We Jews tend to live our lives by the calendar. It’s not a very straightforward calendar, constructed as it is of the separate and disparately cyclical elements of the lunar month and the solar year. Alignment of the two requires some pretty nifty lunar footwork, in the form of two months of adjustable length (29 or 30 days) and seven inserted months in each 19-year cycle.

All of which accounts for the fact that this year (a leap year) Pesach was almost as late as it can be in the solar year and for the fact that I am writing this post at what could be considered one of the two darkest moments of the Jewish year. On the 9^th of Av, we mark the low point of the three-week mourning period commemorating the destruction of both Temples. On the 30^th of Nissan, today, we are in the middle of what I heard described last week as Asseret Y’mei T’shua, the ten days of redemption, a phrase coined as an untranslatable echo of Asseret Y’mei T’shuva (the ten days of repentance that start with Rosh Hashana and end with Yom Kippur).

This (actually eight-day) period in which we find ourselves started last Wednesday evening, as we entered Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Day, marked on 27 Nissan, and will end this Thursday evening, at the end of Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day, marked  on 5 Iyar. The period alsocontains Yom Hazikaron, the Memorial Day for those who fell fighting for the establishment of the state, or in defence of the state, and for the victims of acts of terrorism in Israel. This last always falls on the day before Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and its dying moments lead, with no break, into the celebrations of Yom Ha’atzma’ut.

I know that there are many who find this juxtaposition jarring, and that there are bereaved families who find it difficult to navigate this transition. However, I believe that this very juxtaposition is the most Jewish expression of our understanding of the meaning of our life here on earth.

To explain what I mean, let me go back just over two weeks, to the evening when almost all of my readers (I suspect) sat down to some form or other of Seder night. At many of those tables, we will have told the story of the Exodus from Egypt. We will, however, have started the story much earlier, and covered the descent into Egypt and then into slavery. In this way, our retelling of the Pesach story traces the path from the nadir of slavery to the zenith of the parting of the sea, then looks forward briefly to Mount SInai and even hints at the continuation of our national story.

The slavery in Egypt was, indeed, revealed to Abraham right at the beginning of the Jewish story, at the Brit bein Habetarim, the Covenant of the Parts. We are, it seems, to understand that the slavery was an inevitable part of the historical process that led to the Exodus, the revelation at Sinai, the entry to the Land of Israel. This, we are called on to believe, is all part of the Divine plan, a plan whose intricacies we certainly cannot expect to be able to understand, but whose existence we are required to acknowledge as we go about our daily lives.  

I try to approach Yom Hashoah every year in this spirit: in the knowledge that the Shoah is incomprehensible and unfathomable, but in the hope that I may be able to draw from the stories that emerge from it some guidance as to how to live my life. What is remarkable is that, every year, new stories emerge and are revealed on Israel’s radio and TV and in the newspapers: stories of unimaginable heroism and inconceivable evil, of sacrifice and deliverance. There has been, in recent years, a increasingly tangible sense of urgency in the gathering and telling of these stories. The youngest survivors who can remember anything of the Shoah are now in their mid-eighties, and the point at which no survivors will still be alive is only a generation away.

This was brought home to us vividly this year. At the central ceremony that opens Yom Hashoah every year, each of six torches is lit by a different survivor, accompanied and supported by a second- or third-generation family member, as that survivor’s personal story is told in their own voice and family pictures. This year, one of the six survivors chosen died less than two weeks before Yom Hashoah, and his flame was kindled by his son alone, as we watched film of the late father narrating his account.

Some time soon, then, the Holocaust will become, in historical terms, like the Exodus; it will live on only to the extent that the folk memory is nurtured. The capturing on film of personal testimonies, the survivors speaking in schools and accompanying trips to the death camps, are all initiatives that were started many years, even decades ago. New initiatives are now being launched where individual youth ‘take responsibility for’ the story of individual survivors. In these ways, we must strive to guarantee that the story of the Shoah is passed from generation to generation, exactly as the Exodus has been. Over the approximately 3,500 years since our ancestors left Egypt, that story has been handed down through an estimated 130 or so generations. It always seems to me astonishing that such a small number of fathers to daughters, mothers to sons are needed to form links in a chain that can span that long a history.

When Bernice was working, she always taught her three- and four-year-old pupils about the Shoah. When parents came into the kindergarten and saw, for the first time, (age-appropriate) photographs on the walls, some were horrified. Bernice always pointed out that, for these children, the events of the Shoah were no more immediate than the events of the Purim or the Pesach story; Hitler was no less, and no more, incomprehensible a villain than Haman and Pharaoh. It is, of course, true that not all of the children grasped the story equally well. One came in one morning to tell Bernice that the previous afternoon he had watched with his family the musical Hitler on the Roof. However, it is undeniable that, if we understand that Haman and Pharaoh can be presented in some meaningful way to four-year-olds as villains, then so can Hitler.

There seems to be less complexity in understanding the significance in the path of our history of the deaths of those who fell fighting for the State. A few days after the United Nations voted to create the State of Israel in November, 1947, Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the state’s first president a few months later, famously warned of the bitter struggle that lay ahead, saying: ‘The State of Israel will not be given to the Jewish people on a silver platter.’ Journalist and poet Nathan Alterman, inspired by these words, composed the poem that has become one of the anthems of Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, when he imagined the young men and women who would soon step up and lay down their lives fighting for the creation of the state. Asked who they are, these future warriors – still alive in 1947 but soon to die – answer, in Alterman’s prophetic imagination, from beyond their future grave: “We are the silver platter / Upon which the Jewish State was served to you.”

What even Alterman may not have foreseen, but what his poem continues to prepare the nation for, is that each generation must still be ready to become the silver platter for the future.

That stark realisation informs a day that is composed of what seems an endless succession of individual stories of so often young lives, aflame with promise, cut off in, or indeed before, their prime, leaving entire families bereft: a day of parents grieving for children and orphans mourning fathers they never knew. Every year new names are added to the sombre roll call – the total has now reached over 24,000 security personnel. The transition from that national act of remembrance to the celebrations of Israel’s independence is not easy. However, it is an essentially Jewish transition.

I am writing these words on the first of the two days of Rosh Chodesh Iyar. Every month, we celebrate the New Moon, because we see in the monthly waxing and waning of the moon a metaphor for the waxing and waning fortunes of the Jewish people. If I look for the moon in the sky tonight, I will probably be unable to see it, but I know that, from this low point, it will grow stronger, brighter, more clearly visible, every night.

This last Shabbat, we read the Haftara, the extract from Prophets, that we always read when Shabbat is the day before Rosh Chodesh: the story of David fleeing from the wrath of Saul, a moment that marks a low point, perhaps the lowest point, in David’s fortunes. No longer adored as the slayer of Goliath, no longer able to soothe Saul’s troubled soul with his harp, David has only one friend in the world, Jonathan, from whom he must separate himself to run and hide.

As we read this story, we know that David will rise from these depths to a glorious future as the King of Israel, the conqueror of Jerusalem, the author of the psalms that give eternally magnificent expression to all of humanity’s hopes, despair and triumphs. This story, too, is emblematic of the entire sweep of Jewish history.*

I find myself thinking of the quote made famous by Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

At first sight, MLK seems to be encouraging complacency. If, indeed, the arc bends towards justice, then all we need is patience. However, both his life’s work, and the original sermon from which he adapted the quote, make it clear that he saw it as his followers’ duty to use the faith and optimism that this belief gave them to fuel their actions as they made their own contribution to bending the arc. As the well-known joke has it: ‘Who do you think sent the boat and the helicopter?’ [In the unlikely event that you don’t know the joke, just google: ‘ Who do you think sent the boat, and take your choice of the versions offered.] It is, I would argue, the Jewish way to see the seeds of redemption even in the suffering of exile, and to strive to maintain the faith to act in such a way that we help to hasten that redemption. As we read in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers: “Rabbi Tarfon would say: ‘It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it’.”

It remains only for me to wish you all a meaningful Yom Hazikaron and a celebratory Yom Ha’atzma’ut….and, speaking of helicopters….

*For these insights on the haftara, I am indebted to an essay by my friend Mark Schneider.