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Sin and memory: From shul to Babi Yar Park

FROM Shabbos to Sunday, Sept. 22 to 23; from the East Denver Orthodox Synagogue to the Babi Yar memorial; from Rabbi Amsel to Prof. Shneer.

Shabbos.

Aren’t sin and forgiveness and solemnity and deep prayer and shofar and fasting over once Yom Kippur is done? A puzzling rabbinic statement, a midrash, suggests otherwise.

Sukkos, the midrash says, is the first day “on which sins are calculated.”

This is usually interpreted to mean that G-d gives us a break, so to speak, after the High Holidays. Whatever wrongdoings we commit from Yom Kippur to the first day of Sukkot are not counted. The count for the new year begins only on Sukkot.

So much for the negative interpretation: Sukkot and sin go together.

Rabbi Yehudah Amsel, speaking in Denver last Shabbos, Sept. 22, and citing a commentary by the name of Yeshu’ot Yaakov, offered a very different — and positive — interpretation.

It is based on a close reading by the Vilna Gaon of a common phrase, so common that it slips off the tongue; one doesn’t give it a second thought. What is the accounting that one must give for his or her life? “A din and a heshbon,” a judgment and a reckoning.

The two sound the same: a two-word phrase for one idea. Like saying a tasty food is “nice and good.” You mean: It’s good. You mean: It’s judgment, G-d’s accounting of one’s deeds.

Not so, says the Vilna Gaon, He sees a separate connotation in each of the two words.

“Judgment” is for sin, be it inadvertent, intentional or wanton.

“Reckoning” is for something else — the time wasted while doing the wrong thing. Whatever our wrongdoings, there is an additional factor: The good we could have done while we were busy with the not so good.

The first day of Sukkot — the first “on which the sins are calculated” — is the day G-d sees the Jew embracing the holiday with joy, with acceptance of the Divine presence, with commitment to start the new year right, with evidence that the new year resolutions are being kept.

So, after G-d’s Yom Kippur forgiveness for sin, He extends forgiveness for the time wasted in sin.

That is G-d’s “calculation” on the first of Sukkot.

Chag Sameach. Happy Holiday!

SUNDAY.

Under the guidance of the Mizel Museum, Jews gather once yearly to remember the Nazi slaughter of some 33,000 Jews in September, 1941, in Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev.

I first heard of Babi Yar in about 1957 when Rabbi Samuel Adelman came to Denver to be the rabbi at BMH. He had just returned from the Soviet Union, as the youngest member of the first rabbinic delegation to Soviet Jewry after WW II.

Rabbi Adelman was impassioned anyway. But his feeling for Soviet Jewry, his emotion, his commitment, his consciousness-raising, was white-hot. He declaimed from the pulpit Yevtushenko’s poem on Babi Yar. He described his visit to Babi Yar. He also wrote his own poem about Babi Yar, and declaimed that from the pulpit, too.

Kiev is Russian-speaking. Denver’s memorial last Sunday at Babi Yar Park was conducted, in part, in Russian. Many of the attendees are former Russian Jews. Many of them lost close relatives at Babi Yar. Just as Israel Memorial Day (Yom Hazikaron) tends to bring out the Israeli contingent within our community, the Babi Yar memorial event tends to bring out the Russian contingent.

Prof. David Shneer of CU-Boulder spoke of a trip in 2006 to the Ukraine, in which he witnessed children playing soccer on a paved street — paved with Jewish gravestones.

He spoke of the unique form of Holocaust denial in the Ukraine — the rationalization that it was OK to murder Jews because this was simply revenge against communists, who had starved Ukrainians in the 1930s.

He spoke of attempts to create a new Jewish-Ukrainian relationship, based on acknowledgement of the ugly facts of the Holocaust, but also on the goodwill that the descendants of both the perpetrators and the victims could bring to the table.

He spoke. And others sang. Or prayed. Or mourned. Or toured the Babi Yar Park, with its many components. The emcee, Jessica Milstein, charged the audience to remember.

Students came from Casper, Wyoming and from Regis University. A former Ukrainian Jewish student, now an artist in residence at the Mizel Museum, charged the Jews present to affirm their Jewish identity — a beautiful testament to his own transformation (he had not been told he was Jewish before he was 10), but hardly a necessity for the Jews present.

Babi Yar was possibly the largest single massacre during the Holocaust. That loss, and the memory thereof, is incalculable.

Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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