What's in a number?

By: Lily Rebecca Buder

In school we are taught to rationalize and compartmentalize everything until it can be defined and explained. Perhaps this is efficient in mathematics and science, but certainly not in emotion and understanding tragedy.

Six million. Six million lives, dreams, and futures gone in the course of five years. Yesterday I had the privilege to visit Yad Vashem. At first I was skeptical, I didn’t really know what to expect thinking I had already learned everything there was to know about the Holocaust, I could have not have been more wrong. I had always been taught to rationalize the Holocaust, to think of all who perished as a collective number as a factoid in a history book, not their names, dreams or hopes for the future. That all changed in the course of a few hours.

Tragedies cannot be rationalized no matter their size.

In the past few weeks Israel was shaken by the kidnappings of three Jewish youth in Judea and Samaria (commonly known as the West Bank) Many in the global Jewish community prayed and hoped for the safe and easy return for Gilad Shaar (age 16), Eyal Yifrach (age 19), and Naftali Fraenkel (age 16), but our prayers came too late. It was confirmed last night that three bodies found in a field near Hebron were those of the missing boys. Many criticized the large and emotional response to the initial disappearances of the three boys, but was that response justified?

In the Shoah we lost six million Jewish People, that left a scar on the Jewish People that will last millennia; it brought us to realize the value and importance of every member of our family. Although the number of the boys who lost their lives is small, the futures they could’ve had were very big. Tragedy shouldn’t be defined by how many people died but by what could’ve been if they had been allowed to stay here a bit longer.