When All Is Said and Begun

WHEN ALL IS SAID AND BEGUN

June 6, 2003

Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana

Last Sunday's dedication ceremony for the Holocaust Memorial was a big win for New Orleans and for our Jewish community. I know that I will cherish the memory of that sweet day till the end of mine! I haven't yet seen the Agam sculpture illuminated at night, but others who have report that it is an utterly magnificent sight.

Another told me that while visiting the Memorial just this week, he watched a young child who proudly explained to his mother:
Look, Mom. If you stand here you see a yellow star. But if you stand at the other end, you'll see a beautiful rainbow.
And with that, the mother patiently explained to her son the sad meaning of the Memorial, why it was built, and why a rainbow of hope for the future.

My purpose this Shabbos is to share but briefly some of the lessons I learned from these six years in which many of us struggled to complete the dream.

Lesson Number One

One needs to be careful and clear about presenting a plan-even a righteous one-to others. One ought to expect that they need time to buy into a dream. As with a gourmet dinner, so, too, with an idea for the future, presentation counts!

Lesson Number 2

Having said that, Lesson #2 is this: sometimes bureaucracies have such burdensome processes and narrow vision and protective ownership that they cast off important and worthy projects simply because their genesis was not from within their own close-knit circle.

Lesson Number 3

Given the realities of Lessons 1-careful about presenting a plan or dream to others--and Lesson 2-sometimes people wind up discarding worthy prohects because the idea wasn't born with them-Lesson 3 is this: though not the most preferred or even easiest route, one sometimes enlists doers who are "believers" to accomplish the job and realize the dream. The busier and more productive and responsible the doer, the more fruitful and accountable will be their contribution to the project. A perfect description of the New Orleans Holocaust Memorial's Executive Committee.

Lesson Number 4

Try to keep it simple. Go for a dream, a project which is grounded in unassailable worthiness and will be fashioned by uncommon excellence. People are led to support and trust in such a project, and I have 900 of them to thank tonight! We have three major incentives for this project.

I remember how, when we saw the initial reception of the New Americans and other survivors to the idea of a Holocaust Memorial, we knew we were on to something significant. Time was of the essence as their numbers diminished. We wanted the survivors to see this venture to fruition.

There was another compelling reason: more and more, we citizens are tempted to "stick to our own" and forget one of the central lessons of the Holocaust. Pastor Niemoller's famous illustration still underscores the urgency better than anything else. Remember how he ends it?
. . . So when they came for me there was no one to protest.
You remember it!
First they came for the communists. I was not one so I did nothing.

And finally, the rise of Holocaust denial over the past two decades made the erecting of our Memorial all the more urgent.

Have no illusion as to the danger of such people and their well-funded and fraudulent "historical revisionism." By attacking the facts of the Holocaust, their propaganda insinuates subtle but hateful anti-Semitic beliefs portraying Jews as exploiters of non-Jewish guilt and Jews as controllers of academia and the media. Their claims bear haunting comparison to those very same accusations which brought Hitler to power in prewar Germany.

Holocaust Denial represents the ages-old lie of a Jewish conspiracy theory, uniting otherwise disparate fringe groups such as the Liberty Lobby, Klan factions, neo-Nazis, the Aryan Nation, the skinheads, and many other lunatic groups.

Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, posing as individuals or organizations engaged in a legitimate, dispassionate quest for historical knowledge and "truth," they charge that we Jews have inculcated a sense of guilt in the white, Western Christian world. And those who can make others feel guilty then gain the power to make them do their bidding. Here's their bottom line. You knew it was coming.

This power is then used to support and fund the international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel.

So you put all that together: (1) the survivors of our community and their needs, (2) the human relations priorities of this city of diverse neighborhoods, and (3) the pressing fact of Holocaust Denial, and you have a project of unassailable worthiness.

Next step. Be lucky enough to find and secure a genius to magnificently execute and fashion the dream. I'm not going to tell you that working with Yaacov Agam is a carefree experience. But knowing him and watching his creative genius flower has been one of the most wondrous encounters of my almost 55 years.

When that crane operator lifted out of its storage case the first of the nine 400-pound panels only a week ago, my heart wept at the sight of its visual brilliance and profound symbolic message. And then, one by one, it continued, until all of the complexity of Agam's conceptual design was visible for us all to see and grapple with.

Well, that's enough for a summer Shabbos. And besides, the very last thing I want is for this to sound self-congratulatory, because that's the last thing on my mind.

In the end, I suppose our Holocaust Memorial belongs as much to a little girl from Poland as it does to anyone. Oh, I never met her, but I've never forgotten her, either. We were a group of rabbis making a pilgrimage to Poland in 1987. As our bus headed to Auschwitz-Berkenau, our colleague, Don Edelstein told us that he was returning to Auschwitz. He was a 17-year-old Yeshivah student when the Nazis transported him with the others in a cattle car 44 years earlier.

As we drew nearer to Auschwitz, Rabbi Edelstein told our hushed group about a little girl he remembered so well who was among those tightly jammed into that car. She asked her mother:
"Mama-Ich bin durshtig."
"Mother, I am thirsty."
Over and over again the child begged for water.
Each time her mother replied:
"Nach a-bissel, Racheleh."
"Soon as we arrive, Racheleh."
But after a while the child became aware of the deep sound of her precious mother's weeping. She wept to herself in a manner which totally unsettled the child by the realization of her mother's helplessness.
So this little girl came to console and comfort her mama:
"Vein nish-Mamme."
"Don't cry, Mommy. I won't ask again."

To Racheleh, to that little girl, and to the millions of others whose thirst remained unquenched, we have now dedicated this loving and lovely, but sobering Memorial.

Amen.