It’s Parashat Shmini, the parsha of the “eighth day,” the day after the 7 days of miluim, of practicing the erection and consecration of the Tabernacle. This is the day when all the lessons learned actually come into practice.
And it feels like the eighth day, in terms of holidays. We’ve had 7 (okay, 8, but it should have been 7) days of Passover. And now is the eighth day, when we put all those lessons into practice. What do we take with us from Passover into life?
As if to answer this question, we are immediately confronted, post-Passover, with Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. We go from a celebration of redemption to a remembering of tragedy and suffering. What is the relationship between these two?
They are both practices of memory. We have 6 zechirot, 6 acts of memory we are commanded to do (see your siddur for a complete list), and these are 2 of them: remember that you left Egypt and remember the terrible things Amalek did to you. Remember that there is redemption in the world and remember that there is cruelty in the world.
The two are necessarily linked. Remembering the Holocaust is a difficult thing. One can easily fall into the pit of despair with such memories. One begins to feel that the world is essentially an evil place where cruel things have happened and are still happening at this very moment. How can we bear such thoughts, such memories? As a people, how do we avoid a descent into hopelessness?
We can only face such memories fortified with the lessons of Passover, the holiday of hope. Passover teaches that there is ultimate redemption, that one must hold firmly to the belief that the world is moving in the right direction. Leaving Egypt does happen for those who are in straits.
But remembering our exodus from Egypt is not enough. If we did only that, we would be complacent, content in our sense of having already been redeemed. Our obligation is also to remember Amalek in the world, to remember that there still is cruelty and along with this memory, comes the obligation to erase its presence, to work at the eradication of evil from the world.
Immersed in a sense of evil in the world we could not fight it. It would overwhelm us. One cannot save a drowning person unless one is able to swim securely oneself. And so, we arm ourselves for the fight with the tools garnered in our Passover celebration – the faith in the ultimate triumph of good, in the possibility of redemption.
This is the eighth day, the day we take the memory of redemption to help us confront the memory of tragedy and cruelty.
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Wonderful. Those who define themselves first as victims are capable of justifying all sorts of action and inaction in response. but if we define ourselves first by freedom, and then too recognize the evil that still exist, we can see ourselves as victims and sometimes victimizers, capable of and responsible to protect the vulnerable.
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