Bialik, Baal Shem Tov, the Shoah … ahavat Yisrael

This is an excerpt from a column originally published in May 2022.

In recent days, two voices from Ukraine have been calling out to me. Chaim Nachman Bialik had been a student of Volozhin Yeshiva, but left to become a poet, scholar and publisher. In 1903, after the Kishinev pogrom, Bialik wrote what is arguably the most influential poem in the Hebrew language: “B’ir Haharegah (In the City of Slaughter).” It was a furious indictment of Jewish cowardice. Instead of fighting, the Jews of Kishinev hid during the pogrom, while their friends and families were beaten, murdered and raped. Bialik describes it vividly:

Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs

The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs

Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,

Concealed and cowering — the sons of the Maccabees! …

It was the flight of mice they fled,

The scurrying of roaches was their flight;

They died like dogs, and they were dead!

Bialik is saying “enough” — enough to Jewish cowardice, enough to begging the non-Jewish world to offer a bit of tolerance. Jews must take control of their destiny. It was a clarion call, one answered in the following decades by pioneers who renewed the Jewish spirit and rebuilt the Jewish state. …

Calling from even further in the past is Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement. He revolutionized the Jewish world and taught a community that was broken in spirit the importance of faith, perseverance and love.

The Baal Shem Tov taught: “One must have total self-sacrifice and dedication for love of one’s fellow, even towards a Jew whom one has never seen.” The Jewish family is our responsibility, and the mitzvah of ahavat Yisrael, loving one’s fellow Jew, requires dedication and devotion.

This has always been the ideal, but it has not always been the reality.

When the Jews of Kyiv were being murdered in Babi Yar, American Jews averted their eyes. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, in his book “Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers?: The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1938-1944,” reviews the halfhearted actions of the American Jewish community during the Holocaust. His final paragraph concludes: “The Final Solution may have been unstoppable by American Jewry, but it should have been unbearable for them. And it wasn’t.”

During the Holocaust, we were not our brother’s keepers.

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is senior rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York.

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