Standing together in unity

RABBI ALICIA MAGAL | PARSHAH NITZAVIM DEUTERONOMY 29:9–30:20

Iencounter the Torah portion Nitzavim twice at this season: once this week in the Torah reading cycle and then again on Yom Kippur day when we chant an alternative group of verses from Deuteronomy 29:9-14 and 30:11-20. When I chant the haunting High Holy day trop melody for Atem nitzavim ha-yom kulchem… “You stand this day, all of you, before God…” (Deut. 29:9-10) and look out at the full sanctuary, it is very powerful, for it seems as though, indeed, the elders, officials, children, spouses, visitors and equivalent of woodchoppers and water carriers are present, listening, taking in the message of inclusivity, feeling themselves a part of the larger community, inheritors of the covenant of our ancestors. And when I get to the passage Ki ha-mitzvah ha-zot, “Surely, this instruction which I enjoin

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11 the railway lines could have been repaired, the damage would have delayed the deportations and saved lives.

“[I]t would have helped if we had bombed the railroad lines leading to Auschwitz. The purpose of those rail lines was to carry human beings to their death, and we might even have been able to use long-range fighter planes to get down right on the tracks and knock them out,” McGovern said. Regarding a junction through which trains passed on the way to Auschwitz, he said: “We should have hit that junction and disabled it. We should have hit the rail lines, even if we had to go back several times.”

It is also important to remember that there were bridges along those routes,

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11 a unifying figure: When he died, JTA published an article asking if anyone could replace Wiesel as a “consensus leader” among American Jews, or was the “American Jewish community too divided to unite under any one person’s moral voice?”

Wiesel also wielded a degree of soft power, seen when he rebuked U.S. President Ronald Reagan for a planned visit to an SS cemetery at Bitburg, Germany.

Elizabeth, too, was a living link to World War II, and as such also personified upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens… Neither is it beyond the sea… No, the word/thought/thing/action is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do and observe it!” (Deut. 30: 11-14), the words and melody stir me to emphasize Karov me’od elecha – “VERY CLOSE to you.”

In my mind, the group of Israelites listening to Moses as he exhorts them to follow the path of righteousness when they enter the Promised Land merges with the congregation present today. The promise was made for the generation in the desert and also for “those that are not here today” — those generations yet to come, including us.

While we can spend our lives studying the Torah and sacred texts, we will never finish plumbing the depths of the layers of commentary and mystical messages contained in the written volumes and oral insights of our teachers. This simple verse encourages each of us at any level of learning to take it upon ourselves to recognize that yes, we can act now and not wait for explanations to be brought and bridges could not be quickly repaired. Some of the requests put forward by Jewish groups at the same time actually named bridges that should be targeted. Those pleas were no secret. On July 10, 1944, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that recent escapees from Auschwitz were urging the following: “The crematoria in Oswiecim [Auschwitz] and Birkenau, easily recognisable [sic] by their chimneys and watch-towers, as well as the main railway lines connecting Slovakia and CarpathoRuthenia with Poland, especially the bridge at Cop, should be bombed.”

Debating the options for Allied action, a commentator in the Ken Burns film argues that bombing Auschwitz might have been a bad idea because some of the inmates could have been harmed. That argument is disingenuous for two reasons. First, the United States could have bombed the everything Britain was and became in the ensuing eight decades. If indeed she “embodied” the nation’s values, she also deserved scrutiny for how she confronted its failings. In a Washington Post essay, foreign affairs columnist Ishaan Tharoor concedes that “Elizabeth was perhaps not privy to all the sordid details of the operations carried out to preserve her empire after the end of World War II and through the 1960s.” And yet, he suggests, “Elizabeth cast herself as the happy steward of the Commonwealth” whose “history was hardly benign.”

(Wiesel too faced criticism that despite his devotion to human rights and dignity, he back from far away in the heavens or across the sea! Right now, we can contribute to tikkun olam, repairing and healing the world. We can stand up straight, with pride and dignity and give full attention, as the strong verb Nitzavim indicates and resolve to give tzedakah, act with more compassion, observe Shabbat and the festivals to a greater degree and put into practice the teachings as we understand them at this moment in our current stage of development and observance.

This image of standing together in unity and reaffirming the earlier covenant at Sinai brings to mind a comment attributed to the first Chabad Rebbe Shneur Zalman: Just as a husband and wife need to reaffirm their commitment to each other when the early days of romantic attraction have given way to the day-to-day struggle to overcome accumulated disappointments, so too God and the people of Israel need to reaffirm the covenant at this later date (footnote in the Etz Hayim Torah and Commentary). At the moving ceremony of a renewal of vows of a husband and wife who have been married 25 or 50 years, there is this sense of railway lines and bridges to Auschwitz without endangering inmates. Second, the presence of those prisoners was not the reason the Allies rejected the bombing requests; note that they bombed those oil factories in broad daylight, even though slave laborers were likely to be there. Likewise, the United States bombed a rocket factory in the Buchenwald concentration camp in daylight in August 1944, even though the workers would be there; many were indeed killed, but the Allies considered the attack to be justified despite that risk.

Nahum Goldmann, who was the Jewish Agency’s representative in Washington as well as co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress, repeatedly asked U.S. officials to bomb Auschwitz as well as the railways, and heard their excuses about not wanting to “divert” planes from the war effort.

Three days after Ben-Gurion’s speech did not grapple publicly with the costs of Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza.)

There is, however, another way to think about the queen’s significance: as a sort of religious figure. Not a religious leader, and not a god exactly, but as an intermediary between profane humans and divine aspirations. In a prayer in memory of the queen, Mirvis wrote: “In an age of profound change, she signified order and justice; and in times of tension, she offered generosity of spirit.” That’s as good a definition as any for the function of religion. Americans don’t have monarchs, but we do have what Robert Bellah calls the American civil religion, with “its own reminding the couple — and making those vows vibrantly current for their children and grandchildren — of the beauty, strength and commitment of those vows when they were first said at their wedding so many years before.

So, it is with us, as we stand again, gathered to hear the words of our ancient covenant renewed. May we all allow our thought, speech and actions to flow from the covenant and teachings received by our ancestors and renewed by us in each generation. May we be written in the Book of Living Fully in this New Year 5783. JN in Jerusalem, Ernest Frischer of the Czech government-in-exile reported to Goldmann and the WJCongress that the Allies had been bombing “fuel factories…in Oswiecim and Birkenau,” not far from the “extermination installations.” Goldmann pointed out that fact to Allied officials, to no avail. They were, as Ben-Gurion put it, not willing to even “lift a finger” to rescue Jews.

In a recent JTA interview, Burns asserted that President Roosevelt “could not wave a magic wand” but did his best to help the Jews during the Holocaust. Ben-Gurion, who actually lived through those days and was an eyewitness to Roosevelt’s abandonment of the Jews, understood the reality far more clearly. JN

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media prophets and its own martyrs, its own sacred events and sacred places, its own solemn rituals and symbols.” Such rituals and symbols represent the purposes and the meaning of a nation.

In our case, those symbols include the Stars and Stripes, the Statue of Liberty, the national parks, late leaders who stood for something bigger than themselves. We put bald eagles and dead presidents on our coins; in England, they put their queens and kings. JN

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.