A bar mitzvah in Bergen Belsen

Recently, on a Pesach program, an elderly gentleman named Yaakov Gross asked a few of us if he could speak before the Yizkor service. He wanted to share the story of his bar mitzvah in the concentration camps. This is the story he shared:

In January of 1945, the Nazis were still trying to convince the world that they were treating the Jews well. So they invited a delegation of the Red Cross to visit Bergen Belsen. As part of the show, they “invited” a few of the boys from the kinder-lager, the children’s barracks, to celebrate their bar mitzvah. For the occasion, they erected a platform (read: bimah) in the middle of the square, where roll calls and hangings were normally held. And — no less incredible — they secured a sefer Torah for the event! 

And so 13-year-old Yaakov Gross, along with five other bar mitzvah boys, ascended to receive an aliyah and make a blessing over the Torah scroll in front of thousands of prisoners in Bergen Belsen.

The guards gave them a few hours for the ceremony. When they were finished making their blessings and reading from the Torah, there was a line as far as he could see, maybe half a mile long, of prisoners who wanted an aliyah too. One by one, in the bitter cold of January 1945 in Bergen Belsen, hundreds of prisoners made a blessing over the Torah, despite everything they had endured and everything they had lost.

Yaakov Gross paused for a moment while sharing this story. He looked out at us and reflected in his heavy Polish accent: “Can you imagine the kiddush Hashem?”

As a reward for their participation in the ceremony, and to celebrate their bar mitzvah, each boy was given half a loaf of bread. Their daily ration was normally a small thin slice an inch long, and they were all starving, so a half a loaf was an incredible treasure. “People sold apartments in Budapest for a single slice of bread,” Mr. Gross said. “Half a loaf was like getting a million dollars. If you were careful it could last a week; it could save your life.”

But Yaakov’s mother took the half a loaf and bartered it for a smuggled siddur and a tractate of Talmud, so that young Yaakov could learn and daven every day. She gave up a half a loaf of bread in Bergen Belsen to daven. Years later, when his mother passed away, he shared this story at her funeral, opining that that siddur and masechta were escorting her into heaven.

But the story does not end there. When Ilan Ramon rocketed into space aboard the ill-fated Columbia, he took with him that sefer Torah from Bergen Belsen.

“The Talmud tells us that G-d Himself reads from the Torah every day,” Mr. Gross concluded. “He has Moshe’s Torah scroll; He can read from every Torah scroll ever written and sacrificed over three thousand painful years of Jewish history. But He wanted to read from that Torah scroll, from Bergen Belsen.”

In the middle of this week’s portion of Kedoshim, which follows last week’s Acharei Mot and the aftermath of the tragic death of Aaron’s two oldest sons, Nadav and Avihu, we find a declarative verse: “And you shall guard all my decrees and my judgments, and you shall do them, and the land into which I am bringing you to dwell will not spit you out” (Vayikra 20:22).

Clearly, the Torah tells us that the privilege of remaining in the land of Israel is dependent upon our living by the code of laws proscribed for us by G-d and given to us at Sinai over three thousand years ago. The Torah is telling us quite clearly that we do not get to decide what is right and wrong, nor do we have to intuit it. Objective laws were given us many millennia ago, to define the parameters of what we can and cannot do and how we are meant to build a moral, ethical society.

Some of these mitzvot are easily understood: a society which does not honor its elders, care for its poor and serve G-d, the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, will not last. It is no coincidence that the weakening of Western society has been accompanied by a generation increasingly focused on getting rather than giving, and on themselves rather than those less fortunate around them.

But the Torah shares many mitzvot that are more difficult for us to understand: What difference does it make what we eat? Why is a community that consumes pork less ethical and viable than one that consumes beef? What difference does it make whether stores close or continue business on the Shabbat, our day of rest? And why is our Jewish society prohibited from marrying the offspring of an adulterous or incestuous relationship? Why should the children of such relationships suffer the consequences of actions that were not their mistakes? 

Yet the Torah makes very clear that these are Divine laws given us long ago, and for those of us who believe the Torah, indeed Judaism itself, to be a Divine work, we don’t get to decide what to do based on what we like. We are challenged to believe in something greater than ourselves, and to accept that with all our technological advances, we are still human, and our understanding will always be limited in the face of Divine wisdom. This is not to say that we abrogate our responsibility to understand all that we do, only that we accept the limited parameters of our human understanding.

Recently, the world was witness to a horrific, anti-Semitic caricature in the New York Times depicting the prime minister of Israel as a dog with a collar inscribed with the star of David. Just this week, the Times’s headline described “militants” as having fired hundreds of missiles  from Gaza. Not terrorists firing at innocent civilians, attempting to murder babies while they sleep; “militants,” warriors fighting a war.

We live in challenging times. David has become Goliath. If enough people believe that right is wrong and black is white, then so it will be. But three thousand years ago a nation was born out of slavery to teach the world that right is right simply because it is right, and that we don’t get to decide that: G-d does. We may struggle with it, we may not like it, it may even force us to reconsider the path we take in life. But if right and wrong are subjective, then we are only a step away from the abyss of evil.

Firing at babies is wrong just as firing from behind them is, and always will be. And if the Torah says pork is un-kosher, then so it will remain, no matter how much I like it or want it. 

Seventy-five years ago, the Nazis turned the world upside down, determined to make wrong right, and in the midst of all that horror a thirteen-year-old boy read from the Torah the Nazis longed to destroy, as if to say, “What is right will still be right, long after you are gone.”