follow in sequence, but coincides with Lag BaOmer itself, that interruption of mourning marked by fire, by sudden light, by a paradoxical joy that does not erase what surrounds it, so that the bonfires lit in memory of hidden illumination stand in a disturbing simultaneity with the end of Joseph Goebbels, a man who turned language itself into an instrument of incitement, and whose final act unfolds not after that fire, but within the same day, as if two uses of fire – one that reveals, one that consumes—were momentarily held within a single span of time.

Not succession, but simultaneity: two fires on one day, and the question of which one speaks through us.

It is not without significance that this correspondence is noted, soberly and without elaboration, in Chabad calendars, where the date is recorded rather than explained, as if to acknowledge that certain proximities are to be remembered, but not too quickly interpreted.

Fire, then, stands at the center – not as a single symbol, but as a field of tension, where illumination and destruction remain inseparable possibilities, and where language itself becomes the medium through which these possibilities are shaped, directed, or resisted.

Goebbels did not merely incite hatred; he reshaped language itself, he constructed a linguistic atmosphere within which destruction could appear as necessity, even as destiny, so that words ceased to describe what is and began instead to reorganize what could be perceived, until the boundary between reality and its narration was no longer stable.

At almost the same moment, within the Christian liturgical rhythm – according to the Julian calendar followed in Jerusalem, Moscow, and elsewhere – the Church commemorates Saint George, whose memory itself carries a tension that has never been fully resolved, because he is remembered both as a martyr, a witness who refused to renounce truth under pressure, and as a figure who, over time, has been clothed in the imagery of the warrior, mounted, victorious, confronting the dragon.

This tension is not accidental, nor is it merely the result of later imagination; it reveals something about the way human societies receive and transform witness, because the martyr, who in essence testifies, is repeatedly reinterpreted through the categories of conquest and victory, as if endurance itself needed to be translated into triumph in order to be understood.

It is precisely here that the present begins to press in, not through direct equivalence but through resemblance, because across the globe – under different languages, within different cultures – there emerges again a vocabulary that tends, sometimes openly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, to sacralize war, whether in the name of survival, of civilization, of necessity, or even of truth, so that conflict is no longer merely endured or confronted, but gradually invested with meaning.

What follows from this shift is not immediate, but it is decisive, because once war begins to carry meaning, those who fight are no longer simply actors within a tragic necessity, but are elevated into figures of significance, while those who fall risk being transformed into symbols whose function exceeds their humanity, and the enemy, in turn, is no longer perceived as human in the same register, but as something that must be eliminated rather than confronted.

This movement is not new, and yet it becomes particularly charged when it intersects with memory, especially with the memory of a war whose end shaped the present world, when the structures that emerged from that moment – political, ideological, linguistic – continue, even in transformed forms, to define the space within which global narratives unfold, so that a limited number of powers, each with its own language of legitimacy, continue to articulate necessity in ways that resemble, at times, a form of quasi-theological certainty.

And yet, to observe this is not to reduce it to accusation, because those who speak in such terms are not abstractions; they are human beings, often capable of gestures of humility, of reverence, of sincerity, encountered not only in declarations but in places of prayer, in liturgical settings, in moments that reveal a dimension of the person that does not coincide entirely with the structures within which he or she acts.

This ambiguity is not an obstacle to understanding; it is part of what must be understood.

For the question does not rest solely at the level of individuals, but returns, more deeply, to language itself, to the ways in which words are shaped, carried, and eventually taken up by power.

It is here that another memory becomes essential.

At the Nuremberg Trials, where the crimes of the Nazi regime were exposed before the world, there stood a poet: Avrom Sutzkever, who came not only as a witness to events, but as a bearer of a language and a culture that had itself been targeted for disappearance.

He was called to testify, and yet he was not permitted to speak in Yiddish, so that the language in which the destruction had been lived, suffered, and named from within was required to pass through translation, through another linguistic order, through a structure that could receive the content but not fully the voice.

What is lost in such a passage is not the fact, nor the accusation, but the texture of reality itself, the way in which experience is held within language before it is reformulated.

It is here that a line of Avrom Sutzkever returns, not as a declaration, not as a פתרון a solution, but as a word that remains precisely where solutions fail:

Ver vil blaybn? Got vet blaybn.
ווער וועט בלײַבן? גאָט וועט בלײַבן.

Who will remain? God will remain.

The words do not resolve anything; they do not restore what has been lost, nor do they offer a structure that could contain the catastrophe, and yet they refuse to concede that חורבן (ḥurban-hurb”m, destruction) defines the whole of reality, leaving open a space that is neither secured nor closed, something that persists almost in der luft, in the air, beyond possession.

This space, fragile and ungraspable, finds an unexpected echo in the Amidah, in the blessing of מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים (mechaye ha-metim), where those who lie in the dust – עפר (afar), the earth itself – are not described, not explained, but held within a language that refuses to let silence become the final word.

In the Christian proclamation of Pascha, this affirmation takes another form, not as continuation alone but as rupture within the very logic of death – “by death trampling death”—not as ניצחון (nitzachon, victory) in the ordinary sense, not as the triumph of one כוח (koach, force) over another, but as a transformation that cannot be contained within the categories of domination or possession.

It is precisely here that care is required, because the Messiah, in this understanding, cannot be reduced to the figure of a ruler who has “won” in the manner of worldly power, who possesses all places and secures all outcomes, since such a reading would simply reproduce the very logic that turns violence into meaning; what is revealed instead is a kingship that appears where possession fails, and that opens the future not as a secured horizon but as a call that exceeds what can be grasped or administered.

In this sense, both the quiet persistence of mechaye ha-metim and the paradox of Pascha resist the transformation of death into a foundation for meaning, because they do not sanctify death, but refuse to let it determine the last word. And this refusal is precisely what becomes endangered when war begins to absorb the language of sacrifice, of destiny, of necessity, so that death is no longer encountered as a limit but is gradually integrated into the grammar of justification.

It is within this shift that the figure of Saint George must be approached with discernment, because if he is interpreted as a figure of victorious violence, then his meaning is drawn into the same movement that seeks to sanctify conflict, whereas if he is remembered as a witness, then he stands as a limit against that movement, embodying not conquest but fidelity, not domination but endurance.

And it is here, finally, that a more difficult question emerges, one that does not lend itself to easy formulation or closure.

After the catastrophe of the Nazi period, after the destruction that unfolded within lands long marked by Christian presence, one might have expected a moment in which a unified voice would emerge, capable of asking forgiveness in a manner that could gather the whole into a shared acknowledgment. Yet such a moment, in a fully explicit and collective form, did not take place, so that what remains are gestures, words, reflections – often profound, often sincere – but not a single articulation that could carry the weight of the whole. Superseding works from a drifting tendency to look at sins face to face.

This is not said in accusation, nor in judgment pronounced from outside, but as a fact that remains, and perhaps also as a sign of the difficulty – perhaps even the impossibility – of gathering dispersed responsibility into a single voice, especially when language itself has been fractured by what it has passed through.

In such a world, where voices persist without always being gathered, where languages continue without always being heard, where meaning is contested and often redirected, vigilance becomes necessary – not as an abstract principle, but as a concrete attention to the ways in which words are used, shaped, and transformed within the pressures of history.

For once language is entirely captured, reality itself follows, and what begins as description becomes prescription, what begins as memory becomes mobilization, and what begins as witness risks becoming justification, so that the very words that once resisted death may come, almost imperceptibly, to serve it.

To resist this does not require withdrawal, nor purity, nor even certainty; it asks for something both simpler and more demanding: that words remain accountable, that they do not lose their tension, that they continue to resist the easy fusion of violence and meaning, even when everything around them pushes toward resolution.

It is perhaps in this sense that what persists – in der luft, in the air, not fixed, not secured—retains a particular importance, because it escapes complete appropriation, and therefore continues to bear a form of truth that cannot be entirely absorbed, and in this fragile persistence there remains the possibility that language, even now, may still reveal rather than conceal, may still open rather than close, and may still allow, within the fire that surrounds it, a light that does not consume.