Here is a text version of Rabbi Schwartzs sermon from this past Shabbat reflecting on a new book that prints the word Jew 6 million times: At some point over the last week you may have come across an article about a new book, just published, somewhat awkwardly entitled ‘And Every Single One Was Someone.’ The book is 1,250 pages long, and it weighs just a shade north of seven pounds. Each page has 40 small columns, each column has 120 lines, each line consisting of a single word - Jew. That makes for 4800 copies of the word Jew on each page, times the 1,250 pages, which comes to a total of 6 million. The author of the book - if that is what you want to call it - is a man named Phil Chernofsky, who sees the book as both a memorial to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and also as some kind of conversation starter. He says it was intentionally designed as a large book because he hopes people will have it out in their homes, one of those what we call coffee table books that people casually browse through as they sit and chat in the living room. Reaction to the book has been mixed. Some Jewish leaders have embraced it, to included Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, who has arranged for the purchase of 3,000 of the books, and is giving them away to various contacts and dignitaries, saying recently that he wants one of the books in the White House, and also on every seder table this coming Passover. Folks who like the book see it as a powerful visual way of communicating the sheer volume of the number of people killed. You may remember the film from a few years ago, called Paper Clips that tracked a group of middle schoolers who went through the process of collecting 6 million paper clips as a way of trying to grasp how large a number that actually is. To say 6 million doesn’t actually mean anything, but when you see 6 million of something, when you go through the process of finding and collecting and storing 6 million of something, the abstract number becomes real, becomes tangible. And supporters of this new book say it accomplishes something along the same lines. But others have questioned the book, its ‘author’, and the purpose and intention behind it. The author himself described the book as ‘shtick’ and you have to wonder if keeping a coffee table book symbolizing the 6 million souls who perished in the Shoah around the house is really a good idea. Tomorrow night, for example, while people are watching the Super Bowl, eating, drinking, laughing at the ridiculous commercial, and watching the Broncos win, do we really want a book like that sitting on the table, people resting their beers on top of it? In my mind the book is basically an exercise in numbers - the author needed to repeat ‘Jew’ 6 million times, so he figured it out - he needed x number of pages, x number of columns, x number of words, he chose a font, and he hit print. It is essentially a way of counting the 6 million, and instead of using numbers, using words. But Judaism has never been comfortable with the idea of counting people. We have this conversation off and on on Saturday evenings, when we are trying to figure out whether we have enough for a minyan. If you’ve ever been in a traditional shul, and they are counting for the minyan, you’ll notice the counter will not use numbers. Sometimes the person will use a biblical verse with 10 words. Other times they will actually say ‘not one, not two’ until they get to ‘not ten.’ Actually you all know a Hebrew phrase that has exactly 10 words in it that is also used sometimes to count for the minyan - what is it? The motzi! This discomfort with counting people goes all the way back to biblical times, when King David takes a census of the people, and is punished by God for doing so. Judaism’s discomfort with this seems to come from the sense that assigning a number to a person dehumanizes them. It takes away their individuality - some of you may remember the line from the Police song Invisible Sun from the early 80s - ‘I don’t ever want to play the part of a statistic on a government chart.’ Once you are a number you are not a person. To be a person, you need to have a name, not a number, or, I would argue, not a repetitive word. That is precisely the point of the so called Book of Names, a project undertaken by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. The book is now housed as a permanent exhibit in Auschwitz - Birkenau. It is 6.5 feet tall, and 46 feet in circumference, and as of today it lists 4.3 million names of Jews who were killed by the Nazis. Avner Shalev, who is Yad Vashem’s director, said the following about the Book of Names project - “We understand that human life, human beings, individuals, are at the center of our research and education. This is why we are investing so much in trying to retrieve every single human being, his or her name, and details about his or her life.” I will never forget the first time I went to Yad Vashem. It was the year Becky and I lived in Israel while I was in rabbinical school. Becky’s parents lived with us for part of the year, and one Sunday we went together to see Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum. If you’ve been there you know it is an overwhelming experience. We took the bus back to our apartment, and that evening at dinner we were talking about the day. My father in law had been to Yad Vashem many times, but he explained to me why this trip had been different from every other for him - it was the first time he had visited the museum as a grandfather. He said he was particularly moved by the walk through the Children’s Memorial. If you’ve been there you remember that you walk down into darkness, where you see thousands upon thousands of candles flickering. Each candle represents the life of a child, extinguished during the Holocaust. And as you walk through, in the back ground, you hear name after name after name being read, each one the name of a child who was killed. And he said he emerged from the dark hall into the warm sunlight of the Judean Hills, and the very first thing he saw was the face of his granddaughter. And he knew had she lived at a different time, in a different place, one of those names he had heard might have been hers. The old saying is that a picture is worth a thousand word. I would argue today that one story, even one name, is worth 6 million words. We don’t need a gimmicky coffee table book to remind us of the Holocaust. We need study, memory, community, reflection, personal connection - we need names and stories of individuals and their lives. For in those names and stories we will find not only memory, but also meaning - may we preserve it for generations -
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 13:35:07 +0000
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