Rebelling Against Terror with Joy

Our Jewish ancestors experienced the worst, and yet they found beauty in clouds and sang in Auschwitz.

Sometimes I feel guilty about insisting on joy. On insisting — look up at the sky, see the shapes of clouds whirling with a freedom, fast and fleeting with the promise of other realities past the border of your eyelids. See the yellow roses growing wild once planted in a spacious pot. See how the pomegranates blush pink, blush red promising to ripen in time for Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) at the end of the month.

And yet how can I not also say — See the hostage posters and signs at the bus stops. See the olive trees weeping yellow ribbons. See the stickers of fallen soldiers with their hopeful messages plastered on street poles. See how our hostages die. One by one the signs of their faces have to be rewritten. Some freed, saved, alive. Too many murdered - now written over with regret “May his/her memory be a blessing”. Hersh is gone. Eden is gone. Alex is gone. And for the sake of their names let us say it — Ori, Almog, Carmel — brutally all shot, 48 hours before their bodies were found by the IDF.

There are too many empty chairs in our homes in Israel. Now this week 6 more families are sitting low down, with torn clothes, mourning… We are mourning.

War is real. War is like that. War is all about missing. Missing 1200 slaughtered on Oct 7, the last 101 hostages, 706 fallen soldiers, 66 police officers. Over 62,000 Israelis missing their homes, abandoned to Hezbollah missiles. Missing life before this war.

I am rebellious. Reading the above my spirits are crushed, sad, pestled into exactly what the Islamic Regime and Terrorists want - bashed spirits. Broken Jews.

I refuse. I refuse to give in to what terrorists desire. To steal not only our lives, but our spirits too.

But my mind whirls between the hostage posters and the clouds in the sky. It whirls through my mind’s archives - how to cope? How to beat our enemies when they hold us all hostage to terror? How to cherish the clouds?

I think of the story of the group of Czech women and children who sang, of all things, HaTikvah, Israel’s national anthem, whilst being marched into the Auschwitz crematorium. Before the miracle of a refuge for Jews in the form of a Jewish Homeland - Israel was created. I google it and find the story as related by Filip Muller, a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz who described what happened.

“Their voices grew subdued and tense, their movements forced, their eyes stared as though they had been hypnotized… Suddenly a voice began to sing. Others joined in, and the sound swelled into a mighty choir. They sang first the Czechoslovak national anthem and then the Hebrew song ‘Hatikvah.’”

Enraged SS men tried to halt the singing by beating the Jews into submission, Muller wrote. “It was as if they regarded the singing as a last kind of protest which they were determined to stifle if they could.” But the SS was unable to stop them. “To be allowed to die together was the only comfort left to these people… And when they sang Hatikvah, now the national anthem of the state of Israel, they were glancing into the future, but it was a future which they would not be allowed to see. To me the bearing of my countrymen seemed an exemplary gesture of national honor and national pride which stirred my soul.”

Overwhelmed by feelings of remorse, Muller tried to join the group as they entered the gas chamber, but they pushed him back out. A woman implored him, “Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us.”

“Despite it all they sang.”

The first two stanzas of "Tikvatenu," the precursor to Israel's national anthem. (Israel Forever Foundation)

I think of the father of logotherapy, and the survivor of four concentration camps, Victor Frankl. How when I read the passage below in his memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, (it’s a must read if you haven’t read it) about clouds I could never look at clouds in quite the same way.

“One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, "How beautiful the world could be…”

I think of Adi Baruch, a 23-year-old who volunteered as a IDF reservist on the sixth day of the war to help Sderot residents. She was pounded by Hamas rockets on the way and killed. Her mother found this poem on her computer.

Sergeant Adi Baruch, 23, May Her Memory Be a Blessing

I want to think we have already been through the worst, but I don’t know what tomorrow brings.

There is so much more I want to tell you about, but really maybe the main thing is — now is the time — to put your cell phone down, to hug the closest person to you, to smile at the clouds — To Live.

With blessings,

Sarah

Author Notes and What’s On:

Link to the source story about the Czech women singing in Auschwitz — here.

Zoom Rosh Hashana Food Event - I’m excited to be presenting Iraqi Jewish food customs - simanim for the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah with Harif on Tuesday, 17th of September. I will be sharing my grandmother’s special apple jam recipe along with Sarina Roffe and Fabienne Viner-Luzzato who will share a Syrian Jewish seder and Tunisian seder. Details below, and register here.

Fav Inspiring Substack Post this Week - Olga Meshoe Washington’s post For the Applause of Heaven

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