Today: endless tears; Tomorrow: endless smiles

Today we visited Mt. Herzl in the morning which is a national monument surrounding the grave of the father of Zionism, Benjamin Ze'ev Theodor Herzl who never got to see the creation of the Israeli state.  Mt. Herzl is also the home of the national cemetery for Israeli politicians and soldiers.  If that wasn't enough, it is also the home of Yad Veshem, the Holocaust memorial.

I held myself together through all of the stories of Israeli war heroes--- barely.  But then we reached the end.  At the end of the path through the national cemetery, you reach the most recent graves.  The combination of the open grass waiting for new graves and this young soldier named Hilla's grave just made me break down completely.  I guess I've been doing a lot of that recently?  What struck me most was her photograph and how recent her memorial was.  One of our Israeli peers told me that it was a girl who had been participating as a soldier in some memorial ceremony who had been struck by a light falling from the stage.  There was just some awful juxtaposition between all of the other deaths we had heard and something that seemed just as senseless and random to me.  I understand that there are some things that people find worth fighting for.  I understand heroism.  But somehow getting struck by that light in the middle of a military ceremony and being struck down in an act of aggression didn't seem so different to me.  They just don't make sense on a very human level.  Worse, her parents were standing next to her grave.  Everyone filed past but I couldn't help watch her parents at her graveside.  They just stood there and talked and cleaner her grave as if she was still there and they were cleaning her room quietly so that she wouldn't wake up.  I wanted to feel some fraction of their loss so that maybe I could take just a fraction of their burden.  I had no idea what to do.  So I unwound the portion of my bracelet from Esilalei Boma that broke off shortly after I got back to the US and went to ask her mother for permission to place it on her grave.  Her mother put it down for me and gave me the biggest hug.  I have no words for how incredibly sad that moment was but I'm glad it happened.

I can't even really begin to explain Yad Veshem.  I'll try though.  Hearing about how many people died of starvation in the ghettos was awful.  There was a story of a young orphan snatching a bag as a woman exited a store in the ghetto.  The woman chased after him but the boy was running away trying to eat as much as she could before she caught him.  This was all apparently pretty normal but when he collapsed, it was not normal.  It turned out that the bag had been filled with cleaning supplies and the woman hadn't been yelling at him because she wanted to punish him but because she wanted him to know that it wasn't food.  He was so hungry that he didn't taste the difference as he poisoned himself to death.  I thought that hearing about Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz or the SS mass murder of Jews prior to the concentration camps would be the most difficult things for me to deal with.  However, I never knew about the gas chambers that you don't visit.  Camps where tens of thousands of jews were brought to buildings the size of two barns and systematically murdered in the course of a half hour.  There were 3 survivors who ran as they were being forced to remove the bodies of their families.  Or about the women who marched 500 miles in 3.5 months.  Out of the 10,000 or so of them, only 1,259 survived.  Those that made it to liberation did not all survive due to malnutrition and exhaustion.  There was a nazi propaganda video about the ghettos where all of the Jews looked happy.  They had auditioned for the parts and thought that they would get privileges from being in the video.  Instead they were murdered after the video was made to keep the secret that it was just propaganda.  The testimonies of the people who were saved by courageous non-minority citizens was incredibly powerful.  It all ended with a circular room two stories tall where floor to ceiling shelves were filled with binders of 4 million names of those killed in the Holocaust.  Many of them were accompanied by photographs.  The remaining third of the shelves was empty for the 2 million identified in German records whose entire lives were erased in the course of a few years.  No record of them has been recovered.  I can't even conceptualize that much loss. One third of the Jewish population in the world was murdered.  If you know three jews, statistically one of them would have died in the Holocaust.  On top of that, there were millions of other minority groups that were persecuted as well.  It's just horrifying and mind boggling to think of.

There was not a dry eye today but tomorrow there won't be a face without a smile.  We just have to keep looking forward.  Tomorrow we wake up at three thirty am to hike the Roman ramp up to the top of Masada where the Jews took their own lives instead of accepting slavery and persecution under the Romans.  At the top, we will watch the sun rise over the desert and then I will be having my Bat Mitzvah in their ancient Synagogue.  I will be saying the Aliyah and reading from the Torah as well as giving a speech about why this is important to me and reflecting on my role in the Jewish community.  We immediately go then to bathe in the Dead Sea and then to ride on camels through the desert to a Bedouin tourist attraction where we'll be staying in a Bedouin tent for the evening.  The next morning we hike through the desert to an oasis waterfall.  It is going to be incredible.  Sorry for the depressing post but these are things that I want to hold with me and want you all to understand.  No matter what side you're on politically or how you feel about historical events, it's always important to remember a massive loss of human life like these events.