REMEMBRANCE DAY Shabbat SERVICE 12 NOVEMBER 2011 – Rabbi Steven Katz

When Sandra and I recently spent three days in Istanbul, we received a telephone text from our daughter Laura informing us of the release of Gilad Shalit and that we should immediately search out a television set somewhere and watch his interview with Egyptian TV.  Shalit’s 1941 day long incarceration captured the hearts of millions around the world.  None of us could begin to imagine his anguish, denied  some of the best five years of a lifetime – years when one can explore the world at leisure, make career choices enjoy romance.  He was denied the love of family, the joy of friendship and any meaningful human contact – it must have been a living death – perhaps Shalit in defiance evening, morning and noon screamed out the words of the Psalmist “I shall not die but live.”  None of us could begin to imagine the torment of his parents going to bed and waking up every morning with the crippling fear that while they had slept their son was subjected to physical and mental torture and constant deprivation.  The example of Shalit was a window, a small window into the cruelty, barbarity, inhumanity of just one aspect of the war in the Middle East

In the same way that Shalit’s incarceration  was a small window, a porthole, into one aspect of war, so too Anne Frank’s Diary is a window, a small window into some of the initial  horrors and humiliation, heaped upon Jews in Nazi occupied Europe.  For some it is easier to grasp the suffering of millions through one’s person’s journey into torment and terror.

So where is the window through which we can look to grasp some understanding of the enormity of the Second World War, some understanding, awareness, of its gruesome brutality but also its physical bravery and nobility of spirit – a brutality and nobility seen in all theatres of war- land, sea, and air and on all continents on which the war was fought – Europe, Africa and Asia, a war which involved the servicemen and women  of another two continents N America and Australasia, a war that accounted for the lives of 50 million people of all creeds and colours. The answer of course is that this war which historian Max Hastings has described as “the most terrible event in history” was so comprehensive in terms of the hundreds of millions involved, so vast in  its geographical spread that its horror cannot be adequately conveyed through only one window or one person’s story alone.

I believe that for those born in this country in the first few years following the war, our window into the world was through frosted glass, or at least a  film camera lens.  Up to my early teens and BBC’s wonderful “The World at War” series my knowledge of the war was acquired through the world of cinema.  A raft of British films depicted war in simple terms – good against bad and the good guys always won.  According to the world of cinema in these early years there was no mention of collateral damage – civilian loss and suffering or those who perished in friendly fire – killed inadvertently by their own colleagues.  The heroes in those early films – Richard Attenborough, Richard Todd, John Gregson nearly, always portrayed members of the Royal Air Force.  Why?  I would suggest that the reason is that audiences were spared, anaesthetized, against the true horror of war.  The camera shows bombs usually falling on target with no suggestion of mistakes and civilian loss.  In those early war films we, the audience, were spared the grim reality of war.  War was never fought hand to hand, always from 5000 feet in the sky and there were rarely dead bodies – destroyed homes, rarely blood and tears.

Yet of Britain’s war loss of 449000, 67000 were civilians.  Civilian loss in Nazi occupied Europe was of course much more Italy lost a quarter of a million civilians and the Soviet Union more than thirteen and a half million civilians.  As for friendly fire or sheer accidents in training the RAF alone lost 787 officers and 4500 other ranks in non operational activity.  It was perhaps Spielberg’s The Saving of Private Ryan that first portrayed more of the reality, rather than the romance of war, with its earbursting noise, its gory scenes of limbless, lifeless bodies and rivers of human blood.

But of course no film, no book, can ever fully convey or explain the tragedy and reality of war.  I recently completed the finest book, and I have read many, on the human cost of the Second World War – Max Hastings’ All Hell Let Loose ; the World at War 1939-1945.  Hastings quotes one soldier on the D-Day Normandy beaches – “There were men crying with fear, men defecating themselves. I lay there with some others, too petrified to move.  It was like mass paralysis.  At one point something hit me on the arm.  I thought I had taken a bullet.  It was somebody’s hand, taken clean off by something.  It was too much.”  Worse happened on the Russian front, Hastings writes of the deprivation and distress in Leningrad in the winter of 1941.  “In the first days of January the NKVD reported 42 cases of cannibalism, corpses were found with thighs and breasts hacked off.  Worse, the weak became vulnerable to murder not for their property but their flesh.”

How can we begin to  understand,  to  imagine?  The rabbis of the Mishna warn us “Do not judge others until you have been in their position”.              How can we understand, imagine the fear of an RAF pilot sitting in his noisy uncomfortable claustrophobic   spitfire attacked from both the air and the ground in the pitch black of the night – or the sailors of a battleship waiting helplessly, fearfully for an anticipated torpedo strike, or the soldier landing on a Normandy beach wet to the bone and seasick, with lead heavy laden backpack and suddenly thrust into an ear bursting battle for his life, for civilization such as we know and enjoy today.  Surely this rabbinical warning applies with special force to those who speak about but have never personally experienced the brutality and tragedy of war. 

The purpose of Remembrance Shabbat and indeed Remembrance Sunday is to pay full and fulsome tribute to those who engaged in war service for this country, to those who saw, suffered and survived the brutality of war and to the many, too many, who paid the ultimate self sacrifice and never returned home to their loved ones. 

As Jews we owe a special gratitude to all those who fought in His Majesty’s Armed Services In the Second world War but as citizens of today’s United Kingdom we acknowledge and appreciate the bravery of those currently in war service of this country in Afghanistan, and more recently over the skies of Libya and on the ground and in the air over Iraq.  Words and prayers alone can never repay our ongoing debt of gratitude.  A second reason for these Memorial prayers and ceremonies is to urge all politicians and indeed all right thinking people to explore seriously all alternative ways of bringing     peace and justice for all in our time.  We in the West today are much more honest, open, about the human cost and consequences of war.  In this country today’s casualties and fatalities are named, their photographs shown in the media, their bodies brought back home in dignity and full ceremony – processed through the streets of Wooten Bassett.  Each British life lost in war is a profound unceasing tragedy for the family and a source of national loss.

To my mind the greatest, most deadly threat to civilisation today is that our world as a whole has not embraced this profound Judeo Christian value that we attach to the sanctity of human life, as the rabbis of the Talmud put it in words immortalized in the credits to the film Schindler’s List – “To save one life is to save the world, do destroy a life is to destroy the world.”

Two examples one political, one military that offer proof that our world is divided tragically into 2 halves – one valuing and sanctifying life, the other desecrating, indeed destroying life.

The old Soviet Union suffered the staggering loss of 20 million of its people in the 2^nd World War, thirteen and a half million civilians, yet under Stalin it continued after the war to murder its own people on either political or religious grounds.  And since 1945 the old Soviet Union and the present day Russia have offered staggeringly generous political, economic and military support to regimes and terrorist organizations who seek to achieve their quasi political aims, realize their sickening ideologies through at best the suppression of human rights and at worst murder – one would have thought that a people who had suffered such overwhelming human loss as the Soviets did in the Second World War would be more sensitive to the loss of  human life irrespective of political ideology or religious belief.  Russia and China have at every step objected to comprehensive and effective sanctions against Iran, the country posing the single greatest threat to world peace to the extent that Iran now has not only the malevolent political will but the nuclear capacity to plunge the world into a conflagration next to which the Second World War would be just a localized skirmish.  Incredibly, yesterday’s American Press reported that Russia may finance more nuclear plants in Iran.

This division of the world into two halves is shockingly contemptibly and reprehensibly reinforced by some Palestinian leaders – for example Hezbollah’s Hassan Nassrala who said “We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are most vulnerable.  The Jews love life, so will take that from them.  We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”

Until each nationality, each religion, each sect, each individual on earth values each human life as created “b’tzelem Elokim”  in the image of God, the world will continue to be besmirched by random acts of murder, organized terrorism, genocide or cold calculated  war with all its tragic consequences.  As Jews we have to hope pray and believe that we will see and enjoy Isaiah’s vision of a Messianic world in which one will beat swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, a world in which nation shall not lift up sword against nation, a world in which one will not learn how to wage war.

For the  time being this Messianic world is a prayer, a vision, a dream; paradoxically the Second World War, in spite of its shocking loss of life was a  justified means of trying to transform this prayer, this vision, this dream into the reality of everyday life and it was therefore a milchemet mitzvah, a morally obligatory war.

For now in conclusion let the message ring out from this service that the world owes an enormous debt of gratitude to all those who with their lives, have defended the peoples, values and shores of this country and so have nurtured, kept alive the Messianic dream.  Also let the massage ring out  that any  infringement of human rights, any incitement of racial hatred, any arousal of anti-Semitism or existentialist challenge to Israel, if condoned in silence and unchallenged can wreak vengeance on the whole of humanity and exact a frightful price from us all – victim, onlooker and perpetrator.  If a Jew or any other minority is not safe – no one is safe.  Presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens must wipe out the scourge of prejudice before it wipes us out in global nemesis.  These leaders must speak out in a way that makes us all believe that Isaiah’s vision can become reality and that a better tomorrow will soon become our today.

May this be our goal, may this be our achievement and may it be God’s will.