Remember And Don't Forget

My flight to Israel started out on the right foot. A woman [speaking rapid-fire yiddish] asked the man in the aisle seat to my left to move so that she could sit with her 2 daughters. He refused. I was asked to give up my aisle seat so that he could keep his aisle seat and she could have the three seater. I refused. Then I remembered how on my way to New York I tried to switch seats but could find nobody who granted my request. It was fruuuustrating. So I happily acquiesced and moved to the middle and he took my aisle seat.

It turns out that the seat next me remained vacant so I was quite possibly the only person on the plane to have two seats. I learned once again that from chesed you never lose.....

At the end of the flight, right when we landed, the phones started coming out. It is like motzei Yom Kippur when hungry people have to eat. It has been 10 torturous hours without making a phone call. RACHMANUS!!!:-) There was a very nice pleasant frum lady sitting in the seat next to the empty seat with whom I had exchanged a few words during the flight. I heard her say "I am SOOO upset". I was sure that something happened that makes most housewives upset. A child burned dinner. Or perhaps the washing machine broke down again and another 750 shekel to fix it [I know all about it...]. She gets off the phone and says to me "There was a piguah [terrorist attack] in Har Nof and my neighbor was killed."

I never know what to say to that so I settled for a stunned, pained silence. This was really something to get upset about. I thought I heard her sobbing. She then said "That is that LAST thing I was expecting to hear".

Me too.

I would like to offer a perspective on the matter. Let us take the holocaust as an example. What was worse - The slaughter of four pure, innocent, holy Jews whose only "sin" was that they got up early to daven shachris or the torture, starvation and ultimately gassing to death of 6 million Jews including one and a half million children. Obviously the latter. So why are people so broken about the murder of four when we are well aware and have heard so much about the murder of six million. Nobody I know got up this morning in a foul mood because Mengele performed medical experiments on children, maiming them for life or because the Germans burned down the Warsaw ghetto or because the Klausenberger Rebbe lost his wife and all of his 10 children.

The answer is that people have short memories. The holocaust is a more vague memory which we have all "gotten used to" over our lifetimes. When you get used to something, it doesn't bother you as much. That is why most people cry at a parents funeral but if you follow these people throughout their lives you will see them experiencing much joy. They digested the bad news and cope with it - everybody in their own way. But the initial shock wears off.

That is EXACTLY what will happen here. Every time there is a terrorist attack people are numb, shocked and pained - until the next one. Who thinks about the Mercaz HaRav massacre? The families of the children are still suffering but we all managed to move on. What about the bombing at Sabarro on Yaffo Street which killed so many [including a frum, pregnant woman carrying her first child] or the 2 bus on the way to the Kotel that exploded. Since the birth of the State over 20 thousand soldiers have been killed. Who thinks about the seventy victims of the latest war in Gaza?? Or about those of the Sinai Campaign of 1956? Anyone for the 11 athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics ["The games must go on" proclaimed Avery Brundage]?! Or this? [Rochel Emainu hasn't forgotten...]

My point is that a tragedy is no less a tragedy because [naturally] the effect wears off. All of the pogroms of the past are as tragic today as they were the day they happened. In Hashem's world [kviyachol] - there is no past, present and future. Everything is happening RIGHT NOW. Humans "get used" to things and memory fades. By Hashem - it never does.

The sefarim all teach that the more we remember an event, the more Hashem takes note of it. We are a people of memory and that is why we have so many mitzvos in the Torah to remember; Amalek, the Exodus, the giving of the Torah, Shabbos, how badly we behaved in the desert, the tzoraas of Miraim, that Hashem gives us the strength and ability to be successful etc. etc. From the book of the daughter of a Holocaust survivor “The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.”
   [Fern Schumer Chapman, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past]

The problem is that nevertheless, when tragedy [or good fortune] strikes, we often quickly forget. We are maaminim bnei maaminin that everything happens for a reason and that when we hear of a terrible tragedy and the news sites [almost gleefully I feel - it sells] portray the gore, blood and guts of innocent tzadikim, Hashem is sending all of us a message. If it happens again and again, it would seem that we are not getting the message.

So sweetest friends. Let us become purveyors of memory. Let us remember long forgotten events and experiences and be inspired to tshuva. That is the ultimate goal of our existence.

השיבנו ה' אליך ונשובה חדש ימינו כקדם!!

Let us be mischazeik in simcha and emunah, in limmud hatorah and tfilla, in chesed and tzdaka. Let us learn not only from the deaths of the Kdoshim but from their lives as well so that we also live lives dedicated to spiritual ideals and abandon our unbridled pursuit of materialism.