My Father’s Yahrzeit 5782

My father died fourteen years ago, but he has never stopped guiding me.  Although I was closer with my mother, I’m probably more like my father.  Sometimes when a thought pops into my head, I can’t tell whether it was him or me who thought it.

I’m not going to regale you with tales of my father’s awesomeness.  To give that subject its due, I’d be talking until well past Havdalah.  Instead, just for a change of pace, I’m going to say something about the Torah I just read for you.

Those four verses can be a little hard on our eyes.  They tell how the people of Heshbon were driven out of their land, with even the women and children killed.  The reading ends triumphantly with “we did not leave a survivor.”

My Hebrew school teachers wouldn’t have batted an eye at this.  “Sihon and his people were evil, and besides, this was G-d’s will!”

I prefer Robert Alter’s explanation of the massacres we read in the bible.  He suggests that the archeological evidence doesn’t support a literal reading, and that it’s all metaphorical.  Not great, but more palatable.

Seventy-seven years ago, almost to the day, World War 2 was ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Those deaths were not the least bit metaphorical.

We Americans tend to look back at this as justified or inevitable. It was either bomb or invade the Japanese home islands, which would have led to many more deaths on both sides.  And besides, Japan started it.

 I’ve read a lot of hindsighted second guessing.  The Japanese were already looking for ways to surrender.  The American military was not sure it could redeploy ground forces from Europe for an invasion.  And besides, Truman just bombed the Japanese to prove to the Russians how tough we were.

But back to my father.  Like so many other young men, Seymour rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor.  He joined the Marines.  That has always puzzled me somewhat.  My father was always a gentle man, and nothing like the Marines in the movies.

My father said almost nothing about his service.  He never saw combat – he was stationed in Guam and was training for the invasion of Japan, which never came.

I’m a manifestly flawed man, and I’m in no position to pass judgement on Truman.  For what it’s worth, I do believe that without the bombings, there would have been an invasion.  And what I remember from the Marines in the movies is that up to ninety percent of them died in the initial landings against the Japanese.

Odds are, my father would have been among that ninety percent, and I wouldn’t be here to chant Torah for all of you.

That’s why I always try to remember the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with my father.

Shabbat Shalom.