Let My People Know!
Let My People Know!

I saw a movie the other day in which the main character said that the bad thing about not having kids is that there is no one to bury you when you die.

I found it a painful sentence until I digested it and thought, no, the bad thing about not having kids is that there is no one there to keep you alive in seed and deed and memory.

I couldn't help thinking of the High Holydays and Shmini Atzeret when all Jews who have a deceased parent are obligated to say Yizkor, which in Hebrew means "remember."

Maybe it’s a silly thing to make children remember that way because who would ever really forget a parent?

The answer is that there is a substantive difference between not forgetting and remembering. The former is easy and convenient for the lazy and passive, the latter involves actively keeping the person, their teachings, their legacy, their heritage, their sacrifices alive. 

But remembering is also a national duty for all peoples. The worst slogan, one that grates on my ears, is with regard to the Holocaust: "We shall never forget." 

Who is the "we" that will never forget?  the dying-off generation who lived through it or the one today that is being taught that the Holocaust never happened? Perhaps it’s the ones being told it was a gross exaggeration created by Zionists fabricating a casus belli to snatch the Promised Land? Or is it Holocaust deniers like Ahmadinejad who will never let us forget or revisionists like Mahmoud Abbas whose Ph.D. thesis denied the Holocaust  and who denies the legitimacy of Israel's archeological sites?

If you think we truly haven't forgotten, then I invite you to ask the average Jewish teenager today what the Nuremberg Laws were or ask him if he knows what Treblinka is. Don't be shocked if he thinks it's an iPhone app. I'm sure few will know it was a concentration camp where 800,000 men, women and children were murdered simply because they were Jews.

So whom are we kidding when we say "we will never forget”? It's meaningless and trite. Today's challenge is not to let our people go, it's to let our people know!

Yes, it is a tragedy when you don't have kids to keep memories alive, but the bigger tragedy today is that parents are not giving their kids WHAT to remember.

They don't even know what Israel is fighting for and if they do, they are ashamed of it.

A few weeks ago I went to listen to Alan Dershowitz speak about the rampant anti-Semitism on campus and he said his students are afraid to let people know they are Zionist because then they aren't able to get a date.

So, silently, they walk through campus as Israel's enemies attempt to delegitimize the state and call for divestments and boycotts.

I can't help but think of Menachem Begin and his contemporaries who as teenagers risked their lives over and over again to boast about their Zionism and who fought for a homeland’s existence until they held its soil in their hands and turned sand and swamps into the beautiful verdant Eretz Yisrael.

I can't help thinking  of Begin whose book The Revolt starts with: "I have written this book primarily for my own people, lest the Jew forget again...." And I can’t help but cry because we have already forgotten.

But, as Begin cautioned, for the sake of our future “we dare not resign ourselves to this forgetfulness.” How come we are not firing up the souls of our Jewish youths anymore to make them realize that Israel is our proud birthright and fundamental to our survival? How come we don’t glamorize the young boys and girls who fought in the Irgun who sacrificed not just a date and their “social” lives, but their very lives for Israel and the Jewish people? 

This month marks 38 years since the Yom Kippur War when Israel was hit by an Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack and 2,688 Israelis lost their lives for you and me. So who cares anymore, who remembers? 

Today's Jews seem to have bequeathed to their children the materialism of the American Dream without also nurturing their Jewish pride, their sense of Jewish history, their Jewish place in this world and without honing their Jewish survival instincts.

How dangerous it is in a period when Israel's enemies are indoctrinating their kids with a strong sense of purpose and history, albeit an invented one while we leave ours with a vacuum of knowledge that Israel's haters fill with their poison.

The Jewish people are so quick to forget over and over again who they are and from where they came when their very survival is in the remembering, in keeping the history alive just as Scheherazade kept herself alive by never stopping to tell her narrative.

 I'm not worried that Jews will have no one to bury them, for that service we will find many volunteers. I'm worried that Jews have squandered their best asset, their sole means of survival and justification for the Holy Land: Jewish memory.

I'm not worried about who will say Yizkor, I'm worried about a generation arising that asks, "What is Yizkor?"