Give It Away | Microphilanthropy Blog

Give It Away #4
The Saddest Day

So many books have been written, so many movies have been made. What can I possibly say about the Genocide that hasn't been already said six million times? Maybe it's better not to add my voice to the chorus. Only today it's more of a maelstrom of voices. Because by talking so much about the Holocaust, and insisting upon its singularity, we've made it the brand-name of national massacres. Now when anyone searches for a verbal term that has the raw power to shock and awe, they instantly click on the link "Nazi". And what's even sadder than watering down the suffering of my grandparents is comparing their descendants to the vile perpetrators of the carnage. Because wanton words of mass destruction can be a double-edged sword.

Now I'm not saying that we need to stop telling our stories. And I'm certainly no revisionist mystic or Neturei Karta, I definitely don't believe that we brought it upon ourselves. But at some point, I think we need to end the Olympics of Who-Has-Suffered-More. Our Jewish Holocaust wasn't history's first murder in the millions. Heck, it wasn't even the twentieth century's (the American occupation of the Phillipines bears that shame). Was our slaughter a worse one because we didn't have any real resources to take away, because we hadn't done anything to deserve it? That's true for every victim of collective capital punishment, and we aren't short on historical -- or contemporary -- examples of mass executions. So how are we supposed to talk about our almost-annihilation?

Both of my mother's parents were the sole survivors of their respective families. They lived through atrocious times. I know my grandfather's story because he told it to me, many times. Eventually he told it on camera, and I uploaded it to YouTube, with subtitles in twenty-first century English -- so that my children, who have never even heard Yiddish, will be able to understand his patois Yinglish. I wonder what they'll think when they watch it, what they'll feel when they hear him. After he tells his harrowing tale on tape, the interviewer asked my grandfather if he believes in God; what conclusions did he come to as a result of all of his suffering? He answered her then, over five decades later, that he had never stopped suffering, that he had never been happy ever again, ever since.

What?! My grandfather got married to my grandmother, gave life to my mom and two other children, lived for another fifty years, and was never ever happy again for even a single day of his life? I can't possibly judge him, I've never experienced personal loss like that. But what was the freaking point of getting out of bed and going to work another twenty thousand times, if every blasted second of it was emiserating? His response: This accursed world has a sick, twisted way of pushing you through life. So, so sad. Zaidy, I know you had a lot of love in your heart, because you soiled and toiled in the bowels of that bakery for nearly half a century, and unbeknownst to everyone, you gave away the money as fast as you made it. You lived like a pauper, and when you died, we found out that you had donated more than a million.

His whole world was snatched away from him, and he carried the pain of it all with him for the rest of his life. I guess that anonymously helping others was one of the ways that he numbed away that terrible pain. I wish that he had room in his heart for another emotion, I wish he could have known some joy. I wish that we could have shared some. But looking back now, I realize that what he had shared with me was the greatest life lesson, the noblest truth. And that is: The reason to live... is to give. That is all. There aren't any evil villains that we aren't capable of becoming, and he sure wasn't some kind of hero to hide out in the forest, when his whole village was herded off into cattle cars. But in his simple working-class way, he had hit upon the real meaning of life: Give It Away Till It's Gone.

Okay, I'm rambling. It's Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I'm allowing myself to stagger through philosophical musings on the Shoah. Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this diatribe; there's only one paragraph left to go, I'm going to summarize now, and get straight to the point. I know that of late we tend to commemorate this date by wrapping ourselves in the flag. And I'm not saying anything about the flag -- this flag, or any other. But I just wanted to put another idea out there, as a possible alternative: this Yom HaShoah, let us answer the killing fields of history by opening the storehouses and giving out the grain to anyone that asks for it, whatever they look like. Let's make pre-emptive peace and stop all the holocausts from happening ever again.

Inter-Generation Holocaust Education Project

New Village for Orphans of the Rwandan Genocide