1.
On Sunday, my daughter Ivriya will embark on her school's journey to Poland. During her trip, she will visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and complete a circle: she is the fourth generation descendant of an Auschwitz survivor, her great-grandmother Leah.
Last Saturday, when the emaciated figures of Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami, and Or Levy appeared after their release from Hamas captivity, comparisons began with the "Muselmänner," the concentration camp prisoners who reached the brink of death from starvation, those living dead who appeared as walking skeletons.
The comparison didn't stop there. Immediately afterward, as is common in our discourse, public discussion rapidly moved to describe what was happening to our hostages in Gaza as a "Holocaust." Hebrew is an ancient language, and we have an abundance of words to describe horror and disaster, torment and torture, cruelty and violence, monstrous abuse, villainy and barbarism, evil, and devilry that our brothers endured under the control of these evil people.
2.
And what should I tell my daughter, that if she wants to understand what happened at Auschwitz, she should look at the faces of the three captivity survivors? What a grand reduction of the greatest catastrophe in our people's history. If what our hostages are experiencing in Hamas captivity is a "Holocaust," what will we do when exposed to greater horror, heaven forbid – from where will we mine additional words to contain such evil?
But Ivriya had already mentioned that the comparison bothered her greatly too. I told her that Holocaust denial began with challenging its uniqueness, placing it on a similar continuum with other catastrophes and cases of genocide. Everyone suffers, they said, and what's the difference between one murder and another. This was how they sought to deny the particularity of the Holocaust and turn it into a universal matter similar to other disasters. It was no coincidence that those who worked to strip the Holocaust of its uniqueness accused Israel of similar behavior toward the Palestinian Arabs. Facts were not the guiding light for the accusers, but rather the desire to link Israel's existence with moral wrongdoing, and thereby negate the justification for its establishment. From the same intellectual community that denied the Holocaust's uniqueness came some who morally justified Hamas's attack, claiming "the Jews oppressed the Palestinians." And now, unwittingly, we commit a similar comparison.
3.
When you reach Auschwitz, my daughter, remember that this place was different from all other sites in the history of world evil, "another planet": for the first time in history, evil appeared in its most distilled and refined form, as an end in itself. The creatures of that planet – including the Muselmänner – had no names and faces, only numbers. They bore collective guilt for being sons and daughters of a people who gave the world more than any other collective had contributed to it.
There was no historical precedent for the Holocaust, nor any reason that foretold it in the years before World War II. An entire nation – perhaps the most modern of its time – with its political, legal, and scientific institutions, its army, and security apparatus, joined together with most of its citizens to eliminate all Jews in the world, even those with just a trace of Jewish blood, even if they had lived for generations as Christians.
Even in the last year of the war, when Nazi Germany's defeat was only a matter of time and the German front was desperate for food, equipment, and ammunition, the Nazis preferred to use the few trains still operating in Europe to send half a million Hungarian Jews to the death camps. There is such a thing, my daughter, as devotion to evil. In one of those cattle cars sent to Auschwitz was your great-grandmother Leah.
The Holocaust was unique also in the complete absence of any interest or logical rationale – even a criminal reason – for wanting to kill all Jews. Unlike the vast majority of crimes, even crimes against humanity, the killing of Jews brought no benefit to the Nazis, and no tangible profit. The opposite: Jews were flesh of the flesh of modern Germany, of its culture, scientific life, economy, industry, and politics. Their elimination was tantamount to cultural suicide for German society.
4.
The Jewish people gave the world the Ten Commandments, including the sixth commandment: "Thou shalt not murder!" Can one explain in a Godless culture why murder is pure evil and why it is forbidden always, in all circumstances, regardless of religion, race, gender, and status? The murder of a homeless person, for example, who has no relatives or anyone to mourn them, whose disappearance makes no difference to anyone in the world. Still, this commandment is clear at the basic level of human morality. Placing this commandment at the head of social commandments (between man and his fellow man) in the Ten Commandments was meant to fix its place as a categorical moral imperative beyond appeal or second thought. Murder is murder.
But "thou shalt not murder" is not "thou shalt not kill," despite most translations equating the meaning ("Thou shalt not kill"). Error. The Torah distinguishes between killing and murder. Sometimes it is commanded to kill, for example, our enemies who threaten our lives and the lives of our loved ones. One who prefers to wash their hands clean and not get dirty by killing those who seek our lives is not more moral. The opposite.
5.
When you stand there, my daughter, in the heart of what was the greatest human hell in history, remember that the State of Israel was established not because of but despite the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the ultimate attempt to remove us from the world and along the way to stop the historical process of the Jews' return home to Zion as our prophets foretold. And when they failed, they continued with wars against the Jewish state until Oct. 7. The Hamas charter, the founding document of the terror organization, contains two principles: total commitment to the destruction of Israel and total commitment to killing Jews wherever they are.
This is a document similar in spirit to the book Hitler published in the previous century. Against this evil we place our historical commitment to continue our people's heritage and fight without compromise against those who seek our lives. This genesis war that was forced upon us on Simchat Torah is not over; Hamas still stands, and we are commanded to eradicate this evil from the world and teach the world the laws of removing leaven.
Stand there, my daughter, with your friends, in the heart of darkness, and swear "Never Again!" First, never again will we flee and hide from our pursuers, but we will return battle for battle and destroy them. And second, never again exile, wandering from country to country, subject to the whims of rulers and an incited mob. From there, from the ashes of the crematoria, your great-grandmother rose and ascended to the land of Israel, and together with her an entire people rose to life from its graves and renewed its days as of old in its ancient homeland. And if we overcame the greatest trauma in history, we are truly an eternal people – we have strived with God and with men and have prevailed. With God's help, we will also overcome the existential challenges before us.
And then repeat the immortal words of our prophet Ezekiel, who in his mind's eye saw Auschwitz's valley of death with its dry bones, and in the face of his generation's despair ("Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost; we are cut off") solved the riddle for them and for us: "Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O My people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel... And I will put My spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land; then shall you know that I the Lord have spoken it and performed it." Return in peace.
