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A Lone Voice



“If a person who has risen to the holiness of silence should lower himself to a particular form of divine service, in prayer, study, the limited problems of morality, he will suffer and feel oppressed. He will feel that his soul , which embraces all existence, is being pressed as though with prongs, to surrender her to the lowland where everything exists within a prescribed measure, to the narrowness of a particular path, when all paths are open to him, all abounding in light, all abounding in life’s treasures”

OROT HAKODESH VOL II P 307, Rav Kook

The Holy Izhbetzer comments on “I am earth and ash”, that to grow spiritually, you need both. Some of our Jewish leaders have made a complete religion out of the ashes of the Holy Six Million. But ashes alone are just not enough to nurture the neshama. You need the earth also to build strong roots.
On the one hand I cannot forget what happened in Europe. On the other I know that I have to help rebuild a new world.
What’s a holocaust memorial? Is the last will and testament of the six million to have a memorial? Their last will is that we yidden should be yidden. Unfortunately, many yidden give two million dollars to a holocaust memorial while their own kids don’t care about being Jewish.
Inconsistency in one’s emotions or thinking is a human quality and a very honest expression of one’s humanity. A deceitful person attempts to reconcile contradiction through conniving reasoning and by stretching the truth.
My goal is to turn people on to Yiddishkeit or whatever other religion or spiritual path they were born into. And to make frumm (religious) Jews conscious of our world mission. Orthodox Jews keep G-d’s commandments but have trouble accepting their responsibility to help make this a better world for all of humanity. On the other hand, the enlightened Jews who came out of the ghetto sought to achieve social responsibility but completely neglected the commandments.
Rav Kook taught that the so called secular Jews by settling in and building the Holy Land, were guarding the body of the Jewish people, while the religious Jews were watching its soul. Today the body of the Torah, the laws, are being guarded by the religious Jews, while the soul of the Torah, the fire of its teachings are being watched by the so-called secular Jews.
We orthodox Jews have to deliver G-d’s message to the entire world and that’s why I travel to a place where there aren’t that many Jewish people now. That’s why I came to Poland. It’s a place that has especially bad memories for our people. But that’s the very reason that it makes Poland a prime choice for change. In the Bible we find that Shechem is the city where Dina was raped. Years later it was the city where the brothers sold Joseph and the split of the twelve tribes began. But it’s also the headquarters for the tribe of Joseph who symbolizes the start of the redemption.
So the greatest tribute we can offer to the Six Million is to return to the place of their eternal rest and swear to them that we shall dedicate ourselves to spreading their values and their dreams to the entire world. Holocaust memorials have been turned into a business by people who haven’t the slightest idea of who the pre-holocaust Jews were and what they stood for. We cannot allow assimilated Jews who speak in an alien tongue be our spokespeople to the world. We must address the world in our own Divine language. If I let out tztzis and payus everywhere, then when I return to Germany, I let them out even longer. I was in Hamburg once and a Jewish lady told me that I wasn’t in Jerusalem where I could let my religion hang out this way. I told her that in all the times I’ve been back to Germany, no German ever made such remarks to me. Her comments are, cholila, Nazi-like. The Nazis wanted to wipe out our people and she wants to wipe out our religion. Another time, in Hamburg, I walked into a restaurant with a German TV reporter. He saw me eat some fruit and told me, thank G-d you eat kosher, that he had interviewed a famous Israeli pianist the week before, who ordered ham and cheese. I felt a sigh of relief, he told me. Thank G-d, the Fuehrer didn’t succeed and there are still Jews who are proud to be Jews.
We frummer Yidden can make such a Kiddush haShem with our behavior, that we can inspire the whole world. But first we have to clean up our own act. A little Israeli boy once told me that the reason he doesn’t go to a Jewish school is that he lives near a yeshiva and he hears the children crying whenever they get beaten by the teachers.
Any parent or teacher who hits children is, G-d forbid, keeping Der Fuehrer’s way alive! G-d’s words can be taught to our children and spread throughout the world only in a loving way that is completely free of all anger and hatred.

The Shoah: The Holocaust and helping to rebuild a new world
By Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach on April 29, 1989 – כ”ד ניסן תשמ”ט

Majdaneck, Poland 5749
Originally transcribed for Connections Magazine by Rabbi Sam Intrator

Oi Shloime
I fear we have forgotten.
I fear we have betrayed your memory.
I fear we too are lost.

Where our President speaks of the Koran and ignores history
where inside we are empty
where even our theologies fail us
your voice seems so far away.

What yiddishkeit?
that nostalgia for the shtetl?
the high moral ground?

In Spertus today I watched the third generation Jews of Chicago
wander around busily
with that patronizing smile
doing their chesed work
disconnected from ritual and myth
and I think of myself
lost in this world.
drowning in the twitter and chatter of the day
worried about his speech in Cairo
as if…
poor fellow
prisoner of his own rhetoric!

what did Hitler teach us?
a lot I fear.
these bastards of history are our only teachers.
Like Napoleon before him
the world is never the same.

But you still believed in the message didn’t you?
the “light unto the nations”
the myth of superiority!
and now?
after 60 years of colonial rule?
how is our moral compass reading?
look into the prisons and hospitals and schools for the violence.
nothing has changed!

No my teacher
I fear the change must come within.
today 60 years ago Albert Schweitzer visited University of Chicago and 5000 people came out to visit him!
he too was a hero.
Nobel Prize laureate
Bach scholar
physician and theologian.
Yet 40 years ago today was the massacre at Tiananmen Square
and today during WWII today many US soldiers died in a bloody Midway naval battle in the Pacific.
Today the evacuation at Dunkirk ended.
Today today
each day each day
assimilated Jews get further away
and we the faithful?
where are we going?
further into the Talmud?
into Halachic minutiae?

Stop waging yesterday’s battle my friend!
the war is never over…out there
let the inner battle begin.
worry about our own inner betrayals deceits and lies.
fix the inner world first.
close the blogs
shut down the libraries
seal the pundits.

in the silence
let the deafening screams penetrate
let the pain ooze up from the ground
the centuries martyrs of all races have their say
the memories bubble into the landscape
the horrors percolate into the bloodstream

Let a new consciousness arise
where the only command shall be
“let the other live”
no matter what the consequences.

please make sure to cite my name when quoting from a poem i wrote (above) o shloime my teacher is my work thanks

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