Thread by @rabbisacks

Here is a thread from my Covenant & Conversation essay on #Shemini called "Between Hope and Humanity". You can read it in full here: bit.ly/2WsGOMR & download the accompanying Family Edition here: bit.ly/2TDMySc. #ShabbatShalom

After the #Holocaust, for the #Jewish people, there were, and are, no words to silence the grief or end the tears. We may say – as Moses said to Aaron – that the victims were innocent, holy, that they died "al kiddush Hashem", “in sanctification of God’s name.”

Surely that is true. Yet nonetheless, “Aaron remained silent.” When all the explanations and consolations have been given, grief remains, unassuaged. We would not be human were it otherwise. That, surely, is the message of the book of Job.

Job’s comforters were pious in their intentions, but God preferred Job’s grief to their vindication of tragedy.

Yet, like Moses, the Jewish people found the strength to continue, to reaffirm hope in the face of despair, life in the presence of death.

A mere three years after coming eye to eye with the Angel of Death, the #Jewish people, by establishing the State of #Israel, made the single most powerful affirmation in two thousand years that #AmYisraelChai, the Jewish people lives.

Moses and Aaron were like the two hemispheres of the Jewish brain: human emotion on the one hand, faith in God, the covenant, and the future on the other. Without the second, we would have lost our hope. Without the first, we would have lost our humanity.

It is not easy to keep that balance, that tension. Yet it is essential. Faith does not render us invulnerable to tragedy but it gives us the strength to mourn and then, despite everything, to carry on.