After learning that Alex Peretti had been murdered in Minneapolis, I had a conversation with a dear friend who took a deep breath before saying, “I don’t think the disruptive actions like blowing whistles, surrounding ICE vehicles, and videotaping all these actions is helping.”
I am thinking about what it means “to help.” Help who? To do what? I believe my friend was suggesting that they would like “helping” in this case to look like de-escalation and the retreating of ICE agents from our streets. But what if whistleblowers and videographers are helping to accomplish something else?
There is wisdom in the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. What can we change? I am a lifelong activist and am struggling deeply with this question. I am not alone here. So much of what we see in the news, in our backyards, in our exchanges with our neighbors is unacceptable. So where does that leave us?
Perhaps the wisdom is incomplete. Perhaps there should be another clause: God grant me the foresight to pay attention.
Growing up, I was never comfortable putting excessive emphasis in Judaism on the Holocaust. For many people I knew, the Holocaust was woven into their Jewish identity. But not mine. I did not want “Jewish” and “victim” in the same sentence. I wanted a Jewish identity about flourishing, thriving, and succeeding. I grew up in the late seventies and early eighties, a time of relative peace for Jews. It was a luxury to hold the Holocaust as history and not as core to what it meant to be a Jew.
For a while now, but especially since October 7, 2023, I have wondered about human resiliency, and particularly about Jewish resiliency. I began looking to Holocaust wisdom for inspiration. Viktor Frankl came to mind. He taught us to look at the sunset in the camps and find morsels of joy in a sea of pain. I found my way to Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe. He was a Hassidic master poised to change the Jewish world until global events dictated a different path for his life. He faced profound, unrecoverable personal losses in the sea of communal devastation in Poland. And yet, he insisted on being joyous at holiday celebrations, he inspired his followers to maintain a deep spiritual life, and he taught to always do favors or commit acts of kindness for others.
While this man’s ability to keep and inspire a deep spiritual life cleaving to God, even amidst the horrors of the Holocaust, was remarkable, what is also remarkable is how we know about him at all.
Rabbi Shapira kept a journal.
But Emanuel Ringelblum made sure that journal survived.
Emanuel Ringelblum was an historian, a social worker, and a Jew and so he was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. There he knew keenly that there was an obligation to witness, to record, and to preserve everything he could about what was happening in the world around him. Because the events were so unbelievable, he knew someone needed to hold it all. And he stepped into that role. Ringelblum led a group of people to help record and preserve. They secretly met on Shabbat afternoons and therefore referred to themselves as Oyneg Shabbas. This group of people managed to hide troves of documents, eyewitness accounts, memorabilia, and records.
Including the journal of one Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira.
In a time of deep unrest, in a time when the problems are so big I don’t feel I can do anything, we can do this. We can watch and record. We can hold knowing as a value and insist on it.
If you open up the Torah and roll to where the Shema is located (Deuteronomy 6:4), you will find it immediately because the text stands out. The last letter of the first word of the Shema and the last letter of the last word of the Shema are both enlarged. Ayin and daled. Those letters together spell two powerful words. Ayin-daled spells the word “eid,” which means witness. And daled-ayin spells the word “da,” which means to know. The Shema itself tells us to listen and to pay attention. To remember that God is one and we are one. It is the essential Jewish prayer. We say it five times a day. It was on the lips of those throughout history who have died for being Jews. Our central prayer, forward and backwards, is bookended by these concepts. To be a Jew means we must bear witness. We must never look away. We must demand of ourselves to be knowledgeable about what is happening in our world, what is and what is not true or real.
God grant me the foresight to pay attention. God grant me the strength to not look away. God grant me clarity to know what is real.
In a world where knowing what to do to help feels so elusive, let us know that bearing witness to what is is the Jewish call. And while witnessing may feel too quiet for the level of devastation we are watching around the globe at this time, bearing witness takes strength and brings power to the possibility of change and of hope.