Emotions and history

You know you can see the moon some mornings, very soon after daybreak — which is happening later and later now, as the days grow shorter and winter nears — pale white and low down in the light blue sky?

I saw it on Monday morning. It was full, huge and round and oddly promising. It marked the halfway point between the beginning of the month of Elul and the first night of Rosh Hashanah. It looked beautiful and unexpected, hanging there in the daylight, as if it had been so busy that it forgot to leave. It looked almost as if it were pregnant with hope.

And boy, could we use hope.

Oddly, it’s hope that might be the most prevalent feeling in the cover story about Jeremy Lentz’s trip to Poland this week.

Jeremy is the grandson of Holocaust survivors, and his trip included a visit to Auschwitz, as well as to the smaller-scale horrors that fleck the Polish landscape. He talks about how he’s gotten the Polish citizenship that’s due him because of what happened to his family in the country that had been home to them for 600 or so years. It’s not that he thinks that he’ll have to leave here — it’s that his instincts, honed by a lifetime of being Jewish, tell him that it’s always good to have a plan.

But he also talks, at length and with passion, about the beauty of the Polish countryside, and about the goodness of the non-Jews who work to unearth and protect Jewish history. And it’s more than that. They don’t only revere the memory of dead Jews — which matters enormously — but they also actively welcome living Jews.

One of the underlying truths of Jeremy’s story is that people are complex, and emotions are rarely pure. They bubble and mix. Psalm 30 is beautiful — weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning — but life’s more complicated. After the first stab of wild joy, generally it’s mixed with grief or guilt or fear or impatience or boredom or stray worries about where you might have left the car key.

Life is getting complicated for all of us now, and not in a good way. But still, there’s almost always at least little fugitive stabs of joy and fickers of hope. We need them, but they’re real, and they’re there.

And someday, soon if we’re lucky, joy may once again come in the morning.

—JP