The Sceptic Blog

The message of today’s Armistice Day really speaks to the mood of the Jewish people around the world this year. 

It is a matter of enormous pride to me as a British Jew that after the First World War the United Kingdom did not build a victory memorial.  We built a Cenotaph of remembrance, where year after year human beings would come to reflect on the senseless destruction of the First World War and mourn the annihilation of a whole generation of youth and vigour in a pointless war.

There were no winners in war then and there are no winners in war now.

Wars sometimes have to be fought.  World War Two had to be fought by the allies of the free world against an authoritarian threat that if left unchecked would have extinguished freedom in every corner of the globe.

Today, Israel is fighting a war for its survival, against a merciless enemy that has committed atrocities that will haunt our collective memory forever. 

So we have to fight – but even as we fight we mourn.  Every child’s cry pierces to our heart.  Every sob of the dispossessed, the bereft, the dying and the disabled fills our hearts and our prayers.

And we hear the cries of the hostages of all ages held by Hamas in Gaza and they pierce our hearts until we hardly know how to carry on.

Avrohom Ovinu cried for Soroh in this week’s parashah with a small chaf, one reason for which was because she lived such a full and wonderful life and there was so little to mourn and so much to celebrate.

What can we say today of young lives extinguished at their very outset in unimaginably inhuman conditions?  What can we say of young men full of vigour and promise cut down in the service of their country and defence of their people?  What can we say of young mothers left widowed, young children left orphans?  All the thousands and thousands of innocent lives destroyed or damaged in a war not of their making and due to a hatred they never felt or fomented.

So we stand in silence because there is simply nothing to be said.

We resolve to fight evil, but never to feel triumph in our hearts.  When the Mishneh in Pirkei Ovos counsels us not to rejoice in the downfall of our enemy it speaks not only to the need to show human compassion even to those whose ways and choices have forced us to do battle against them, but also to the stark reality that the defeat of evil rarely leaves us much if anything to be happy about, and its bequests are usually – as today – human misery, suffering, death and disability. 

With the help of the Ribono Shel Oilom the Defence Forces of Israel will be successful in restoring peace and security to the land that we dreamed about inhabiting through thousands of years of exile.  And when once more b’ezras Hashem we are all able to walk in calm and comfort through our land, we will stand, as we stand today on Armistice Day, hand in hand with all humanity – with all who know how to shed a tear for the victims of senseless violence. And we will whisper the words of the poet Robert Binyon in 1914 that have become the essence of remembrance the whole world over as we remember the victims:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.”

And we will pray for a time when in the words of the Novi “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation”, a time when the whole world is receptive to the description of the Torah we give every time we return the sefer to the Oron HaKoidesh: “Her ways are the ways of pleasantness and her every path is peace”.  A time when sense and decency will have prevailed, and we will have played our full part in reawakening the ruchniyus of our people, and through our people the whole world, ad sheyovo Melech, Goel u’Moishia, bimheiro b’yomeinu omein v’omein.