THE CHOICE BY DR. EDITH EVA EGER: FORGIVENESS
OPINION: LENORE S. DAVIS
Seven years ago, I read in the New York Times book review of this book, newly published, by a Holocaust survivor in her 90’s, entitled The Choice, so I ordered the book and read it, and it did not resonate with me. I forwarded the book to a neighbor. Throughout these years, I heard rave reviews from all who read the book, and so, when my daughter, Esther, asked if I had read the book, and she, too, raved about it, I decided to re-read the book with a new eye, and it is with this new eye, years later that I am appreciating the book more.
Holocaust survivors had such great obstacles to overcome; if we are comparing our challenges, they pale. But as John Goldberg, Hersh’s father, Rachel Polin Goldberg’s husband, stated in his speech at the Democratic National convention, “In a competition of pain, there are no winners.” We feel the pain of the challenges G-d gives each of us individually, and collectively.
As I teach each week about Bitachon/trust in G-d from the book Shaar Habitachon by Rabbi Bachya Ibn Pekuda, one of the great challenges is to remember that when someone hurts us, he is merely G-d’s messenger and focusing on that person, hides the true purpose of pain, which is to look inward and change and improve internally and with our relationship to G-d.
Dr. Eger was in the Auschwitz concentration camp, survived and became a practicing psychologist. She was asked to give a lecture to chaplains in Berchtesgaden in the Hotel zum Turken, where Hitler and his officers decided the fate of the Jews. She writes:
I say to the chaplains when I give my keynote address the next morning. There is a phrase she learned as a girl. “Times are changing and we are changing with them. we are always in the process of becoming.” I ask them to travel back with me forty years, to the same mountain village where we sit right now, maybe to this very room, when fifteen highly educated people contemplated how many of their fellow humans they could incinerate in an oven at one time. “In human history, there is war I say. “There is cruelty, there is violence, there is hate. But never in the history of humankind has there ever been a more scientific and systematic annihilation of people. I survived Hitler’s horrific death camps. Last night I slept in Joseph Goebbels’s bed. People ask me, how did you learn to overcome the past? Overcome? Overcome? I haven’t overcome anything. Every beating, bombing, and selection line, every death, every column of smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror when I thought it was the end–these live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or excised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.”
Forgiveness isn’t easy, I tell them. It is easier to hold grudges, to seek revenge. I tell of my fellow survivors, the courageous men and women me in Israel, who looked pained when I mentioned forgiveness, who Insisted that to forgive is to condone or to forget. Why forgive?: Doesn’t it let Hitler off the hook for what he did?
I tell of my dear friend…Larry Gladstone…when he spoke to me explicitly…about applying for reparations… That was the right choice for many, but not for me. It felt like blood money. As if one could put a price on my parents’ heads. A way to stay chained to those who had tried to destroy us.
It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of the past.
At best, revenge is useless. It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase the wrongs we’ve suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At worst, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even nonviolent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.”
How apropos of the season of forgiveness, starting with this Jewish month of Elul. To ask G-d to forgive, for a year’s worth of sinning, means to look inside ourselves to forgive all those who have sinned against us. Some have a custom each night as they say their shema prayer to forgive all those who hurt them. On the eve of Yom Kippur, as we take out the torah scrolls for the prayer of Kol Nidre, many take the opportunity to forgive all those who have hurt him that year, for if we don’t forgive, we appear hypocritical when asking G-d to forgive us.
I will keep this article up through Yom Kippur in hopes that it reaches far and wide, the message of forgiveness. Collectively, as one nation in Israel and the diaspora, collectively in exile, we have to shudder at all that we did wrong to have suffered our fate on October 7th. If we haven’t asked G-d for forgiveness yet, it is time to look inward and see our individual and collective actions which caused G-d to potch us as He did.
May we be zocheh to Rachamei Shamayim. May G-d scream back to us SALACHTI KIDVARECHAH, I have forgiven you as you asked. May G-d release our hostages from captivity in Israel and may He fulfill his promise to our foremother Rachel who consistently cries for her children in exile: V’SHAVU VANIM L’GVULAM/MAY G-D RETURN HIS CHILDREN BACK TO THE BORDERS OF THEIR LAND.
-Suri