From Kristallnacht’s glass, the strength to rise
This week marks 88 years since Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. At our commemoration in Long Beach, something happened that was not on the program. During the candle lighting, a woman stepped forward and told the audience that her mother, sitting beside her, was a Holocaust survivor. The 96-year-old survivor was invited to light a candle. Then someone handed her the microphone.
She was 8 years old in November 1938. She remembered looking out her window and seeing the street covered in shards of broken glass. To a little girl, she said, it almost looked like snow.
The room went silent. But what stayed with me was her daughter’s face. Eighty-eight years after a little girl watched her world shatter, her daughter stood beside her, glowing with admiration.
How does a person carry the memory of broken glass for a lifetime and still build a life her children admire?
The answer begins in this week’s parsha.
Avraham returns from the Akeidah. Rashi, citing the Midrash, teaches that Sarah died upon hearing that her son had been bound on the altar. Avraham emerges from the hardest moment of his life only to discover that his wife has passed away.
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Most commentators count the Akeidah as the last of Avraham’s 10 trials. Rabbeinu Yonah, in his commentary on Pirkei Avos, offers a different understanding. The tenth trial, he explains, was the burial of Sarah. Hashem had promised Avraham the entire land. Yet when the time came to bury his wife, he could not find a single plot without paying Efron an enormous sum. And still, Rabbeinu Yonah teaches, Avraham did not question Hashem.
How could purchasing a burial plot be the final test, coming even after the Akeidah?
Perhaps because the Akeidah demanded that Avraham confront one extraordinary moment. The burial of Sarah demanded that he keep going after that moment had passed. There was no dramatic command, no angel calling from heaven, no miraculous intervention. There was only a grieving husband who had to get up, face the world and negotiate over a field.
The Torah does not pretend that Avraham felt nothing: “Vayavo Avraham lispod l’Sarah v’livkosah (Avraham came to eulogize Sarah and to weep for her).” Then the Torah tells us, “Vayakom Avraham mei’al pnei meiso (Avraham rose up from before his dead).”
In “Chumash Masores HaRav,” Rav Soloveitchik explains that vayakom marks a turning point in mourning. A mourner sits low, his body expressing the weight of loss. Avraham rises. He reclaims his dignity and his resolve. The Rav cites Ibn Ezra, who reads pnei meiso as referring to Sarah’s body. Her physical life had ended, but Sarah, the mother of the Jewish people, would live on through the generations that followed her.
Avraham did not rise because his pain had disappeared. He rose because his pain was not the end of his story.
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Modern research has found the same strength in our own time. In 2010, researchers from the University of Haifa and Leiden University reviewed decades of studies on Holocaust survivors. The trauma left lasting marks, and survivors showed more post-traumatic symptoms than their peers. Yet in physical health and cognitive functioning the gap was small, and the researchers described their resilience as remarkable.
An earlier study by the same team found that, in the general population, survivors’ children showed no consistent signs of inherited trauma, and later research pointed the same way among grandchildren. Suffering is real, but it does not have to determine who the next generation becomes. The daughter standing proudly beside her mother was a living example.
Chazal teach, “Ma’aseh avos siman labanim (The deeds of our forefathers are a sign for their descendants).” Avraham’s vayakom was not his alone. It became a pattern his children would need again and again. After the Churban, after the expulsions, after the pogroms, after Kristallnacht and everything that followed it, the Jewish people sat on the ground and wept. And then, like Avraham, we rose. We buried our dead, bought land and built again.
Avraham wept, and then Avraham rose. He buried Sarah, purchased a piece of land and continued building the future of the Jewish people. He could not change what had happened, but he could determine what would happen next.
Eighty-eight years ago, a little girl looked out her window and thought the broken glass looked like snow. The glass was real. The destruction was real. The pain was real. But 88 years later, so was the candle she lit, and so was the daughter at her side, the next generation she had built.
Seared into the story of our people is the strength to rise.
Vayakom Avraham.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach. www.bachlongbeach.com.
