THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

stronger army because of the Shoah, and more resources from other countries’taxpayers, and an automatic forgiveness for any of our excesses. We want to beabove criticism and attention, all these because of Hitler’s twelve years, whichchanged the face of Europe and our face beyond recognition. It cannot go on like thisforever. This inherent contradiction will smash its vessel, the state, and the society thatcontains it.We are fast approaching an intersection where we need decide who we are andwhere we are going. Are we going to the past, toward which we always orientedourselves, or will we choose the future, for the first time in generations? Will wechoose a better world that is based on hope and not trauma, on trust in humanity andnot suspicious isolationism and paranoia? In this case we will have to leave our painbehind us and look forward, to find out where we can repair ourselves and perhapseven the world. During most of our history, we learned how to survive in a flawedworld by outsmarting the system, bypassing the laws of hostile regimes, where wewere subjects. But now we are citizens of our own state and we continue to beat thesystem, our own this time, deliberately or out of a habit, not realizing that we are notfooling anyone but ourselves. We need to declare: Mourning time is over; the sevendays of shiv’ah are past. We are now living in the seventh decade since the Shoah,and we need to get rid of the sack and ashes and get back to living, to a different life.The public rising from the sack and ashes of national mourning appears in oursources. David’s quick rise from mourning his son, the fruit of his adultery withBathsheba, is seemingly opposed to human nature. When a dear one is ill andstruggles to live, we try to preserve hope, to endow him with our strength and thehope that he overcomes his illness. Yet when evil takes it toll and the ill person dies,all our pain and anguish break out in force. We sit in mourning for seven days,according to our Jewish customs. Kings and kingdoms, on the other hand, conductthemselves differently. With the passing of his child, David stops being a grievingfather, haunted by guilt, and returns to be the monarch of a sovereign kingdom. Heabandons sorrow and rises to normalcy. It is as if he mourns his son before his death,and when the child is gone, the mourning chapter is closed and a new chapter of lifebegins. This is how he explains this seemingly unnatural behavior:And his servants said to him, “What is this thing that you have doneconcerning the child? While the child was yet living you fasted and