Tonight at Kesher Israel, we will commemorate the Holocaust, whose cruelty was far beyond comprehension. We Americans of the 21st century live relatively secure and prosperous lives. It is hard to fathom that less than 100 years ago, there was nothing cheaper than Jewish blood—that more than one out of every three Jews was murdered, and countries such as the United States did little to intervene. To stand face to face with this is to live in a world that feels absurd and alien.

And yet, the world we live in, outside of our bubbles, is filled with genocides, mass displacements, human cruelty and vulnerability of all sorts. We imagine that we have control, but in the blink of an eye, we can experience life as tragic and out of control.

Our Torah portion, Shemini, begins in a similar way. Our parsha opens with the greatest of joys. The first sacrifice, a calf, is inaugurated in the Tabernacle through its consumption by a divine fire from heaven. This phenomenon signaled that God had forgiven the Israelites’ sin of the golden calf and reconciled with them. The Divine, as it were, was back in their midst, bringing hope and the security that even for terrible sins the human being has the capacity to undo the wrong, to be forgiven and to change the past.

Then suddenly, two sons of Aaron, the High Priest, come forward with incense—which God did not command—seemingly inspired by the spiritual manifestation of the Divine there in front of them. Again, a fire comes out from heaven. Will it consume their sacrifice as it had consumed the calf in rapprochement just a moment before? Alas, the fire strikes them instead, and a sudden pall of mourning, joy’s opposite, fills the air of the Tabernacle. In the face of such human perplexity, at that moment of facing the raw and unpredictable existential state of the human being, face to face, there is only one response: silence. V’yidom Aharon—and Aaron was silent.

Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote (in “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah,” Tradition, Spring 1978): “I know that I am perplexed, that my fears are irrational, incoherent. At times I am given over to panic; I am afraid of death. At other times, I am horrified by the thought of becoming, God forbid, incapacitated during my life-time… I don’t know what to fear, what not to fear; I am utterly confused and ignorant…”

My mother said that life is a tragedy, for the hero—each of us—always dies. In the face of this human tragedy of life, as Aaron taught us, there can be naught but silence. But after the silence, there must be a small voice; we must speak up against the darkness and the seeming absurdity of life.

Indeed, Rabbi Soloveitchik writes further: “Judaism, in contradistinction to mystical quietism, which recommended toleration of pain, wants man to cry out aloud against any kind of pain, to react indignantly to all kinds of injustice or unfairness. For Judaism held that the individual who displays indifference to pain and suffering, who meekly reconciles himself to the ugly, disproportionate and unjust in life, is not capable of appreciating beauty and goodness” (ibid.).

May this Yom HaShoah not just immobilize us with the tragedy of the past but inspire us to cry out against the injustices of the future.