Yom Ha Shoa

Pour out Thy wrath upon the nations that know Thee not,/And upon the kingdoms that call not upon Thy name./For they have devoured Jacob,/And laid waste his habitation.

Pour out Thine indignation upon them,/And let the fierceness of Thine anger overtake them./Thou wilt pursue them in anger, and destroy them/From under the heavens of the Lord. (Passover Haggadah, Glatzer edition)

Now there’s something for us Jews to remember, as we commemorate our Holocaust dead. 

Does the violence offend you? The chosenness horrify you? You’re free to memorialize your disgust as you wish—and so often do—from your despotic/autocratic, left-wing/right-wing, murderous/pusillanimous, armed/prostrate roosts; you may even enter Israel’s eternal and undivided capital, Jerusalem, and cram little Israel-scourging prayers of denunciation into the crevices of the Old City’s Western Wall with your manicured, Kabbalah-braceleted hands—which is more freedom to pray or dissent than most Mussulman descendants of Nazi collaborators and “citizens” of any of the oppressive, brutalizing, terrorizing lands encircling the Jewish State will ever experience, or remember, in their lifetimes.

But please, by all means, wail on. And while you’re doing all that disapprobatory shuddering; while you’re sobbing over your false Davids and specious Goliaths; while your fingers are twitching on your pens, and your rocks, and your grenades, and your rockets; while that familiar little frisson of horror over the detested Jews who unaccountably will rise up from subjugation is snaking its way up your spine once again; while you’re whispering your “love” for Israel in the tongue of anti-Semitism; while you’re sniffing the scent of our blood, we’ll be counting our dead, and when we’re done with that, we’ll be reminding you never to forget the mighty hand and the outstretched arm—and the long memory—of the Israeli Defense Forces.