Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

In Honor of the Martyrs of Armenia

In commemoration of the 92nd Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

April 27, 2007

by Harold M. Schulweis

Your Eminence, Archbishop Hovnan Derderian — my brother …

Why should we dwell in the sadness of the past? History brings our people such grief. Memories filled with terrifying images. Starvation, rape, pillaging, torture, executions death marches through the arid desert.

Let bygones by bygones. Forget the past, bury it the ash heaps of history. It’s history, and history is passé. It happened 92 years ago. the Nazis defeated 62 years ago. Why resurrect the pain? Why lay a heavy stone upon the hearts of our children and children’s children? Is it not wiser to forget — to remove the sharp thorns from our memory?

But biblical wisdom mandates memory. 169 times in the Hebrew Bible, the word “Zachar” — Remember — is repeated. To remember is the moral mandate of our generation. Why is it so wrong to forget? Because to die is tragic, but to be told after death that you have not lived is blasphemous. Your ancestors lived and died, and dying they lived. Dying, their last words were “remember.”

We dare not forget their martyrdom. Not for ourselves alone. We dare not forget for the sake of our children and our children’s children. Children must know. As Cicero put it, “Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever.” Our children must not be infantilized. Memory is their wisdom for survival. They must be prepared to live in the real world. To deny or to trivialize the unspeakable atrocities which led to the slaughter of a million-and-a-half Armenians — men, women and children — is to waste the meaning of the lives of the martyrs. They were witness to the deafening silence of a world that closed their ears to the screams of helplessness. Silence is the slow strangulation of conscience. Denial is suicidal

When I forget the past, I erase tomorrow. “Holocaust denial is not a clear and present danger. It is a clear and future danger.” Blind to yesterday’s atrocity, I am blind-sighted from tomorrow’s catastrophe.

No two genocides are alike. They are different in motivation, execution, intention. Genocides kill with different weapons, different gases, burn with different fuel. The extermination of the Armenians is not the killing fields of Cambodia, nor are the crematoria at Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, the devastation of Rwanda or the state rape of Darfur. The ominous clouds spreading over the skies of Chad and the Central African Republic cast different shadows. Genocides have different geographies, different motivations and different demographies. Their victims held different catechisms, liturgy, dogmas and doctrines. But all genocides share in common the fears of little children, the tears of shivering orphans, the callous abandonment of an entire people, the scars of betrayal.

My tradition teaches us that it is cruel to play the game of “one-downsmanship.” The Talmud says no one has the right to claim “my people’s blood is redder than yours.” By what scale can we measure our tragedy? How shall we rank the depth of our wounds, the degrees of our suffering? Comparisons of torment are vulgar. Is your bleeding less than my own?

Are my nightmares less traumatic than yours?

Of genocides, we cannot say “mine is mine and yours is yours.” We must learn to say “yours is mine, and mine is yours,” because both are ours. Our genocide is global. The lessons of genocide are not for Jews and Armenians alone, they are lessons for the world.

Children of Armenia, we share a kinship of suffering. We are bound together. Your past was prologue to our future. Imagine if the first genocide of the 20th century — yours — had been met with a thunderous “no” against the howling mobs. Imagine if the world had cried out, “Do not stretch out your hands to the children.” Imagine if the world had spine, our peoples’ fate — yours and mine — would be radically different.

Our enemies would divide us. Throughout human history, the killers of the dream seek to pit us against each other — black against white, poor against rich, the cross, the crescent, the Star of David against the other.

Tonight we gather to comfort each other. Is my faith too small to mourn with you? Is my heart so small that I cannot feel your pain? Are my tears so dried up that I cannot shed tears for you and yours? Is my compassion so narrow that I cannot reach out to you? Is genocide my private property?

Tonight, we lock arms together. We are not alone. Alone we are weak. Alone our voices are whispers. Together, the full-throated voice of our ancestors pierce the heavens and penetrate the towers of apathy. Together we bring dignity and sanctity and recognition to our martyred ancestors.

The past is irreversible. We cannot turn it around. We cannot pretend that it never happened. The dead cannot speak. But we are alive. We have eyes to see, legs to walk, ears to hear, lungs to scream.

Holocausts are not the same, but holocausts intersect. In episodes documented in Martin Gilbert’s new book, The Righteous, we read of an Armenian doctor in Budapest, Ara Jeretzian, who, during the Jewish Holocaust, set up a medical emergency clinic in a private house, and took in 40 Jewish doctors and their families as well as other Jews — 400 people in all. Ara Jeretzian could have walked away from the danger to himself and his family. He could have averted his eyes. Conscience would not let him. The Godliness in his spirit would not allow him to think, “Who are they to me? They do not speak our language, or sing our liturgy or recite our catechism. Who are they to us?” Ara Jeretzian is an Armenian Christian, whose acts are recorded in the archives of Yad V’shem, in Jerusalem.

Christian rescuers Aram and Felicia Tascudijian were part of a small Armenian community in Nazi Germany’s Vienna. One night in 1942, Valentin Skidelsky — a Jew — came to their door in search of safe haven. Skidelsky had escaped from a train taking him to a Nazi concentration camp. They hid him in their attic until the end of the war in 1945.

Evil is contagious, but so is goodness. Did these Armenians ask “Who is Skidelsky to me? He is not of our faith or ethnicity.”

They knew, and we know, the answer to God’s first question in the bible, “Where are you?” Only one answer is acceptable is “Hineni — Here I am. Hineni — Here I stand. Hineni — Here I answer: We are our brother’s keeper.” The blood of millions shed by the murderers of God’s children co-mingle and cry out to us from the bowels of the earth. Hineni — Here I must save, rescue, heal, protect, defend, feed and hide those hunted by the beasts.

When Cain killed Abel, the first murder recorded in the Bible was genocide. For Cain did not kill Abel alone. He murdered Abel’s children and the children of children. He destroyed an entire people, a whole culture.

What would our murdered say to us? “Remember — know the truth, know the facts. But knowledge is not doing. Crying is not doing. Mourning is not doing. We who see with ancient eyes remember with an eye and hand to the future.”

We need to search each other out. We have a profound need for moral heroes, and especially, heroes from the other side. Christians needs Jewish heroes, and Jews need Christian heroes. Armenians need Turkish heroes and Turks need Armenian heroes. The blacks in Darfur need white heroes, and the whites need Black heroes. The poor need the rich heroes, and the rich need poor heroes. Every moral hero from the other side opens us up, helps destroy the bias and stereotype that stain our vision. Wherever, whenever the noxious smell of hatred and xenophobia rise we will smother it. My ancestors did not cry out “Never again” for their people alone. Never again will we turn a blind eye. Never again will we say “this is not my concern.” Apathy in the face of murder is blasphemy

Archbishop Derderian, I wrote this meditation to honor the Armenian community and to memorialize its martyrs:

Why do we fear to be forgotten? Why do we so yearn for immortality?

To be forgotten is not to have lived. 
To be forgotten is to die to the world.

In the bible we read “You shall not shed the blood of your brother.” 
The Hebrew for “blood” is written in the singular.

But in the Hebrew, that verse reads 
“You shall not shed the bloods of a people.”

Bloods is written in the plural. 
He who sheds the blood of one person
spills the blood of thousands of generations.

Children of Armenia, Children of Israel, Do we not recognize each other? 
I see you in me, and I see me in you. 
Do we not both know what it means for a parent 
to hold in one’s arms a frightened child?
Do we not know the terror in which being awake
is more horrifying than having a nightmare in our sleep?

Not alone do we cry. 
Not alone do we mourn. 
We cry separately, together.
Together we will not forget
and together we will not be forgotten.
Together we will console each other 
and together we will comfort each other.

Together the world’s walls of sinister silence will be torn down.
Together the towers of hope will be built up.
Never again will we look on passively 
while swords are raised against any people,
any race, any nation, any religion.

Children of Armenia and of Israel,
We are each others’ protectors.
If one voice is muted,
the other voice will scream out loud.

If one hand is maimed, 
the other will raise his hand and shield the persecuted.

Who are you to me? 
My own self.

We honor the presence of so many of the Armenian and Jewish community. We are blessed by the presence of His Eminence Archbishop Hovnan Derderian, and so many religious and secular dignitaries. Our deepest appreciation to Marcy Rainey, who has been so instrumental in planning this meeting and the previous lectures, and for Janice Kamenir-Reznik, the president of Jewish World Watch, and Tzivia Schwartz-Getzug, the executive director of Jewish World Watch.

What a joy to hear the harmonies of two choirs. I congratulate your artistry, and your gifted directors — Mrs. Marguerite Zavanian, director of the St. Peter Armenian Church Choir, Dr. Noreen Green, director of the Valley Beth Shalom Choir — and accompanists Dr. Ron Sinanian and Chris Hardin. You have brought two peoples together in liturgy and song.

Our thanks to Valley Beth Shalom and the Jewish World Watch; Judie Cotton, president of Valley Beth Shalom; and Buzzy Bookman, the chairman of VBS’ Schulweis Institute.

* This document, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced without the written permission of the author.