Said to Myself

It is astounding to me how much money we spend as a community on Holocaust education. Particularly now with the recent spike in antisemitism in Europe I am sensitive to the need to “never forget”, but do we need to pay for other people to remember?  Let them pay for their own crimes and their feeling of guilt. The Holocaust is clearly part of our memory and history, but so too is the breadth and depth of Jewish literate, art, and culture. No matter what we teach our neighbors they will have to decide for themselves how they want to live. Our primary concern should be how we educate our children. My fear is that we spend more time teaching our children about how we died over and above teaching them how we lived let alone how we might live as Jews. You can disagree with me, but I doubt that a discourse of survival will be compelling to the next generation of North Americans who are growing up in affluence and safely.  So what are we left with?

In this week’s Torah portion, Terumah, we read that God tells Moshe to tell the Israelites, “Let them take for Me a portion, from every man whose heart motivated him you shall take My portion“(Exodus 25:1). The Israelites who had only recently escaped slavery do not limit their expression to preserving the memory of the experience they had in Egypt as we see in the Seder. They communicate their devotion to the Jewish project by making a contribution. Instead of continuity for the sake of continuity they throw themselves into the project of building the Mishkan, Tabernacle. In the contribution we create community. Does God really need a Mishkan? Clearly we did.

There is a certain sanctity in inviting and trusting  people to join the Jewish project. We must throw off the helicopter parent’s urge to prepare the way for the child as compared to preparing the child for the way. Do we trust the next generation to do their part? We need to be open to the fact that there are many ways for people to contribute. While we must stay vigilant about antisemitism we must stay on message and give the next generation the gift of allowing them to contribute in their own way.