There are many stories of how life is woven, how life is threaded, how wearing strings or connecting the dotsthrough the generations can – and may – reveal the truth about life. There are also many stories, many significant points in history that do not deserve to be interpreted as a stitching of a thread. There are moments in Jewish history that are generators, that are branches of creation of the threads of our very own lives to date. I see women practicing their crocheting on the train, women knitting sweaters and scarves and socks, and I wonder to myself if they aren’t somehow connected more directly than others to the threads of life, to binding and winding and weaving the love with which they wish to warm us, their loved ones.
And there are threads of time. Times of joy, times of trial and doubt, and times of terrible mourning and loss. We now approach the Three Weeks, the twenty one days when the fate of the Jewish people was tied, knotted, and cut off for centuries – lasting until today – with the destruction of their truest source of their connection to God, the Holy Temple.
Three weeks of mourning and loss; but what does that mean to us? It is now the year 2008 – or 5768 – and how are we to understand, to feel, to internalize a tragedy that has no comparison, a catastrophe that, I pray to God, can never be repeated?
Is it a strange sort of fortune, a destiny that I should be here to bear witness to another global tragedy, to so many terrible, heart-scorching atrocities, just so that you might comprehend the slightest fraction of the magnitude of a loss that even I – even I – have difficulty comprehending or “sensuating”.
loss: defeat, beating, thrashing, slaughter…damage, harm, injury… bereavement, demise, death.
“sensuating”: being aware through the senses: a physical, bodily experience of a moment in space or time.
What we know of the Three Weeks is what we read about in texts or hear about in lectures. Perhaps the Three Weeks in Jerusalem in 70 CE were horrifyingly like some of the last weeks of my life in Skala, on the Polish-Ukrainian border in the 1940’s before my family and I went into hiding beneath a chicken coop for two and a half years.
There was the night of my eighteenth birthday, the first Aktzia which lasted from September 26th to September 29th 1942. The Nazis spent three full days just so they could fulfill their quota of killing 750 Jews from our small village of 1500. Three days…how many threads can be unstitched in a Jews’ life? How many stitches in the shattered bones, our only graves?
Luckily – oh how we thanked God we were lucky! – we came back alive…but then we saw only the dead, only the killed! There were only twenty-four hours given to us to run to the next village, to the ghetto. And who wouldn’t run from a city of the defiled dead?
I had lost everything and everyone I had ever known. I saw most of them gone…forever. I questioned my own will to go on. I remember my last night at home, the last night before the Aktzia. I remember the last time I spoke to my father, just after Liberation, after spending two and a half years beneath a chicken coop, four of us stuffed in a space barely large enough for two.
What I suffered, what my family suffered is unspeakable. Nor can I speak of other torments: of those who had less than one could imagine and still breathed another breath every day at the time of the Destruction of the Temple; of Rav Yochanon who had his talmidim sneak him out as if dead so he could set up a place of study in Yavneh; of Rav Tzadok who learned all day and night and fasted for forty years, sucking on fig juice to sustain him as he beseeched God to save the Jewish people.
I am 83 years old and I still remember the last night in my childhood home, the last night I spoke with my father. Both were destroyed. I wish I could give you a reason why. I mourn everybody, I mourn everything that was lost to me.
But after Liberation, we didn’t allow ourselves to mourn. It took until my mother’s death in 1982 – she was 82 and died a natural death – she died of old age in her sleep and she looked so peaceful. My mother was the first person I had ever known to die a natural death, to not be mutilated, to not be mutilated in death. I thank God for that. And I have no shame in telling you that that is what it took for me to finally cry.
I feel like everyone I’ve known or met has always had to leave, that I’ve always had to say goodbye.
My feeling of victory is that I survived, that I raised a beautiful family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And still…even my husband Joseph left me so early…when he died in 1986….left me here alone.
Is there a resolution for loss? I don’t know. I experienced the communal loss of Skala – we were a vibrant community no matter how poor we were. But individual losses are irreplaceable.
Perhaps, even to this day, we feel that those out there who did not go through what we did could not possibly understand…The hypothetical question of choosing to burn in the flames of a bonfire in order to save a Sefer Torah…do you know what you would choose unless you were truly faced with that decision?
As impossible as it is to explain, I believe either way, one chooses life.