The amount of respect I have for you is truly beyond measure. It’s not because you won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Or even because you received the highly coveted Presidential Medal of Freedom.
You are my role model because you kept your faith after losing your mother and sister in Auschwitz and hearing your father being beaten and eventually killed in Buchenwald in such a dehumanizing way.
At one point in time I too was angry at God. So much so that I threw the whole entire way of life out the window. I couldn’t fathom how He could let so much evil into the lives of so many innocent people. Tragedy after tragedy, my despair grew worse and worse.
I will never forget the days before Rosh Hashanah 2014. I was sitting with my rebbe in the beis medrash. He was trying to instill in me some measure of inspiration in the hope of changing my mindset right before the High Holidays. He showed me your New York Times article “A Prayer for the Days of Awe” that had been published exactly 17 years prior to the day.
I was instantly riveted after reading your first few sentences – “Master of the Universe, let us make up. It is time. How long can we go on being angry?”
Reading the rest of the piece, I was almost brought to tears. Here you were, a man who for 50 years had lived with those daunting memories, and who had gone through hell and back, and you still could not handle the unbearable pain and incompleteness that comes with not having a connection with Hashem.
It was from that moment on that I realized the true meaning of emunah and the relationship our souls have with our Creator. Since then I have come back stronger than ever, making sure nothing stops me from ever losing my connection again.
As I sit here today, mourning this devastating loss, I realized that I owe you a sincere and heartfelt thank you. Not just for saving my life, but for all the generations that would have been lost had you not done what you did.
I bid you a final farewell. It comforts me to know that a man whose life was never peaceful will finally be resting peacefully in Gan Eden. May your spirit bask in the everlasting presence of God’s glory. I thank you for everything you have done for me as well as for this world. You will never be forgotten.
Menachem Mendel Davis
Via E-Mail