Praising God on the Train Tracks

Dear friends,

This Sunday, as part of the Kumah Festival we will be commemorating Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which takes place today. In an event that will search for a way to acknowledge and mourn the past while leading us toward a new, forward looking relationship with memory. It will be an extraordinary coming together of artists, survivors and activists, centering around a personal story of redemption, even joy of one of our community members at a unique, theatrical commemorative event in Poland for her family members, some of whom were murdered by the Nazis.

A few years ago I was in Germany and Poland for a fellowship, and thought deeply about the relationship between light and sadness, between pleasure and suffering, between my body here in the present, and my mind traveling back to the past. I share with you this rather personal piece I published about the hardest day I had during that trip. It's longer than my usual letters to you, but attempts to dig into some of the questions and complexities we will be exploring this Sunday. Please read it HERE.

The memory of the dead, our tradition reminds us, is a blessing.

Rabbi Misha