Thoughts from Pesach to Yom HaShoah to Yom Hazikaron to Yom Ha’atzma’ut.

How can we commemorate the incomprehensible, the totally unimaginable?

How can we have a Seder when all was out of order… no law… no order… except for those for whom alles ist in ordnung!

Would we sit in complete darkness? Would there be one candle far across the room? Or would there be many candles around the room that we quickly collect … and then slowly snuff out, one by one.

Would there even be a table … around which we can only stand, for we are forbidden to sit … and surely never to recline?

If there would be a table, would there be an appropriately empty bowl?

Perhaps there should be four cups … of salt water? To commemorate our blood and sweat … and, perhaps, God’s tears…

Or a bowl full of disorder, pieces of broken bone that cannot be put back together; small pieces of rotting potato flavored with grass; blood red horseradish; egg shells as sharp as broken glass?

Do we wash our hands after being touched by this mess—and pray that it is water that comes out of the faucet?

What kind of Haggadah can there be? Do we sit in utter silence? If we speak, is it only in broken whispers—and only after looking all around to see if anyone can hear our words? Or do we just listen to the screams in our heads? Or do we scream out—and, perhaps, again not to be heard?

What questions do we ask? What questions can we ask? How? Why? Where were the humane beings at those moments? What is the matter with the human race? Who can we trust? What can we do to avoid it next time?

Do we bar the doors, so no one—alive or all those ghosts—can enter?

If there is one imperative in this Haggadah it is that “it is incumbent on each of us to imagine that we too experienced the Shoah!” But can we?

I have tried, but failed, to imagine the last thoughts of my father’s uncle, the man after whom I was named, as he ran out of the bunker he was hiding in to save a child—and was then killed by local partisans. Anti-Semites all.

Or a third or so cousin, as he was literally being chopped to pieces when he was finally caught after a number of successes saving Jews by wearing a stolen German officer’s uniform?

I would not want to even try to imagine my mother-in-law’s experiences after hearing her screams during her regular nightmares that took her back to those times. Nightmares that stopped for a while after her first grandchild was born.

I have also failed to imagine what was in my father-in-law’s head on that last death march. He was ultimately one of only eight who survived from the 200 Jewish men in a forced labor battalion in the Hungarian army—allies of the Germans. He had already lost a wife and child. Did he think he would survive at all? Could he imagine being married again, having children again, let alone grandchildren—or that his great-grandchildren would serve in the army and navy of a Jewish state called Israel? But I could begin to understand his great joy at the birth of each, and his smile when he saw each—even to his last years.

Is this “Seder imperative” possible? How can we know if we have accomplished it? Do we have to have nightmares that night? Do we rush instinctively to pack an escape bag? What do we pack in it? And where can we go?

How can we commemorate the incomprehensible, the totally unimaginable?

We truly can’t—but we can build upon what we are able to understand to create a better future. For ourselves and for others.

Next Year in Jerusalem!

By Chaim Lauer