Outside the camp

Tuesday night there was a candle on our counter. Yellow wax topped by a six-pointed star — the same shade of yellow as the star Jews were forced to sew onto their clothing in the ghettos of Europe.

It is a yahrzeit candle — the memorial candle you light on the anniversary of a parent's death, a day aflame for a soul. The yellow candle exists because there are six million souls for whom nobody is left to light one. Whole families, entire villages. So once a year the candles go out to anyone who will light them, and each flame is a stranger saying kaddish for a stranger.

At a second night seder two weeks ago, I sat across the table from a Holocaust survivor. There are fewer of them every year. When I lit the candle on Monday, his face was the face I saw.

Tuesday was Yom HaShoah. Monday evening at sundown through Tuesday evening at sundown. The memorial siren sounded at ten in the morning and the country stopped for two minutes — one siren in a country that has been awash in sirens for two and a half years, most of them set off by people who have been explicit about wanting another Shoah.

I spent part of the day with a book I had received as a birthday gift and hadn't yet cracked: Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust.

The thesis is far from subtle and the evidence is overwhelming. IBM did not stumble into the Holocaust. IBM pursued it. Thomas Watson, the CEO, personally managed the Nazi account from New York. His German subsidiary custom-designed punch cards for each stage of the genocide — one card format for the census that identified the Jews, another for the asset confiscations, another for the ghetto rosters, another for the transport lists, another for the camp intake and the slave-labor assignments and the deaths. Hollerith code 6 meant Jewish. Hollerith code 8 meant gas chamber. IBM leased the machines rather than selling them, which meant on-site service twice a month, by IBM technicians, at locations the company knew — including Auschwitz. They did not sell the Reich a tool and walk away. They built the tool to specification, kept it running, optimized it, consulted on mass death, and collected the revenue, from 1933 through the last week of the war. The machinery of categorization was American, and the Americans building it knew exactly what it was being used for.

My mother worked at IBM. My father worked at IBM. I learned to golf as a kid at the IBM country club, on a course built for employees. Nobody in my family ordered a deportation. A country club in upstate New York was not a concentration camp. The connection is distant. But, still, the counter held a lit yellow candle, and I was reading about how a Hollerith number on a punch card became a tattoo on a forearm, and I did not know what to do with any of it.

I am not sure that is the kind of thing you ever finish doing something with.

This week's parsha is Tazria-Metzora — a double portion in Vayikra — and it is, on its surface, the most physically uncomfortable reading of the year. Biblical dermatology. Skin patches. Discolorations. Mildew on walls. A priest is summoned, inspects the affliction, and issues a ruling. Tamei or tahor. Impure or pure.

When the ruling is tamei, the Torah is blunt:

כׇּל־יְמֵ֞י אֲשֶׁ֨ר הַנֶּ֥גַע בּ֛וֹ יִטְמָ֖א טָמֵ֣א ה֑וּא בָּדָ֣ד יֵשֵׁ֔ב מִח֥וּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶ֖ה מוֹשָׁבֽוֹ׃ {ס}        

They shall be impure as long as the disease is present. Being impure, they shall dwell apart—in a dwelling outside the camp.

— Vayikra 13:46

Badad yeshev — alone he shall dwell. Not exiled forever. But while the affliction is visible, this person is no longer part of us.

That would be a rough place to end the story, so Metzora picks up where Tazria left off:

זֹ֤את תִּֽהְיֶה֙ תּוֹרַ֣ת הַמְּצֹרָ֔ע בְּי֖וֹם טׇהֳרָת֑וֹ וְהוּבָ֖א אֶל־הַכֹּהֵֽן׃

This shall be the ritual for a leper at the time of being purified. When it has been reported to the priest,

וְיָצָא֙ הַכֹּהֵ֔ן אֶל־מִח֖וּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶ֑ה וְרָאָה֙ הַכֹּהֵ֔ן וְהִנֵּ֛ה נִרְפָּ֥א נֶֽגַע־הַצָּרַ֖עַת מִן־הַצָּרֽוּעַ׃

the priest shall go outside the camp. If the priest sees that the leper has been healed of the scaly affection,

— Vayikra 14:2–3

The priest goes out. That verse reverses the previous one. The metzora could not come back in on his own — the whole point is that he had no standing to do so.

Somebody had to walk out and get him. The structure of return is built into the law. The person gets put outside; the priest gets sent to fetch him.

The rabbis associate tzara'at specifically with lashon hara — evil speech, the kind of speech that puts other people outside the camp. That's the mechanism. You talk someone out. The Torah talks you out in response. The priest walks out to bring you back.

On Tuesday, while our yellow candle was still burning, a freed Israeli hostage named Agam Berger stood on a stage in Birkenau holding a 130-year-old violin. The violin had belonged to a Polish Jewish orchestra musician who was murdered in the Holocaust. It was restored by a Czech-born violinmaker in Israel and given to Berger after her release — she had been a surveillance soldier at Nahal Oz on October 7 and was held in Gaza until last January.

At the central ceremony of the March of the Living, on Yom HaShoah, she played "Undzer Shtetl Brent." Our town is burning. Mordechai Gebirtig wrote it in 1938 as a warning. The Nazis invaded Poland the next year. Gebirtig was murdered in the Kraków ghetto in 1942.

A violin that was put outside the camp. A young woman who was put outside the

camp. Both came back. One plays the other. The song is a song about a burning town, sung in a place where the burning happened, by someone who survived a different captivity. All of it on the day we light a candle for the people who did not.

That is not a metaphor, exactly. It is closer to what the parsha is describing, in the plain sense. Someone goes outside the camp, and someone walks out to bring them back.

This morning the yellow candle is long cold. Modi will bake challah this afternoon. In a few hours we'll light Shabbat candles — ordinary wax, not the yellow of the ghetto armband. Tonight we count day sixteen of the Omer. And we read, of all things, about the priest going outside the camp.

Outside, and back.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham