“If we had two hearts like we have two arms and two legs, then one heart could be used for love and the other one for hate. Since I have but one heart, then I don’t have the luxury of hating anyone.”

Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laGvura “Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and Heroism” is a day of commemoration for the Jews who perished in the Holocaust. In Israel, it is a national memorial day observed on the 27th of Nisan which is in between the anniversary of the beginning of the most significant portion of the insurgency in the Warsaw ghetto uprising (14th of Nisan) and Yom Haazmaut (Israel Independence Day (5th of Iyar)).

read The Shoah: The Holocaust and helping to rebuild a new world

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.Majdaneck, Poland 5749

Originally transcribed for Connections Magazine by Rabbi Sam Intrator

Shlomo Carlebach

Coming in touch with death, a person can’t help thinking, “What kind of God makes a world with death in it? If I were God, I’d do things very different; I’d do things better.”

Let’s put it this way. When you come in contact with death, you can’t help being a little angry with God. And if you are a Cohen, how can you be angry in your heart with God, and then go into the Holy Temple to serve Him? It just doesn’t go. So the priest had to wait until sunset, and take a mikvah, a ritual bath, and then he could return to serve God the next day.

These laws of the priesthood regarding serving God became the basis for many of the Jewish laws of mourning. If your father or mother, brother or sister, son or daughter, husband or wife died, from the time of their death until they are buried, you are technically exempt from most positive commandments. For example, you don’t have to say blessings, because that’s a form of thanking and serving God, and right now, you may be in a frame of mind of being a little bit angry with God. So you aren’t obligated to say those blessings.

And you know, my sweetest friends, today we don’t have a Beit HaMikdash, a Holy Temple, and although we still have Cohanim, priests, we don’t have animal or incense offerings to serve God in the Holy Temple. Today we serve God through offerings of words of Torah study and words of prayer. Today our rabbis are like our priests, serving God through teaching Torah. But if you are angry with God, you can’t teach Torah. You can say the words, but the love and light within them do not flow through them.

So please open your hearts. The saddest thing is that today our teachers and rabbis haven’t just touched one dead person. They’ve been touched by Six Million dead people. And they are so angry with God, so angry with God. Gevald, are they angry with God! And because they are so angry with God, all their words of Torah are just that: words. There’s no light, no taste, no meaning, no melody in them.

But young people today are so hungry for that light, for that meaning, for that melody – for the deepest inner dimensions of truth. And if they can’t get it from Judaism, they’ll go anywhere that love and light are to be found.

Thank God our hungry, searching, younger generation found some traditions that weren’t so angry with God, and they could get the love and light and meaning that they so craved. And today in Judaism, Baruch HaShem, thank God, we have a whole new generation of teachers who haven’t been touched directly by the Six Million. Or maybe they have taken Six Million mikvahs from tears of sadness and then another Six Million mikvahs from tears of joy. And their words are filled with light and joy and love.

God willing, now people can come back to Judaism to quench that deep, powerful, longing for God’s love and from our own tradition. I bless us all that we should find that beauty in Torah, in Shabbos, and in the deepest depths of the heart of our holy and ancient and living tradition.

Thank you so much. God bless you all. Good Shabbos, Good Shabbos.

Transcribed by Rabbi David Zeller, Berekeley 1974