Yom HaShoah: A Reflection on Resilience
A Thought on Yom HaShoah Today: on Resilience
From Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon
There is no doubt that the destruction wrought on our people over the many centuries of persecution has taken a fearsome toll. Demographers say that without the enemies who have tried to destroy us, in every generation, there would now be hundreds of millions of Jews in the world; today there are only 16 million Jews. We have been brutally attacked by powerful empires, republics, kingdoms, sultanates, czars, cossacks, dictatorships, Reichs, and jihadists, and it has always damaged us terribly.
And yet, we Jews survive, and all those who sought our annihilation in the past are gone, afterthoughts of history.
That testifies to a profound and poorly recognized aspect of Jewish identity: resilience, the ability to rise from defeat and loss and destruction and to insist on living active Jewish lives. As Jews, we always believe that our amazing, ever-evolving tradition affirms life, ethics and holiness in unique and precious ways.
And we know that each of us carries both the responsibility and the capability to continually renew Jewish life: through prayer, study, communal celebration and, most of all, righteous action.
Resilience is not a gift; it is a choice, a continual choice, to live our Judaism actively every day.
The Shoah was unique, an utter annihilation of the Jewry of Europe and half the Jews in the world in the early 1940s. It is our responsibility as Jews to demonstrate the resilience that is so central to our tradition and our identity, and affirm “Am Yisrael Chai—the people of Israel live, and will always live.”