Parshat Ve'etchanan: Never Again?
I don't think anyone would argue that in the future, when we remember the year 2020, two nightmarish words will come to mind, namely ‘Coronavirus’ and ‘Covid19’. One shudders to consider what could greet us from August onwards.
The year that began on 1st January should have been recalled for so many other reasons.
·
Was it not going to be the seventy-fifth anniversary of
the end of the Second World War?
·
Was it not going to signal the start of brand new and
exciting decade?
· Was it not going to introduce this country into a new experiment ‘sans Europe’?
After a brief start, our calendars ground to a halt on 23rd March and 'Groundhog Day' became a reality[1], to the extent that many of us forgot the date of the month, let alone which day of the week it happened to be. Was it Monday or Wednesday, Sunday or Tuesday and did it really matter, when many of our friends were winning their respective battles to cling onto life whilst thousands of others lost theirs and when many of our loved ones were either furloughed or ended up losing their jobs?
Instead of remembering the anniversaries that we had planned to mark, which rightly did feature albeit in a greatly subdued manner, our minds were filled with history lessons that we barely recalled from school - the Influenza Pandemic which followed the ‘Great War’ (a misnomer if ever there was one) and the Black Death. Perhaps they seemed more relevant in the overall scheme of things.
Covid aside, what lessons should we have remembered in this challenging year?
· In the seventy-fifth year after the liberation of Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, Majdanek and others, where the grotesque number of six million became eternally branded into our collective subconscious.
· On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the genocide perpetrated against eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys - where the town of Srebenica entered our vernacular, never to leave.
What lessons should the world's population of seven-and-a-half billion human beings have learned in 2020?
Biblical
critics have long enjoyed finding fault with the Bible, hence their moniker.
An 'old chestnut' they employ is to claim that the Sefer Devarim/Deuteronomy was written many years after its predecessors, in the times of King Josiah (late seventh BCE) and that Moses was not involved in its inscription in any way. Their rationale stems from the structure of the book which repeats much of what has appeared in the four previous books of the Torah.
Rabbi Sacks, in a fascinating essay (https://rabbisacks.org/book-covenant-devarim-5777/) debunks this theory by comparing the entire makeup of Sefer Devarim with recent Archaeological finds. These highlight the similarities between the format of the book and contemporary regional treaties that had been drawn up by other nations during the same historical period.
This week's Parsha of Va'etchanan contains two of the most famous readings in Jewish literature - the Ten Commandments and the first paragraph of the Shema. We recite the latter twice a day (in full) and hear the former three times a year - in Parshat Yitro (Sefer Shemot/Exodus), on Shavuot, the historical date when the Torah was given at Mount Sinai and in this week's Parsha.
The Ten Commandments, or more accurately, the Ten Statements (Aseret Hadibrot - if you recall, I explained in my last Drasha that 'davar' from which 'dibrot' is derived means a ‘word’. 'Commandant' is the translation of 'mitzvah') sets out the basis for a society that is founded on moral principles, where there is a single Gd (as opposed to man-made idols) whose Name is never to be forsaken or misused. A society where murder, theft (of humans or property), adultery and the basic decency between humans is to be placed at the very pinnacle of its value system. In short, a world that each of us would like to live in…that we should be living in.
And if stating it once seemed arbitrary, repeating it in this week's Parsha underscores its significance because if you don't repeat important facts, you run the risk of these being ignored over time.
After the Second World War, society promised to ensure that 'never again' meant 'never again'.
How many times, could the slogan 'never again' be repeated until it became ingrained into the minds of the generations that were born after 1945?
If 'never again' meant something, why did we find ourselves commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacres that took place between the 6th and 11th July? Why did we look in astonishment at the emaciated faces of those inmates of the Omarska camps, set up by the Bosnian Serbs to incarcerate the Bosnianks and Croats?
Where the detainees had one meal a day.
Where many were raped, tortured and murdered.
In one camp of many.
Not in 1945.
In 1995.
Never again?
|
(44) This
is the Law that Moses set before the Israelites: |
(מד) וְזֹ֖את הַתּוֹרָ֑ה אֲשֶׁר־שָׂ֣ם מֹשֶׁ֔ה לִפְנֵ֖י בְּנֵ֥י
יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ |
Every time
we raise the Sefer Torah at the end of the reading, we recite Verse 44, because
we acknowledge that the Torah in its entirety has been given to us so that we
can internalise every single lesson it teaches us. Once or twice or however many times it takes
for us to internalise them.
(45) these are the decrees, laws, and rules that Moses addressed to the people of Israel, after they had left Egypt,
To which Rashi explains:
“Those are the very same testimonies which he spoke when they came forth from Egypt; and he again repeated it (this law) to them in the plains of Moab.”
Rashi is informing us all that 'never again' doesn't just apply to the Holocaust. It is relevant for time immemorial. Just as the laws that were given at Sinai were identical to those repeated by the eastern banks of the River Jordan, so the lessons that we learned in the past are just as valid today.
First it was Auschwitz in 1945, then Srebrenica in 1995 and now we are witnessing the stomach churning and chilling aerial shots of the transportation on trains and incarceration in camps of blindfolded Muslim Uighur people in China.
According to a report by Byrahima Mahmut, a Uighur lady who now lives in London (sourced from last week’s The Jewish Chronicle), possibly three million of her brothers and sisters are being held in camps where they are being tortured on a daily basis and crowded into tiny cells. A recent report stated that there was a programme of forced sterilisation of 'at least 80% of Uighur women of childbearing age. Those who refuse are threatened with incarceration in concentration camps.’
Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Education Trust (HET) wrote the following in an article below Byrahima's piece:
"According to the US Holocaust Museum and Memorial, between one and three million Uighurs out a population of twelve million are currently in some form of detention and those who are not still face rapidly tightening control restricting their ability to express who they are...."
Not in 1945 or 1995. Now, in 2020.
Never again?
We have a duty to do our best to protect those, like our relatives and parents' friends who were persecuted because of their ethnicity. If the powerful slogan of 'never again' didn't manage to transmit the message across the generations, we must be resolute to hold accountable those who think that they can repeat the 'projects' that led to the attempted genocide of our people three-quarters-of-a-century ago.
Today I am
Jewish.
I am Bosniak.
I am Tutsi.
I am Darfuri.
I am Uighur.
And I will
not be silent whilst my people are being persecuted.
Saying 'never again' is not enough to save my people.
The Torah, in repeating the Ten Commandments (and many other Laws) teaches us that, for 'never again' to mean something substantial, it must be accompanied by action. Let's make 2020 a year in which, Covid notwithstanding, we averted another genocide.
Please play your part in rescuing the Uighur people by writing to your MP and placing their plight at the top of the political agenda. We owe both to them and ourselves.
There is still enough time to make this year worth remembering – for the right reasons.
Shabbat
Shalom.
[1]
I’m referring to the 1993 film
“Groundhog Day” where a television weathercaster relives the same day over and
over again.
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