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To commemorate Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, I will share again my favorite Holocaust-related poem.

To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century

by Muriel Rukeyser



To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:
Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist: and God
Reduced to a hostage among hostages.

The gift is torment. Not alone the still
Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.
That may come also. But the accepting wish,
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.



I like it, among other reasons, because it is not *about* the Holocaust so much as it's about the fact that the Holocaust demands a response. And it's at least a two part response. Of course, the response requires us to speak up against other genocides and try to prevent the Holocaust from happening again, to take an event that happened in the past and is unerasable and use it as inspiration to erase possible futures. But the other part of the response is to live lives of purpose and meaning that repudiate the antisemites' mission of hatred and repression. Though Rukeyser frames it as the Jews' gift, it is also the gift/choice for the whole world, to live as free people, free-thinking people, who fully enjoy the world that they are blessed to live in. To fully enjoy even the suffering, the 'full agonies.'.


Today is the fourteenth day of the Omer