On sufferance: Ol Rappaport’s High Holy Days

‘The Holocaust demands the attention of all people of faith.’

Why do bad things happen to good people? Conversely, why do good things happen to bad people?

As a practising Jew, the High Holy Days are an enormous challenge for me. From Rosh Hashanah (the New Year, which starts at sunset on 2 October) to Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement, ending at sunset, 12 October), we meditate on and repent our shortcomings. If our repentance is true we will be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good year. As a Liberal congregant, much of this is stripped from our liturgy (we do not believe God’s love is so conditional), but the traditional greeting remains: ‘May you be inscribed for a good year’.

My first visit to Auschwitz was dull and impersonal. The guide recited his script but our visit did not intersect with the route my wife’s grandparents took when they were murdered there. It barely affected me until the High Holy Days when I remembered the ranks of wooden barracks. A small voice asked, ‘Is this the good year that my repentance has won me?’ 

I returned home and pulled out my Siddur (Jewish prayer book) and read the liturgy for Yom Ha’Shoah (the Day of the Whirlwind, the Jewish Holocaust day). It helped me come closer to my centre. But I stopped attending the High Holy Day services for some years after that. In the next few years I travelled central Europe visiting the places my grandparents had lived or stayed before their murder. My watchword was ‘To walk where they walked and to stand where they fell.’ 

It is said that on a wall in Mauthausen concentration camp were inscribed the words ‘If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgivenes’. I’m an unreconstructed theist, I have no doubt of the existence of the Eternal One, ever to be praised, though I have no more understanding of God’s nature than a moth has of astrophysics, though it steers by the moon. But the Holocaust demands the attention of all people of faith. It’s not just Jews who need to question how such an event could come about under a loving deity.

Does God even intervene in human events, in human history? And if God doesn’t, what is the point in prayer? Benedict XVI spoke well: ‘In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread silence – a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this? In silence, then, we bow our heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death here; yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again.’

Shortly after my wife was diagnosed with an aggressive, terminal cancer, she asked: ‘What did I do wrong for this to happen?’ I replied ,‘God doesn’t work like that, shit happens, and you’re Jewish.’ (Ashkenazi Jews are statistically more likely to develop certain cancers). Massively inadequate though my answer was, it was answer enough for Lesley. She died a year later with a courage, serenity and acceptance that humbles me.

There may be questions we will not see answered this side of Eternity, but that’s no reason not to ask them.

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Comments

The editor, in their wisdom, excised one word from my article which I regret. I wrote specifically of _intercessionary_ prayer , not _all_ prayer.  I particularly value praise prayer, which encourages humility, a virtue I singularly lack.

By Ol Rappaport on 3rd October 2024 - 12:18

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I thank you Ol Rappaport for your candour and courage. The question , ‘Is this the good year’  is a humbling one. I hear a quiet Quakerly response, ‘how can I live, how can I love to help make it a good year ?
I am grateful to be reminded of the high holy days in the Jewish year. And also the prayers of praise.

By bigbooks1963@gmail.com on 3rd October 2024 - 17:43

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I too noticed that the adjective, ‘intercessionary’, was missing before the word, ‘prayer’. And that was before I read Ol’s comment on his own article. I agree with Ol that it’s not _all_ prayer.
The QFP that I most associate with prayer, the kind that encourages humility, is 2.01 at https://qfp.quaker.org.uk “Worship is the response of the human spirit to the presence of the divine and eternal, to the God who first seeks us. The sense of wonder and awe of the finite before the infinite leads naturally to thanksgiving and adoration.”
Or, in other words, The sense of wonder and awe of the moth who does not understand astrophysics but who steers by the moon. 
😊

By Robbie Spence on 3rd October 2024 - 23:30

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Apologies Ol, that’s a fair point. I was just struggling to make it fit the page. J

By The Friend editor on 4th October 2024 - 10:29

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