Thursday, April 12, 2018

Paschal moon: the thunder from Sinai


Yom HaShoah, the annual commemoration of the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust, began at sundown yesterday. At 1000 local time, everything will come to a halt across Israel, and people will stand silent and still, remembering those deaths. It’s an astonishing thing to watch on my computer screen; I cannot imagine it in real life.

(Possibly the two minutes of silence at 1100 on 11 November every year in the UK is the closest approximation. But in the years I lived there, I never saw the kind of universal participation—traffic kept moving, people chattered—so, no.)

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is by Maria Skobtsova, née Elizaveta Yurievna Pilenko in 1891 in Riga, then part of Russia. She embraced atheism in her youth, married for the first time at age 20 (to a Bolshevik), and got involved with pre-war literary circles. For a while—during and after the Russian Revolution, Skobtsova had quite the adventurous life, including a planned assassination of Leon Trotsky, from which she was dissuaded by friends. Following her divorce, she was drawn to the (Orthodox) Church; she married a second time (to a man named Skobtsov), divorced this husband and moved to Paris with her children. The short version of this journey is that she took religious vows (assuming the name Maria) and found her calling in social work and theological studies. Her home became a center for refugees, geographic, economic and spiritual; her doors were open to anyone in need of help.

I don’t know whether it was a residue of her early years as an atheist, but somewhat unusually for a follower of Eastern Orthodoxy (the term “pogrom” and its practice originated in tsarist Russia), Skobtsova welcomed Jews to her refuge (without expectation of needing conversion), including during the time following the German invasion and occupation of France. Her spiritual advisor, Father Dmitri Klepenin, issued baptismal certificates to Jews, and she both sheltered those who came to her and helped many escape the country.

Eventually the Nazis came for her. In 1943 she was sent to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women, where she was gassed on 31 March 1945, five weeks before the end of the war. In 2004, the Eastern Church declared Skobtsova a saint; in 1985, she was recognized as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Skobtsova’s poetry covered a lot of ground, but for today I’ll give you this one.

“Israel”

Two triangles, a star,
The shield of King David, our forefather.
This is election, not offense.
The great path and not an evil.
Once more in a term fulfilled,
Once more roars the trumpet of the end;
And the fate of a great people
Once more is by the prophet proclaimed.
Thou art persecuted again, O Israel,
But what can human malice mean to thee,
who have heard the thunder from Sinai?




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