Making the Holocaust part of the liturgy

It’s amazing that Menachem Z. Rosensaft’s “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz” doesn’t burst into flames.

This book of poetry — every poem in it a response or counterpoint to every one of the psalms in the biblical book — written by the son of Holocaust survivors and the brother of a murdered sibling he never knew, is composed with fire, fueled by a combination of rage, love, and despite-it-all faith that sears your eyes as you read it.

(And to be practical for a second, it’s newly published by Ben Yehuda Press, as part of its Jewish Poetry Project. Mr. Rosensaft will talk about it on April 23, for Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey’s Yom HaShoah program. See below.)

Mr. Rosensaft is a lawyer and law professor; his long and impressive resume includes his position as general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress.

“We have to recalibrate how we deal with Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust memory, with the survivors leaving the scene,” Mr. Rosensaft said. “My strong view is that this has to be done in another way — possibly through liturgy — instead of a simple continuation of what we have been doing.

“We cannot just have what has become a secondhand repetition of what the survivors have been telling us for the past 80 years.

“When the survivors were telling their stories and transmitting their memories — and now, still when they do tell them — that is an authentic link with the experience of the Holocaust. But I do not believe that it can be replicated on an ongoing basis. So, in order to make Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust memory an integral part not just of Jewish consciousness but of the consciousness of our society in general, we have to rethink how we are going to convey it.”

Yom HaShoah is fine, but it’s not enough, he said. “We can’t relegate Holocaust remembrance to Yom HaShoah, because then it’s exclusively for those who decide to attend a commemoration. We can’t even relegate it simply to the martyrology on Yom Kippur, for those who are still in synagogue when the martyrology is read.

“Rather, I believe that it should be done through our liturgy. And I am hoping that my ‘Burning Psalms’ will start a discussion about how to accomplish this. Because if we believe — and I do believe — that the Holocaust, the Shoah, was a watershed event in Jewish history, then it needs to be treated as such in our religious consciousness. It cannot be a side issue.”

The Shoah was a turning point in Jewish history comparable with the destruction of the First and Second Temples, Mr. Rosensaft said, but we have to ensure that it’s remembered with more clarity than those two historic nightmares were. “I don’t mean to be heretical,” he said. “Or maybe I do. But although the destruction of both temples is historical fact, they are compartmentalized together, once a year, into Tisha B’Av, which means that no one is made aware of them, as historical fact, consciously.

“We have to bring the reality of the Holocaust into our ongoing interaction in shul, whether it is with God or with ourselves, and that has to be done through liturgy, because that’s our common denominator. Whether it’s Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist, the Jewish existence as a people manifests itself primarily religiously, and we have to bring Holocaust memory into it.”

Remember, Mr. Rosensaft said, “our liturgy has not been stagnant for the past 2,000 years. Kol Nidre was added in the seventh or eighth century of the common era. Yedid Nefesh, a particularly moving and inspirational hymn, was composed in Sfat, after the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. In 1948, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog — the grandfather of the current president — composed a prayer for the state of Israel, Avinu Shebashamayim, which was edited by his friend Shai Agnon. It’s recited throughout the Jewish world, and it is recited in just about every synagogue on every Shabbat and every festival, along with the prayer for our country, which also was added to the liturgy.

Menachem Rosensaft is with Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem on December 7, 2023. (Shahar Azran/WJC)

“As a result of the inclusion of Avinu Shebashamayim, you cannot leave a Shabbat or festival or High Holiday service without a conscious awareness of the centrality of Israel in Jewish life.

“But the remembrance of the Shoah, the fact of the Shoah, the need to inculcate an awareness of the Shoah in our consciousness, is not less crucial than the awareness of the state of Israel.”

Mr. Rosensaft has an idea about where to place this new piece of liturgy. “I suggest that it goes between the mourner’s Kaddish and the Aleinu,” he said. “We have a place where we have a remembrance of people who have passed away recently, and of people whose yahrzeit we are observing. That is a place to include, in some format, a remembrance of the millions who were murdered during the Shoah. Not as a part of an annual martyrology. Not as part of a collective. They deserve an individualized, separate remembrance, and I think that this is a way of doing it.”

But it’s not that he believes that it must be done in any one way, Mr. Rosensaft said. It’s that it must be done in some way. “We have to start the discussion now, when we still can do it. If we wait for 10, 20, 30 years, it will be too late.”

Mr. Rosensaft doesn’t “have the kind of arrogance to suggest that my psalms are the answer” to what addition could be made to the liturgy to include the Holocaust, he said, but “they are how I have reacted theologically and spiritually to Holocaust remembrance.”

Mr. Rosensaft is a lawyer, which means that he thinks analytically, and in some ways it is logical that his history has led him to this book. He was born in the DP camp that was housed at Bergen-Belsen right after the war, to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen-survivor parents; his grandparents and brother were murdered by the Nazis. His work, as both general counsel and executive vice president of the WJC, took him to places like Bosnia, where he could see late-20th-century mass murder, and Hungary, where autocracy is on view; it also took him to Israel very many times, giving him a lot of time to think and to write.

“I have been writing poetry for most of my life,” Mr. Rosensaft said. “It is my literary genre of choice. My first master’s degree was in creative writing from Johns Hopkins. It’s the mode where I am most comfortable in dealing with emotions. I can write poetry dealing with things that are more difficult to express in prose, or in an op-ed.”

Legal writing and poetry usually don’t coexist, do they? “They wouldn’t intersect in a Venn diagram,” Mr. Rosensaft agreed. “But over the years, I have been writing poems that were related to or in reaction to or replying to some of the psalms. And it occurred to me that the one absolute constant in Jewish liturgy — and in Christian liturgy as well — is psalms. They are our narrative in our interaction with God.

“Psalms are basically gratitude to God, praise of God, expressing an intimacy in our relationship with God. And it struck me that it doesn’t work anymore. We are expressing gratitude and praise without acknowledging that at a critical moment in the existence — and almost the non-survival — of the Jewish people, any kind of divine intervention was utterly absent.

“At some point, I saw that God may have parted the water for Moses, but he didn’t crumple the walls of the death chambers of Auschwitz to allow the people inside to escape.

“It struck me that this needed to be said.”

It’s not that there is no doubt in the psalms, but that doubt is resolved. Psalm 22 asks “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s the question that Matthew says Jesus asked on the cross, Mr. Rosensaft said. It’s resolved in Psalm 22, but “that question needs to be voiced.”

Menachem Rosensaft stands at his grandmother’s grave at the Czeladz Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Bedzin, Poland, on January 24, 2020. (Jean Rosensaft)

So he did.

Instead of doing the obvious, by taking the lines from the psalms that are included in the liturgy, or in places like the Birkat HaMazon, the grace after meals — his father refused to include the line from Psalm 37 that says “I was young and I became old but I never saw a righteous person forsaken and his children searching for bread” because he had seen both, many times over — Mr. Rosensaft decided to try to engage with every psalm. “I stopped continuously feeling that it was presumptuous or arrogant on my part to do this, because who the hell am I to presume that I can actually reimagine psalms. Instead, I had the feeling that they were forcing themselves on me. Every time that I thought I should stop doing this, the answer was no, continue.

“I wrote them from 1 to 150. Sometimes it took me a few hours. Sometimes it took weeks. And then once it was finished, it was finished.”

There is overwhelming fury in Mr. Rosensaft’s poetry, but also a sense of deep connection with the God at whom he rages. How can he still feel that connection? “There is a difference between theology and liturgy,” he said.

Theology is personal, and he has his own. “I found I could reconcile a belief in a divinity with the horrors of the Holocaust because I do believe in the presence of a divine spark. The shechina. And I believe that the shechina manifested itself within those victims who remained human to one another, and who refused to become dehumanized. It manifested itself within the Jew who comforted another Jew in the barracks. Who told a joke. Who shared a piece of bread. Who comforted a child going into the gas chamber. And I believe in the shechina within the non-Jews who risked their lives to hide Jews. To save Jews. To help Jews. The shechina was absent from the perpetrators and their accomplices and those who profiteered from the tragedy.

“But that is a very personalized approach to theology,” he conceded.

Liturgy, on the other hand, “is how we express our religious manifestation. If we throw it out the window, then we have to replace it or walk away from it. It’s the glue that holds us together religiously as a faith community. So if we don’t chuck it out the window, then we will continue reciting it, but we will also raise our own psalms, our own questions. And we will continue to engage in a dialogue with God.

“It’s a dialogue with no response, but it’s not a monologue, because the silent response is itself a response.

“The model of our interaction with God that we have created over the millennia may or may not be true, but I believe that we want to continue it, because it is the glue that holds us together. Whether it is Mordecai Kaplan reimagining Judaism as a civilization or modern Orthodoxy or charedi Orthodoxy or the Reform movement, we will continue a process that we are comfortable with, because it’s what we have grown up with, that our parents or grandparents or great-grandparents were comfortable with. They might not have recognized the synagogue that we are in, but they would understand it, because it grew organically.

“In my opinion, we can’t continue doing that without integrating the Holocaust into it, and that can’t be by integrating the memories of survivors. Those memories are very important, and bringing them in through the second and third generation is important, but that doesn’t answer what happens next. It’s almost temporary, a Band-Aid. At some point, we have to figure out where we have to go next to make sure that we don’t lose the awareness of the tragedy.

Mr. Rosensaft returned to the anger in his version of the psalms. “I don’t believe in muting the rage,” he said. “It has to be there. There isn’t any way of dealing with it otherwise.

“And we also can’t have only rage.”

Take Psalm 23. This is Menachem Rosensaft’s revision of the poem that is recited to comfort mourners confronting fresh grief. His is not comforting. It is raw.

“a psalm to the emptiness
no shepherd
only foes
no festive table
only bitter soup
moldy bread
no green pastures
no still waters
only blood-drenched
rat-infested
mud
he is always hungry
she is always cold
their heads anointed
by blows
shadows walking
through the valley of death
Adonai’s fog-wrapped house
forever”