This week we will mark Yom Hashoah, the day on which Israeli public life, and Jewish communities worldwide, turn to remember the six million murdered in the Holocaust. Jewish philosophers in the latter 20th century invested significant thought in the question of theodicy, or “Where was God in Auschwitz?”
And notwithstanding the volumes that address it, my sense is that no particular solution has been satisfying – the questions outweigh the answer.
Our parashah offers one distinctly Jewish approach to tragedy, as we read about the devastating death of Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu. On what should have been a joyous day – the inauguration of the sanctuary – tragedy struck when fire emerged from God, consuming the young priests.
Moses speaks to Aaron, offering an explanation, a justification of sorts, but Aaron doesn’t even respond. “Aaron was silent”. In the face of the grim, mystifying loss of his sons he doesn’t utter a word.
What is the nature of this silence? Is it simply shock and grief (Abarbanel)? Or perhaps is he silently accepting the harsh divine decree (Rashi)? Or might his silence be an expression of prayer – “To God my soul is silent. From Him is my deliverance” (Psalm 62:2)?
Some tragedies are too difficult to put into words. Jewish law suggests that a visitor to a shivah sit with mourners in silence, waiting for the mourners to open the conversation.
In the same spirit, Job, after losing his children, sits in silence. “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great” (Job 2:13). When his friends break the silence and begin their theologising, they violate their solidarity with Job’s suffering.
It seems appropriate then, that in Israel, Holocaust Day and Yom Hazikaron – the Memorial Day for fallen soldiers – are marked by national moments of silence. The piercing silence expresses what words cannot.
In a historic speech – “Kol Dodi Dofek” – delivered 70 years ago, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik asserted that questions of divine justice were impenetrable and unsolvable: “God does not address this question, and it is not answered... we ask not about the reason for evil and its purpose, but rather about its rectification and uplifting.”
Yet Aaron arose from his mourning, and continued with the ritual of the sanctuary. And the most enduring response to the Shoah for Rav Soloveitchik was that we transform the brit goral – our shared suffering – into a brit ye’ud – a covenant of a common future.
It is the builders – of communities, of the halls of learning, of the State of Israel – who have contributed the most eloquent and enduring response to our loss, pain, and suffering.
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