A Time To Remember

There is a command in Torah that appears again and again: זכור — remember.

We remember Shabbat.
We remember Sinai.
We remember Amalek.

And in our generation, we remember the Holocaust.

But remembrance in Judaism is never passive. It is not history for the sake of memory—it is memory that demands transformation.

But a question arises as we remember tragedy:

Where was God?
 Why did He allow this?

Even in the Tanach, we hear cries of “למה”—why? From Book of Lamentations to the Psalms of King David, this question resounded from hearts of the people of faith.

I pose to you another question, quieter and more dangerous:

Where was man?

The Holocaust was not only a collapse of the world—it was a revelation of what man becomes when he abandons the image of God within him.

And yet, thought there are so many that succumb to silence growing within them, many others refuse at the expense of their lives to let the voice die. There were Jews who, in the ghettos and camps, still chose Torah, still chose chesed, still whispered the Shema, still risked everything to perform even the smallest mitzvah.

And likewise, there were righteous people from the nations who risked their lives preserving the humanity within themselves and others in the face of normalized evil.

They would not abandon their duty to God and man.

That is not normal faith.

That is not comfortable faith.


That is emunah that has passed through fire and somehow still breathes.

Our sages teach that Al Kiddush Hashem is not only in dying for God’s name, but living for it.

After the war, broken survivors of the Holocaust did something the world did not expect: they built families, they built life.

That rebuilding was not just survival.

It was defiance.

It was a declaration:


You can burn bodies,

but you cannot erase a covenant.


You can shatter communities,

but you cannot destroy the soul of a people bound to the Olam Haba.

So when we say זכור, we are not only looking backward.

We are being commanded forward.

To live with deeper responsibility.


To guard human dignity with urgency.


To refuse indifference.


To choose life again and again, even when history gives us every excuse not to.

To allow that voice inside of us to get louder.

Because memory, in Judaism, is not about the past.

It is about who we dare to become because of it.

May we all have a meaningful and transformative Yom HaShoah, b’shem Yeshua