Let's have a little Rachmanut...

Young people left Europe for America never to see their families again.

In America they needed to learn a new language and culture in an unwelcoming environment.

Here they raised children into an American culture (without the help of grandparents) and though they couldn't help them with their homework, they encouraged them to excel.

Many of them felt a need to jettison the (pre-modern) religion they knew in Europe in order to live in America.

This group (now two generations old - yes, I leave out the tiny community of Sephardim here from the beginning and the large and influential Central Europeans because these groups are not the ones that seem to feel the same religious imperative of the Sho'a) was still an immigrant society when Hitler came to power.

They then experienced the slaughter of their families and struggled: some impotently as civilians, many others as soldiers - giving their own lives, to save who they could.

Many, quite understandably feel terrible guilt for not being able to do more to affect the outcome of events that happened "on their watch."

Raised in a world where the reining metaphor was of a scientific world, they looked to cause and effect in events of a proximate nature.

"If after the destruction there is a construction.... after holocaust: Israel...."

They were cut off from the spiritual sources of their people...

• by culture: they had moved from a medieval world view to a scientific one;
• by distance: they had moved from Europe to America at a time before international communications were a commonplace thing;
• by destruction: the communities they had come from existed no more.

On their own they needed to rebuild as best they could with the tools they now had available.

They spent a generation (their entire lives, during a time when the entire world appeared to be on the brink of atomic self destruction) not thinking about their spiritual lives, but struggling to maintain a physical existence for themselves, their children and the remnants of their people around the world.

If many of them have difficulty seeing beyond the boundaries of their lives, we should be thankful to them, rather than berate them, for what they have done.

Mark Hurvitz
April 29, 1997