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By Alan Morinis A story I heard over Yom Kippur has stayed with me, and I want to share it with you in the hope that it will help guide you in this tumultuous world in which it is very hard to find one’s bearings. In synagogue one morning, a man who sits in front of me every day turned to me and said, “I learned the Yom Kippur prayers in the concentration camp.” He’s an older man, and I knew he was a Holocaust survivor, but I had never asked and until that moment, he hadn’t volunteered any of his story to me. “How was that,” I asked? “We were shoveling sand and gravel from a railway car. The Germans shipped building materials to the camp on a railway, then two men were given the job of moving the material from the big car to a cart to go to the camp. They were building bunkers, and I was shoveling with an older man. It was Yom Kippur, we knew that, and when the guard—you know, the SS man—had walked past, the other man would recite a line of the Yom Kippur prayers, and I would repeat after him, following behind him. I was only 18. He knew the prayers by heart. I hadn’t said the Yom Kippur prayers so many times by then. Like that, I learned the prayers in the camp.” He then turned back to his present prayers, and I was left with the sense of awe I often feel when I hear a personal story of the Holocaust, and I am drawn into the impossible exercise of imagining myself in that situation. Reflecting on this story, it struck me that reciting prayers in the concentration camp was, among many things, a statement of freedom for Izzie. Though captured and enslaved, there was a part of him that did not surrender. His body may have been forced to shovel gravel all day long, but Izzie remained spiritually free. He and his fellow prisoners were actually so physically enslaved that on the day that the war ended for them, they were on a forced march and the procession of prisoners just kept marching along for quite some time after the SS guards had already drifted away. Yet there was a part of Izzie that moved him to utter the words of the Yom Kippur kedusha:
Izzie had a right to ask that question too. Where is the God of gods right now, as I sweat my life away shoveling endless gravel for the Nazis on Yom Kippur? And his response was to revere, to sanctify and to laud, from the place in him that could never fully be imprisoned in the camp. Izzie’s story is about spiritual freedom in the face of physical enslavement. We, on the other hand, are so physically free. We are free to live where we want, eat what we want and associate with whom we want. We are free to vote for whom we want and to worship where we want or not worship at all. Compare any aspect of your life to that of people in a concentration camp to appreciate how extensive our long list of freedoms is. Yet, how is it that in the face of such freedom we can be so spiritually enslaved? Though our civilization has made physical freedom its crowning accomplishment, it has also made spiritual deprivation the norm. It is entirely feasible to enslave people without needing to own their bodies. It is just as effective to control minds and hearts, and pass on responsibility for their housing and feeding to the slaves themselves. I mean something very specific when I say that the world we live in is rife with spiritual slavery. This can be explained by referring to what the Torah tells us is the real purpose of a human life. Comb through the Torah as carefully as you can, and you won’t find the instruction “ashirim tihiyu”—you shall be wealthy. Nor will you find “yafim tihiyu”—you shall be beautiful. That despite the fact that wealth and physical appearance are the sorts of matters given the highest priority in the world we inhabit. No, what the Torah says is “kedoshim tihiyu”—you shall be holy. The Torah repeats this injunction in several places in several ways, and when the Torah repeats something, that gives special emphasis. The pursuit of holiness is the purpose of a human life. Everything else is secondary. Rabbi Yechezkel Levenstein, who was the Mussar supervisor of the great Mir Yeshiva during the war put it: “A person’s primary mission in this world is to purify and elevate his soul” (Sichos Mussar 12-13). Seek holiness. Our society has not had the same priorities as do our Mussar teachers. Society has put material matters ahead of spiritual concerns, and has actually denied the spiritual altogether. The messages imprinted on all of us through powerful media, advertising, politics, finance, education, health care, etc., tell us insistently and repeatedly that the physical is the priority. As a result, it is all too common in our world for people to waste the opportunity of being alive. That happens when we do not internalize the Torah’s message of kedoshim tihiyu—that our spiritual lives are the priority, perhaps even the reason we exist at all—and live our lives accordingly. Physical freedom is not the cause of our spiritual enslavement, but it does play a role in it. Being free to shop where we want, when we want, for whatever we want, can open up fields of possibility that are enthralling. The marketplace is full of alluring baubles working their magic on our desires. Because we do not suffer external restraints, everything is possible, and because we are endowed with such capable imaginations, we are very easily beguiled by a world of possibilities. In fairy-tales, people are enslaved more often by a spell rather than being taken captive physically. That image applies to us as well. Our free world casts a spell. In the simplest terms, despite the fact that the Torah speaks to us in concise, pointed and specific terms, this world has not made holiness its watchword. Jewish tradition provides us a valuable model for how to respond to a life of physical freedom. Having a scaffolding of guidelines within which to live helps us exercise this freedom, maintain it, make it a source of prosperity in society. It helps us to live lives that are physically healthy and to pursue holiness above all else. Without living within such frameworks that are beyond the personal, human nature sends us wandering, since we are free to do so. And that wandering becomes aimless, if not actually misdirected. And then neither our lives nor our society will be what we want them to be. Later Izzie told me another story. As I mentioned, on the day that he was liberated, the Germans had put the remnants of the camp on a forced march. Of the 400 people who had begun the march, only half were still alive. The sick and weak fell to the side, where the Nazis finished them off with bullets. Izzie himself had slipped to the back of the line and had come to the point of exhaustion. A man who was a friend of his father walked nearby, and Izzie told him that he couldn’t go on any more. “Come on,” said the man. “Put your arm in mine and we’ll go together. Can’t you see? The trucks are gone. We’re walking to freedom.” That day the Americans liberated them. Had he not had the companionship of that man, Izzie himself might have ended his life in a ditch with a Nazi bullet in his brain. The Torah emphasizes the spiritual because that is the essence of human life. And the Torah also emphasizes the need to live within an enduring structure external to the individual and his or her preferences. In our situation, where we are blessed with physical freedom, but also live under a spell that blinds us to the real priorities in life, the spiritual danger is great. The wise response is to embrace external structure and limitation that will help keep us awake to our priorities. And from this last story, we learn that we do not do that alone. We do it in community. We do it by leaning on trustworthy others. May we be that for each other on this journey toward holiness. |
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