August 24, 2001

"Our Children Die - but Our Faith Lives"

In the Soviet Union, he was a respected academician and a card-holding  member of the Community Party, but an emptiness in one small part of his  heart drew him to Israel with his wife. From an absorption center near  Jerusalem, they were placed at a Senior Citizen's Center for Russian olim.  As a result of his aliyah, his daughter and family followed and eventually  resided in the same neighborhood. He tearfully shared his frustrations with  me at being unable to lead his child and grandchildren to Judaism. Though he was approaching his seventieth birthday, he determined to read Hebrew and found his way to a shul every Shabbos, and occasionally, a teen-aged grandson would join him. He recognized his lifelong emptiness was his lack of Jewish spirituality which was unavailable in the Marxist society.

This elderly Russian Jewish grandfather spoke of the happiest day in his  life when his grandson, but a few months ago, revealed that he would study Bible during his Freshman year in college. But then on the very next Friday  night, his grandson and some friends went to a Tel Aviv disco and returned 
as a charred lifeless body, murdered by a terrorist bomber at the Dolphinariam. He cried as his voice bellowed, ". . .so if there is a G-d, why would He have taken the one branch of my seed who had Jewish feelings?"

"Hashem gives death and gives life, lowers to the pit and elevates." (Samuel I 2:6) I sought to bring him comfort, but the words of Hannah read in the Haftorah for the First Day of Rosh Hashanah had the opposite effect on the bereaved grandfather. "If it is G-d who took my grandson, then we are all cursed to damnation." But I quickly retorted with Hannah's words, telling him, yes, "Hashem brings death and gives life, lowers to the grave and brings up."

A prerequisite commitment of faith prior to the submission of prayer declares, "You are faithful to resurrect the dead." Three times daily and four times on Shabbos and Yom Tov, this tenet of faith is articulated. We thus deny the finality of death.

Neither the most imaginative minds or the extreme of all fantasies could foresee the return of our people to our biblical homeland and, after two thousand years, a reviving of Jewish sovereignty and a revival of Torah learning and practice. Auschwitz's ovens would have marked the end of our two thousand years of hellish exile. After seeing the skin torn from our children's flesh, the pious and the secular smeltering in ovens that could have melted steel, Jews exhibited an unknown strength–unknown to all of humankind. We broke the bows of mighty men as we rose out of the dust to sit among the princes of the world. We came singing to the heights of Zion as our sons and daughters came back from the land of the enemy.

The intifada hurts, and the loss of one life to murder and terror is the equal of six million. Hitler and his cohorts murdered millions but failed to destroy our faith and spirit. Arafat's crazed schemes and blood-thirsty terrorists must not be allowed to comfort themselves in the false belief of having even minutely diminished the flame of faith the czars of the Soviet Union failed to extinguish.

I assured the old man that all the eloquence in the world could not bring him comfort or reason for his martyred grandson. But the tears shed now will irrigate the soil on the boy's grave. . . and seeds will sprout. . .blossoming into many different colors, young and old. . .and winds of hope and peace will spread their seeds far and near. "For after returning, I regretted. . ." (Jeremiah 31:18) Please, I begged him and all the other survivors of hateful terror, don't regret. The future is ours though the pain is great, the suffering intolerable and the cries of anguish, deafening. "Weeping endures for a night and joy comes in the morning." (Tehillim 30:6) Jews always knew that the night precedes the day and when the night's darkness recedes to the morning's light, a new day emerges. . .and every day I anticipate "he will come."

Shabbat Shalom