Devarim: "The New Israeli"

I recently finished a course at Yad Vashem that guided teachers about how to incorporate different themes and motifs about the Holocaust in the yearly high school academic calendar, from Yom Hashoah, to the U.N.'s "International Holocaust Rememrance Day," to the Tenth of Tevet, designated by the Israeli Rabbinate as the general day of Kaddish for those who don't - or can't - know the date of passing for their deceased loved ones. This is particularly poignant for me seeing that my grandfather, Moshe ben Esther Z"L, who passed away only five-and-a-half months ago, used to say kaddish for his family on Rosh Chodesh Elul, because it was on that date, 82 years prior, in the year 5702, that they were herded to the town square - the rynek in Polish - and sent to their deaths. 

The topic of remembrance is one that is important in the Book of Devarim, and a particular verse seemed to strike me as fitting in light of the dynamics in Israel shortly after the war. A model of the new Israeli was sought by many, and perhaps even the survivors themselves, who constituted 40% of the population at the start of the Israeli War of Independence. Survivors consciously hid the atrocities they had experienced on their very flesh from their children, and Israelis who were ignorant, disparaged survivors as weak, an account I heard recently detailing how native born Israeli children would even make bleating sounds when survivors would pass. 

Of the Jews who would enter the land, Moshe says, "Moreover, your little ones who you said would be carried off, your children who do not yet know good from bad, they shall enter it; to them will I give it and they shall possess it."

In a certain sense, there was a similarity of sorts in the two experiences: Moshe wanted to design, or craft a new model of the Israeli, one who could rely wholeheartedly on Hashem - one who would learn to speak to Hashem, the very paradigm that Moshe foreordained by his failure to speak to the rock. 

A tabula rasa needed to be created. Every society, at times, needs to undergo that. Having just returned from my wife's family in France, it was fascinating to visit the "Museum of Resistance and Deportation," which reframed France's almost incomparable failure at the start of the war, into a history of bravery, striving for liberty, underground activities and collaboration - not with the Germans - but rather with the British to defeat the Nazi threat. The first exhibit there showed how the world's dictators all together, Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, plotted to uproot France's liberties and freedoms, and how France, as a nation, valorously overcame the aggression. Germany, after the war, needed re-education, to teach the populace that Hitler's anti-Semitism was incongruous with the country's time-honored traditions and heritage, and a Japanese friend at Hebrew University once told me that they were taught in high school that Japan, known for its belief in determinism, deserved to be attacked by America, which was in the right dropping atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. 

Every country needs to create a new narrative and it's interesting how Moshe's words bespeak that imperative, depicting children as ones who don't know "good from bad," something embryonic, or even primordial, reminiscent of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.