April 25, 2006 is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Israel. I thought I might reflect on one of the many issues that the holocaust presents. One of those issues is the matter of faith.
The vast majority of survivors of the holocaust, who by and large were observant Jews prior to it, lost their faith because of it. On the other hand, those who passed the “test” of the Holocaust and maintained their faith are the very same one's who changed the face of Orthodoxy in America. Those who remained religious and immigrated to the United States sought a religious education for their children of the type that had been ingrained in them by their parents in Europe and sought to pass on. They thus helped to create the vast national network of religious day schools by populating them with their children. This has resulted in what we now have today... an incredible renaissance both qualitatively and quantitatively in Torah learning and Mitzvah observance unlike anything America has ever experienced pre holocaust.
One might think that surviving the horrors of the holocaust and remaining Frum means that these people were of the purest in their faith, untainted by doubt. Well, I’m sure that’s true in many if not most cases. But in a documentary feature broadcast several years ago on public television I learned that there are some people who survived with faith... but not an entirely intact faith.
Menachem Daum, an observant Jew in his mid fifties who is a television producer, by profession, presented a 10 minute documentary. In it he described his parent’s holocaust ordeal. They were from those who retained their faith. His father had been Moser Nefesh to put on Teffilin during the worst of times when he most certainly was Patur from doing so. Recently paralyzed, unable to move or speak, he is aided by his devoted son, Menachem, and who puts Talis and Teffilin on his father and Davens with him every day.
But Menachem's mother, who was scrupulously observant until the day she died, nevertheless, lost much of her faith on the day she arrived in Auschwitz and her young child was taken from her arms and executed. Menachem indicated that he, too, is more observant in practice than by conviction... mostly out of respect out of respect for his parents. But he does not understand his father's pure faith. He is perplexed by the events of the holocaust as are many of us who are children of the holocaust (...those whose parents lived through it).
It was that pure faith that caused a Mesiras Nefesh of a different kind. After immigrating to the US after the war, he settled in upstate New York, where and started a business. He soon realized the type of success that all Americans strive for. He was on the verge of achieving the American dream but saw that his young son's soul was in jeopardy in that there was no religious education available, nor was there any kind of religious environment in which his son could grow up. So instead of the relentless pursuit of the American dream he abruptly moved to Brooklyn where his son could attend Yeshiva.
Here we have a man, Menachem Daum, who was raised by the sincerest of parents, in a religious environment with a fine yeshiva education, who himself raised a religious family with two sons learning as Avreichim in Yeshivas Mir Yerushalyim, yet... he is a doubter and expressed that publicly. This was somewhat of an eye opener to me. It is one thing to be Orthoprax if one has little or no background. But here is a man who was raised in the most religious of homes and went to the finest of Yeshivos and leads a Frum lifestyle, scrupulous in his Mitzvah observance, and he questions his faith. And is an open doubter of God.
This makes me wonder hoe many other such people there are with similar profiles... observant, scrupulously so, yet flawed in their beliefs. Not from the questions so often raised in the blogosphere with respect to perceived contradictions between science and Torah but because of this unanswerable question: How could God let a “Tzadik V’Rah Lo” of such magnitude happen? ...Six million deaths.... many of them Tzadikim... and untold numbers of survivors who suffered unimaginable horrors!
Yet... I owe my very existence to the holocaust. My father’s first wife was murdered by the Nazis and I am a product of a second post war marriage.
