A Lone Voice

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog

from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with

muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the

sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the

white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen

wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my

East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My

noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love

would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted

now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle

the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W. H. Auden

If a person who has risen to the holiness of silence should

lower himself to a particular form of divine service, in

prayer, study, the limited problems of morality, he will

suffer and feel oppressed. He will feel that his soul , which

embraces all existence, is being pressed as though with

prongs, to surrender her to the lowland where everything

exists within a prescribed measure, to the narrowness of a

particular path, when all paths are open to him, all

abounding in light, all abounding in lifeʼs treasures.

OROT HAKODESH VOL II P 307, Rav Kook

The Holy Izhbetzer comments on “I am earth and ash”,

that to grow spiritually, you need both. Some of our Jewish

leaders have made a complete religion out of the ashes of

the Holy Six Million. But ashes alone are just not enough

to nurture the neshama. You need the earth also to build

strong roots.

On the one hand I cannot forget what happened in

Europe. On the other I know that I have to help rebuild a

new world. What’s a holocaust memorial? Is it the last will

and testament of the six million to have a memorial? Their

last will is that we yidden should be yidden. Unfortunately,

many yidden give two million dollars to a holocaust

memorial while their own kids don’t care about being

Jewish. Inconsistency in one’s emotions or thinking is a

human quality and a very honest expression of one’s

humanity. A deceitful person attempts to reconcile

contradiction through conniving reasoning and by

stretching the truth.

My goal is to turn people on to Yiddishkeit or whatever

other religion or spiritual path they were born into. And to

make frum (religious). Jews conscious of our world

mission. Orthodox Jews keep G-d’s commandments but

have trouble accepting their responsibility to help make

this a better world for all of humanity. On the other hand,

the enlightened Jews who came out of the ghetto sought

to achieve social responsibility but completely neglected

the commandments.

Rav Kook taught that the so called secular Jews by

settling in and building the Holy Land, were guarding the

body of the Jewish people, while the religious Jews were

watching its soul. Today the body of the Torah, the laws,

are being guarded by the religious Jews, while the soul of

the Torah, the fire of its teachings are being watched by

the so-called secular Jews. We orthodox Jews have to

deliver G-d’s message to the entire world and that’s why I

travel to a place where there aren’t that many Jewish

people now. That’s why I came to Poland. It’s a place that

has especially bad memories for our people. But that’s the

very reason that it makes Poland a prime choice for

change. In the Bible we find that Shechem is the city

where Dina was raped. Years later it was the city where

the brothers sold Joseph and the split of the twelve tribes

began. But it’s also the headquarters for the tribe of

Joseph who symbolizes the start of the redemption. So the

greatest tribute we can offer to the Six Million is to return

to the place of their eternal rest and swear to them that we

shall dedicate ourselves to spreading their values and

their dreams to the entire world. Holocaust memorials

have been turned into a business by people who haven’t

the slightest idea of who the pre-holocaust Jews were and

what they stood for. We cannot allow assimilated Jews

who speak in an alien tongue be our spokespeople to the

world. We must address the world in our own Divine

language. If I let out tztzis and payus everywhere, then

when I return to Germany, I let them out even longer. I was

in Hamburg once and a Jewish lady told me that I wasn’t

in Jerusalem where I could let my religion hang out this

way. I told her that in all the times I’ve been back to

Germany, no German ever made such remarks to me. Her

comments are, cholila, Nazi-like. The Nazis wanted to

wipe out our people and she wants to wipe out our

religion. Another time, in Hamburg, I walked into a

restaurant with a German TV reporter. He saw me eat

some fruit and told me, thank G-d you eat kosher, that he

had interviewed a famous Israeli pianist the week before,

who ordered ham and cheese. I felt a sigh of relief, he told

me. Thank G-d, the Fuehrer didn’t succeed and there are

still Jews who are proud to be Jews. We frummer Yidden

can make such a Kiddush haShem with our behavior, that

we can inspire the whole world. But first we have to clean

up our own act. A little Israeli boy once told me that the

reason he doesn’t go to a Jewish school is that he lives

near a yeshiva and he hears the children crying whenever

they get beaten by the teachers.

Any parent or teacher who hits children is, G-d forbid,

keeping Der Fuehrer’s way alive! G-d’s words can be

taught to our children and spread throughout the world

only in a loving way that is completely free of all anger and

hatred.

The Shoah: The Holocaust and helping to rebuild a new

world By Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach on April 29, 1989 - כ"ד

ניסן תשמ"ט

Majdaneck, Poland 5749 Originally transcribed for

Connections Magazine by Rabbi Sam Intrator

I fear we have forgotten. I fear we have betrayed your

memory. I fear we too are lost.

Where our President speaks of the Koran and ignores

history where inside we are empty where even our

theologies fail us your voice seems so far away.

What yiddishkeit? What kind of healing did you mean? That

nostalgia for the shtetl? Surely not! The high moral ground?

You were way beyond that pietism!

In Spertus today I watched lazily as third generation old

ladies volunteered and wandered around busily with that

patronizing Mona Lisa smile doing their chesed work

disconnected from ritual and myth in their do gooded-ness

but there is no mezuza on any door in this multi million

dollar edifice to perpetuate Judaism.

And I think of myself lost in this world. drowning in the

twitter and chatter of the day worried about his speech in

Cairo and Buchenwald “to the victims that died here” as

if...Poor fellow...Prisoner of his own rhetoric!

What did Hitler teach us? A lot, I fear. These bastards of

history are our only teachers. and the history of violence

and war seems to be the real lesson with moments of

peace interspersed. Look at Napoleon before him the

world was never the same. The horror of the State invades

our consciousness.

But Shloime! You still believed in the message didnʼt you?

the “light unto the nations” gag appropriated by secular

zionists so conveniently and the myth of superiority! What

now? After 60 years of colonial rule? How is our moral

compass reading? Just look into the prisons and hospitals

and schools for the violence. Nothing has changed! We

appropriated the state apparatus as well.

No, my teacher, I fear the change must come within.

Today 60 years ago Albert Schweitzer visited University of

Chicago and 5000 people came out to visit him! he too

was a hero. Nobel Prize laureate Bach musicologist,

pianist, organist physician and theologian. Yet 40 years

ago today was the massacre at Tiananmen Square and

during WWII today many US soldiers died in a bloody

Midway naval battle in the Pacific. Today the evacuation at

Dunkirk ended. Today today today going back remains

bloodied.

Today today each day each day assimilated Jews get

further away and we the faithful? Where are we going?

Further into the Talmud? Our legal texts, our rhetoric of the

past? Into Halachic minutiae? Anything to avoid the deep

chasm within?

Stop waging yesterdayʼs battle my friend! The war is

over...Out there let the inner battle begin. Start worrying

about our own inner betrayals deceits and lies. Fix the

inner world first. Close the blogs shut down the libraries

seal the Beis Midrash.

And in the silence let the deafening screams penetrate let

the pain ooze up from the bloody ground the centuriesʼ

martyrs of all races have their say let the memories bubble

into the landscape the horrors percolate into the bloodstream.

Let a new consciousness arise where the only command

shall be “let the other live” no matter what the

consequences.