Who knows seventy?
Seventy years is an
important time span in Jewish symbolism and history. For millennia, it has been
seen as the amount of time we need to fully recover from a catastrophe, to the
point where the tragedy can give way to a burst of creativity.
It was seventy years after
the first temple was destroyed in 586 BCE that an edict of King Cyrus restored
a glimmer of hope to a Jewish people primed to return to Jerusalem.
It was seventy years after
the second temple was destroyed by the Romans, in the year 70, that Jews
gathered their resolve and revolted, anticipating another redemption, similar
to the one that had occurred six centuries earlier. Although this time hope was crushed with the
defeat of Bar Kochba in the 130s, precisely seventy years after that, the
Mishnah was completed and rabbinic Judaism came to fruition.
Seventy years after the
expulsion from Spain in 1492, Jewish life, replanted in Safed, came to full
flower with the publication of the Shulchan Aruch.
Seventy years is a
biblical lifetime.
Psalm 90 states “Our days
may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures.”
In the Talmud, Honi the
circle drawer slept for seventy years, awakening to witness the fully grown
tree that he had planted for his grandchildren.
It’s a powerful, mystical
number, the combination of two sacred numbers, seven and ten. There are seventy members of the Sanhedrin
court, seventy elders to support Moses, seventy words in the Kaddish, seventy
faces of Torah, seventy names for God.
In numerology, seventy is equivalent to the letter ayin, the eye that
can see hidden mysteries and connections.
So it makes perfect sense
that after seventy years, the equivalent of a lifetime, we can at last envision
new possibilities and remove ourselves from the traumas of the past.
This week we mark exactly
seventy years since the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. It is now precisely seventy years since the
end of the Shoah. So we are presented
with the eternal question of the middle child (the one squeezing between her
two siblings in the back seat of the car):
Are we there yet?!
Where is our Mishnah or
Shulchan Aruch? Where is our Cyrus to
release us from Babylonian bondage?
Where is Honi, who can remind us of our duty to focus on the future
rather than on the past?
With each prior
tragedy-plus-seventy, not only have we been able to move on, but we’ve been
able to do it one specific way: by re-imagining God’s role in history. And by re-envisioning God, we’ve also been
able to forgive God – and again be thankful for all of life’s blessings and for
life itself.
But the Holocaust is
unique, and seventy is not time enough.
We’re not ready to move on. We’ve
seen all too clearly that we are not yet ready to transition from victim to
visionary. There are still too many real
victims walking among us, as well as too many who have fallen victim to the
Shoah’s lasting scars of cynicism and despair.
It is still too soon to
say to God all is forgiven, much less that we are grateful. It is still too soon to say that all is
explicable. Maybe someday it will be.
Right now, the greatest favor we can do for God, and for our own
intellectual integrity, is to leave God out of this conversation. We have a covenant with God, and that is at
Sinai. But Jews have another Covenant:
the one made at Auschwitz, the Covenant of Never Again. The promise to remember is not a pledge made
to God, but to humanity.
Seventy years appears to
be the point of separation, of moving on. That’s the way it’s always been. But not here.
Not now. Not with survivors still
walking among us. Not with so many
Jewish souls still singed with anger and mistrust. And perhaps, some would say, not with so many
real dangers afoot as to warrant that mistrust.
Our ancestors could move on,
but we can’t. Not yet.
Perhaps in another seventy
years.
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