THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

minister who came from “there,” from over the river, from the right and the Shoah.We pruned and cut out our horrific holocaustic experience to fit into some of thetraditional Jewish pattern. We added symbolism of our own. We called it Shoah, notRuin, as is the custom. We designated a special day of remembrance, wrote specialprayers, and created a new ritual and ways of worship. We made it into an eventmore Israeli than Jewish. Yet we fell back into past patterns, underlining the messagethat “the entire world is against us.” We revalidated the existential Yiddish equation: Isit good for the Jews or bad for the Jews? And we took the Shoah to be exclusivelyour own. Thus we missed the option of turning its horrors into a much moremeaningful, universal event. It is not something between us and the world, butbetween all the good in the world against all the bad. In short, we nationalized theShoah, monopolized it and internalized it, and we do not let anyone get closer.It is not too late. It is still possible to redefine the relationship between the worldand the Jews. We can turn the word Jew into a concept that is much wider than merenationality, religion, genetics, and traditions. A Jew in its new definition is the answerto the Nazi in its old definition. Wherever the Nazi turns off the light, the Jew comesto turn it back on. Just as our call “Let my people go” is echoed beyond historywhenever and wherever people demand their liberties all over the world to this day,the term Jew can identify anyone who refuses to bend in the face of discrimination,evil, and persecution. It will mean a free person, and Judaism will be a synonym forequality, freedom, and fraternity. Modern Israel is a tremendous treasure of unfulfilledpotential. We have much of the positive, except in one aspect. I want to believe thatone day we will be part of a worldwide cultural process of universalism and a forcein bridging the gap between nations and cultures.At a time when the world progresses toward being more “Jewish” in adopting ourtraditional morality, we Israelis become more localized and provincial. We have notjoined the post–World War II world revolution that is directed at forming a fraternityof nations against the Hitlers of the world. We were there; we started on that path inthe first years of our independence. Many in the world looked up to us in admiration.Here was a persecuted nation that converted the energies of wrath, frustration, andrevenge into energies of building, creation, and absorption. We inspired emergingAfrican nations and others who followed in our footsteps. Not all was perfect, but thedirection was correct, until the metamorphosis of the 1960s and the Eichmann trialthat opened that decade. I know it is small wisdom indeed to analyze retroactively,