By Rabbi Dr Walter Rothschild, Berlin, Germany

These are interesting times. In the week in which I am writing this in April and the week in which you will be reading it in May – not far apart – Europe is awash with memorial meetings and ceremonies to mark what happened eighty years ago. At the sites of former battles, at the sites of former concentration camps and forced labour camps, at the sites where cities were bombarded and pulverised together with their inhabitants – efforts are made to lay wreaths, to unveil plaques, to recite prayers, to interview eye-witnesses and survivors – none of which can do anything truly to heal the wounds that were inflicted then, but it is still considered – rightly – to be better than nothing. The most recent head of the Catholic Church, a Priest, has passed on to higher things (one hopes) and discussions are being taken to choose a successor. Whereas one of the tasks of a Cohen in Judaism was to ensure through natural means a successor, a dynasty, in Catholic Christianity a different method was developed to ensure continuity.  But even Priests can die….

In the first of this week’s sidrot, ”Acharey Mot”, we are confronted with this issue. How do you clean up after a Catastrophe? This is the problem facing Moses – and the problem facing Aharon. The two brothers have different roles and different perspectives. Moses has to lead the people onwards in spite of what has just happened, he has to convey God’s demands and hold the People together; Aharon is the bereaved father who has just lost two of his sons, Nadav and Avihu, but now has to cleanse the holy place so that the worship of this demanding God can continue almost as though nothing had happened. It actually happened back in Chapter 10 but of course the effects continue.

How do you cleanse a place where living people have been reduced to charred corpses, to piles of near-unidentifiable ash?  How do you return to the normality that existed beforehand? How can you make what has been utterly defiled into something ‘Kadosh‘, holy again? This is not just a theoretical question for the Torah but one that affects those who seek to rebuild Kibbutzim and other settlements in southern Israel after the events of October 2023. How can one rebuild, how can one move back, how can one live and work there – and play and love there? It is also a question  that affects all those who have lost sons and daughters to the war against Hamas and Hizbollah – and of course those who have sons and daughters whose lives have been so badly affected by wounds, amputations, traumas…. The same applies to haunted, scarred places all over Europe where buildings were reduced to rubble or marked with holes and gashes and where people were brought to be brutally killed, whether in battle or just because they were considered ”unwanted” by those with power over life and death at the time.

There are practical things to do and there are ritual acts and there are cleansing actions to perform but the facts of what had happened are not forgotten and so we read them in the Torah each year. And hopefully we can also learn from them. Moses has had to arrange for the remains to be removed, for the Holy of Holies to be first cleaned and then cleansed (the two are not the same) and then rededicated, resanctified, and this all needs to be done quickly, there is no time for lengthy mourning rituals. The People must have known what had happened behind those curtains and must have been unsettled. Aharon’s wife, the mother of the victims, is never even mentioned. It is the Institution of Altar and Mishkan that need to be repaired, not the Family…..

What the Torah describes and prescribes does not necessarily suit modern tastes but the psychological need behind the rituals is still the same. Not to wipe away the Memory of what has happened but to wipe away the Uncleanness. Living in Germany I find every day further evidence that I am walking where, not so long ago, people died violent deaths – the blood has been wiped away, also the ash and the rubble, but the atmosphere remains. (Close to where I live in Berlin is where a man drove a lorry into a Christmas Market and now the blood which flowed that night is symbolised in metal sculpture and name plaques.) I am sure that one could say the same of any place where something awful has happened – such as many cities and villages in Ukraine now, as well of course as many other places in the Middle East.

This year – perhaps ironically – is one of those where two sidrot are combined. ”After the Deaths” comes ”The Holinesses”.   Today churches and synagogues stand once more in cities that were once reduced to rubble and ash. God is worshipped there again. But we should not forget those who were burned……

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