“Va Etchanan (And I Pleaded)”

This year in Israel, Yom ha Shoah falls between April 7 and 8. As the siren wails, all Israel comes to a standstill. For me, Yom ha Shoah, in one sense, is the most solemn day in the State, even more so than Yom Kippur. All Jews, regardless of country of birth or philosophical and religious differences, are united for a few minutes in collective memory of those who died. 

The siren has dual significance: to remember those who perished during the Shoah and, simultaneously, to remind us to be vigilant about the cruelty that mankind is capable of.  

Each Shabbat, when Rabbi Gadi recites the “Shema,” the central prayer of Judaism, I am reminded of another “Shema,” Primo Levi’s poem, a plea for teaching and remembering the Shoah, and a curse if we fail to heed his words. It is the invocation of a prophet.

          “Shema”

You who live secure 

In your warm houses, 

You who return at evening to find

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider if this is a man,

Who labors in the mud

Who does not know peace

Who fights for a crust of bread

Who dies at a yes or a no.

Consider if this is a woman,

Without hair or name

With no more strength to remember

Eyes empty and womb cold

As a frog in winter.

 

Consider that this has been: 

I command these words to you.

Engrave them on your hearts

When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,

When you go to bed, when you rise,

Repeat them to your children,

Or may your house crumble,

Disease render you powerless,

Your offspring turn their faces from you.

Primo Levi was a young Italian Jew, captured by the Fascists in late 1943, and deported to Auschwitz in February 1944. After liberation in January 1945, he returned to his hometown of Turin, Italy, where he attained worldwide fame for his writings. He wrote the poem, “Shema,” in January 1946 as a warning to the world, to his readers, to convey what happened in Europe and the potential for human evil.

Primo Levi divides  the poem into three parts. In the first four lines, he approaches the general public: “You,” all the readers who are secure and safe must know what happened. The middle section is a summary of the horror in the camp that Levi had recently suffered and witnessed. The last part of the poem invokes the “Shema.” We are commanded to teach our children and cursed should we fail to heed the plea. For Levi, who took his own life on April 11, 1987, the world as he knew it had ignored the plea.  

For many of us in Israel, Italy, and in the US, our custom is to commemorate the birth of Primo Levi on 4 Av with comforting passages from his work. His bar mitzvah parasha, Va Etchanan, is read in the diaspora on Shabbat Nachamu. And on the anniversary of his death, April 11, which sometimes corresponds to Yom ha Shoah, we read his poem, “Shema.”

—Submitted by Elizabeth Levi Senigaglia