You can't talk about November 9 without getting personal. When I talk here about the significance of this date, it is also clear that I cannot speak “for the community”. Because this date is associated with many different, deep and personal feelings.
November 9 is coming up soon, and we all know that over the last 150 years or more in Germany, November 9 has reminded us of happiness and success, but also of dehumanization and shame. And that also makes this day a special date for us as Jews.
Not only that the Reichspogromnacht in 1938 was explicitly directed against Jews, that a bomb attack on the Jewish Community Center in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1969 only failed by luck, but also Dresden events such as the ground-breaking ceremony and the inauguration of the New Synagogue Dresden in 1998 and 2001.
The media and discussions emphasize the fateful significance of 9 November for Germany. We Jews have long been familiar with this contradiction within a term or a date. In our customs, it seems to have become second nature to us. On what is hopefully one of the happiest days in a person's life - their wedding - we celebrate exuberantly and yet, at the moment of greatest happiness, the shards of broken glass remind us of the destruction of the temple and the associated remorse. Another example concerns not only Jews, but also Christians and Muslims. In the Torah, the basis of these three monotheistic religions, there are many stories and descriptions of heroes and villains. But unlike in many secular stories and also unlike in later religious writings, in the Torah the good and bad qualities of man, happiness and damnation are often not distributed among different people. The good prophet and the evil thief, the happy pious man and the cursed wicked man. No, our common greatest prophet Moshe - Moses - appears at his first mention as a vengeful manslayer. Can that really be true? Even later - to stay with Moses - he repeatedly makes mistakes and has to wrestle with God. How do I talk about Moshe now? Where is this going?
I will explain: Just as we would probably understand our Judaism and our teachings much less, and live even less authentically, if we focused only on the passages in our Torah (and other scriptures) that are free of contradiction. In the same way, we would limit ourselves if we tried to reduce November 9 in our Jewish and also German history to one side. Happiness or suffering, role model or guilt.
No, it is precisely this contradiction that tells us something about our shared Jewish and personal past, about our present and, with a little effort and God's help, also about our future. We are and were all of these things: happy and guilty, courageous and selfish, brave and despondent. We Jews - we Germans - we humans. I am firmly convinced that there is no reason to agree or argue about the meaning of November 9, but that we should try to make the different aspects visible as in a prism.
That is why it is so important to us in the JKD throughout the year that remembering the suffering and celebrating the happiness - for example about our wonderful synagogue in Neustadt or about the growing community garden - do not contradict each other, but that both belong to this day and to our lives. In this way, we can learn neither to haughtily suppress the pain when we are happy, nor to sink despondently into misery without giving happiness a chance.
Therefore, on November 9, we will both remember the pain and celebrate the victories. We are still here, our adversaries have not managed to realize their extermination plan. And we stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, including the victims among them. Their suffering and ours has taught us the importance of many contradictions in Judaism, not least the importance of cohesion while at the same time cultivating diversity. We feel this balancing act particularly keenly today. I warmly invite you all to carry these and other contradictions forward and to develop our community, rooted in tradition, together into the future.
Even for those of us who are not familiar with history, November 9 invites us as Jews, as Germans and as human beings to enter into conversation, to exchange ideas and to understand the various aspects of this fateful date even more deeply. Only what we understand can we use to shape a better future for us all.
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