On New Army Officers, Holocaust Remembrance and Pharoah's Amnesia
This week, my eldest daughter graduated from officer training school and was inaugurated as an officer in the Israel Defence Forces.
“My daughter an officer in the Israeli army” - A sentence that only lived in the wildest dreams of my great-grandparents, in fact only a fantasy in the minds of our ancestors through 2000 years of exile. And yet, it was no dream. It was real. I stood there, watching as forty young men and women deferred their lives, their careers, their studies - choosing to give another year beyond their required service. Because, as the iconic British posters of the First World War declared, “Your country needs you.”
And they are not alone. They are part of a generation - tens of thousands strong - answering the same call.
I shed a few quiet tears, not just for my daughter, but for all of them - for what they have lost, for what they have seen, and for who they have become. Her closest friends were there to cheer her on. Seven of them stood together for a picture, laughing and joking.
And then, it struck me.
Among those six friends, two had lost brothers in the war, and two had just emerged from months of relentless combat in Gaza. Their smiles were not just expressions of happiness but defiance – they pulsated life even as the weight of loss and war clung to their shoulders. They may look like ordinary twenty-year-olds, however they are anything but. And yet, the most remarkable thing - they don’t even realise it themselves.
My daughter is like any young woman her age. She loves straight hair, polished nails, trendy clothes. She goes out, laughs with friends, dreams of the future. When we tell them – her and her friends - how proud we are of them and how incredible they are – they embarrassingly shake it off – “ooof Ima tafsiki” – Mum stop! Truthfully there is nothing extraordinary about her - except for the fact that unlike most i-Gen kids her age, she remembers.
As do they all.
They remember the images of October 7th.
They remember the pain of the empty chair that lingers in every friend’s get-together.
They remember that for twenty-four excruciating hours on one fine summer’s day in October 2023, we were exiled once more –alone, vulnerable, abandoned.
For a generation that had taken Israel’s independence, sovereignty, and strength for granted, that day seared a new reality into their souls - an open wound, a painful scar.
But Judaism has never allowed wounds to fester into despair. Its concept of freedom is not unfettered individualism, nor (a)self detached from commitment and responsibility.
From the very inception of our national journey, memory has been our source of strength. We do not remember to dwell in grief or resign to fate - we remember to educate, to inspire, and to shape a better tomorrow.
As Oliver Sacks, the eminent Jewish neurologist, poignantly notes in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a person’s identity is woven from the memories they hold. The most tragic aspect of memory loss is not merely the forgetting of facts but rather the erosion of self. Our identities, he argues, are not solely our own; they are the inherited recollections of our ancestors, the threads of connection that bind us; a tapestry of collective experience we carry forward.
This week, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we witnessed an unforgiveable distortion of memory. While the world ostensibly paused to commemorate the Holocaust, many conveniently forgot to mention that the six million murdered were Jews. As George Santayana famously warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is a lesson etched into history, but one first taught in our most ancient text: the Torah.
Pharaoh, ruler of the world’s greatest empire, was, ironically, the freest of men, yet profoundly enslaved. Not by chains, but by amnesia. The wilful erasure of his people’s suffering sealed his downfall and condemned Egypt to relentless pain. When memory is forsaken and the ties to our past are severed, society unravels from within.
The Torah recounts that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened twenty times. The first ten, he hardened his own heart. The last ten, God hardened it for him. When we relinquish our ability to act, when we surrender responsibility, we become prisoners of our own inertia.
Moses, by contrast, offers a radically different vision of freedom - one inextricably bound to memory. "And this day shall be for you a zikaron (a memorial)." (Exodus 12.14)"And you shall tell your children on that day: this is done because of what the Lord did for me when He took me out of Egypt." (Exodus 13:8)
Instead of speaking of liberty, self-determination, or individual rights, Moses imposes the burden of memory as a moral imperative. Only a freedom rooted in the memory of the past and the responsibility for the future will lead to the Promised Land.
We cannot read Parashat Bo, with its relentless emphasis on memory as "a sign on your hand, a memorial between your eyes" (Exodus 13:16) - without thinking of the horrors experienced during the Holocaust that seared memory into our flesh. The tattooed numbers on the arms of survivors, the trauma etched into the faces of its victims and forever living in their minds between their eyes. These became our national zikaron, a remembrance not of redemption, but of catastrophe.
And yet, the Torah demands something seemingly impossible: to remember both slavery and redemption - to hold these two truths together in dialectical tension. As the Holocaust theologian Rabbi Yitz Greenberg asks: How can we dare to speak of God’s saving hand in the face of burning children? How do we reconcile the Exodus with the midrashic image of babies buried alive in the pyramids?
This tension is not confined to history; it is unfolding before our eyes as we ride an unrelenting rollercoaster of emotions. One day soaring from the unbridled joy of a modern-day Exodus, as hostages return after over 480 days in hell, the next sinking into a pit of deep despair as uncertainty envelops us and we look into the eyes of those still enslaved - some held captive in Gaza, others trapped in the grip of their own trauma, frozen in the agony of October 7th.
There are times when we too, long to forget - just as they did in Egypt - to relinquish the weight of memory and surrender to indifference. When the world so readily forgets, why should we be the bearers of remembrance? What is the point?
It is at these moments our youth remind us why. Moments when, despite the heavy burden of grief and responsibility they nonetheless rise. They hear the echoes of the past in the urgency of the present and, as the Brigadier General declared yesterday at the ceremony, they respond as Moshe did before God at the burning bush - with one simple, unwavering word: Hinneini - I am here.
Here to use their freedom in service of their people.
Here to step into the unfolding story of their nation.
Here to stand at the crossroads of history, not as bystanders but as participants.
Here to transform the dreams of the past into the reality of the present.
The road to the Promised Land is long, arduous, and unrelenting. But of one thing I’m certain -there is an entire generation ready to walk it.
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