Poetry, the Shoah, and baseball - The Jewish Standard

I don’t usually read poetry. Fiction, yes; nonfiction, yes; more and more and politics, with sick fascination, absolutely. But poetry, not so much.

But I’ve just read two books of poetry in the last few weeks. One was Menachem Rosensaft’s “Burning Psalms,” and the other was Henry Schipper’s “The Ball Dreams of the Sky.” That’s this week’s cover story; I wrote about “Burning Psalms” at great length a few weeks ago.

The striking thing is that both books are about the Holocaust, at least in part; “Ball Dreams” moves between the Shoah and the baseball diamond.

It made me think about how the Jewish world goes from Pesach, the holiday of liberation, to Yom HaShoah, the grim memorialization of death, destruction, and hatred, in about four days. That’s quite an emotional shift. The Israelis decided to be even more dramatic, going from Yom HaZikron, the day dedicated to the memory of the soldiers who died defending the country, and the victims who died in acts of terrorism leveled at it, to Yom Ha’Atzmaut, the day celebrating Israel’s independence. There is no time at all between them.

We make that same shift on days when we say Yizkor, remembering our dead, and Hallel, praising God. It demands a kind of emotional lability that not all of us always can muster, at least without paying a real emotional price.

I went to the Yom HaShoah commemoration at the Jewish Community Center of Paramus / Congregation Beth Tikvah this year. Mr. Rosensaft spoke there; he talked about how he believes that it’s necessary for us, the Jewish community, to come up with some way to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive as its by-now-elderly survivors continue to age, and the size of that subcommunity shrinks.

The condition of the shul’s big parking lot — full — and the roads leading to it — packed and honking — showed that we haven’t forgotten yet. The fact that there had to be police officers outside not only directing traffic but also deterring acts of vandalism or violence is sobering, though; the idea that the hatred that caused the Shoah is rising again is horrifying.

But Mr. Schipper is right too. He can’t forget the Holocaust; his parents lost their entire families to it, and their lives were irretrievably scarred by it. But he can also find joy, and art, and beauty, and share that with us too.

This is turning into an increasingly harsh, even unhinged world, ruled by malice and careless avarice. But there’s something deeply human, and good, in finding joy and beauty in it too. It keeps us going, as baseball does for Mr. Schipper.

We should all find our own form of baseball.

—JP

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