Until the Flame Rises

On Sunday I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I don't know what I expected. I'd read the books. I'd watched the movies. I'd seen the photographs. I'd visited museums and memorials. I thought I was prepared. I was not.

What I was not prepared for was the tidiness. The paths are maintained. The signs are informative—to a point. There are guided groups in every language, moving through the barracks and the crematoria on a schedule, headsets on, stopping at designated points for photographs. It is curated. There is a gift shop.

Birkenau is worse. The sheer scale of it — the train tracks, the ruins of the gas chambers, the rows of barracks stretching to the horizon — is genuinely beyond language. And here, too, the informational panels are polished and careful.

The history is presented with the rough edges sanded smooth, the specifics of who did what to whom softened into the passive voice, as if the murder happened to no one in particular and was carried out by no one at all. The one word you will read the least at Auschwitz-Birkenau seems to be "Jews."

It was, to borrow an incredibly inadequate word, unbearable.

The only very vaguely tolerable moment in the entire visit was unplanned. Walking through Birkenau, we came across a Jewish group — Canadian if you could tell from the collection of Maple Leaf and Israeli flags — and they were davening. Praying. Standing in the place that was built to be the last place any Jew would ever stand, and reciting the same words Jews have been reciting daily for centuries.

We joined them — saying the words and for a few minutes the place was not a museum. It was a minyan.

The parsha this Shabbat is Behaalotecha — "when you raise up" — and it opens with an instruction about light.

דַּבֵּר֙ אֶֽל־אַהֲרֹ֔ן וְאָמַרְתָּ֖ אֵלָ֑יו בְּהַעֲלֹֽתְךָ֙ אֶת־הַנֵּרֹ֔ת אֶל־מוּל֙ פְּנֵ֣י הַמְּנוֹרָ֔ה יָאִ֖ירוּ שִׁבְעַ֥ת הַנֵּרֽוֹת׃

Speak to Aaron and say to him, “When you mount the lamps, let the seven lamps give light at the front of the lampstand.”

— Bamidbar 8:2

The English loses the Hebrew. Behaalotecha doesn't mean "mount" or "kindle." It means "when you cause to rise up." The root is alah — to ascend. The Torah uses a word about rising for the act of lighting a flame, because that's what fire does. It climbs.

Rashi catches this. His comment on the verse has stayed with me since I first read it: the lamplighter must hold the flame to the wick until the light ascends of itself. You don't just touch the fire to the lamp and walk away. You stay. You hold it there. You wait until the flame catches and rises on its own.

Rashi also explains why this passage follows the dedication offerings of the twelve tribal princes. Aaron watched the other leaders bring their gifts for the dedication of the Mishkan and felt left out — his tribe wasn't included. God responded: your part is greater than theirs, because you will kindle and set in order the lamps. (Rashi on Bamidbar 8:2)

The offerings were one-time events. Grand, expensive, each one catalogued in detail across the entire previous parsha. Aaron's task was daily. Walk in. Trim the wicks. Hold the flame. Wait. Do it again tomorrow. The princes brought spectacle. Aaron brought continuity.

Behaalotecha covers a lot of ground after the menorah. The Levites are consecrated. A second Passover is created for those who missed the first — because when a group came to Moses and asked "Why should we be left out?" God made room. The silver trumpets. The departure from Sinai. The complaining about the manna. Moses breaking down under the weight of leadership. Miriam's punishment for speaking against her brother.

It's a messy parsha. The Israelites leave Sinai and immediately start falling apart. They want meat. They want Egypt. They're tired. Moses tells God he can't carry this people alone — "kill me rather" — and God responds by sharing the prophetic spirit among seventy elders. Nobody in Behaalotecha seems to be at their best.

But the parsha opens with the menorah. Before the grumbling, before the rebellion, before any of it: light the lamps. Hold the flame to the wick. The light rises.

The same week I was at Birkenau, Argentina's President Milei was in Jerusalem, standing before the Knesset, saying "Am Yisrael Chai."

A head of state, in the capital, in the middle of everything, affirming that the people of Israel are alive. I read about it on my phone on a tram in Krakow — the city where the Jewish quarter is basically a souvenir shop.

I keep going back to Rashi's image. The lamplighter holds the flame to the wick until it rises on its own. Not a single dramatic act. A daily one. Showing up, trimming, holding, waiting. The light is not the lamplighter's. The lamplighter's job is to stay long enough for it to catch.

At Birkenau, a group of Jews we'd never met stood in the place that was engineered to be the end of Jewish prayer and they prayed. The words were the same words — the same siddur, the same cadence, the same language that has been carrying our people for thousands of years. The place was designed to extinguish the flame. Eighty years later, someone is still holding it to the wick.

The menorah was lit in the Mishkan — a tent. A portable, temporary, pack-it-up-and-carry-it structure in the middle of the wilderness. God did not wait for the Temple to command the lighting. The light did not require permanence. It required someone willing to show up every day and hold the flame.

Tonight — the same as every Friday night — hold the flame. Wait for it to rise.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham