 |
| A silent memorial at Auschwitz. (Julie Siegel/DP) |
Yesterday was Yom HaShoah, the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising established by the Israeli government as Holocaust Remembrance Day in the late 1950s. This year it passed rather uneventfully for me. I took some time to think about the seemingly endless train tracks, the heaps of shoes and human hair stolen from the Nazis’s victims, and the haunting piles of human ashes, all of which I witnessed during a trip to Poland with United Synagogue Youth as a high school junior. But another powerful memory that came to mind was of my Yom HaShoah spent in Israel last year.
Each year the centerpiece of the commemoration in Israel is a two-minute siren at 10 a.m audible all over the country. My apartment was near one of the busiest streets in Jerusalem and I could easily see the traffic come to a standstill as people got out of their cars to bow their heads in respect and silence. For two minutes, life completely stopped. It was eery, but moving.
When tragedy strikes, as it did yesterday at Virginia Tech, the inclination is often to find words to describe what happened or what can be done next. Just hours after the shooting with details still hazy and a community still reeling MSNBC was already advertising a special report on “how it happened–and why?”
Without trying to draw too close a parallel between genocide and homicide, I think it is important to remember the power of silence in times of sorrow. Sometimes there aren’t words that can or should express what’s being felt. Sometimes silence is the best way to respect a loss too profound to explain.
An RSS feed of The Spin is available