The Holocaust is a kind of Rorschach test, if one can use a German-Swiss device as the lens through which we consider this Yom Hashoah. In fact, however discredited that test may be as a diagnostic tool in psychology, it is the perfect way to challenge ourselves and invite others to examine our thoughts and feelings about the Holocaust, especially today, as people observe Yom Hashoah.
This day can be, and is, observed in many ways. It can be recognized through gathering students to watch old films—often made by the Nazis—of Jews being tormented and murdered, as it was when I was a child in a Jewish Day School. It can be honored in hearing personal accounts from the rapidly shrinking pool of survivors who can speak in the first person about the Holocaust. There are public programs featuring academics and analysts, and there is the sounding of a siren across the State of Israel, during which people cease all activity, even stopping their cars and standing silently beside them for what feels like an eternity even though it is not more than 60 seconds.
Yom HaShoah can even be ignored, and that too is a kind of observance, which invites consideration, as even the most powerful events in history do shrink back from the prominence they once held. To be clear, I am not suggesting or supporting that move, but since all memory and forgetting are ways of making sense of things, it bears at least some recognition as part of the ongoing conversation about what the Holocaust means to us, how that meaning shapes us, and how we take an active and conscious role in that process.
At the very least, taking an active and conscious role in how we remember the Shoah feels like an opportunity to reverse the process of the murders of so many millions, whose only agency was how to deal with and find meaning in events that were otherwise almost always totally beyond their control. That in and of itself is a huge thing—thank you Viktor E. Frankl—and yet it still leaves them as innocent victims. In that sense, the conscious choice-making processes we engage in around Yom HaShoah and Holocaust memory simultaneously honor the victims and move us beyond the range of choices they could make.
All of which brings me to a magnificent project that was created by compassionate and visionary filmmaker and writer Stephen Grynberg, who invited me in to help him as he honors past suffering in a hauntingly beautiful way that chooses life and light, especially when we are often tempted to do otherwise.
Illuminate The Past invites us all, especially on Yom HaShoah, not only to remember and honor the past, but to do so in ways that help us to better understand that past and, perhaps even more powerfully, to light a way forward that carries that past with us without being enslaved by it. Like the virtual candle you will be asked to light when you visit the site today, as I invite you and all those with whom you share the link to do, you will have the opportunity to experience yourself as a bringer of light, and one who can help light the way forward for others, in your own unique way. Experienced this way, you not only light a candle but become a candle, in the sense that was meant by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook when commented in relation to Hanukkah that we not only light the candles, but that we are the candles. That is an opportunity not to be missed, and I hope that you do not.
We all need more illumination, perhaps now more than ever, especially as illumination does not determine what we see or how to understand what we see. It simply and powerfully allows us to see more—to widen our field of vision—which is especially necessary these days, and never more needed as we consider how the past shapes our present, and how we want our present to shape our future. After all, “never forget” is just the beginning. The real “work” begins with what and how we choose to remember, and Illuminate The Past is an invaluable way to do just that.