Yom HaShoah: The Remembering Day

Yom HaShoah
The remembering day.
The day we repeat to ourselves, to comfort ourselves, to remind ourselves,
“Never Again.”
Today I remember that day in the seventh grade where I sat on the bus and listened to the radio
“There was a bomb threat”, the host said, “At a jewish organization downtown.”
My heart sank. My dad works at a jewis organization downtown.
I murmured to myself the first prayer I could remember, the Sh’ma:
“Listen, oh Israel, Adonai is God, Adonai is one.”
Where was the one for the six million?
Where was God when his creation went so deeply sour?
Did those people in the camps ever wonder He was?
Did they pray?
Did they stop praying?
There were Rabbis amongst them. What did they do? In a world gone dark, where was His light?
How do we heal? Can we ever?
Today is the remembering day. Today, I look at a picture of women stripped to their underwear beside a pit. Beside their own mass grave.
Today, I remeber when I first heard about thw Holocaust, in the car with my dad in elemetary dchool. How do you tell a child that if they had lived less than a hundred years ago, they might have been rounded up, shot, gassed, buried?
How do you regail a child with the stories of their immigration ancestors when the dark reminder that-if they hadn’t-if they’d waited another twenty years….
How do you reckon with the antisemitism that still exists today?
How best to remember?

Today, we light candles.
In the darkness of the world, we still believe. We light the lights, and we remember.